Oh Joy - my latest hobby

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Been watching the local airplanes via their ADS-B flight transponders. Did a $20 receiver, a home-made antenna (designs available all over the place) and a spare RaspberryPi computer and that was it.  Loaded the software from FlightAware and joined their network. I also joined ADSBExchange as FlightAware filters out all non-civilian or non-commercial flight information and I have a Naval Air Base just across the bay.  C'mon man...

Anyway, got this in my inbox:

We would like to be the first to tell you about a recent event – Collins Aerospace has announced its intent to acquire FlightAware.

Let’s talk about what that means for FlightAware's ADS-B network.

Most importantly, Collins recognizes the importance of the ADS-B ground station network and is committed to maintaining and expanding it. This acquisition opens up resources to deliver new hardware innovations, better open-source software solutions, and a variety of web and mobile improvements to benefit the flight tracking community.

Well crap.  They could be Geek Gods and just leave FlightAware alone.  They might even fund it some more and improve it. Unfortunately, what happens all too often is that this will be "played with", it will never really fit into the Corporate Culture and in 2-3 years, it will become abandonware. Cue up a generation or two of new operating systems (Windows 11 for example) and the software will no longer run. Grrrrr...

But then again, I am still really pissed off at how EMagic's SoundDiver was handled.  It was available for Windows and MAC and then in 2002, Apple bought them out. Dropped support for the Windows version, fiddled with it for a year or two and then abandoned it. It was a library program for musical instruments that had amazing support for a huge range of synthesizers and effects processors.  It would allow you to manage audio samples, MIDI sequences, MIDI configurations, basically control your whole setup from one very nicely laid out window. Double Grrrrr....
Corporate idiots - buy the stuff but they do not use it so they do not know what they have.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 30, 2021 7:10 PM.

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