Vesaero Maiden

The first Maiden flight went somewhat bad I realized too late that the prop I was using is too big for the motor and the plane come down with a lot of smoke.

However if you want to check out the brief flight video I have it here.

Early impressions are the plane flies rather well it does some really hard banking turns it definitely follows the “super maneuverability” design of the initial concept.

With enough power these hard banks won’t be a problem the plane does exhibit some pitch up tendencies at higher speeds which will need to be examined.

PS3 Firmware 3.21 Update Process Impressions

Like may people out there I was a bit disappointed when I heard that firmware 3.21’s only feature was the removal of Linux. I used it from time to time but I will admit it was not in steady use on my system for day to day operations.

That said I disagreed heavily with Sony’s underhanded approach of removing features that were obviously advertised on the side of the box my unit came in.

This is not about Sony’s update decision however there are plenty of posts on the internet about that, this is about the update process.

First off if you have another OS installed before you update you are required for format your HDD. Formatting your HDD removes all user settings, saved games, movies, music and photos you’ve loaded on. For me that’s 60GB.

I looked around for a “Just delete Other OS partition and resize” option but alas there was none.

Any sane user at this point would offload the data to a backup hard drive. So I went to the backup utility and selected backup to external HDD. This is where Sony’s lack of care for this release is made obvious the backup will take 2 hours to complete. I’m guessing since I’m in the middle of it that the restore will also take 2 hours.

4 Hours for a firmware update is by far the worst customer experience ever. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s greatly disappointed in Sony for this.

It would’ve been possible to just wipe the OTHER OS partition and expand the main partition without losing user data. But no, Sony decided that he customer’s time is not really worth anything.

A very poor rollout Sony as much as I’m usually negative about Apple, their iphone and ipod releases are done far better. Major releases although they wipe your phone, automatically make sure everything is back the way you left it before the update is done.

In order to ease customer suffering Sony could’ve also implemented a prompt to insert an external HDD and have the user data reloaded when the update was complete. But to be honest a simple delete partition and resize main partition would have been much more effective and much faster.

Take note people this is NOT how to update consumer devices.