barring something really weird (like spilling a coffee cup of 1M H2SO4 on the flight controls).
Ever see "Fate is the Hunter"? The crash in that movie was triggered by coffee spilling on the flight controls. Whether that has anything to do with reality is another question (should be noted that Ernest K. Gann, the author of the book, was a veteran pilot).
The accident does remind me a bit about the Eastern Airlines L-1011 loss of engine oil incident where some A&P guy forgot to put the O-rings back on the engine oil inspection magnets. The flight crew had to restart the center engine to get to the airport.
Fuel problems may still be a possibility, the plane had been in descent attitude for a while, engines were probably at the lower range of power output (low fuel consumption) - fuel pick-up tubes wedged, water in the fuel (may have come from just melted ice), etc.
Definitely not a complete dork - the GP's number of 2,000ft/sec is Mach 2 at altitude - which is, as you pointed out, faster than the terminal velocity of the airliner.
There was a column in Flying magazine a nmber of years ago about how far an airliner could glide from cruising altitude and the figure was something like 120 nautical miles.
I wonder if a lot of the subprime mortgage mess could have been avoided had the mortgage brokers been subject to a similar kind of scoring, rating how many customers thought that they were ripped off by the brokers.
It would also be interesting to have scoring of the FICO scoring.
On the other hand TFA may be more of a caution to those who think that Google has solved the "Database on Clusters" problem. The key point is integrity or lack there of (as you pointed out), Google doesn't need to maintain 100% integrity unlike the typical used of a DBMS.
The closely related topic, on which there is a 100% binary on-off difference between OOXML and ODF is that Sun may dictate the standard, it is comprehensible to anyone and thus anyone can write software to read/write it, whereas Microsoft dictates the standard and is the only one capable of fully comprehending and implementing it. THAT is the issue that many have with OOXML, that it's faux-openness. It's a "standard" which depends entirely on Microsoft's proprietary implementations.
One option for ISO ratification of OOXML is to make the standard only apply to the non-propietary portions of OOXML (i.e. not for gems like 'space as done by Word 95') and have a utility that checks for violations of that standard. I don't see MS going for that.
A couple more events like these and you can kiss your cell phone/GPS/non-local TV good by.
GPS and direct broadcast satellites are in a much higher orbit. The low orbit space junk may make it difficult to get up to the higher orbit, but it won't be the same level of threat to low altitude satellites. What the Chinese didn't take into account was that the space junk will threaten their manned missions as much as anybody elses.
And yes, it is true that much of the space junk is the US' fault.
A lot of the space junk came from boosters blowing up in space. A lot the final stages had leftover fuel that would exapnd and rupture the tanks. The US learned relatively early on and later persuaded the Russians to vent the fuel after the satellite was in proper orbit.
Having the largest army in the world and being able to do something with are two different things. The two nations with most to fear from the Chinese army are Russia and India.
I do think we're too lax about China's grab for technology.
I stopped subscribing to SA a bit after 2000 for pretty much the same reason that you did and had been a pretty avid reader of the magazine since the mid 1960's. I've continued to subscribe to Science News because, as you said, they continue to focus on science.
One small example of how SA has gone downhill - they used to be very good at correctly placing the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, but now invariably place it on "Mt. Palomar" (Science News still gets it right). While this may be a really minor point, it does make me wonder of what other things they get wrong. The political tone just made it even more irritating.
Back in the early 80's, Jerry Pournelle was enthused with a program called WRITE (Writers Really Incredible Text Edditor). What it allowed him to do was simply to sit down and write text without a lot of distractions - nothing on the screen other than text.
One consistent criticism of most word processors is that they promote presentation over content - programs like WRITE, WriteRoom shift the focus back to content. The same could be said of most text editors, with the choice being a very personal matter.
Admittedly, I've not used Office 2007 much because of an initial attempt at using the trial version corrupted *all* of my.doc files to be only compatible with the new Office 2007, essentially forcing users to upgrade and make the purchase.
I remember hearing about this issue with the trial version of Word 97 converting all files it was allowed to touch to Word 97 format. Some things never change....
This is an area where I think Sun is far more on the ball than Microsoft - for one, SO/OOo defaults to saving in the same format as the original document. More importantly, the file formats are better documented than the ones for Word, so you should be able to read them for the forseeable future. The downside of SO/OOo is that it is too much of a clone of MS-Office and dealing with all the formatting issues does get in the way of writing.
I've been thinking of getting a Mac specifically to be able to use Pages.
You're darn right on that one. This was in use in Europe prior to 9/11/2001, and the US turned down an offer from the European airport security trainers. The interesting thing about this technique is that it doesn't work if the person is agitated (e.g. from dealing with rude security personnel), so a big part of the training is putting the person being questioned at ease.
Most of the information in my post is from Don Philips column in the February 2008 issue of Trains magazine.
I've got a legitimate datestamp on one file on my computer that is at least as old as you are and some files (fortunately ASCII text) that were written before you were born (dates were reset when migrating from my first machine to my second).
People who wrote stuff in TeX before you were born will have an easier time of reading and editing their documents than someone with an early version of Word for Windows.
I got badly burned at work a few years ago when the fsck'ing pst file got corrupted - switched over to PC-Pine a short while later and only moved back to Outhouse when the company got bought and switched to the new parent's network (and saw lotsa problems with permissions for a pst file on the network).
The idea of heating a wire to incandescance predated Edison's light bulb by at least a couple of decades. The problem was that the filaments of the previous light bulbs had such a low resistance that it wasn't practical to use a remote generator. What Edison did do was find a material (charred bamboo) that had both a high resistance and withstood very high temperatures. These bulbs could run off 120VDC - which is why the US residential voltage is 120V. He was aided in this process by the then recent development of a mercury vacuum pump
What most conventional histories of Edison and the light bulb ignore is that Edison's group developed a lot of the infrastructure for an electric lighting utility. These included improved dynamos, metering systems, etc.
A sure sign that the recording industry hasn't got a clue was letting Tower Records be liquidated rather than supporting an effort to keep the chain going. Granted that they didn't have the selection they had 10 years ago, but it still beat the crap out of what you could find in a big box store.
Having radio pretty much tied up by the likes of Clear Channel hasn't helped either - and the royalty decision for internet radio was a great example of a pyrrhic victory. Would be interesting to see what will happen if they force 'real' radio to pay royalties per song played - after all, some of us old timers got a pretty decent music collection from taping off the air.
You've got an excellent point about the hazards of CFL's. What may be a less hazardous and more effcient option is using LED's.
The other big guys did you think this through before passing the law issue is light dimmers. Most of the incandescant replacements do not handle dimmers very well if at all and there are a scheissload of dimmers in houses.
I checked your homepage and noticed the Glasgow address - did my check ride for my pilot's license from the Glasgow airport (back when Nixon was prez). Order of hazards there for a data warehouse would be windstorms, thunderstorms or a severe cold spell.
Media that would survive large temperature swings would have to be fairly flexible, very hard material will have problems with cracking. OTOH, the media would have to be stored in a controlled environment - should be little to no expansion/contraction.
I *could* sell them some land in Montana; I just bought two city lots and the 5000 sq ft building on them for 25 grand. Taxes are low, too.;-)
You better have some good insulation on those buildings, eastern Montana has some pretty extreme temperature swings between winter lows and summer highs (my dad was from Miles City). The whole point of storing film underground is to minimize temperature swings - though digital media would presumably be a lot less sensitive.
You've pointed out (correctly) that USB is more common than Firewire, but offered nothing about how USB is a better interface than Firewire for disk drives. LaCie states that they get around 10% better throughput with fw400 than USB 2.0.
While bit-rot may not happen exactly as Steve Gibson explains, hard drives can gradually fail over time. The whole point of the scrubbing functionality of ZFS is to catch failing sectors when they're still readable (retries).
Good point on the drive interfaces changing - though the problem isn't quite as bad as you make out, PATA started out a bit over 20 years ago as a proprietary Compaq interface. SCSI is still around, but in a much smaller niche than it used to be. USB should be readable for at least a decade (think how long it took for the Centronics interface to die off), although Firewire may face extinction in a few years (despite being a better interface for drives than USB).
Unfortunately, you are right on the money about tape back-ups. Capability for reading CD-ROMS and DVD's should be around for at least another decade - but I wouldn't want to trust recordable media for that long of a time.
You obviously don't know anyone who has experience running an electric power system - check out the forecast demand on the Cal-ISO website sometime. Peak load typically occurs 2 to 3PM and load is still near peak from 5 to 6PM, well after the output from PV panels would start declining.
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Ever see "Fate is the Hunter"? The crash in that movie was triggered by coffee spilling on the flight controls. Whether that has anything to do with reality is another question (should be noted that Ernest K. Gann, the author of the book, was a veteran pilot).
The accident does remind me a bit about the Eastern Airlines L-1011 loss of engine oil incident where some A&P guy forgot to put the O-rings back on the engine oil inspection magnets. The flight crew had to restart the center engine to get to the airport.
Fuel problems may still be a possibility, the plane had been in descent attitude for a while, engines were probably at the lower range of power output (low fuel consumption) - fuel pick-up tubes wedged, water in the fuel (may have come from just melted ice), etc.
There was a column in Flying magazine a nmber of years ago about how far an airliner could glide from cruising altitude and the figure was something like 120 nautical miles.
It would also be interesting to have scoring of the FICO scoring.
On the other hand TFA may be more of a caution to those who think that Google has solved the "Database on Clusters" problem. The key point is integrity or lack there of (as you pointed out), Google doesn't need to maintain 100% integrity unlike the typical used of a DBMS.
One option for ISO ratification of OOXML is to make the standard only apply to the non-propietary portions of OOXML (i.e. not for gems like 'space as done by Word 95') and have a utility that checks for violations of that standard. I don't see MS going for that.
GPS and direct broadcast satellites are in a much higher orbit. The low orbit space junk may make it difficult to get up to the higher orbit, but it won't be the same level of threat to low altitude satellites. What the Chinese didn't take into account was that the space junk will threaten their manned missions as much as anybody elses.
A lot of the space junk came from boosters blowing up in space. A lot the final stages had leftover fuel that would exapnd and rupture the tanks. The US learned relatively early on and later persuaded the Russians to vent the fuel after the satellite was in proper orbit.
I do think we're too lax about China's grab for technology.
One small example of how SA has gone downhill - they used to be very good at correctly placing the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, but now invariably place it on "Mt. Palomar" (Science News still gets it right). While this may be a really minor point, it does make me wonder of what other things they get wrong. The political tone just made it even more irritating.
One consistent criticism of most word processors is that they promote presentation over content - programs like WRITE, WriteRoom shift the focus back to content. The same could be said of most text editors, with the choice being a very personal matter.
I remember hearing about this issue with the trial version of Word 97 converting all files it was allowed to touch to Word 97 format. Some things never change....
This is an area where I think Sun is far more on the ball than Microsoft - for one, SO/OOo defaults to saving in the same format as the original document. More importantly, the file formats are better documented than the ones for Word, so you should be able to read them for the forseeable future. The downside of SO/OOo is that it is too much of a clone of MS-Office and dealing with all the formatting issues does get in the way of writing.
I've been thinking of getting a Mac specifically to be able to use Pages.
Well said - the limitation of liability is a huge subsidy - think the public can expect corporations to act in the public interest.
You're darn right on that one. This was in use in Europe prior to 9/11/2001, and the US turned down an offer from the European airport security trainers. The interesting thing about this technique is that it doesn't work if the person is agitated (e.g. from dealing with rude security personnel), so a big part of the training is putting the person being questioned at ease.
Most of the information in my post is from Don Philips column in the February 2008 issue of Trains magazine.
People who wrote stuff in TeX before you were born will have an easier time of reading and editing their documents than someone with an early version of Word for Windows.
I second that.
I got badly burned at work a few years ago when the fsck'ing pst file got corrupted - switched over to PC-Pine a short while later and only moved back to Outhouse when the company got bought and switched to the new parent's network (and saw lotsa problems with permissions for a pst file on the network).
What most conventional histories of Edison and the light bulb ignore is that Edison's group developed a lot of the infrastructure for an electric lighting utility. These included improved dynamos, metering systems, etc.
Having radio pretty much tied up by the likes of Clear Channel hasn't helped either - and the royalty decision for internet radio was a great example of a pyrrhic victory. Would be interesting to see what will happen if they force 'real' radio to pay royalties per song played - after all, some of us old timers got a pretty decent music collection from taping off the air.
To paraphrase Dire Straits: Worse of all young man you have MBA disease.
Anyone here old enough to remember "My Living Doll"?
The other big guys did you think this through before passing the law issue is light dimmers. Most of the incandescant replacements do not handle dimmers very well if at all and there are a scheissload of dimmers in houses.
Media that would survive large temperature swings would have to be fairly flexible, very hard material will have problems with cracking. OTOH, the media would have to be stored in a controlled environment - should be little to no expansion/contraction.
You better have some good insulation on those buildings, eastern Montana has some pretty extreme temperature swings between winter lows and summer highs (my dad was from Miles City). The whole point of storing film underground is to minimize temperature swings - though digital media would presumably be a lot less sensitive.
You've pointed out (correctly) that USB is more common than Firewire, but offered nothing about how USB is a better interface than Firewire for disk drives. LaCie states that they get around 10% better throughput with fw400 than USB 2.0.
Good point on the drive interfaces changing - though the problem isn't quite as bad as you make out, PATA started out a bit over 20 years ago as a proprietary Compaq interface. SCSI is still around, but in a much smaller niche than it used to be. USB should be readable for at least a decade (think how long it took for the Centronics interface to die off), although Firewire may face extinction in a few years (despite being a better interface for drives than USB).
Unfortunately, you are right on the money about tape back-ups. Capability for reading CD-ROMS and DVD's should be around for at least another decade - but I wouldn't want to trust recordable media for that long of a time.
You obviously don't know anyone who has experience running an electric power system - check out the forecast demand on the Cal-ISO website sometime. Peak load typically occurs 2 to 3PM and load is still near peak from 5 to 6PM, well after the output from PV panels would start declining.