A lot has been said that President Truman should not have dropped the Bomb on Japan but should have arranged a demonstration of its power to Japan's leaders to convince them to surrender.
Whatever the merits of a demonstration vs having taken the lives of civilians, the U.S. did conduct a demonstration of the Bomb, for the benefit of the Soviets and others.
Bikini is a widely-used term for a certain type of two-piece women's bathing suit, but is the name of a place in the Marshall Islands where one of the early atom bomb tests were conducted. It was the site of the "Crossroads" tests of Hiroshima-sized bombs, and it was one of the few "public" tests for which there was a lot of film footage. I heard that the bathing suit became known as a bikini because people in the 50's had "Bikini" parties where women would wear revealing bathing suits because people thought the Bomb would end the world and one wanted to go out doing whatever one wanted. If you have seen images of atom bomb shots (such as the montage at the end of Dr. Strangelove), you have probably seen film of the Crossroads shots at Bikini Atol.
Apollo could be viewed as such a demonstration of war technology. Apollo was a combination of rocket power to take enough payload to bring men to the Moon and back, inertial guidance systems to achieve the bullseye accuracy of the rocket launches, and enough reliability of the rocket propulsion and other systems to get the men back.
It has become cliche "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we feed a poor child a school lunch? If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we have a high-speed train?" and so on. But it was in the manner of perhaps indirect military threat "If we can put a man on the Moon, darn tootin' we can target a nuclear warhead right down the air shaft of the men's room in the Kremlin."
If the 20 billion-dollar (1960's dollars) Apollo program was ape threat posturing, the Sputnik launch which started the whole space race was much the same thing.
You can always hack that 4-degree swing in the thermostat. Too warm? Use a blow dryer to "persuade" your thermostat that it is too warm to get the AC to kick in.
TCL/TK was "Java" before there was Java
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Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The funny thing is that TCL/TK was what Sun was promoting before they came out with Java and started pushing that.
Whenever you have one of these overlapping-window GUI front-ends to an OS, developing apps for it is a hard slog, whether it is Windows, GTK, Motif, raw X, whatever. Just like MS came out with their application programmer-friendly Visual Basic as the go-to way of slapping a GUI together, Sun was at one time promoting TCL/TK as the way of slapping a GUI front end on your C program.
In commercial apps, your users worry if your widgets are pretty and Mac people are in a huff about ported software or Java not conforming to UI standard, but for internal apps that just have to get a job done, you often don't care. The projected associated with a high-voltage custom x-ray machine had been a Sun shop since the days Sun 2's came out, and the current app running the x-ray machine is TCL/TK running on a SPARC.
That app makes good use of the Canvas widget to display gray-scale x-ray images and allow you to drag cursors and place measurement markers over those images; apart from that the app is a bunch of buttons to start and stop image collection and motion tracking modes of the x-ray system. I wouldn't have taken note that it was TCL/TK it it were not pointed out, but now that I know, I can see the characteristic widget styles and layouts along with the Canvas that does the x-ray images.
Given that this was all implemented prior to the release of Java, TCL/TK is what you had, and TCL/TK is what you did unless you wanted to take much more time doing the GUI, and our app has aged well (although try hiring someone to change the TCL code), so yes, it is a good question why Sun in effect abandoned that and jumped on the Java bandwagon of their making.
The WaveSurfer speech waveform analysis (pitch, formants, sound spectrogram) package is based on TCL/TK and has Python hooks. This is the free speech package out of KTH is Sweden. It is not my package, by the way so I am not shilling for it, but I have taken an in depth look at it to see how they get to be multi-platform and not Windows-bound.
I think there may be one other speech analysis package that did spectrograms and used TCL/TK at one point, but I don't think it has an active distribution the way WaveSurfer does.
What the WaveSurfer people did is that about half their code base is C-language for implementing speech-specific TK widgets, such as a spectrogram Canvas elaboration of the TK Canvas widget. Their C-language routines call down to low-level X to draw things, and if you build on Windows you need some implementation of X. The WaveSurfer Windows distribution, however, is a single.exe file that has WaveSurfer and whatever support libraries all rolled in, so there is a very simply install.
Their TCL part, however, is a big ball of goo, or at least to someone who doesn't know TCL. Instead of pushing a lot of the functionality into the speech toolkit widgits, they implement a lot of stuff in the TCL layer -- it is not simply a thin scripting layer over a largely C code base. You find that out when you try to customize your own speech app using their speech widgets -- there is tons of functionality that you need to reproduce in your own app as the widgets are pretty bare bones. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but using the WaveSurfer app and hearing about rolling-your-own speech app with their toolkit, you kind of get the wrong impression about how much is in the widgets. I found this out when playing with Python scripting to display their widgets.
The one thing that appeals to me about TK is the Canvas widget, which was apparently inspired by someone's Scheme graphics or some such thing. No worrying about paint messages and invalid regions -- you just give the Canvas a scene graph of line, text, even 3-color bitmap or even overlaying buttons, and the Canvas takes care of all of that. I would like to see such a high-function widget in other environements.
I was never bothered by the non-Windows look to WaveSurfer (OK, the lame Files Open dialog of GTK under Windows bothers me, but not most stuff as Windows is not that uniform a GUI experience to begin with).
The only thing I find Matlab useful other than it is the only thing my engineering students seem to want to bother to use is that it is a reasonably good Java scripting environment.
You have to run javac from some other place (Eclipse, command line), but Matlab is a nifty substitute for the java command. You can construct Java objects from the Matlab command line or from inside M-file and function scripts, you can assign those objects to Matlab variables, you can invoke methods on that object using oname.fname() syntax.
Cooler yet but not yet well documented in Matlab is javacomponent where you can embed Java Swing widgets in Matlab figure windows, so you can build Matlab GUI apps out of Swing widgets. There is a slow move to do this -- I think someone has a DNA sequence widget that they promote for use inside of Matlab.
Matlab can do much of this because it is Java in reality. Well, not all of it, but the Matlab IDE shows the coffee cup when it is slow to load, telling you that it is a Swing JFrame. All their numeric stuff may be hardcore C (or even FORTRAN) code under the hood, but Mathworks has moved into Java as a portable way of doing their GUI across the different OSs they support.
Matlab also allows embedding ActiveX widgets in a figure window (under Windows only, of course). If a figure window happens to be a JFrame in reality, and if it is displaying my ActiveX control wrapper for a Swing widget (it really works quite well once you get the classpath and librarypath details worked out), well you get the picture of what you can do.
Is there a remote chance that this Octave thingy is going the Java Swing JFrame route for figure window graphics by way of Matlab clonality, or was that too much to hope for?
I think it is fair to say we are at peak oil right here and now in terms of the short-term demand-curve supply-curve economics.
The low-cost producers in the Middle East and some other places can lift oil for dollars a barrel and can sell it for $90/barrel and have us over a barrel. This high price produces powerful economic incentive to do just about anything to produce liquid fuels, but the just about anything (cellulosic ethanol, tar sands, deep water drilling, more advanced recovery) takes gobs of money to implement and takes years to ramp up. It seems it is no longer a matter of the folks in Saudi turning a tap because in the absence of major investment and new drilling, they seem to be tapped out.
The further trouble is that the last time oil was this high in real terms the price crashed to a level that put a lot of people out of business. There is a kind of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me kind of thinking.
I agree with the Peak Oilers that the Earth has been reasonably-well surveyed and that the last era of mega-discoveries was Saudi in the 1950's, which pretty much did in the coal-burning steam locomotive and put us on the path to the automobile culture of today. It seems that the resolution of the late 70's Oil Crisis was 1) demand destruction, partly efficiency and conservation, partly a world wide economic slowdown, and 2) "reserve growth" in the form of enhanced recovery of existing oil.
There are a number of futures, and they don't all entail the "exponential growth in price" of the Peak Oil Doomers. The demand side has a strong China component, and while I don't wish recession and economic trouble on anybody, that economy may be shakier than you think. On the supply side, Daniel Yergin, the CERA dudes, and others are tallying up all of the coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, tar sands, and other projects in the works to add another 20 MBPD to give us 10 MBPD growth in the current mid-80 MBPD World oil use when you allow for 10 MBPD decline in the "easy oil." Those combination of things may put us into another cycle where we are back in the 1990's again oil-price wise.
The one thing which bugs me about GM, Ford, and Cerebrus is that their entire livelihood depends on cheap oil. As far as the fuel-economy standards they are bitching about, something like a Toyota Yaris easily exceeds those standards (remember the auto-maker compliance is on the old EPA test while the mileage sticker in the window is on the de-rated MPG so consumers feel happier about their driving skills).
A Toyota Yaris can transport two people to work in better comfort by far than a city bus. You want a higher crash test rating? OK, that adds weight and bulk and cost to the car. You want more zip? OK, a bigger engine adds weight and adds idling and part-load losses and uses more gas. You say that you have to do your turn taking the kids to soccer practice -- OK, you need a minivan now. You want to sit up higher to see out over (sedans, mainly -- doesn't help if everyone drives one) -- OK, more air drag on the highway. OK, now you tell me you own a boat and need to tow it to the landing. We have started with "basic transportation", which is much nicer than any public transportation when you think of it, but the auto companies don't make any profit on that basic transportation, but then you start adding features: more crash safety, more performance, more seats, taller seating position, towing capacity, and now you are talking about a high-value high-profit vehicle using twice the gas.
So the deal is, not only do American automaker sales depend on cheap gas, sales of the "value-added" cars and light trucks that could help them stay in business depend on cheap gas. Don't these dude's have energy economists on their payrolls to forecast trends. Or if they do, do they know something about the long-term oil supply situation that the Peak Oilers don't know? Or do the multi-million salaried top execs have their heads up their backsides?
I am not sure that the RTFM attitude is the critical path retarding the adoption of software.
I see there being two tiers of OSS. Something like Eclipse or Open Office (or perhaps Star Office) is in the first tier. A lot of other things are in the second tier, and the difference relates to installation. I am speaking from the standpoint of getting these things going under Windows, and I imagine the same thing occurs for Linux.
The first tier software may requiring reading TFM, and the menus or other interfaces may be quirky compared to other software one is used to, but generally there is a FM to read and plenty of tips offered on many Web pages. The issue with the second tier is one of dependencies. You want to install and get going with the first tier, generally there is some kind of install program and package that you download, hit install, make a couple of choices, wait, and then go. The second tier package is rife with dependencies. Want to run GovLabs partial differential equation solver. Gee, if you are running under Windows, you have to set up Cygwin and GTK and learn some Unix commands. Oh, you need to get a working setup of OpenGL up and running? And did we tell you, you need SparsMat sparse matrix solver from these other guys because all of our stuff is based on it.
It becomes this multi-day treasure hunt of going through the list of dependencies and installing other stuff first and hoping everything hangs together. It is like buying a carbody from Volvo, and engine from Volkswagen, a transmission from Borg Warner, and being knee deep in instructions on how to install the VW engine on the Borg Warner transmission flange and drop the whole thing into the engine compartment and get the wheels to turn and hook up the gas pedal to the throttle.
Big auto company high-volume cars are more complicated than MS Windows -- it takes the mid single digits in Dirksens to develop a new car (the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who horse traded his support as a Republican for Johnson's Civil Rights initiatives in exchange for pork for Illinois to break the logjam between Northern and Southern Democrats, famously quiped a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you run into real money). I don't think Windows costs quite that much and is part of why MS is so high profit still.
An automobile may be less complex than Windows in terms of interacting parts; there is more to a car than what you have on the road as there is also the factory tooling to build the car while the factoring tooling to pound out shrink-wrap copies of Windows is nowhere near the same. A car nowadays also has multiple embedded computer systems in it. Not nearly the SLOC as Windows, but critical code with regard to software errors.
What has matured about a car is that the market doesn't accept the MS business model of slap it together and push it out the door. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would love to do just that, but the Toyota and Honda competition doesn't let them. You can't just build a car to a certain performance spec and call it a day -- all of those interacting parts have to interact with each other through at minimum of 100,000 miles of abuse at the hands of lusers, perhaps the standard has increase to 200,000, without big ticket rebuilds of engines and transmissions.
A mass market car these days has to be crafted to the engineering standards as Space Shuttle software rather than MS software -- if the number of parts and interactions between parts is smaller, the expectation of how they hold up has been greatly raised, and as such, the intellectual labor to create a new car is somewhat greater.
Maple shows the Java coffee cup
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Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
Waiting for Maple to load, I have seen the Java coffee cup icon. It looks like Maple is using Java for the UI as is Matlab these days to help with portability across OS's.
My three pet gripes about GUI software are 1) focus stealers -- you are typing away in one app and some other app pops up and then you are typing into some other window that has grabbed focus, 2) Files Save that makes you start over from the beginning with each program launch or even each Files Save instead of remembering where you last saved a file, and 3) programs that lock up the GUI at the least provocation (yeah you, Adobe -- I dread Web surfing into PDF files, even from a broadband connection).
There is this assumption because billions are spent on the Osprey, this means there is some serious disregard for the taxpayer if not outright corruption.
How about this reason for spending whatever it takes to build the Osprey: the Iran hostage crisis and the failed rescue mission using helicopters and multiple refuelings. Given that events like pursuing Bin Laden's minion's in Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis will be more the norm for fighting wars than a nuclear standoff between superpowers, perhaps there is no upper limit on what we should spend on getting the Osprey to work -- the Osprey being a helicopter with the speed and range of a small turboprop aircraft.
While Mr. Liberal Troll's mention of the mega billion's spent on the Osprey betray a certain ignorance of why there are legitimate national reasons to do that, the suggestion that the kinks in the Osprey will be ironed out in the manner of the M16 rifle perhaps represent the flip side.
Based on what I have read, there is not much good about the M16 and the kinks haven't all been worked out. There have been complaints out of Iraq that the M16 with its lightweight high-velocity bullet just isn't lethal often enough. Yes, the lighweight ammo has all manners of advantages, but a rifle not powerful enough to kill an enemy who is coming at you to kill you is not much of a military rifle. The other thing about the M16 is that it is unlike any other military assault rifle in that it does away with the gas piston and relies on some kind of inertia in the bolt to cycle the next round, and that the M16 is just "a bridge too far" in terms of materials technology and what can be achieved with gun mechanisms. They have tinkered and tinkered with it, but the basic design is fundamentally flawed. Like the Osprey, if you could get it to work, it offers advantages of a more accurate and lighter weight rifle than an AK-47, but it is ever so prone to jam unless the ammo is clean burning and the bolt is kept surgically clean.
Likewise, the Osprey may be fundamentally flawed in that a tilt rotor design has too high a "disk loading" to be safe as a helicopter in the "corners of the flight envelope." Again, maybe the price to pay to "insert commandos" in remote parts of the world without a logistical tail may be lives of such brave soldiers when the Osprey crashes, as it probably will with greater frequency than conventional helicopters, which are also tradeoffs between safety and capability. Like the M16, the Osprey will never get well.
Again, while to Mr. Liberal Troll, such things as the Osprey and even the M16 are examples of the conspiracy of corruption of all of the demonized members of the military industrial complex, forgetting that both of these weapons are crafted to address some important security concerns. Liberal Trolls get all righteously angry, but on the other hand, there can remain serious problems with some of the things they complain about.
Liberal Trolls like to point to Randy Cunningham as one of the "fat cats." What Randy Cunningham did and what happened to Randy Cunningham is a true tragedy, but Randy Cunningham is a true hero for what he did many years prior that protects the freedoms of you, me, and Mr. Liberal Troll to have all these discussions. I don't know what demons drove Randy Cunningham to do what he did, and perhaps warriors are out of place in peacetime civilian society.
I find your theory interesting on why the Chinese submarine even surfaced.
Correct me on this, but I have long imagined there to be a Mad Magazine "Spy vs Spy" quality to the Cold War confrontations. One one hand, you might want to put the fear into the other side that you have a certain capability (i.e. ultra quiet sub). On the other hand, you may not want to tip your hand that you can do a certain thing.
There is this account of a Russian attack sub tailing a U.S. super carrier, and the captain of the carrier ordering increasing amounts of speed to see if the sub could keep up. There was a certain sobering factor that the sub was able to match whatever speed the carrier could reach. Above a certain speed, the sub was going so fast and making so much noise that there was no longer any sub stealth involved, but there was a command decision about whether to go even faster to see if the sub could keep up. On one hand, the sub is giving up intel about how fast it can go, but the carrier is giving up intel on its speed, and the account was that the captain of the carrier gave up on attempting to outrun the sub to not reveal what the carrier could do.
There must be also a factor that any of this sea-going machinery must have a "short time rating" and that one can push the capabilities of the power plant in exchange for shortening its life or needing repairs. I heard an account that when the SS United States (one of the last of the great passenger liners) made a record Atlantic crossing on its maiden voyage, the machinery was never quite the same after that.
So why would the Chinese sub surface. One explanation is that is close to home waters and it was to "teach the Americans a lesson" about messing around in Chinese near-territorial waters. Another explanation, as you have offered, is that the Chinese sub captain panicked, and in so doing gave up some information of about Chinese capabilites that they might want to keep secret.
Being of a Near Eastern heritage having elements of Turkish culture owing to Ottoman rule, my wife could have told you we are the go-to people if you want a detailed parsing of a logical argument or want a long, philosophical discussion about almost anything. My wife often gets the detailed parsing or the philosophical discussion even when she hasn't requested it.
I don't see any problem about this disrespecting people in Turkey or this being offensive to anyone of Turkish or Near Eastern heritage. The one problem I see is if you use this service for any kind of serious scholarship. Low-wage labor is used in scholarship all of the time (grad students, undergrad hourly workers), but if someone makes a significant contribution, a co-authorship may be in order, and for a more minor contribution, even the undergrad hourly often gets acknowledged. If one of these low-wage anomymous knowledge workers helps you make a key argument, how do you properly cite this in your journal article?
It seems like for a lot of the journals out there, it is a Word/Mathtype vs LaTeX world out there. Anyone seen any acceptance of Open Office/Math Editor?
One of the hangups I have heard about D-T fusion (OK, OK, I heard it from those wacky The Oil Drum dudes) is that to set up a working DT fusion economy, you have to take into account the doubling time of the amount of tritium that you breed, and there is concern that the doubling time is such that we will run out of oil before the industry has enough time for one D-T reactor to breed enough T for the next pair of D-T reactors which in turn "beget" the next pair of pairs of D-T reactors.
Is this a legitimate concern, or if someone has a working D-T reactor, one can breed enough tritium soon enough that one can launch a D-T reactor economy?
The other quesiton I have about D-T is since this produces lots of fast neutrons, will an industrial-scale reactor be an even bigger plutonium-breeding proliferation concern than fission power? Or are the neutrons the wrong energy for making plutonium? Or will the D-T reactors be so high tech that "other countries" wanting one will require so much support and supervision that breeding Pu on the QT is not a concern?
Who would I rather have at the exit, Joe Sixpack (am I to assume from this term you mean someone of the labor instead of managerial or intellectual classes who is an infrequent flier on account of his occupation and is only on an airplane to attend his aunt's funeral or his cousin's wedding?) or 150+FlightSegmentsPerYear? Both Joe Sixpack and 150+FlightSegmentsPerYear represent opposite ends of the human factors problem in safety - inexperience for Joe Sixpack and complacency for 150+FlightSegmentsPerYear. If Joe Sixpack is able bodied and works construction or other labor that requires conformance to safety rules, I will take Joe Sixpack any day over anyone else.
On the other hand, there was nothing in my post demanding that 150+FlightSegmentsPerYear not be seated in an exit row -- I referred to a Letters discussion in Aviation Week that perhaps frequent fliers should be seated in exit rows and should be given some minimal training by the airlines on an exit door mockup. My concern is from my own experience seeing people seated in exit rows of varying degrees of physical fitness, to put it charitably, not only paying no attention to the safety drill but making a demonstration of their lack of attention by engaging in other activities. When passengers in those exit rows are directed to read the seat card to determine the requirements for exit door operation and are requested to summon a flight attendant for reseating if they don't meet those requirements, I have never seen anyone interrupt what they are doing to consult that card.
The use of checklists and the ritualistic review of safety instructions counteracts both the human factors of inexperience and complacency by reinforcing actions, which one hopes one never needs to use, as a matter of rote drill.
The other consideration is that an airplane is not a bus or a train; it is a craft that navigates the fluid medium of the air in the manner that a ship navigates the fluid medium of the water, it has an embarkation point and a disembarkation point and a time in between where one is essentially a prisoner of the crew and your fellow passengers, and safe operation of an airplane or a ship imposes additional requirements of social cooperation. An anti-social passenger on a bus can be and has been a serious threat to safety as well, but at least a bus can pull off the road and the driver can radio the cops. The safety drills are a ritualistic legal requirement on ships too, and I suppose the average cruise ship passenger is as jaded about the life boat drill as airline passengers are about the safety demonstration.
My argument is that following the ritual of paying attention to the flight attendant and taking out the safety card on every segment of every flight improves safety because it reinforces the notion that you are not on a bus. Come to think of it, I was on a bus that had a safety video . . . asking you to fasten your seat belt . . . in Japan. Conformance to social ritual for the common good is a hallmark of Japanese society and I guess something that goes against the grain of most U.S. people and way against the grain of most people on Slashdot.
As to seeing a FA kick a fat person out of an exit row, I defer to your experience because I fly much less often and maybe on different airlines. Given the culture of individualism and indifference to conformity, even when legally mandated, I wonder on an airline FA implements that procedure without a passenger lawsuit.
Let's for the moment leave out the Creation Science politics. Where does someone get the freakin' idea that they can just retract a paper that is part of the archival record?
You can retract a paper in review, and I suppose you can back out of conference paper, like the first discovery of a pulsar planet where the dude figured he hadn't corrected for light-time effects of the Earth's orbit around the Sun completely. But once you have gotten something past peer review and published it, for crying out loud, the thing is published and if you are making a fool out of yourself to have published, freakin' boo-hoo -- published is part of the public record.
The 1955 paper represented the dude's best thoughts at the time about a speculative time in pre-history (i.e. 4 GA BCE), and it past muster with enough peer reviewers who though the same way at the time. If the dude thinks the 1955 paper is wrong, he should draft and submit another freakin' paper -- for peer review -- where he explains the errors in the 1955 paper and how more modern knowledge reverses certain points, and has to defend his new point of view against review criticism.
Where does someone get off thinking they can withdraw or remove an archival publication? And seriously, even if the thing is wrong, where does one get the idea that one can withdraw a "wrong" paper. Science is partly about truth, but it is more about process about how inferences about truth are arrived at, and if you start extirpating papers from the public record like this, it will be Stalin airbrushing out the political rivals he had executed or the fictional Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth stuffing old propaganda down the Memory Hole to maintain cohesion of the Party Line.
The whole point of leaving wrong papers in the public record is so young guns can write new papers refuting the old papers so they can get tenure at research universities, and if the old coot wanted to refute his own paper, he needs to stand in line with the other supplicants for journal page space. Seriously though, leaving "wrong" papers in the public record is important -- who knows, maybe the current crop of papers will be proven wrong and the original papers will be demonstrated to be right all along once better techniques or proofs or evidence are developed.
"Withdrawing" a paper that has been on library shelves since 1955 is the most arrogant kind of vanity -- suck up having your stuff be proven wrong by later work like the rest of us.
I am thinking there was more than one accident involving 727's when they first came out.
Until that time, there were straight jets such as the 707 and DC-8 (I guess you could also include the British Comet, but that was even earlier yet but more limited in its usage), and you were basically talking about very long-range planes operated out of major international airports (JFK, O'Hare, Heathrow, Frankfurt) with very long runways.
The 727 essentially created widespread domestic jet travel, not just between New York and Chicago but to Grand Rapids, Michigan or Madison, Wisconsin and such. It had fan jets that improved fuel economy on the shorter hops and gave it something more than that agonizing rate of climb of the early straight turbojets, it had "air stairs" in the back to board passengers at airports with rudimentary facilities, and it had rear engines, which allowed the entire wing to open up into a massive high-lift system. I remember riding on 707-320's (the turbofan 707), and the 707 lacked the leading edge droops and slats, and it had a relatively smaller amount flaps that had to be extended so far down that you could watch them flutter during short final.
I had talked to some flight instructors about 727's and jets and general, which seemed to come in way nose high compared to the kind of approaches one did in a propeller GA craft. When I was taking lessons, these guys were all trying to qualify for flight engineer jobs on 727's to get on the airline captain career path. I was told there was a procedure for landing (yes landing, not taking off) a 727 on one engine. I expressed surprise at this and then was told that a 727 landed at a pretty high percentage of takeoff power -- they make the final approach "on the back side of the power curve" pretty much "hanging on the engines."
Come to think of it, part of the 727 flying experience was that just as you were about to land, you would watch the wing come apart into droops, slats, and flaps, and you would hear the engines rev up that always reminded me of the sound of my mom's old GE vacuum cleaner.
Anyway, the 727 has a reputation of a very high rate of descent with all the flaps cranked out without engine power to counteract its rather draggy high lift system. I have watched other planes, 737's especially, and none come in with as nose high an attitude on landing approach with quite as much cranking up of the engines. I can imagine that someone with propliner experience could have problems in the 727, especially in the early days before the instructors also developed experience on what to warn pilots about, and I am thinking they must of crumped more than one 727 (i.e. not a crash, but landed hard enough to break something).
It isn't just meals, and it isn't just bags: getting out of a plane in a wreck and saving your backside also costs you extra.
Never knew how they allocated exit-row seats, but now Northwest charges for them, either in terms of a cash surcharge or in terms flyer points or one of those "Elite" or "Gold" memberships.
One thing about exit-row seats is that each of the big exits are "manned" by a flight attendant -- that is what they are there for and anything else they do like get you a pillow or not get you anything to eat in this day and age is incidental. The exit row seats are unique in that they are "manned" by whatever passenger is seated there -- in other words, your safety depends on the conscientiousness of a fellow passenger rather than on an airline employee who at least has had some kind of training.
Mind you, this exit row thing is a kind of loophole to the safety rules that allows airlines to place revenue seats next to some exits instead of rear-facing jump seat with a flight attendant sitting there. The gummint was OK with this until a few years back that they started to "have issues" with it and issued those rules that the airline had to ask if you, as a customer, thought you were physically fit enough to lift a 40 pound exit door, and the airlines began this lameoid thing of "asking" customers if they wanted to be moved from the exit row -- apparently there are all of these 90-lb 90-year-old grannies who can lift 40 pounds from an awkward angle because no one ever volunteers to leave such a seat.
AvWeek had a discussion about passengers and exit rows, and the time it was suggested to qualify certain frequent flyers by having them demonstrate that they could operate and lift the plug doors and giving those passengers preferrential exit row seating. The current system, at least on Northwest, is that the exit row is a perk that you can pay for, never mind if you are the kind of jerk who never pays any attention to the safety demonstration or has never looked at a seat card.
Part of the thing is that 1) airlines have a "don't scare the passengers" approach to airline safety, and 2) most passengers believe that they are French toast in any kind of accident and that the safety info is pointless, and many if not most passengers make a demonstration out of pointedly not paying any attention to the safety drills.
My own personal perspective is twofold. One is that I lived in Chicago when the 727 jet was new, and pilots transitioning from prop planes lacking the high power-off sink rate of the 727 with all of the droops and flaps down were crumping 727's with alarming regularity. The Chicago Tribune told of one accident in Chicago where after one of these crumped landings, only two people got out, people seated next to exits with the presence of mind to operate them, and the rest of the people died from smoke and not from any other injuries. Secondly, I hold a private pilot certificate and have been indoctrinated in the ways of procedures and checklists. Unlike many other conveyances, airline passengers play an active role in the safe conduct of their flights. Can't be bothered to pay attention to the safety announcements and look at the seat card because you have flown the fourth leg of a trip and have flown hundreds of times? Gee, I guess the pilots can't be bothered with checklists because they have flown thousands of times and must know all of the settings by rote not, don't they?
So you got fat slobs with frequent-flier privileges who could care less about paying attention to the fact that they are in an exit row and have a role to play in an emergency, and you have the rest of us steerage passengers on the Titanic told we are last in line at the life boats.
From the description of it, it sounds like more of a shoot than a chute.
Maybe in addition to the Depends, you need a pellet gun to ride the thing, which would make the device a shoot and make you Psycho Astronaut to even want to go down it.
There is something unsatisfying about developing for a small number of cores or parallel execution units.
Here's the reasoning. To do heavy multi-thread parallelism to speed up some kind of multi-media, game, data visualization program, you probably want a higher-level language with garbage collection to handle some kind of data flow model -- say Java with a good class libary to support this -- in place of C with pthreads and trying to place locks on data without the whole thing deadlocking. Assume for sake of argument that Java is 4 times slower than C -- yeah, yeah, JIT compilers and loop and bounds checking optimizations, but there are C/C++ compilers that are really heavily optimized.
So what good does 4 processors do you? I am thinking you are better off optimizing the heck out of something in C++ to run on one processor than to get your marvelous data-flow class library working on 4 processors. Now if you had a 100 processors, now you are talking about abandoning optimized C code with optimizing C compilers for something like Java in order to go for the parallelism without sweating P-threads.
Suppose you go the route Intel is pushing, of an optimizing C++ compiler that identifies loops that can be unrolled and made parallel and automatically creates, launches, synchronizes, and destroys threads behind the scenes. Well, if you had a compiler that could do that, wouldn't it be even more effective with whatever vector-processing capability is not utilized on Intel chips because no one has a compiler for it, or perhaps compiling to a GPU?
On one hand, I heard that 100 processor chips are in the development pipeline. On the other hand, I heard that maybe 16 processors is an upper limit for the shared memory multi-threaded model because of all of the cache synchronization issues, and to go beyond that, you will need to go to clusters with communication between local processor memory.
But the paltry level of processors you are getting now is probably OK for the OS running multiple apps with less processor contention, but to explicitly optimize any given app for thread parallelism, seems like a lot of effort for what, factor of 2 gain? Perhaps less?
Slashdot Mirror
. . . these are not the Higgs' bosons you are look for.
Whatever the merits of a demonstration vs having taken the lives of civilians, the U.S. did conduct a demonstration of the Bomb, for the benefit of the Soviets and others.
Bikini is a widely-used term for a certain type of two-piece women's bathing suit, but is the name of a place in the Marshall Islands where one of the early atom bomb tests were conducted. It was the site of the "Crossroads" tests of Hiroshima-sized bombs, and it was one of the few "public" tests for which there was a lot of film footage. I heard that the bathing suit became known as a bikini because people in the 50's had "Bikini" parties where women would wear revealing bathing suits because people thought the Bomb would end the world and one wanted to go out doing whatever one wanted. If you have seen images of atom bomb shots (such as the montage at the end of Dr. Strangelove), you have probably seen film of the Crossroads shots at Bikini Atol.
Apollo could be viewed as such a demonstration of war technology. Apollo was a combination of rocket power to take enough payload to bring men to the Moon and back, inertial guidance systems to achieve the bullseye accuracy of the rocket launches, and enough reliability of the rocket propulsion and other systems to get the men back.
It has become cliche "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we feed a poor child a school lunch? If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we have a high-speed train?" and so on. But it was in the manner of perhaps indirect military threat "If we can put a man on the Moon, darn tootin' we can target a nuclear warhead right down the air shaft of the men's room in the Kremlin."
If the 20 billion-dollar (1960's dollars) Apollo program was ape threat posturing, the Sputnik launch which started the whole space race was much the same thing.
You can always hack that 4-degree swing in the thermostat. Too warm? Use a blow dryer to "persuade" your thermostat that it is too warm to get the AC to kick in.
Whenever you have one of these overlapping-window GUI front-ends to an OS, developing apps for it is a hard slog, whether it is Windows, GTK, Motif, raw X, whatever. Just like MS came out with their application programmer-friendly Visual Basic as the go-to way of slapping a GUI together, Sun was at one time promoting TCL/TK as the way of slapping a GUI front end on your C program.
In commercial apps, your users worry if your widgets are pretty and Mac people are in a huff about ported software or Java not conforming to UI standard, but for internal apps that just have to get a job done, you often don't care. The projected associated with a high-voltage custom x-ray machine had been a Sun shop since the days Sun 2's came out, and the current app running the x-ray machine is TCL/TK running on a SPARC.
That app makes good use of the Canvas widget to display gray-scale x-ray images and allow you to drag cursors and place measurement markers over those images; apart from that the app is a bunch of buttons to start and stop image collection and motion tracking modes of the x-ray system. I wouldn't have taken note that it was TCL/TK it it were not pointed out, but now that I know, I can see the characteristic widget styles and layouts along with the Canvas that does the x-ray images.
Given that this was all implemented prior to the release of Java, TCL/TK is what you had, and TCL/TK is what you did unless you wanted to take much more time doing the GUI, and our app has aged well (although try hiring someone to change the TCL code), so yes, it is a good question why Sun in effect abandoned that and jumped on the Java bandwagon of their making.
I think there may be one other speech analysis package that did spectrograms and used TCL/TK at one point, but I don't think it has an active distribution the way WaveSurfer does.
What the WaveSurfer people did is that about half their code base is C-language for implementing speech-specific TK widgets, such as a spectrogram Canvas elaboration of the TK Canvas widget. Their C-language routines call down to low-level X to draw things, and if you build on Windows you need some implementation of X. The WaveSurfer Windows distribution, however, is a single .exe file that has WaveSurfer and whatever support libraries all rolled in, so there is a very simply install.
Their TCL part, however, is a big ball of goo, or at least to someone who doesn't know TCL. Instead of pushing a lot of the functionality into the speech toolkit widgits, they implement a lot of stuff in the TCL layer -- it is not simply a thin scripting layer over a largely C code base. You find that out when you try to customize your own speech app using their speech widgets -- there is tons of functionality that you need to reproduce in your own app as the widgets are pretty bare bones. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but using the WaveSurfer app and hearing about rolling-your-own speech app with their toolkit, you kind of get the wrong impression about how much is in the widgets. I found this out when playing with Python scripting to display their widgets.
The one thing that appeals to me about TK is the Canvas widget, which was apparently inspired by someone's Scheme graphics or some such thing. No worrying about paint messages and invalid regions -- you just give the Canvas a scene graph of line, text, even 3-color bitmap or even overlaying buttons, and the Canvas takes care of all of that. I would like to see such a high-function widget in other environements.
I was never bothered by the non-Windows look to WaveSurfer (OK, the lame Files Open dialog of GTK under Windows bothers me, but not most stuff as Windows is not that uniform a GUI experience to begin with).
You have to run javac from some other place (Eclipse, command line), but Matlab is a nifty substitute for the java command. You can construct Java objects from the Matlab command line or from inside M-file and function scripts, you can assign those objects to Matlab variables, you can invoke methods on that object using oname.fname() syntax.
Cooler yet but not yet well documented in Matlab is javacomponent where you can embed Java Swing widgets in Matlab figure windows, so you can build Matlab GUI apps out of Swing widgets. There is a slow move to do this -- I think someone has a DNA sequence widget that they promote for use inside of Matlab.
Matlab can do much of this because it is Java in reality. Well, not all of it, but the Matlab IDE shows the coffee cup when it is slow to load, telling you that it is a Swing JFrame. All their numeric stuff may be hardcore C (or even FORTRAN) code under the hood, but Mathworks has moved into Java as a portable way of doing their GUI across the different OSs they support.
Matlab also allows embedding ActiveX widgets in a figure window (under Windows only, of course). If a figure window happens to be a JFrame in reality, and if it is displaying my ActiveX control wrapper for a Swing widget (it really works quite well once you get the classpath and librarypath details worked out), well you get the picture of what you can do.
Is there a remote chance that this Octave thingy is going the Java Swing JFrame route for figure window graphics by way of Matlab clonality, or was that too much to hope for?
The low-cost producers in the Middle East and some other places can lift oil for dollars a barrel and can sell it for $90/barrel and have us over a barrel. This high price produces powerful economic incentive to do just about anything to produce liquid fuels, but the just about anything (cellulosic ethanol, tar sands, deep water drilling, more advanced recovery) takes gobs of money to implement and takes years to ramp up. It seems it is no longer a matter of the folks in Saudi turning a tap because in the absence of major investment and new drilling, they seem to be tapped out.
The further trouble is that the last time oil was this high in real terms the price crashed to a level that put a lot of people out of business. There is a kind of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me kind of thinking.
I agree with the Peak Oilers that the Earth has been reasonably-well surveyed and that the last era of mega-discoveries was Saudi in the 1950's, which pretty much did in the coal-burning steam locomotive and put us on the path to the automobile culture of today. It seems that the resolution of the late 70's Oil Crisis was 1) demand destruction, partly efficiency and conservation, partly a world wide economic slowdown, and 2) "reserve growth" in the form of enhanced recovery of existing oil.
There are a number of futures, and they don't all entail the "exponential growth in price" of the Peak Oil Doomers. The demand side has a strong China component, and while I don't wish recession and economic trouble on anybody, that economy may be shakier than you think. On the supply side, Daniel Yergin, the CERA dudes, and others are tallying up all of the coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, tar sands, and other projects in the works to add another 20 MBPD to give us 10 MBPD growth in the current mid-80 MBPD World oil use when you allow for 10 MBPD decline in the "easy oil." Those combination of things may put us into another cycle where we are back in the 1990's again oil-price wise.
The one thing which bugs me about GM, Ford, and Cerebrus is that their entire livelihood depends on cheap oil. As far as the fuel-economy standards they are bitching about, something like a Toyota Yaris easily exceeds those standards (remember the auto-maker compliance is on the old EPA test while the mileage sticker in the window is on the de-rated MPG so consumers feel happier about their driving skills).
A Toyota Yaris can transport two people to work in better comfort by far than a city bus. You want a higher crash test rating? OK, that adds weight and bulk and cost to the car. You want more zip? OK, a bigger engine adds weight and adds idling and part-load losses and uses more gas. You say that you have to do your turn taking the kids to soccer practice -- OK, you need a minivan now. You want to sit up higher to see out over (sedans, mainly -- doesn't help if everyone drives one) -- OK, more air drag on the highway. OK, now you tell me you own a boat and need to tow it to the landing. We have started with "basic transportation", which is much nicer than any public transportation when you think of it, but the auto companies don't make any profit on that basic transportation, but then you start adding features: more crash safety, more performance, more seats, taller seating position, towing capacity, and now you are talking about a high-value high-profit vehicle using twice the gas.
So the deal is, not only do American automaker sales depend on cheap gas, sales of the "value-added" cars and light trucks that could help them stay in business depend on cheap gas. Don't these dude's have energy economists on their payrolls to forecast trends. Or if they do, do they know something about the long-term oil supply situation that the Peak Oilers don't know? Or do the multi-million salaried top execs have their heads up their backsides?
I see there being two tiers of OSS. Something like Eclipse or Open Office (or perhaps Star Office) is in the first tier. A lot of other things are in the second tier, and the difference relates to installation. I am speaking from the standpoint of getting these things going under Windows, and I imagine the same thing occurs for Linux.
The first tier software may requiring reading TFM, and the menus or other interfaces may be quirky compared to other software one is used to, but generally there is a FM to read and plenty of tips offered on many Web pages. The issue with the second tier is one of dependencies. You want to install and get going with the first tier, generally there is some kind of install program and package that you download, hit install, make a couple of choices, wait, and then go. The second tier package is rife with dependencies. Want to run GovLabs partial differential equation solver. Gee, if you are running under Windows, you have to set up Cygwin and GTK and learn some Unix commands. Oh, you need to get a working setup of OpenGL up and running? And did we tell you, you need SparsMat sparse matrix solver from these other guys because all of our stuff is based on it.
It becomes this multi-day treasure hunt of going through the list of dependencies and installing other stuff first and hoping everything hangs together. It is like buying a carbody from Volvo, and engine from Volkswagen, a transmission from Borg Warner, and being knee deep in instructions on how to install the VW engine on the Borg Warner transmission flange and drop the whole thing into the engine compartment and get the wheels to turn and hook up the gas pedal to the throttle.
An automobile may be less complex than Windows in terms of interacting parts; there is more to a car than what you have on the road as there is also the factory tooling to build the car while the factoring tooling to pound out shrink-wrap copies of Windows is nowhere near the same. A car nowadays also has multiple embedded computer systems in it. Not nearly the SLOC as Windows, but critical code with regard to software errors.
What has matured about a car is that the market doesn't accept the MS business model of slap it together and push it out the door. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would love to do just that, but the Toyota and Honda competition doesn't let them. You can't just build a car to a certain performance spec and call it a day -- all of those interacting parts have to interact with each other through at minimum of 100,000 miles of abuse at the hands of lusers, perhaps the standard has increase to 200,000, without big ticket rebuilds of engines and transmissions.
A mass market car these days has to be crafted to the engineering standards as Space Shuttle software rather than MS software -- if the number of parts and interactions between parts is smaller, the expectation of how they hold up has been greatly raised, and as such, the intellectual labor to create a new car is somewhat greater.
Waiting for Maple to load, I have seen the Java coffee cup icon. It looks like Maple is using Java for the UI as is Matlab these days to help with portability across OS's.
My three pet gripes about GUI software are 1) focus stealers -- you are typing away in one app and some other app pops up and then you are typing into some other window that has grabbed focus, 2) Files Save that makes you start over from the beginning with each program launch or even each Files Save instead of remembering where you last saved a file, and 3) programs that lock up the GUI at the least provocation (yeah you, Adobe -- I dread Web surfing into PDF files, even from a broadband connection).
How about this reason for spending whatever it takes to build the Osprey: the Iran hostage crisis and the failed rescue mission using helicopters and multiple refuelings. Given that events like pursuing Bin Laden's minion's in Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis will be more the norm for fighting wars than a nuclear standoff between superpowers, perhaps there is no upper limit on what we should spend on getting the Osprey to work -- the Osprey being a helicopter with the speed and range of a small turboprop aircraft.
While Mr. Liberal Troll's mention of the mega billion's spent on the Osprey betray a certain ignorance of why there are legitimate national reasons to do that, the suggestion that the kinks in the Osprey will be ironed out in the manner of the M16 rifle perhaps represent the flip side.
Based on what I have read, there is not much good about the M16 and the kinks haven't all been worked out. There have been complaints out of Iraq that the M16 with its lightweight high-velocity bullet just isn't lethal often enough. Yes, the lighweight ammo has all manners of advantages, but a rifle not powerful enough to kill an enemy who is coming at you to kill you is not much of a military rifle. The other thing about the M16 is that it is unlike any other military assault rifle in that it does away with the gas piston and relies on some kind of inertia in the bolt to cycle the next round, and that the M16 is just "a bridge too far" in terms of materials technology and what can be achieved with gun mechanisms. They have tinkered and tinkered with it, but the basic design is fundamentally flawed. Like the Osprey, if you could get it to work, it offers advantages of a more accurate and lighter weight rifle than an AK-47, but it is ever so prone to jam unless the ammo is clean burning and the bolt is kept surgically clean.
Likewise, the Osprey may be fundamentally flawed in that a tilt rotor design has too high a "disk loading" to be safe as a helicopter in the "corners of the flight envelope." Again, maybe the price to pay to "insert commandos" in remote parts of the world without a logistical tail may be lives of such brave soldiers when the Osprey crashes, as it probably will with greater frequency than conventional helicopters, which are also tradeoffs between safety and capability. Like the M16, the Osprey will never get well.
Again, while to Mr. Liberal Troll, such things as the Osprey and even the M16 are examples of the conspiracy of corruption of all of the demonized members of the military industrial complex, forgetting that both of these weapons are crafted to address some important security concerns. Liberal Trolls get all righteously angry, but on the other hand, there can remain serious problems with some of the things they complain about.
Liberal Trolls like to point to Randy Cunningham as one of the "fat cats." What Randy Cunningham did and what happened to Randy Cunningham is a true tragedy, but Randy Cunningham is a true hero for what he did many years prior that protects the freedoms of you, me, and Mr. Liberal Troll to have all these discussions. I don't know what demons drove Randy Cunningham to do what he did, and perhaps warriors are out of place in peacetime civilian society.
Correct me on this, but I have long imagined there to be a Mad Magazine "Spy vs Spy" quality to the Cold War confrontations. One one hand, you might want to put the fear into the other side that you have a certain capability (i.e. ultra quiet sub). On the other hand, you may not want to tip your hand that you can do a certain thing.
There is this account of a Russian attack sub tailing a U.S. super carrier, and the captain of the carrier ordering increasing amounts of speed to see if the sub could keep up. There was a certain sobering factor that the sub was able to match whatever speed the carrier could reach. Above a certain speed, the sub was going so fast and making so much noise that there was no longer any sub stealth involved, but there was a command decision about whether to go even faster to see if the sub could keep up. On one hand, the sub is giving up intel about how fast it can go, but the carrier is giving up intel on its speed, and the account was that the captain of the carrier gave up on attempting to outrun the sub to not reveal what the carrier could do.
There must be also a factor that any of this sea-going machinery must have a "short time rating" and that one can push the capabilities of the power plant in exchange for shortening its life or needing repairs. I heard an account that when the SS United States (one of the last of the great passenger liners) made a record Atlantic crossing on its maiden voyage, the machinery was never quite the same after that.
So why would the Chinese sub surface. One explanation is that is close to home waters and it was to "teach the Americans a lesson" about messing around in Chinese near-territorial waters. Another explanation, as you have offered, is that the Chinese sub captain panicked, and in so doing gave up some information of about Chinese capabilites that they might want to keep secret.
I don't see any problem about this disrespecting people in Turkey or this being offensive to anyone of Turkish or Near Eastern heritage. The one problem I see is if you use this service for any kind of serious scholarship. Low-wage labor is used in scholarship all of the time (grad students, undergrad hourly workers), but if someone makes a significant contribution, a co-authorship may be in order, and for a more minor contribution, even the undergrad hourly often gets acknowledged. If one of these low-wage anomymous knowledge workers helps you make a key argument, how do you properly cite this in your journal article?
It seems like for a lot of the journals out there, it is a Word/Mathtype vs LaTeX world out there. Anyone seen any acceptance of Open Office/Math Editor?
Is this a legitimate concern, or if someone has a working D-T reactor, one can breed enough tritium soon enough that one can launch a D-T reactor economy?
The other quesiton I have about D-T is since this produces lots of fast neutrons, will an industrial-scale reactor be an even bigger plutonium-breeding proliferation concern than fission power? Or are the neutrons the wrong energy for making plutonium? Or will the D-T reactors be so high tech that "other countries" wanting one will require so much support and supervision that breeding Pu on the QT is not a concern?
On the other hand, there was nothing in my post demanding that 150+FlightSegmentsPerYear not be seated in an exit row -- I referred to a Letters discussion in Aviation Week that perhaps frequent fliers should be seated in exit rows and should be given some minimal training by the airlines on an exit door mockup. My concern is from my own experience seeing people seated in exit rows of varying degrees of physical fitness, to put it charitably, not only paying no attention to the safety drill but making a demonstration of their lack of attention by engaging in other activities. When passengers in those exit rows are directed to read the seat card to determine the requirements for exit door operation and are requested to summon a flight attendant for reseating if they don't meet those requirements, I have never seen anyone interrupt what they are doing to consult that card.
The use of checklists and the ritualistic review of safety instructions counteracts both the human factors of inexperience and complacency by reinforcing actions, which one hopes one never needs to use, as a matter of rote drill.
The other consideration is that an airplane is not a bus or a train; it is a craft that navigates the fluid medium of the air in the manner that a ship navigates the fluid medium of the water, it has an embarkation point and a disembarkation point and a time in between where one is essentially a prisoner of the crew and your fellow passengers, and safe operation of an airplane or a ship imposes additional requirements of social cooperation. An anti-social passenger on a bus can be and has been a serious threat to safety as well, but at least a bus can pull off the road and the driver can radio the cops. The safety drills are a ritualistic legal requirement on ships too, and I suppose the average cruise ship passenger is as jaded about the life boat drill as airline passengers are about the safety demonstration.
My argument is that following the ritual of paying attention to the flight attendant and taking out the safety card on every segment of every flight improves safety because it reinforces the notion that you are not on a bus. Come to think of it, I was on a bus that had a safety video . . . asking you to fasten your seat belt . . . in Japan. Conformance to social ritual for the common good is a hallmark of Japanese society and I guess something that goes against the grain of most U.S. people and way against the grain of most people on Slashdot.
As to seeing a FA kick a fat person out of an exit row, I defer to your experience because I fly much less often and maybe on different airlines. Given the culture of individualism and indifference to conformity, even when legally mandated, I wonder on an airline FA implements that procedure without a passenger lawsuit.
You can retract a paper in review, and I suppose you can back out of conference paper, like the first discovery of a pulsar planet where the dude figured he hadn't corrected for light-time effects of the Earth's orbit around the Sun completely. But once you have gotten something past peer review and published it, for crying out loud, the thing is published and if you are making a fool out of yourself to have published, freakin' boo-hoo -- published is part of the public record.
The 1955 paper represented the dude's best thoughts at the time about a speculative time in pre-history (i.e. 4 GA BCE), and it past muster with enough peer reviewers who though the same way at the time. If the dude thinks the 1955 paper is wrong, he should draft and submit another freakin' paper -- for peer review -- where he explains the errors in the 1955 paper and how more modern knowledge reverses certain points, and has to defend his new point of view against review criticism.
Where does someone get off thinking they can withdraw or remove an archival publication? And seriously, even if the thing is wrong, where does one get the idea that one can withdraw a "wrong" paper. Science is partly about truth, but it is more about process about how inferences about truth are arrived at, and if you start extirpating papers from the public record like this, it will be Stalin airbrushing out the political rivals he had executed or the fictional Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth stuffing old propaganda down the Memory Hole to maintain cohesion of the Party Line.
The whole point of leaving wrong papers in the public record is so young guns can write new papers refuting the old papers so they can get tenure at research universities, and if the old coot wanted to refute his own paper, he needs to stand in line with the other supplicants for journal page space. Seriously though, leaving "wrong" papers in the public record is important -- who knows, maybe the current crop of papers will be proven wrong and the original papers will be demonstrated to be right all along once better techniques or proofs or evidence are developed.
"Withdrawing" a paper that has been on library shelves since 1955 is the most arrogant kind of vanity -- suck up having your stuff be proven wrong by later work like the rest of us.
Until that time, there were straight jets such as the 707 and DC-8 (I guess you could also include the British Comet, but that was even earlier yet but more limited in its usage), and you were basically talking about very long-range planes operated out of major international airports (JFK, O'Hare, Heathrow, Frankfurt) with very long runways.
The 727 essentially created widespread domestic jet travel, not just between New York and Chicago but to Grand Rapids, Michigan or Madison, Wisconsin and such. It had fan jets that improved fuel economy on the shorter hops and gave it something more than that agonizing rate of climb of the early straight turbojets, it had "air stairs" in the back to board passengers at airports with rudimentary facilities, and it had rear engines, which allowed the entire wing to open up into a massive high-lift system. I remember riding on 707-320's (the turbofan 707), and the 707 lacked the leading edge droops and slats, and it had a relatively smaller amount flaps that had to be extended so far down that you could watch them flutter during short final.
I had talked to some flight instructors about 727's and jets and general, which seemed to come in way nose high compared to the kind of approaches one did in a propeller GA craft. When I was taking lessons, these guys were all trying to qualify for flight engineer jobs on 727's to get on the airline captain career path. I was told there was a procedure for landing (yes landing, not taking off) a 727 on one engine. I expressed surprise at this and then was told that a 727 landed at a pretty high percentage of takeoff power -- they make the final approach "on the back side of the power curve" pretty much "hanging on the engines."
Come to think of it, part of the 727 flying experience was that just as you were about to land, you would watch the wing come apart into droops, slats, and flaps, and you would hear the engines rev up that always reminded me of the sound of my mom's old GE vacuum cleaner.
Anyway, the 727 has a reputation of a very high rate of descent with all the flaps cranked out without engine power to counteract its rather draggy high lift system. I have watched other planes, 737's especially, and none come in with as nose high an attitude on landing approach with quite as much cranking up of the engines. I can imagine that someone with propliner experience could have problems in the 727, especially in the early days before the instructors also developed experience on what to warn pilots about, and I am thinking they must of crumped more than one 727 (i.e. not a crash, but landed hard enough to break something).
Ha, moderated down, Uncle Vladimir is up to his old tricks of suppressing criticism.
It's pretty much the same thing.
Never knew how they allocated exit-row seats, but now Northwest charges for them, either in terms of a cash surcharge or in terms flyer points or one of those "Elite" or "Gold" memberships.
One thing about exit-row seats is that each of the big exits are "manned" by a flight attendant -- that is what they are there for and anything else they do like get you a pillow or not get you anything to eat in this day and age is incidental. The exit row seats are unique in that they are "manned" by whatever passenger is seated there -- in other words, your safety depends on the conscientiousness of a fellow passenger rather than on an airline employee who at least has had some kind of training.
Mind you, this exit row thing is a kind of loophole to the safety rules that allows airlines to place revenue seats next to some exits instead of rear-facing jump seat with a flight attendant sitting there. The gummint was OK with this until a few years back that they started to "have issues" with it and issued those rules that the airline had to ask if you, as a customer, thought you were physically fit enough to lift a 40 pound exit door, and the airlines began this lameoid thing of "asking" customers if they wanted to be moved from the exit row -- apparently there are all of these 90-lb 90-year-old grannies who can lift 40 pounds from an awkward angle because no one ever volunteers to leave such a seat.
AvWeek had a discussion about passengers and exit rows, and the time it was suggested to qualify certain frequent flyers by having them demonstrate that they could operate and lift the plug doors and giving those passengers preferrential exit row seating. The current system, at least on Northwest, is that the exit row is a perk that you can pay for, never mind if you are the kind of jerk who never pays any attention to the safety demonstration or has never looked at a seat card.
Part of the thing is that 1) airlines have a "don't scare the passengers" approach to airline safety, and 2) most passengers believe that they are French toast in any kind of accident and that the safety info is pointless, and many if not most passengers make a demonstration out of pointedly not paying any attention to the safety drills.
My own personal perspective is twofold. One is that I lived in Chicago when the 727 jet was new, and pilots transitioning from prop planes lacking the high power-off sink rate of the 727 with all of the droops and flaps down were crumping 727's with alarming regularity. The Chicago Tribune told of one accident in Chicago where after one of these crumped landings, only two people got out, people seated next to exits with the presence of mind to operate them, and the rest of the people died from smoke and not from any other injuries. Secondly, I hold a private pilot certificate and have been indoctrinated in the ways of procedures and checklists. Unlike many other conveyances, airline passengers play an active role in the safe conduct of their flights. Can't be bothered to pay attention to the safety announcements and look at the seat card because you have flown the fourth leg of a trip and have flown hundreds of times? Gee, I guess the pilots can't be bothered with checklists because they have flown thousands of times and must know all of the settings by rote not, don't they?
So you got fat slobs with frequent-flier privileges who could care less about paying attention to the fact that they are in an exit row and have a role to play in an emergency, and you have the rest of us steerage passengers on the Titanic told we are last in line at the life boats.
Maybe in addition to the Depends, you need a pellet gun to ride the thing, which would make the device a shoot and make you Psycho Astronaut to even want to go down it.
Here's the reasoning. To do heavy multi-thread parallelism to speed up some kind of multi-media, game, data visualization program, you probably want a higher-level language with garbage collection to handle some kind of data flow model -- say Java with a good class libary to support this -- in place of C with pthreads and trying to place locks on data without the whole thing deadlocking. Assume for sake of argument that Java is 4 times slower than C -- yeah, yeah, JIT compilers and loop and bounds checking optimizations, but there are C/C++ compilers that are really heavily optimized.
So what good does 4 processors do you? I am thinking you are better off optimizing the heck out of something in C++ to run on one processor than to get your marvelous data-flow class library working on 4 processors. Now if you had a 100 processors, now you are talking about abandoning optimized C code with optimizing C compilers for something like Java in order to go for the parallelism without sweating P-threads.
Suppose you go the route Intel is pushing, of an optimizing C++ compiler that identifies loops that can be unrolled and made parallel and automatically creates, launches, synchronizes, and destroys threads behind the scenes. Well, if you had a compiler that could do that, wouldn't it be even more effective with whatever vector-processing capability is not utilized on Intel chips because no one has a compiler for it, or perhaps compiling to a GPU?
On one hand, I heard that 100 processor chips are in the development pipeline. On the other hand, I heard that maybe 16 processors is an upper limit for the shared memory multi-threaded model because of all of the cache synchronization issues, and to go beyond that, you will need to go to clusters with communication between local processor memory.
But the paltry level of processors you are getting now is probably OK for the OS running multiple apps with less processor contention, but to explicitly optimize any given app for thread parallelism, seems like a lot of effort for what, factor of 2 gain? Perhaps less?
I'm a great fan of your Web site, so you may accuse me of trolling.