Well, at the time the air base near the crash site was the home of a B-52 bomber wing. The Strategic Air Command had dispersed its bombers among a bunch of smaller wings scattered across the country; obviously that made the bombers harder to destroy, but it also increased the number of potential strategic targets.
Others have already linked to Wikipedia's article about the crash, with one guy saying "sounds like a wing fell off". Reading the article, that seems fairly close to the mark, though not quite right. Here's a summary of what happened to the bomber:
The bomber was on an "airborne alert mission", meaning that it was carrying live nukes while flying on a route and schedule that would make it ready to perform a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union on short notice. (This was part of a program called Operation Chrome Dome.) While it was refueling from a tanker over North Carolina, the tanker crew told the bomber crew that the bomber's right wing was leaking fuel. The bomber broke off from the refueling, informed ground control, and were ordered to fly offshore and hold to burn off most of their fuel load, to reduce the risk of an emergency landing. However, on the way to the holding point, the fuel leak rapidly worsened and became critical, and the plane was then ordered to land immediately. During the descent toward the field, while passing through 10,000 feet altitude, the pilots found they could no longer keep the aircraft under control. The captain ordered the crew to eject; those who survived reported that the plane was still intact when they last saw it. Once the airplane went out of control, it must have gone into an uncontrolled spiral dive, a "tailspin"; that's what frequently happens to a flying airplane when control is lost. Such a dive is often fatal for the airplane long before it reaches the ground; the aerodynamic stresses increase so fast that it breaks up in the air.
From the sound of it, there was some sort of structural failure in the right wing which got rapidly worse. The wing did not actually fall off while the pilots were inside, but the failure became so bad that they couldn't maintain control and were forced to bail out. Unfortunately, even this article puts so much focus on what happened to the nukes that the important question of what caused the bomber accident in the first place is ignored. It would be nice to see what the Air Force's accident report has to say on this.
I have experimented with the open source jbig2enc library available at http://github.com/agl/jbig2enc, which has a encoding parameter called the “threshold”, described like this:
“sets the fraction of pixels which have to match in order for two symbols to be classed the same. This isn't strictly true, as there are other tests as well, but increasing this will generally increase the number of symbol classes”
The included command tool accepts values for this parameter between 0.4 and 0.9, with 0.85 as the default.
I have found replaced digits in single-page numerical tables encoded with this parameter set as high as 0.82. As with the other examples you have found, the errors are not in any ways obvious to the eye which is, of course, the real problem.
Since JBIG2 has been supported in PDF since 2001, it would be surprising if only Xerox have fallen into this trap.
Yeah they serve all right.. I'm guessing it's not too terribly dangerous to fly about in an armored helicopter shooting at a bunch of asiatic hillbillies with AK-47s.
With AK-47s, and heavy machine guns, and RPG launchers, and portable surface-to-air missiles and such. Oh, and there's always the risks of bad weather and mechanical failure inherent to helicopter flight. Helicopters are dangerous, period, and the Apaches are far from invulnerable. A number have been lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some crews have died.
In general, when a piece of military hardware is heavily protected, it also faces powerful threats that make that protection necessary. Otherwise it'd just be carrying extra dead weight that would better be replaced with useful equipment. The military isn't in the business of building invulnerable weapons or letting soldiers fight in "god mode".
And don't you think their opponents wouldn't love to have the coup of bringing down a royal? Just by being in the combat zone, they put themselves at risk.
Because you know if there's ever an imminent threat the members of the Royal Family aren't going to be sat at Buck House with a cuppa tea counting down the seconds...they'll be on their merry way to the other three corners of the globe.
Any member of the Royal Family who did that would rightly be disowned by the rest of the family and the British public, and would probably be looked down upon by much of the rest of the world as well. If the monarch herself did it (and I can't imagine Elizabeth II doing it in a thousand years--she may look like a little granny, but she has far too much backbone for that), she would effectively have abdicated. In the face of such a selfish, craven act, Britain would either find itself a new monarch with more spine, or get rid of the monarchy entirely.
The Royal Family enjoys a lot of privileges, but in the end they exist to serve the British state, as its personification. Their lives are far more controlled and circumscribed than ordinary people.
Just look at the case of Edward VIII to see how Britain might treat a monarch who doesn't take his duty seriously.
Easiest thing is to see what comes up under the "Glenn Greenwald" tag in LGF's archives. (You have to scroll to the bottom repeatedly for the page to load older posts, but there's stuff there going back to 2006.) Johnson has spoken contemptuously of Greenwald as dishonest for years, well before Johnson's falling out with the right. A past incident where Greenwald was supposedly caught "sockpuppeting" as commenters defending him on other blogs certainly didn't help matters. Anyway, I get the feeling that once Johnson makes up his mind like that about someone, there's not much that will change it, regardless of ideology.
If you read LGF's take on it more closely, it seems to have a lot to do with Charles Johnson's relationship with Glenn Greenwald, who's been the main guy other than Snowden himself pushing the Snowden story. Johnson himself has remarked that there are indeed very troubling issues with today's overgrown surveillance apparatus, but he has zero trust for Greenwald.
It wasn't the heart operation itself that was the problem, it was the heart condition he needed the operation for. He'd known about it for a long time, but had previously believed it to be harmless. Actually, it had gradually been getting worse. While the long pauses between comics had been bad for quite a while, his situation really became terrible the last half year, because he was *completely* sapped of energy. That's when he saw a doctor and found out the state of things, which led him to have the operation. Sounds like he's been feeling vastly improved.
Because kids in their basement have parents paying for their expenses, while Fred has a family to provide for? Did you realize Megatokyo has been his livelihood for years?
Or a less well-known but more catastrophic (and less excusable) example, the capsizing in a storm of the British sailing turret ironclad HMS Captain in 1870, in which nearly all aboard her drowned, almost 500 people. Among the victims was her designer, Captain Cowper Coles, an early advocate of warships with turreted main guns. Due to poor supervision during Captain's construction, she was about 10% heavier than planned, and since the design already sat low in the water and had limited stability, the extra weight proved to be her undoing.
Yes, this is indeed a known bug which I've encountered myself. In my case, the culprit was some free version of VMware. (Note that VMware is listed among the problematic software on the Apple support page linked to by the parent.) Uninstalling the VMware version solved the problem.
(That ">>" in my subject is a "much greater than", not a right shift.:)
To me, the dividing line between a minicomputer and a microcomputer is the capability for virtual memory. Desktop computers have been architecturally minis since the 68030 and i386.
That's kind of funny to me, since the term "minicomputer" came into vogue in the later 1960s to describe computers like the original PDP-8 (the "Straight 8"). Far from being a virtual memory machine, the PDP-8 was a 12-bit architecture with a minimal instruction set and a very limited address space. Later PDP-8s used bank-switching to expand their addressable memory, as did the later 16-bit PDP-11. In many ways the early minis were architecturally similar to 8-bit and 16-bit microcomputers. Compared to them, the 80386 and 68030 look like ultra-powerful monsters.
The story says it was estimated to be 40 feet *long*. 40 feet *tall* would have been mind-boggling huge for a predatory dinosaur. Only the very largest of dinosaurs, all plant-eating sauropods, reached such heights.
In fact, Namco entered the video game industry by purchasing Atari's struggling Japan subsidiary in 1974, when Atari desperately needed the cash. The two companies had a close relationship for years.
There's plenty of other stuff in there making up the total system weight: structural framework, power supplies, and of course the mercury delay line memories, which were basically big sealed tanks of mercury. It also seems to have had magnetic drum storage, another heavy component. And I doubt weight of the system was a major concern anyway, as long as the floor could support it.
Perhaps because the low-power tubes were considered unsuitable for computing applications? Vacuum tubes in digital switching circuits have quite a different workload from those used in radios as amplifiers. The low-power tubes may not have provided fast switching performance, or they may have been unreliable in switching circuits. I'd think that power usage was a secondary concern for the designers of these computers; reducing it would be nice, but not at the cost of speed or reliability.
Yeah, the full term is "thermionic valve". This is the British expression for what Americans call a "vacuum tube". Though I'm American, the British term seems to better describe the device's function.
It's true in the U.S., too. This country has had lots of car nuts for many years. If that weren't true, many of the small industries that cater to auto enthusiasts would be in a lot of trouble.
They're Iranian Air Force roundels: the outer ring is green instead of the blue used by the Royal Air Force. Although the Iranian Air Force's officer corps was purged after the Islamic revolution, its markings are only slightly modified from those of the old Imperial Iranian Air Force, which dates back to 1920, two decades before the occupation by the British during World War II. So it's not surprising that they were modeled after the British ones--or perhaps the French ones, since the French were actually the first to use the roundel. The French one is almost identical to the British, except that it has red on the outside and blue in the center. Anyway, the three-ring roundel is a very popular insignia for military aircraft, and lots of countries use it.
Most British (and American) Ships of the Line from the late 17th and 18th centuries had long range forward facing guns called "Long Nines". These were cast iron, "9 pound" guns usually 8 or 9 feet in length used as a "chase gun" firing from the bow or stern of the ship. On the larger ships such as the classic British "Man of War", often entire broadside batteries were "long nines".
Most warships in the age of sail used long guns as chase guns; they weren't unique to the British and Americans. And a long nine-pounder was only a modest-sized gun, like you might find on a frigate. The heart of the fleet, the ships of the line, would have 24-pounder or 32-pounder long guns for the broadside battery. (During the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century, short-barreled "carronades" became much more popular, replacing many of the smaller long guns.)
This was part of the reason why the British fleet ruled the seas for so long. They could take out an enemy from a range so far the enemy could not shoot back.
Actually, this is the exact opposite of the strategy preferred by the British. It's true that back in the days of the Spanish Armada in the late 16th century, they preferred to hit at a distance with longer-ranged guns, but this approach didn't work out as well as hoped; the guns' accuracy and energy fell off much too quickly with range. By the height of the age of sail in the late 18th century, British ships preferred to close to point-blank range (one reason why short-range carronades became so popular). The keys to their naval superiority were better seamanship (leading to more efficient and effective ship handling), aggressive tactics (take the fight to the enemy whenever you could), and better gunnery, which for the British meant that their gun crews could pump out more shots more accurately than their adversaries could. The British believed that in a close-range fight, their ships could be relied on to deal much more damage more quickly than their enemy, to the point that they could board or otherwise force the enemy to surrender, and that any damage their own ships suffered could be handled and patched by their well-trained crews. It was a belief often confirmed in practice.
In this style of fighting, the main role of chase guns was either to slow down a fleeing adversary enough to allow the British ship to close for a short-range battle, or if pursued by a clearly superior enemy, to slow him enough to allow you to escape.
The British kept to this approach until the development of accurate long-range rifled guns forced them to abandon it.
Engineers: Engine found on right wing after brief search.
Heh, nice one, but alas that joke seems to be meaningless for modern airliners. It comes from the days of piston-engined airliners, because only piston engines "miss" (misfire in one or more cylinders).
Robert Maxwell also decided peoples' pension funds were his to play with. He's now living in hiding, or fell off a boat, which ever you choose to believe.
Considering his body was found by a fishing boat on the same day he went missing, and that he would now be 88 if he were still alive, the "living in hiding" supposition seems rather far fetched.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at the time the air base near the crash site was the home of a B-52 bomber wing. The Strategic Air Command had dispersed its bombers among a bunch of smaller wings scattered across the country; obviously that made the bombers harder to destroy, but it also increased the number of potential strategic targets.
Others have already linked to Wikipedia's article about the crash, with one guy saying "sounds like a wing fell off". Reading the article, that seems fairly close to the mark, though not quite right. Here's a summary of what happened to the bomber:
The bomber was on an "airborne alert mission", meaning that it was carrying live nukes while flying on a route and schedule that would make it ready to perform a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union on short notice. (This was part of a program called Operation Chrome Dome.) While it was refueling from a tanker over North Carolina, the tanker crew told the bomber crew that the bomber's right wing was leaking fuel. The bomber broke off from the refueling, informed ground control, and were ordered to fly offshore and hold to burn off most of their fuel load, to reduce the risk of an emergency landing. However, on the way to the holding point, the fuel leak rapidly worsened and became critical, and the plane was then ordered to land immediately. During the descent toward the field, while passing through 10,000 feet altitude, the pilots found they could no longer keep the aircraft under control. The captain ordered the crew to eject; those who survived reported that the plane was still intact when they last saw it. Once the airplane went out of control, it must have gone into an uncontrolled spiral dive, a "tailspin"; that's what frequently happens to a flying airplane when control is lost. Such a dive is often fatal for the airplane long before it reaches the ground; the aerodynamic stresses increase so fast that it breaks up in the air.
From the sound of it, there was some sort of structural failure in the right wing which got rapidly worse. The wing did not actually fall off while the pilots were inside, but the failure became so bad that they couldn't maintain control and were forced to bail out. Unfortunately, even this article puts so much focus on what happened to the nukes that the important question of what caused the bomber accident in the first place is ignored. It would be nice to see what the Air Force's accident report has to say on this.
http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0808_number_mangling_not_a_xerox-only_issue
And one of the comments to that posting says:
I have experimented with the open source jbig2enc library available at http://github.com/agl/jbig2enc, which has a encoding parameter called the “threshold”, described like this:
“sets the fraction of pixels which have to match in order for two symbols to be classed the same. This isn't strictly true, as there are other tests as well, but increasing this will generally increase the number of symbol classes”
The included command tool accepts values for this parameter between 0.4 and 0.9, with 0.85 as the default.
I have found replaced digits in single-page numerical tables encoded with this parameter set as high as 0.82. As with the other examples you have found, the errors are not in any ways obvious to the eye which is, of course, the real problem.
Since JBIG2 has been supported in PDF since 2001, it would be surprising if only Xerox have fallen into this trap.
Yeah they serve all right.. I'm guessing it's not too terribly dangerous to fly about in an armored helicopter shooting at a bunch of asiatic hillbillies with AK-47s.
With AK-47s, and heavy machine guns, and RPG launchers, and portable surface-to-air missiles and such. Oh, and there's always the risks of bad weather and mechanical failure inherent to helicopter flight. Helicopters are dangerous, period, and the Apaches are far from invulnerable. A number have been lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some crews have died.
In general, when a piece of military hardware is heavily protected, it also faces powerful threats that make that protection necessary. Otherwise it'd just be carrying extra dead weight that would better be replaced with useful equipment. The military isn't in the business of building invulnerable weapons or letting soldiers fight in "god mode".
And don't you think their opponents wouldn't love to have the coup of bringing down a royal? Just by being in the combat zone, they put themselves at risk.
Because you know if there's ever an imminent threat the members of the Royal Family aren't going to be sat at Buck House with a cuppa tea counting down the seconds...they'll be on their merry way to the other three corners of the globe.
Any member of the Royal Family who did that would rightly be disowned by the rest of the family and the British public, and would probably be looked down upon by much of the rest of the world as well. If the monarch herself did it (and I can't imagine Elizabeth II doing it in a thousand years--she may look like a little granny, but she has far too much backbone for that), she would effectively have abdicated. In the face of such a selfish, craven act, Britain would either find itself a new monarch with more spine, or get rid of the monarchy entirely.
The Royal Family enjoys a lot of privileges, but in the end they exist to serve the British state, as its personification. Their lives are far more controlled and circumscribed than ordinary people.
Just look at the case of Edward VIII to see how Britain might treat a monarch who doesn't take his duty seriously.
Easiest thing is to see what comes up under the "Glenn Greenwald" tag in LGF's archives. (You have to scroll to the bottom repeatedly for the page to load older posts, but there's stuff there going back to 2006.) Johnson has spoken contemptuously of Greenwald as dishonest for years, well before Johnson's falling out with the right. A past incident where Greenwald was supposedly caught "sockpuppeting" as commenters defending him on other blogs certainly didn't help matters. Anyway, I get the feeling that once Johnson makes up his mind like that about someone, there's not much that will change it, regardless of ideology.
If you read LGF's take on it more closely, it seems to have a lot to do with Charles Johnson's relationship with Glenn Greenwald, who's been the main guy other than Snowden himself pushing the Snowden story. Johnson himself has remarked that there are indeed very troubling issues with today's overgrown surveillance apparatus, but he has zero trust for Greenwald.
If you actually believe that, try actually comparing his earliest comics with his latest ones, and see if you still think so.
It wasn't the heart operation itself that was the problem, it was the heart condition he needed the operation for. He'd known about it for a long time, but had previously believed it to be harmless. Actually, it had gradually been getting worse. While the long pauses between comics had been bad for quite a while, his situation really became terrible the last half year, because he was *completely* sapped of energy. That's when he saw a doctor and found out the state of things, which led him to have the operation. Sounds like he's been feeling vastly improved.
Because kids in their basement have parents paying for their expenses, while Fred has a family to provide for? Did you realize Megatokyo has been his livelihood for years?
Or a less well-known but more catastrophic (and less excusable) example, the capsizing in a storm of the British sailing turret ironclad HMS Captain in 1870, in which nearly all aboard her drowned, almost 500 people. Among the victims was her designer, Captain Cowper Coles, an early advocate of warships with turreted main guns. Due to poor supervision during Captain's construction, she was about 10% heavier than planned, and since the design already sat low in the water and had limited stability, the extra weight proved to be her undoing.
Yes, this is indeed a known bug which I've encountered myself. In my case, the culprit was some free version of VMware. (Note that VMware is listed among the problematic software on the Apple support page linked to by the parent.) Uninstalling the VMware version solved the problem.
To me, the dividing line between a minicomputer and a microcomputer is the capability for virtual memory. Desktop computers have been architecturally minis since the 68030 and i386.
That's kind of funny to me, since the term "minicomputer" came into vogue in the later 1960s to describe computers like the original PDP-8 (the "Straight 8"). Far from being a virtual memory machine, the PDP-8 was a 12-bit architecture with a minimal instruction set and a very limited address space. Later PDP-8s used bank-switching to expand their addressable memory, as did the later 16-bit PDP-11. In many ways the early minis were architecturally similar to 8-bit and 16-bit microcomputers. Compared to them, the 80386 and 68030 look like ultra-powerful monsters.
The story says it was estimated to be 40 feet *long*. 40 feet *tall* would have been mind-boggling huge for a predatory dinosaur. Only the very largest of dinosaurs, all plant-eating sauropods, reached such heights.
In fact, Namco entered the video game industry by purchasing Atari's struggling Japan subsidiary in 1974, when Atari desperately needed the cash. The two companies had a close relationship for years.
There's plenty of other stuff in there making up the total system weight: structural framework, power supplies, and of course the mercury delay line memories, which were basically big sealed tanks of mercury. It also seems to have had magnetic drum storage, another heavy component. And I doubt weight of the system was a major concern anyway, as long as the floor could support it.
Perhaps because the low-power tubes were considered unsuitable for computing applications? Vacuum tubes in digital switching circuits have quite a different workload from those used in radios as amplifiers. The low-power tubes may not have provided fast switching performance, or they may have been unreliable in switching circuits. I'd think that power usage was a secondary concern for the designers of these computers; reducing it would be nice, but not at the cost of speed or reliability.
Yeah, the full term is "thermionic valve". This is the British expression for what Americans call a "vacuum tube". Though I'm American, the British term seems to better describe the device's function.
It's true in the U.S., too. This country has had lots of car nuts for many years. If that weren't true, many of the small industries that cater to auto enthusiasts would be in a lot of trouble.
They're Iranian Air Force roundels: the outer ring is green instead of the blue used by the Royal Air Force. Although the Iranian Air Force's officer corps was purged after the Islamic revolution, its markings are only slightly modified from those of the old Imperial Iranian Air Force, which dates back to 1920, two decades before the occupation by the British during World War II. So it's not surprising that they were modeled after the British ones--or perhaps the French ones, since the French were actually the first to use the roundel. The French one is almost identical to the British, except that it has red on the outside and blue in the center. Anyway, the three-ring roundel is a very popular insignia for military aircraft, and lots of countries use it.
Yup, when Demolition Man was made they were all owned by PepsiCo. They've since been spun off into a separate fast-food company called Yum! Brands.
A hundred comments and no one has mentioned the Goodyear blimp yet? Sad...
Most British (and American) Ships of the Line from the late 17th and 18th centuries had long range forward facing guns called "Long Nines". These were cast iron, "9 pound" guns usually 8 or 9 feet in length used as a "chase gun" firing from the bow or stern of the ship. On the larger ships such as the classic British "Man of War", often entire broadside batteries were "long nines".
Most warships in the age of sail used long guns as chase guns; they weren't unique to the British and Americans. And a long nine-pounder was only a modest-sized gun, like you might find on a frigate. The heart of the fleet, the ships of the line, would have 24-pounder or 32-pounder long guns for the broadside battery. (During the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century, short-barreled "carronades" became much more popular, replacing many of the smaller long guns.)
This was part of the reason why the British fleet ruled the seas for so long. They could take out an enemy from a range so far the enemy could not shoot back.
Actually, this is the exact opposite of the strategy preferred by the British. It's true that back in the days of the Spanish Armada in the late 16th century, they preferred to hit at a distance with longer-ranged guns, but this approach didn't work out as well as hoped; the guns' accuracy and energy fell off much too quickly with range. By the height of the age of sail in the late 18th century, British ships preferred to close to point-blank range (one reason why short-range carronades became so popular). The keys to their naval superiority were better seamanship (leading to more efficient and effective ship handling), aggressive tactics (take the fight to the enemy whenever you could), and better gunnery, which for the British meant that their gun crews could pump out more shots more accurately than their adversaries could. The British believed that in a close-range fight, their ships could be relied on to deal much more damage more quickly than their enemy, to the point that they could board or otherwise force the enemy to surrender, and that any damage their own ships suffered could be handled and patched by their well-trained crews. It was a belief often confirmed in practice.
In this style of fighting, the main role of chase guns was either to slow down a fleeing adversary enough to allow the British ship to close for a short-range battle, or if pursued by a clearly superior enemy, to slow him enough to allow you to escape.
The British kept to this approach until the development of accurate long-range rifled guns forced them to abandon it.
Pilots: Number 3 engine missing.
Engineers: Engine found on right wing after brief search.
Heh, nice one, but alas that joke seems to be meaningless for modern airliners. It comes from the days of piston-engined airliners, because only piston engines "miss" (misfire in one or more cylinders).
Robert Maxwell also decided peoples' pension funds were his to play with. He's now living in hiding, or fell off a boat, which ever you choose to believe.
Considering his body was found by a fishing boat on the same day he went missing, and that he would now be 88 if he were still alive, the "living in hiding" supposition seems rather far fetched. :)