Boeing announces $10.55 billion deal to divest Jeppesen, ForeFlight, AerData and OzRunways to Thoma Bravo

[Will.iam]

I have yet to see an ad with fltplango. They make their money on fleet management of 5 planes or more which is not ever going to be me. 

[PeteMc]

4 hours ago, N201MKTurbo said:

Thoma Bravo business model is to expand the companies they acquire. Aviation is kind of stagnant. I think everybody that wants ForeFlight already has it. I’m not sure how they are planning to expand it. The same with Jeppesen. 

Yep, that's one reason I'm thinking they may sell off the pieces.  But maybe they just want to create an Aviation image and buy up some other companies too.  I'm assuming FF and Jepp are profitable, so why not own them if they are.

As for adding more, that was the demise of QuickBooks in my opinion.  And although I'm not an Accountant or a professional Bookkeeper, I've seen LOTS of comments about how Intuit kept adding gimmicks thinking they could sell more.  As a result, i bet a massive number of their professional users will bail in an instant if something else comes along.  So you may see the same thing with FF if they just keep trying to add STUFF to keep adding stuff.

 

[Vance Harral]

2 hours ago, redbaron1982 said:

it is clear that open-source has won over closed-source projects.

We're getting pretty far off topic, but, I'll bite.  Why do you think open source has *clearly* "won" over closed-source projects?

In your response, I hope you'll take a crack at explaining why the following cases are all anomalies that don't count, despite the open source community having decades of opportunity:

• Why is social media and messaging dominated by commercial platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp?  Why haven't things like Diaspora displaced them (pun intended)?
• Adobe Photoshop dominates the image manipulation market,  Why hasn't GIMP won significant market share, despite having 30 years to do so?
• Commercial POS/CRM/payroll/accounting software is unquestionably dominated by closed-source commercial software: QuickBooks, Peoplesoft, Salesforce, etc.  GnuCash has hundreds of contributors but is essentially unheard of in these circles.  Why?
• (my niche) Verilog RTL simulation is dominated by commercial products: Xcelium, Questa, VCS.  The open source simulators don't scale, are consistently behind the latest IEEE standards, and are only good for toy projects.  If open source has clearly "won", what happened here?

3 hours ago, redbaron1982 said:

This is not to say the closed-source is dead, for sure it is not, but the % of closed source vs open source projects that are powering mission critical systems, is tilted way more to the open source side.

The examples above suggest otherwise.  My guess is you don't actually have any data about what percentage of "mission critical" systems are powered by open source software, but let me know if I'm mistaken.  In thinking about that, make sure you consider the entire system stack.  Just because Linux is at the bottom of it doesn't make it an open-source project.

2 hours ago, redbaron1982 said:

Even the most rancid institutions, like PMI, have made Agile a core part of their PMP curricula

Agile is a reasonably successful software management approach, but it's use has nothing to do with whether a project is open source or not.  Every commercial software vendor I've worked for in the last decade has implemented (or at least claimed to implement) "Agile" techniques.  One of the most famous companies using short release cycles, a.k.a "move fast and break things" is Facebook; and while a lot of the underlying components of that software stack are open source, the product itself is most decidedly not.  Out of curiosity, have you actually read The Cathedral and the Bazaar?  The canonical principles in that seminal document about Agile-ish things don't actually have much to do with whether the software is open-sourced or not, that's just the environment where the experiment took place.

In summary, I think you've got a serious blind spot about open source always "winning".  Your explanation of why an open-source EFB isn't dominating the market is a good example of that.  The fact the software might have to comply with regulatory standards isn't some sort of strange corner case problem that's an inherent barrier to being open-sourced.  It's just another product requirement.  Albeit one that isn't "sexy" and therefore - like so many other things - maybe not attractive to volunteer-ish labor.

 

[M20F]

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

[shawnd]

3 minutes ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

I am interested in what this is going to be :-) Keep me posted.  

[Fly Boomer]

18 minutes ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

You're a Mensch!

[N201MKTurbo]

17 minutes ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

I have a 6502 emulator in my closet. It runs off of a Centroncs port. That could be a problem.

[MikeOH]

22 minutes ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

I've got a KC standard interface around somewhere if you need data storage

[aviatoreb]

7 hours ago, Paul Thomas said:

Foreflight was developed in part with AOPA's money. I'm shocked that AOPA or EAA has not built a good app and make it free to their members. That would be a perk with real value and be an easy way to retain members.

If the cost was to really get out there due to PE coming in, it wouldn't take much to get a group of engineers to develop a competing application. There are also still some free applications out there but I don't know how well they compete as I use foreflight.

They used to have a reasonably nice app that I think ran at least through internet browser for flight planning - but that seems to have gone away years ago.

[201Mooniac]

1 hour ago, N201MKTurbo said:

I have a 6502 emulator in my closet. It runs off of a Centroncs port. That could be a problem.

Don't worry, you can get a 6502 emulator written in javascript and run it in your browser

[N201MKTurbo]

4 minutes ago, 201Mooniac said:

Don't worry, you can get a 6502 emulator written in javascript and run it in your browser

But you can’t plug that one into a board and run it.

[0TreeLemur]

For grins I just downloaded AvareX on my iPad.   Seems a nice start.  I'll give the UI a score of 5/10 .  It would work as a moving map with selectable background.  I give deducts because I don't see how to enter a flight plan, and random button pushing didn't reveal anything useful in the "Plan" page.   I also see the "Plate" option, but don't have a clue how to display one.  I did download some.  Doesn't seem to have the ability to select an airport, at least not from the Map display.  This is a major gap.  Of course I have not RTFM.

I guess this is a work in progress?   I can see that it could become a competitor to ff someday with some more development.

Is there an FM I should R?   Anyone using it?

[dkkim73]

1 hour ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

LISP? 

 

[dkkim73]

Just now, 201Mooniac said:

Don't worry, you can get a 6502 emulator written in javascript and run it in your browser

Ah but how are you going to EMP-harden that. 

[Hank]

@0TreeLemur, I use Avare, and will check out AvareX, which I'd not heard of until this thread.

In Avare, you have to select an airport on the Find tab. To enter a flight plan, go to the Plan tab; enter your starting location under "Add Waypoint to Plan," hit the Search button then Add; do the same for each waypoint and your destination. 

Once you have a Plan, the Plate page will show all plates for the destination. You may need to.hit the <Destination> button, then choose the destination whose plates you want to see. The center (large) box will list all plates, tap the one you want to see.

Nonidea if this is how AvareX works, I haven't downloaded it yet. But it's probably quite similar. Google says it has a more modern interface than Avare, though.

[dkkim73]

4 hours ago, McMooney said:

the value is really in the data and integrations they have,  i could probably build you something really really close to foreflight for a few million.  100M  budget would probably get you something seriously next level.  

100Mill i think i'd  be able to finish my Assisted reality Istrument panel

This is a thought-provoking comment. One hears a lot of received wisdom about standards and "you couldn't ever do (insert surprise here)". Then someone does it. At the risk of getting political, you could think of deals brokered, clean-sheet space launch vehicles, finding the profit in existing launch businesses and leveraging them, etc. 

You would think for $100M with hardcore motivated people (not just milking the budget on someone else's business plan) you could build some next-level innovation in aviation UI/UX. Assisted/augmented/annotated reality applications have crossed my mind a few times in aviation. Sounds like you are thinking similarly. 

Others have pointed out that there are adoption issues, cert, marketing aspects, etc, but the development cost itself is a different question. 

Lot of knowledge and experience on this forum. 

 

 

[MikeOH]

12 minutes ago, dkkim73 said:

LISP? 

 

He could try APL

[Justin Schmidt]

This is pretty funny, I bet y'all did this same thing when Boeing bought them only a few short years ago.

Fact is Boeing shot themselves in the foot pretty bad and the new CEO is trying to save the company.

Secondly, thoma bravo has done an excellent job with their portfolio building and growing the companies.

[shawnd]

We should have a vote on this thread to see how many people understand what the rest of the nerds mooniacs are talking about ... 

 

[dzeleski]

6 hours ago, Jeff Uphoff said:

That's not even remotely true. I started doing Linux development in early 1993--Linux was barely a year old at that point--and it and projects it leveraged, such as GNU and Athena/X, were already thriving and distributed worldwide over Usenet and various email lists. Heck, I felt like a latecomer to the party at the time!

I coauthored some of Linux's initial networking documentation in 1993 and then cofounded the original security project in 1994, by which time multiple companies had already sprung up in the ecosystem, most notably Red Hat.

By the late 90s/early 00s, there was a flurry of Linux-related IPOs (I was granted share allocations in them), and I was working with Linus at Transmeta and was even briefly his team lead in our Linux group. He, I, and a couple of others cofounded the Linux Kernel Organization around then, and I served on its board until 2012, when we merged it into the Linux Foundation--where Linus had already been a fellow for close to a decade.

There's nothing "very very recently" about any of this.

Fun aside: Linus and I knocked around Northern California a bit in my first Mooney, a vintage M20C, when we worked together there.

--Up.

I think you unfortunately took the team part too literally and that’s my fault due to the way I wrote it. Linus is very well known for running that project very controlled and very hands on. Reviewing nearly every single change and being involved in every single aspect to the point of a bit of insanity.

Im not saying no one else was ever involved (the commit history obviously shows this) but that it largely was either stay at his level or we got a very entertaining rant off the mail list. My apologies.

edit: if I remember correctly I’m fairly sure up until a few years ago only Linus had write permissions to his tree and he quite literally reviewed everything himself(with varying levels of detail). I know the subsystem maintainers did most of the heavy lifting here but that was why I put team in quotes because Linus at the end of the day was the gatekeeper. 

Edited April 23 by dzeleski

[0TreeLemur]

1 hour ago, MikeOH said:

He could try APL

One of my graduate advisors gave me an APL code once to use as a starting point for a model I was helping develop.  It was about 35 lines long.  That routine is now running continental scale flood forecasting.  In Fortran.  A lot longer than 35 lines.   (first time I've ever used that face on MS).

[N201MKTurbo]

I inherited a system that used a 68HC11 running LISP. It was a propane tissue freezer. I screwed with the LISP code for a while, but finally said screw it and rewrote it in assembly. I don’t remember anything about LISP.

[MikeOH]

1 hour ago, 0TreeLemur said:

One of my graduate advisors gave me an APL code once to use as a starting point for a model I was helping develop.  It was about 35 lines long.  That routine is now running continental scale flood forecasting.  In Fortran.  A lot longer than 35 lines.   (first time I've ever used that face on MS).

My only exposure to APL was at a local community college back around 1974. I think it was an overview of computer languages: APL, COBOL, FORTRAN, ??  IIRC, the keyboard was unique to accommodate the special APL characters/operators, but it was a very compact/efficient language especially for matrix/data sets...but waaay arcane!

Also that class was my first and last experience with batch processing (keypunch cards)!  The young ones today don't know how good they have it!

Oh, and your Alaska map is NOT even approximately to scale!

[Fix]

10 hours ago, M20F said:

I am writing a flight bag in a mix of 6502 assembler and LISP.  I plan to launch a kick starter later this year.  

I can program 6502 assembler, and will join the project.

lda #$00
sta $c000
rts

 

 

[N201MKTurbo]

2 hours ago, Fix said:

I can program 6502 assembler, and will join the project.

lda #$00
sta $c000
rts

 

 

Why don’t you use an index register and fill a whole block of memory with zeros?