Flight guide in Palm Pilot discussion

[Brian Lloyd <brian@lloyd.com>]

At 11:57 AM 2/10/00 -0700, you wrote:
>> You know what I WOULD be interested in for this data is something like the
>> Flight Guide in my Palm Pilot.

>All of these possibilities depend on the data being easily had for
development 
>and freely re-distributable.
>
>I agree 100% that the Jepp Data is "Better" in a lot of ways.
>I also said, I was going to use the Jepp view product,
>(A CD version of the approach chart & map subscription)
>I'm also going to have to buy the NavData for the GPS.
>All in all I'll be sending close to a thousand bucks a year
>to them.

Well, we know they aren't going broke.  ;^)

>But, a cute little whiz-bang flight guide for a palm pilot, or a
>flight planning package, or an inflight info system distributed for 
>free will be of little use, when people would be forced to fork
>$300.00 over to jeppesen to licence the data.

That is why I thought about a Flight-Guide-like product for the Palm Pilot
as a good use for the FAA data.  In that case you are less worried about
the absolute accuracy of the data.

>In all probability would be quashed by jeppesen due to liability
>concerns about untested, unverified, or hide-the-women-and-children
>Open source code anybody could screw with.

They can say what they want to say.  If they operate on a common data
format the buyer would be able to use whichever data source he/she preferred.

>I think maybe we are a bit overly "Linux" centered.
>Write good, Portable C Code. it will compile fine under linux, and
>also be portable to other platforms.

For that I would write in Java these days.  Having supported an application
on 12 different platforms (most UNIX with with NT thrown in for good
measure) I can attest to the "portability" of C being greatly overblown.
My test matrix was huge.  I had to not only test for correctness on each
platform but I also had to verify that changes in one didn't break anything
else.  Painful.

>I don't think linux development needs to be so closed and xenophobic
>to prevent writing portable software, except for Windows ;-).

Windows is  -*< E V I L >*-!


Brian Lloyd                                    Lucent Technologies
brian@lloyd.com                                3461 Robin Lane, Suite 1
http://www.livingston.com                      Cameron Park, CA  95682
+1.530.676.6513 - voice                        +1.530.676.3442 - fax

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