Quirks with Time Machine not happy to back up to a shared USB drive, but got it its own and it's fine now.
I don't agree with some of their UI changes -- ArsTechnica (a real nerd news site...) covers most of the complaints nicely.
Works fine here, otherwise. One MacBook upgraded in-place from last 10.4.x release, and an older iBook G4 that had some problems with an upgrade (lost its 802.11x drivers and I didn't mind rebuilding it, since reinstalling apps is as simple as dragging them from the Applications folder on a mounted disk image made from the machine prior to wiping)... both having no problems after the 10.5.1 updates.
The OP doesn't even tell what hardware he's running it on, or anything... what a whiner.
Is a kernel panic, and you should be able to find the reason in the logs, unlike Windows. Apple's problem isn't in making systems easier to use, it's in attracting folks who won't ever think about looking at a Unix log file for clues.
Recommend that your mom head for an Apple store and get some free training from non family members?
It sounds like your mom just wants attention from you and dad. If she really wanted to get something done that was worth doing on the computer, she'd figure it out or ask where she could get the knowledge she needed.
I've met a lot of people who use the computer and "not wanting to learn anything new" as a way to get loved ones to spend time with them "fixing" it.
Ask her specifically what she wants to do and tell her you'll build up a lesson plan for her. See if she's still interested. If not, your dad is buying personal computers for someone simply not interested.
The true Blackberry branded holsters have a magnet in them that puts the phone to sleep via a sensor in the phone. You sure you're using RIM-created Blackberry branded holsters and not cheap $3 Chinese crap?
Who says the Google brains aren't already "into" crypto, and/or selling information to governments? Not saying they are, but if they are, they're not exactly going to tell you or me, now are they?
The "we have more patents than you" cold war is old. It's the key component of IBM's legal plan, and has been for decades.
"Fine, we infringe your patent, you infringe 30 of ours!"
The problem with this is that even if the USPTO were doing a good job on patents (and I think we all agree here that they're not), it implicitly gives the larger company the advantage in all situations, as long as they've been dutifully filing (mostly useless) patents continuously throughout their growth over the years.
The legal system is horribly skewed toward the larger company, or the plaintiff or defendant with more money to pay more lawyers, and the lawyers (who are also the major base from which we continually elect our political leaders) definitely want it that way, since that's ultimately in their best interests.
The best thing that could happen would be: We stop electing lawyers so heavily, first. Then we pass laws to switch our legal system to "loser pays"... always. The *entire* costs of the lawsuit are placed upon the defendant if they lose.
You'd see a lot less screwing around by people skirting the law, because they'd quickly learn that the financial consequences of losing a case against them were dire, and you'd see a quick decline in frivolous lawsuits or lawsuits that didn't have a chance of being won, because the plantiff would pay for the ENTIRE costs including legal defense costs of the defendant if they lost, too.
I agree that Debian upgrades are some of the best I've dealt with over the years. I decided to dig into the WHY of that once, and found that bugs in upgrading from one package to another are considered release-CRITICAL bugs by default and DO have the power to stop an entire release of an OS.
Comparing that to what I've seen behind closed doors in numerous commercial software release "Change Control Board" meetings, I'd have to say that commercial software is far more likely to start arguing over "how many people do you think that will affect?" so they can figure out a way to justify a release NOW so a) revenue comes in and everyone still has a job, and b) the developers make their deadline for a bonus. (Sadly, #2 is more powerful than #1, even.)
I then watched, and sure enough -- during freezes right before release, testers report things, and developers in the Debian world actually tag things as CRITICAL and the entire distro has to stop and wait. It's pretty impressive to see that ANY software management "shop", free or non-free... does that anymore. On some occasions they'll simply remove the offending package, if pressed for time and/or a dev simply says they can't fix it. Bravo!
(Oh and judging by the above and by the problems I've encountered with their upgrades over the years, RedHat more likely follows the "Change Control Board" decision making process above, than the Debian one. There's no rule at RedHat that ANYTHING has to upgrade cleanly, let alone EVERYTHING...)
There's a growing body of evidence that "opt-in" would be better for Class Action lawsuits versus the current "opt-out" system. Many reasons. One would be that the lawyers would have to hunt down and get permission from all the people to represent them, so there'd be a very big damper put on the lawyers who just troll for Class Action suits constantly to make money, with little or no benefit to the consumer.
The other thing it points out, which many of us are aware of, is that education doesn't focus on entrepreneurial skills and/or teaching people how to actually make money.
Being "educated" is just another path to being slave labor for someone else, albeit at a more "comfortable" income level.
Drop out of school, learn how to start a successful business, grow it, hire "educated" people to run it (seen the pedigrees of CEO's lately?), better yet... sell it to educated people...
And go hang out on the beach drinking a cold beverage and watching the sun set.
Yeah I realized after I posted that, that I was mixing up another agency thing where they have the same acronyms, and the NASA/ASRS system... it was late. It *is* the NASA we all know and love...
Changes in the last few years in runway markings, the way controllers are allowed to clear aircraft to/from runways, and various other changes have made a positive impact on the number of incursions...
Well, they WOULD if the number of airports built that can handle air carrier traffic were increasing at the same rate as number of air carrier flights, and carriers didn't try to schedule as many aircraft into the airports as they can possibly handle, to avoid layover time for passengers connecting through the somewhat broken hub and spoke system, currently in use by all major air carriers.
But in general, the runway incursion numbers are very VERY low, and pilots are (and have been) on a hyper-vigilant kick about them... since they know their options are very limited in ways to react to one.
Chicago O'Hare (United) is probably the absolute worst-case example of how airlines can crush any safety system by overloading it completely by scheduling of too many aircraft in one place at one time.
Maybe for VFR pilots not talking to air traffic controllers in uncontrolled airspace, this is a good analogy.
But the equivalent analogy in aviation would be something like this:
"I had to deviate from course and ignore the air traffic controller, the mandated by law Terminal Collision Avoidance System warnings from the panel of the aircraft, and the co-pilot -- and then I almost caused a collision."
Or the car version:
"The lane traffic controller didn't clear me to change lanes, the automated blind-spot detection system on the car mirror was ignored, and the co-driver with a fully operative set of his own controls for the car also didn't check the blind spot, and I almost hit the car in the lane next to me."
Hard to make commercial aviation to automotive analogies. Doesn't work.
Yeah because the circuit breakers and fusible links installed to mitigate shorts in every single circuit aboard the aircraft, are all of a sudden no longer working.
Give it up, man... engineering includes a few risks and trade-offs. Even the article you cited only has TWO examples from how many flying commercial aircraft?
A ticking time-bomb indeed. Whatever.
Seen the wiring in older houses lately? People sleep in those. Start a crusade, fix that -- come back to aviation when you've finished that up.
Apply same comments to software engineering, and you see why places like banks and financial institutions lose personal data and don't report it.
Get real. Same in any industry. Only ethics and morals fixes it.
Starting commercial pilots are paid less than many schoolteachers (a notoriously underpaid profession for what they do) with only seniority and longevity in a brutal airline price-war market as their only ally to survive it until they can make a living wage, just like in many other professions today.
The government provides a "no-penalty" service called a "NASA" report (not NASA the space agency, but the National Aeronautics Safety Administration) where pilots can report truly unsafe conditions, and that system has promoted numerous good studies on how the FAA should regulate air carriers and other operators. There's no "barrier" to reporting safety issues in this manner to pilots, even ones scared for their jobs.
And I don't know any pilots who will willingly endanger passengers in any way -- people who aspire to the cockpit simply don't think that way. Plus the old rule is, "The pilot is the first to the scene of the accident."
Flying, unlike the above-mentioned software so-called "professionals" that fuck up system security via software on a daily basis, have a vested interest in the successful outcome of the flight. The software dev makes more money and can simply leave and do it all over again at the next company.
The only "potential" problem that's actually already here is poor scheduling by airlines. In order to make "hub and spoke" systems work for passengers who don't like long layovers, the airlines have to schedule as many of their own company's aircraft to arrive and depart at once, as possible.
This causes stress on the very well-thought-out safety systems, that are unnecessary. That stress shows up as runway incursions, mainly... and has been a concern for aviation safety professionals for a few decades now.
But other than that, the article is sensationalist and uses dodgy "statistics" like "50% more". "50% more" than what?
Almost every major airport with parallel runways allows simultaneous approaches to both runways.
And his 800 hours is pretty high for many private pilots. A Commercial rating can be had at 250... under perfect circumstances.
Aircraft of different speeds will overtake each other and pass at airports using simultaneous parallel approaches, but everyone's in their swimming lanes, and no "safety" issue is at stake. Some airports (Denver International comes to mind, since it's here...) have three parallel runways and can conduct operations to all three at the same time, with some limitations, in good weather.
As a pilot, I agree with the comment that "I'm not surprised" that there are more issues happening than are reported, but that's like saying there are more auto accidents on the freeway than I hear about or see.
The article (and the wording of the Slashdot article submission) are unnecessarily alarmist. And the use of the usual "double the number of incidents" horse-hockey math where real numbers aren't given versus total number of flight operations, likely makes the data seem more important than it is.
It also sets off my statistical Bullshit-O-Meter. Doesn't it yours?
If not, look into having the ground crew recalibrate yours.
If your aircraft requires an operable Bullshit-O-Meter for safe flight and it's not a deferrable maintenance item, you'll have to notify maintenance that the aircraft will be grounded upon arrival so they can order parts. Better get on the horn to flight ops on the company frequency!
That photo shows that the other aircraft was being separated from you by vertical (not lateral) separation, and doesn't look unsafe to me (as a pilot) at all.
Controllers don't think in 2-dimensions, and the type of separation you took the photo of there is perfectly legitimate, especially in that beautiful blue sky.
There's also rules for allowing pilots to maintain visual separation on their own in terminal areas if they confirm that they have the other traffic in sight, so passengers might "feel" like the other aircraft is close, but the pilots are watching the other aircraft and maneuvering appropriately.
The safety article states:
"Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly."
Twice as many as what? There aren't that many bird strikes compared to total number of flight operations -- we're talking far less than 1% here.
Ain't statistics grand? (Or at least good for grandstanding, perhaps.)
"The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" _ potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans."
In what kind of weather? During a visual or instrument approach? A request to side-step to a parallel runway is a no-brainer for any pilot, private or commercial... especially not commercial. A request to go-around and/or be re-vectored to a different runway because of a wind shift and runway change? Another no-brainer. Asked to perform a missed-approach procedure in bad weather single-pilot (never the case in the airline world) and fly outbound to a new fix and hold in order to switch runways? Not fun, but something every single pilot who flies instruments is tested on.
Everything about flying is "potentially dangerous" but changing landing plans is something you deal with from day 1 of flight training. You INTENDED to touch down at a specific spot, but a little gust carried you a bit further... that type of CONSTANT change is what makes flying so challenging and also rewarding for any good pilot. You plan, and execute, and replan and execute... from the moment it's untied to the moment it's tied back down.
Flying's about mitigating risk by thinking ahead. The most "dangerous" situations are the runway-incursions mentioned -- the pilot has far fewer options than they'd like during a takeoff/landing roll when another aircraft appears out of the fog/dark on their assigned runway. Tenerife being the absolute worst-case example, and it was either directly or indirectly caused (depending on your view of the Captain's motivations) by a Captain who was pushing too hard to get off the ground... in other words, he'd already lost the mental battle, before he ordered the throttles pushed up.
Checking your own motivations and decisions against past experience really isn't enough. Pilots have to study and learn from accidents to know where their "mental blind spots" are. This is a difficult self-discipline to learn and to maintain at all times when proceeding to "commit acts of blatant aviation".
This article at the external site and the wording of the Slashdot article are just fear-mongering. FAA systems don't need "modernization"... radar still works, the system for going non-radar still works, all of the safety systems still WORK -- the equipment just hasn't been maintained properly, including refreshing it. Modernization seems to also bring with it the (stupid) desire to monkey with the system, which is dead-wrong. Fix and replace the system in INCREMENTAL upgrades that were neglected for 20 years.
Don't rip it out and throw it away. It's the safest system in the world today, even with its warts.
They apparently don't realize that there are whole companies that do all of their sales online, who could lead them to the promised land of "server farm best practices".
Perhaps Jeff Bezos could give them a call and help them pull their heads out of their asses, tell 'em about this little site called Amazon that handles millions of orders a day during holiday season.
Slashdot Mirror
Quirks with Time Machine not happy to back up to a shared USB drive, but got it its own and it's fine now.
I don't agree with some of their UI changes -- ArsTechnica (a real nerd news site...) covers most of the complaints nicely.
Works fine here, otherwise. One MacBook upgraded in-place from last 10.4.x release, and an older iBook G4 that had some problems with an upgrade (lost its 802.11x drivers and I didn't mind rebuilding it, since reinstalling apps is as simple as dragging them from the Applications folder on a mounted disk image made from the machine prior to wiping)... both having no problems after the 10.5.1 updates.
The OP doesn't even tell what hardware he's running it on, or anything... what a whiner.
Is a kernel panic, and you should be able to find the reason in the logs, unlike Windows. Apple's problem isn't in making systems easier to use, it's in attracting folks who won't ever think about looking at a Unix log file for clues.
The helmet having an NBA team on it is a feature, not a bug!
Recommend that your mom head for an Apple store and get some free training from non family members?
It sounds like your mom just wants attention from you and dad. If she really wanted to get something done that was worth doing on the computer, she'd figure it out or ask where she could get the knowledge she needed.
I've met a lot of people who use the computer and "not wanting to learn anything new" as a way to get loved ones to spend time with them "fixing" it.
Ask her specifically what she wants to do and tell her you'll build up a lesson plan for her. See if she's still interested. If not, your dad is buying personal computers for someone simply not interested.
The true Blackberry branded holsters have a magnet in them that puts the phone to sleep via a sensor in the phone. You sure you're using RIM-created Blackberry branded holsters and not cheap $3 Chinese crap?
Who says the Google brains aren't already "into" crypto, and/or selling information to governments? Not saying they are, but if they are, they're not exactly going to tell you or me, now are they?
Nicely done.
Because we can't survive without cheap Chinese-made shit from WalMart.
Follow the money.
Congress can use Yahoo executives as scapegoats, but has no balls to follow through on things they could do.
Gee, big surprise.
The "we have more patents than you" cold war is old. It's the key component of IBM's legal plan, and has been for decades.
"Fine, we infringe your patent, you infringe 30 of ours!"
The problem with this is that even if the USPTO were doing a good job on patents (and I think we all agree here that they're not), it implicitly gives the larger company the advantage in all situations, as long as they've been dutifully filing (mostly useless) patents continuously throughout their growth over the years.
The legal system is horribly skewed toward the larger company, or the plaintiff or defendant with more money to pay more lawyers, and the lawyers (who are also the major base from which we continually elect our political leaders) definitely want it that way, since that's ultimately in their best interests.
The best thing that could happen would be: We stop electing lawyers so heavily, first. Then we pass laws to switch our legal system to "loser pays"... always. The *entire* costs of the lawsuit are placed upon the defendant if they lose.
You'd see a lot less screwing around by people skirting the law, because they'd quickly learn that the financial consequences of losing a case against them were dire, and you'd see a quick decline in frivolous lawsuits or lawsuits that didn't have a chance of being won, because the plantiff would pay for the ENTIRE costs including legal defense costs of the defendant if they lost, too.
I agree that Debian upgrades are some of the best I've dealt with over the years. I decided to dig into the WHY of that once, and found that bugs in upgrading from one package to another are considered release-CRITICAL bugs by default and DO have the power to stop an entire release of an OS.
Comparing that to what I've seen behind closed doors in numerous commercial software release "Change Control Board" meetings, I'd have to say that commercial software is far more likely to start arguing over "how many people do you think that will affect?" so they can figure out a way to justify a release NOW so a) revenue comes in and everyone still has a job, and b) the developers make their deadline for a bonus. (Sadly, #2 is more powerful than #1, even.)
I then watched, and sure enough -- during freezes right before release, testers report things, and developers in the Debian world actually tag things as CRITICAL and the entire distro has to stop and wait. It's pretty impressive to see that ANY software management "shop", free or non-free... does that anymore. On some occasions they'll simply remove the offending package, if pressed for time and/or a dev simply says they can't fix it. Bravo!
(Oh and judging by the above and by the problems I've encountered with their upgrades over the years, RedHat more likely follows the "Change Control Board" decision making process above, than the Debian one. There's no rule at RedHat that ANYTHING has to upgrade cleanly, let alone EVERYTHING...)
There's a growing body of evidence that "opt-in" would be better for Class Action lawsuits versus the current "opt-out" system. Many reasons. One would be that the lawyers would have to hunt down and get permission from all the people to represent them, so there'd be a very big damper put on the lawyers who just troll for Class Action suits constantly to make money, with little or no benefit to the consumer.
That would work even better if we had a true "loser pays" legal system, like we should.
The other thing it points out, which many of us are aware of, is that education doesn't focus on entrepreneurial skills and/or teaching people how to actually make money.
Being "educated" is just another path to being slave labor for someone else, albeit at a more "comfortable" income level.
Drop out of school, learn how to start a successful business, grow it, hire "educated" people to run it (seen the pedigrees of CEO's lately?), better yet... sell it to educated people...
And go hang out on the beach drinking a cold beverage and watching the sun set.
Where exactly do you think the "telecommunications center" of the U.S. is?
Yeah I realized after I posted that, that I was mixing up another agency thing where they have the same acronyms, and the NASA/ASRS system... it was late. It *is* the NASA we all know and love...
Changes in the last few years in runway markings, the way controllers are allowed to clear aircraft to/from runways, and various other changes have made a positive impact on the number of incursions...
Well, they WOULD if the number of airports built that can handle air carrier traffic were increasing at the same rate as number of air carrier flights, and carriers didn't try to schedule as many aircraft into the airports as they can possibly handle, to avoid layover time for passengers connecting through the somewhat broken hub and spoke system, currently in use by all major air carriers.
But in general, the runway incursion numbers are very VERY low, and pilots are (and have been) on a hyper-vigilant kick about them... since they know their options are very limited in ways to react to one.
Chicago O'Hare (United) is probably the absolute worst-case example of how airlines can crush any safety system by overloading it completely by scheduling of too many aircraft in one place at one time.
Maybe for VFR pilots not talking to air traffic controllers in uncontrolled airspace, this is a good analogy.
But the equivalent analogy in aviation would be something like this:
"I had to deviate from course and ignore the air traffic controller, the mandated by law Terminal Collision Avoidance System warnings from the panel of the aircraft, and the co-pilot -- and then I almost caused a collision."
Or the car version:
"The lane traffic controller didn't clear me to change lanes, the automated blind-spot detection system on the car mirror was ignored, and the co-driver with a fully operative set of his own controls for the car also didn't check the blind spot, and I almost hit the car in the lane next to me."
Hard to make commercial aviation to automotive analogies. Doesn't work.
Yeah because the circuit breakers and fusible links installed to mitigate shorts in every single circuit aboard the aircraft, are all of a sudden no longer working.
Give it up, man... engineering includes a few risks and trade-offs. Even the article you cited only has TWO examples from how many flying commercial aircraft?
A ticking time-bomb indeed. Whatever.
Seen the wiring in older houses lately? People sleep in those. Start a crusade, fix that -- come back to aviation when you've finished that up.
They were likely separated vertically and passing over a ground-based navigation station. Nothing abnormal going on there at all.
Apply same comments to software engineering, and you see why places like banks and financial institutions lose personal data and don't report it.
Get real. Same in any industry. Only ethics and morals fixes it.
Starting commercial pilots are paid less than many schoolteachers (a notoriously underpaid profession for what they do) with only seniority and longevity in a brutal airline price-war market as their only ally to survive it until they can make a living wage, just like in many other professions today.
The government provides a "no-penalty" service called a "NASA" report (not NASA the space agency, but the National Aeronautics Safety Administration) where pilots can report truly unsafe conditions, and that system has promoted numerous good studies on how the FAA should regulate air carriers and other operators. There's no "barrier" to reporting safety issues in this manner to pilots, even ones scared for their jobs.
And I don't know any pilots who will willingly endanger passengers in any way -- people who aspire to the cockpit simply don't think that way. Plus the old rule is, "The pilot is the first to the scene of the accident."
Flying, unlike the above-mentioned software so-called "professionals" that fuck up system security via software on a daily basis, have a vested interest in the successful outcome of the flight. The software dev makes more money and can simply leave and do it all over again at the next company.
The only "potential" problem that's actually already here is poor scheduling by airlines. In order to make "hub and spoke" systems work for passengers who don't like long layovers, the airlines have to schedule as many of their own company's aircraft to arrive and depart at once, as possible.
This causes stress on the very well-thought-out safety systems, that are unnecessary. That stress shows up as runway incursions, mainly... and has been a concern for aviation safety professionals for a few decades now.
But other than that, the article is sensationalist and uses dodgy "statistics" like "50% more". "50% more" than what?
It's crap reporting.
Almost every major airport with parallel runways allows simultaneous approaches to both runways.
And his 800 hours is pretty high for many private pilots. A Commercial rating can be had at 250... under perfect circumstances.
Aircraft of different speeds will overtake each other and pass at airports using simultaneous parallel approaches, but everyone's in their swimming lanes, and no "safety" issue is at stake. Some airports (Denver International comes to mind, since it's here...) have three parallel runways and can conduct operations to all three at the same time, with some limitations, in good weather.
As a pilot, I agree with the comment that "I'm not surprised" that there are more issues happening than are reported, but that's like saying there are more auto accidents on the freeway than I hear about or see.
The article (and the wording of the Slashdot article submission) are unnecessarily alarmist. And the use of the usual "double the number of incidents" horse-hockey math where real numbers aren't given versus total number of flight operations, likely makes the data seem more important than it is.
It also sets off my statistical Bullshit-O-Meter. Doesn't it yours?
If not, look into having the ground crew recalibrate yours.
If your aircraft requires an operable Bullshit-O-Meter for safe flight and it's not a deferrable maintenance item, you'll have to notify maintenance that the aircraft will be grounded upon arrival so they can order parts. Better get on the horn to flight ops on the company frequency!
That photo shows that the other aircraft was being separated from you by vertical (not lateral) separation, and doesn't look unsafe to me (as a pilot) at all.
Controllers don't think in 2-dimensions, and the type of separation you took the photo of there is perfectly legitimate, especially in that beautiful blue sky.
There's also rules for allowing pilots to maintain visual separation on their own in terminal areas if they confirm that they have the other traffic in sight, so passengers might "feel" like the other aircraft is close, but the pilots are watching the other aircraft and maneuvering appropriately.
The safety article states:
"Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly."
Twice as many as what? There aren't that many bird strikes compared to total number of flight operations -- we're talking far less than 1% here.
Ain't statistics grand? (Or at least good for grandstanding, perhaps.)
"The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" _ potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans."
In what kind of weather? During a visual or instrument approach? A request to side-step to a parallel runway is a no-brainer for any pilot, private or commercial... especially not commercial. A request to go-around and/or be re-vectored to a different runway because of a wind shift and runway change? Another no-brainer. Asked to perform a missed-approach procedure in bad weather single-pilot (never the case in the airline world) and fly outbound to a new fix and hold in order to switch runways? Not fun, but something every single pilot who flies instruments is tested on.
Everything about flying is "potentially dangerous" but changing landing plans is something you deal with from day 1 of flight training. You INTENDED to touch down at a specific spot, but a little gust carried you a bit further... that type of CONSTANT change is what makes flying so challenging and also rewarding for any good pilot. You plan, and execute, and replan and execute... from the moment it's untied to the moment it's tied back down.
Flying's about mitigating risk by thinking ahead. The most "dangerous" situations are the runway-incursions mentioned -- the pilot has far fewer options than they'd like during a takeoff/landing roll when another aircraft appears out of the fog/dark on their assigned runway. Tenerife being the absolute worst-case example, and it was either directly or indirectly caused (depending on your view of the Captain's motivations) by a Captain who was pushing too hard to get off the ground... in other words, he'd already lost the mental battle, before he ordered the throttles pushed up.
Checking your own motivations and decisions against past experience really isn't enough. Pilots have to study and learn from accidents to know where their "mental blind spots" are. This is a difficult self-discipline to learn and to maintain at all times when proceeding to "commit acts of blatant aviation".
This article at the external site and the wording of the Slashdot article are just fear-mongering. FAA systems don't need "modernization"... radar still works, the system for going non-radar still works, all of the safety systems still WORK -- the equipment just hasn't been maintained properly, including refreshing it. Modernization seems to also bring with it the (stupid) desire to monkey with the system, which is dead-wrong. Fix and replace the system in INCREMENTAL upgrades that were neglected for 20 years.
Don't rip it out and throw it away. It's the safest system in the world today, even with its warts.
They don't seem to be able to deal with normal web traffic for selling things.
Colorado Rockies Suspend World Series Ticket Sales because Monfort Brothers want to make sure Denver looks like a cow-town -- Assistance was gladly provided by California based web server farm morons who haven't heard of load-balancing or using something other than JSP on their smokin' Pentium III machines
They apparently don't realize that there are whole companies that do all of their sales online, who could lead them to the promised land of "server farm best practices".
Perhaps Jeff Bezos could give them a call and help them pull their heads out of their asses, tell 'em about this little site called Amazon that handles millions of orders a day during holiday season.
You monitor your touchpad for failures from a remote management server? That's hard-core, man.