Guy IS a hero, though the slashdot article comes off as a little weird... "engineer mode"?... Or was the submitter an engineer looking for reflected glory?
Well, "engineer mode" is a direct quote from the Seattle Times. In fact, the entire summary is a quote from the actual article. The submitter had nothing to do with the terminology.
And, really:
"Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,"
means he was thinking like an engineer.
It's the article that makes him sound like an engineer super-hero. And, I don't see much reason to detract from him that much.
I can find Bill Gates denying he said it. I can find someone saying they don't believe him. I can even find someone saying that the quote is likely apocryphal.
It doesn't seem like anybody is actually reliably attributed to this quote. So, either it's a meme that's stuck, or Bill Gates is lying, or it's mis-attributed and nobody knows who said it.
Well, first and foremost, whoever ordered a machine in the late 90's without a CD drive messed up.
At the time, we had a bunch of HPs and an older Sun or two. None of us were proper sysadmins, so we could have easily missed something that someon else might have found. Damned annoying though.
In retrospect if we could have mounted the CD on a different workstation and have it use TFTP or something like that -- well, that's just funny.;-P
I seem to recall about four people all trying to sort out how to do the install.
Didn't it have a way of doing an OS load via NFS or somesuch in the bootloader?
Not that we were able to ascertain, it just booted and said "insert CD" or somesuch.
Now, there's any number of things I likely didn't know that I could do, and therefore didn't. But, nonetheless... a CD for a machine with no CD drive was kind of borked.:-P
All I know is, it sat there for a couple of months.
Yes, good call. Including a recovery disk with a laptop that doesn't have a disk drive would certainly have been questionable.
You laugh, but sometime in the late 90s, I took delivery of a new Sun workstation.
It had no OS installed, didn't come with a CD-ROM, and had a CD to install Solaris shipped with it. So, it wasn't actually possible to install the OS.
It took us six-months for the company to buy us a CD-ROM for it so we could install the OS. It got named "anchor" since it spent several months essentially being useful as just that.
If you're not paying for the service, you are the product, not the customer.
And, even if you are paying for the service, you may still be the product. Which is why advertisers on TV think you should be obliged to watch their ads.
I don't think you can use Swissair 111 as an argument against water landings.
No, more of an example of the ones that don't work.
My argument against water landings comes from having worked in the aircraft industry.
The laughing derision from the maintenance employees and insiders over water landings is the large basis of my disbelief in them.
I didn't get the impression they put much stock in the notion. In fact, I got the impression that it was largely considered to be a myth by them. Of course, I don't have actual data, but the office guffawing over the topic didn't instill any confidence.
But that's beside the main point. Do you really thing most smaller developers can't find a place to host their website and software which costs less than 30% of all their sales?
Guess it depends on how you look at it.
From your perspective, they could do it cheaper than they pay Apple to do it. Which, may or may not be true -- an app developer doesn't necessarily want to find/buy/build an e-commerce platform. So, any time they spend on that is time they're not developing apps.
If the app store supports finding apps, downloading apps, collection of fees and all of that, recommendation systems... I can imagine some smaller shops finding that actually quite useful. Looking on the app store, I see tons of apps that are like $0.99.
And, since taxes are passed on to consumers, every time you as a customer buys an "app" from the store it's really you who's paying that insane 30%.
The elasticity of the price of apps doesn't quite work that way. Eventually, you price yourself out of what people will spend.
Say I have an arbitrary upper bound of $1.99 of what I'll spend on an app. If you try to pass on the $0.65 or so entirely to me so the app is then $2.64 or whatever, you might have exceeded what I'm willing to pay. So, you can only push your price up so far before you simply don't make the sale in the first place.
Look, in the end, you're free to publish to/buy from the app store as you choose. I'm willing to bet that for some developers, that 30% is actually a pretty sweet deal. If I go over to my iTunes and look at the top grossing iPad apps, the current 6th position sells for $1.99. I'm betting the publishers of that have actually done fairly well under the app store model.
I know a lot of people that look at a purchase of less than $2 as being more or less an impulse item that costs what about the same as a coffee.
Um, roofs do not need to support a lot of weight, there's generally nothing on top of them.
Well, it has to support itself without sagging in the middle. If it's strong enough to keep a 747 aloft, I'm sure it's more than up to the task of being a roof -- specifically, if you support them with walls, you don't really need to worry about the wing segments sagging under their static load, because they're already designed for that. I suspect you need fewer load bearing walls, for example. The diagrams make it look like a small(ish) number of support columns.
Even a half-assed engineer could design a truss system better suited to a roof than a jumbo jet wing.
But, could they design and build two roof sections of 2500 square feet for the cost of yanking the wings off the aircraft and shipping them? From the sounds of it, reusing the aircraft components actually gave them a hell of a lot of material -- much of which had already been engineered for strength, for a "relatively" affordable sum. I think once you're building the multi-million dollar residence, the intact wing was actually cheaper than designing/building a roof that size.
Nobody is saying that an aircraft wing is the optimal/cheapest way to build a big roof. What they are saying is that as he was looking into how to meet the design requirements, and concluded that an existing airplane wing gave him a lot of what he needed.
Having been allowed to tour the inside of a 747 which was stripped down almost to the airframe -- it's a massive structure. Using a wing as a roof is actually a fairly cool thing. Hell, I'm sure the fuselage has a couple of acres of aluminum in it, and loads of structural steel.:-P
Even a half-assed engineer can appreciate at least some of the coolness of this.
Airbus Industrie documentation specifies that an A320-family aircraft landed intact on the water (which is highly improbable, but...) with the ditching mode activated should float for at least three days.
Contrary to the safety speech they are required to give you before take off... except for that one in the Hudson, aircraft don't generally make "water landings". At least, not very well.
Usually it's more like Swissair 111, with catastrophic results. I wouldn't want to be be present for one, that's for sure.
The owner of this house is not calling this green. The architect isn't even really calling it green.
In this case, a clever architect decided it would be cheaper to meet his (rich) client's needs by reusing parts of an airplane.
"Recycled" in this case is not an indication that this was intended to be an environmentally friendly house. It's a mansion, and some of the design goals were well met by using the existing components of a 747.
This isn't some tree hugger making a "green" home -- this is a wealthy lady who owns a big Mercedes dealership building a massive home on 55 acres of remote property. This is more about the architect than anything even remotely to do with saving the environment.
I'm sure there's nothing else "green" about this home unless it's in support of her Feng Shui.:-P
And, I'm sure it's a hell of an expensive plot of land. I'm betting absurdly expensive, in fact. $2 million to build it probably is gonna translate into an overall property worth several times that.
I'm sure the cost of moving the plane far exceeded the price of the plane itself.
Dude, seriously, at least try to read some of the article:
Additionally, incorporating prefabricated lightweight components off site and delivering them to the remote site via helicopter, although at a cost of $8,000/hr. became realistic after considering the cost of getting traditional labor and material to the site.
Yes, it was expensive. But, in the context of this project, it was "cost effective" -- outrageously expensive, but, apparently not as stupid as the alternative.
If you're building on 55 acres of Malibu California, and you own a Mercedes dealership... cost is relative.
Speaking of which, why do they need to keep the wings?
Why? You couldn't build a better roof-truss than a wing of a 747. It's a huge structure designed to support lots of weight.
Use it as a roof, and it's basically an engineering marvel. From the same article I quoted before:
In researching airplane wings and superimposing different airplane wing types on the site to scale, the wing of a 747, at over 2,500 sq. ft., became an ideal configuration to maximize the views and provide a self supporting roof with minimal additional structural support needed.
A 2500 square foot, pre-engineered roof. Two in fact. All as part of the $50K in material costs. I seriously doubt you could build that inexpensively -- and if it's designed to keep a 747 in flight, it's bloody solid!
it massively increases the probability of a pilot misidentifying it from above.
That's why they had to register it with the FAA, so that when pilots call it in it's a well known landmark and they don't scramble people.
too bad he had to level a hilltop and clear away some forest to build his stupid house.
Well, someone with 55 acres of land in Malibu aren't doing this for environmental reasons.
In this case, it seems like it was a means to an end since she wanted all curved shaped. This isn't an "environmental" project, this is an innovative architect.
I'm stunned you can buy an entire decommissioned 747 for $50K -- that's a lot of material.
My favorite thing from the second link is:
Although, we did find out that we have to register the roof of the house with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) so pilots flying overhead do not mistake it as a downed aircraft.
Now that would make for some strange calls to flight control... uhh... tower.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "engineer mode" is a direct quote from the Seattle Times. In fact, the entire summary is a quote from the actual article. The submitter had nothing to do with the terminology.
And, really:
means he was thinking like an engineer.
It's the article that makes him sound like an engineer super-hero. And, I don't see much reason to detract from him that much.
The other guy's.
They paid the damages to the engineers car and thanked him.
I'm pretty sure you could put far more profane things into a comment and it would stick.
I don't think there's as much filtering as you think -- I've seen most of the major swear words used on Slashdot. penis is comparatively tame.
I bet you could post the "seven words", which I leave as an exercise to someone else ...
I can find Bill Gates denying he said it. I can find someone saying they don't believe him. I can even find someone saying that the quote is likely apocryphal.
It doesn't seem like anybody is actually reliably attributed to this quote. So, either it's a meme that's stuck, or Bill Gates is lying, or it's mis-attributed and nobody knows who said it.
Anybody got something more definitive?
Mmmmm ..... brains!!!
Well, first and foremost, whoever ordered a machine in the late 90's without a CD drive messed up.
At the time, we had a bunch of HPs and an older Sun or two. None of us were proper sysadmins, so we could have easily missed something that someon else might have found. Damned annoying though.
In retrospect if we could have mounted the CD on a different workstation and have it use TFTP or something like that -- well, that's just funny. ;-P
I seem to recall about four people all trying to sort out how to do the install.
Not that we were able to ascertain, it just booted and said "insert CD" or somesuch.
Now, there's any number of things I likely didn't know that I could do, and therefore didn't. But, nonetheless ... a CD for a machine with no CD drive was kind of borked. :-P
All I know is, it sat there for a couple of months.
Awww, how sweet. ;-)
I'll be in my bunk pondering that.
Well, that and the federal laws the require it.
Don't give up on that indignation thing though. That's fun too. :-P
You laugh, but sometime in the late 90s, I took delivery of a new Sun workstation.
It had no OS installed, didn't come with a CD-ROM, and had a CD to install Solaris shipped with it. So, it wasn't actually possible to install the OS.
It took us six-months for the company to buy us a CD-ROM for it so we could install the OS. It got named "anchor" since it spent several months essentially being useful as just that.
What you describe isn't unprecedented.
And, even if you are paying for the service, you may still be the product. Which is why advertisers on TV think you should be obliged to watch their ads.
In short, you're always the product.
But, I bet you read the article about the new version of the Linux kernel and didn't whine about that, right?
Just turn off the Apple section or stop clicking the links.
See, now nobody is gonna believe you.
Might as well be "Pink Unicorn" given that most people on Slashdot don't seem to believe there's any females around here. ;-)
No, more of an example of the ones that don't work.
My argument against water landings comes from having worked in the aircraft industry.
The laughing derision from the maintenance employees and insiders over water landings is the large basis of my disbelief in them.
I didn't get the impression they put much stock in the notion. In fact, I got the impression that it was largely considered to be a myth by them. Of course, I don't have actual data, but the office guffawing over the topic didn't instill any confidence.
Guess it depends on how you look at it.
From your perspective, they could do it cheaper than they pay Apple to do it. Which, may or may not be true -- an app developer doesn't necessarily want to find/buy/build an e-commerce platform. So, any time they spend on that is time they're not developing apps.
If the app store supports finding apps, downloading apps, collection of fees and all of that, recommendation systems ... I can imagine some smaller shops finding that actually quite useful. Looking on the app store, I see tons of apps that are like $0.99.
The elasticity of the price of apps doesn't quite work that way. Eventually, you price yourself out of what people will spend.
Say I have an arbitrary upper bound of $1.99 of what I'll spend on an app. If you try to pass on the $0.65 or so entirely to me so the app is then $2.64 or whatever, you might have exceeded what I'm willing to pay. So, you can only push your price up so far before you simply don't make the sale in the first place.
Look, in the end, you're free to publish to/buy from the app store as you choose. I'm willing to bet that for some developers, that 30% is actually a pretty sweet deal. If I go over to my iTunes and look at the top grossing iPad apps, the current 6th position sells for $1.99. I'm betting the publishers of that have actually done fairly well under the app store model.
I know a lot of people that look at a purchase of less than $2 as being more or less an impulse item that costs what about the same as a coffee.
Well, it has to support itself without sagging in the middle. If it's strong enough to keep a 747 aloft, I'm sure it's more than up to the task of being a roof -- specifically, if you support them with walls, you don't really need to worry about the wing segments sagging under their static load, because they're already designed for that. I suspect you need fewer load bearing walls, for example. The diagrams make it look like a small(ish) number of support columns.
But, could they design and build two roof sections of 2500 square feet for the cost of yanking the wings off the aircraft and shipping them? From the sounds of it, reusing the aircraft components actually gave them a hell of a lot of material -- much of which had already been engineered for strength, for a "relatively" affordable sum. I think once you're building the multi-million dollar residence, the intact wing was actually cheaper than designing/building a roof that size.
Nobody is saying that an aircraft wing is the optimal/cheapest way to build a big roof. What they are saying is that as he was looking into how to meet the design requirements, and concluded that an existing airplane wing gave him a lot of what he needed.
Having been allowed to tour the inside of a 747 which was stripped down almost to the airframe -- it's a massive structure. Using a wing as a roof is actually a fairly cool thing. Hell, I'm sure the fuselage has a couple of acres of aluminum in it, and loads of structural steel. :-P
Even a half-assed engineer can appreciate at least some of the coolness of this.
Contrary to the safety speech they are required to give you before take off ... except for that one in the Hudson, aircraft don't generally make "water landings". At least, not very well.
Usually it's more like Swissair 111, with catastrophic results. I wouldn't want to be be present for one, that's for sure.
The owner of this house is not calling this green. The architect isn't even really calling it green.
In this case, a clever architect decided it would be cheaper to meet his (rich) client's needs by reusing parts of an airplane.
"Recycled" in this case is not an indication that this was intended to be an environmentally friendly house. It's a mansion, and some of the design goals were well met by using the existing components of a 747.
This isn't some tree hugger making a "green" home -- this is a wealthy lady who owns a big Mercedes dealership building a massive home on 55 acres of remote property. This is more about the architect than anything even remotely to do with saving the environment.
I'm sure there's nothing else "green" about this home unless it's in support of her Feng Shui. :-P
Oh, sure, that's what they all say. ;-)
Thanks, now I've refreshed my page to confirm what you say, and I no longer have the article either. Bastard!! ;-)
Not Hawaii. Malibu, California.
And, I'm sure it's a hell of an expensive plot of land. I'm betting absurdly expensive, in fact. $2 million to build it probably is gonna translate into an overall property worth several times that.
Dude, seriously, at least try to read some of the article:
Yes, it was expensive. But, in the context of this project, it was "cost effective" -- outrageously expensive, but, apparently not as stupid as the alternative.
If you're building on 55 acres of Malibu California, and you own a Mercedes dealership ... cost is relative.
Why? You couldn't build a better roof-truss than a wing of a 747. It's a huge structure designed to support lots of weight.
Use it as a roof, and it's basically an engineering marvel. From the same article I quoted before:
A 2500 square foot, pre-engineered roof. Two in fact. All as part of the $50K in material costs. I seriously doubt you could build that inexpensively -- and if it's designed to keep a 747 in flight, it's bloody solid!
That's why they had to register it with the FAA, so that when pilots call it in it's a well known landmark and they don't scramble people.
Well, someone with 55 acres of land in Malibu aren't doing this for environmental reasons.
In this case, it seems like it was a means to an end since she wanted all curved shaped. This isn't an "environmental" project, this is an innovative architect.
That's pretty awesome, actually.
I'm stunned you can buy an entire decommissioned 747 for $50K -- that's a lot of material.
My favorite thing from the second link is:
Now that would make for some strange calls to flight control ... uhh ... tower. ;-)