Well, it was tough, I wasn't sure I was going to pull it off -- and then I just thought of those inspiring words from a man who knows how to ski: language lessons.
You think print journalism is immune to what I'm talking about?
No. That's why earlier I wrote "alongside good journalism, sensational and prurient reporting..." I'm just asking you not to take one notoriously subpar segment of journalism and apply to the entire media.
just because 60 Minutes was successful doesn't mean it was bad.
I didn't say 60 Minutes was bad, but that it started certain trends in motion, and these were bad. A similar example might be Lord of the Rings -- a brilliant work, but one which also inadvertantly spawned the low-grade Orcs-and-Swords fantasy genre. Read the linked article, especially the bit where Hewitt, 60 Minutes' creator is noted for his observation when "Almost three decades later Hewitt flippantly claimed 60 Minutes destroyed television by equating news with the profit motive." The 60 Minutes theory isn't mine alone!
Curious to know what news outlet you work for.
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to figure that out from my posting history and profile. I leave it as an exercise in investigative reporting.:)
Okay, but what you're complaining about here is not "the media" but a subset, i.e. "television news and magazine shows".
It's this type of use of blanket terms, which conflate all media into a monolithic entity that I'm unhappy with. Just as geneticists get annoyed at having to deal with the fall out from some people running around trying to set up reproductive cloning clinics, so I, as a print journalist, get annoyed when I'm tarred with the same brush as some lightweight passing off some prepackaged newstainment as journalism.
Incidentally, the shift you're describing started not with CNN, but with 60 Minutes in 1967. Why? Apart from the instantly-imitated pre-packaged magazine segment format, 60 minutes was the first news program to make a profit. Previously, television news organizations were not expected to make money: they were seen as a public service, part of the cost of maintaining the station's license to monopolize part of the public airwaves. Before long though, TV news organizations were expected to make money too, and this led to changes in format and content, and to spiraling cost reductions.
Interestingly, this has meant a return to having the news agenda set, not by TV, but, by and large, by print publications. TV news organizations rarely have the resources any more to go out and find new stories, but must wait until stories are broken in print. This is especially so with local news: manys the time I'll see a story pop up in, say, The Daily News, and two or three days later the same story will appear on the local news. Even in the heyday of US journalism, generally considered to be the early and mid 1970s, most of the action was driven by newspapers.
Re:I just want to say...
on
Dr Who Rolls On
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And the terrified eyes of Doctor Constantine as he morphed...
Not to be snarky, but just when was this? It certainly wasn't during the 19th century (when the term "Yellow Press" was coined), and we can rule out the entire 21st century as being close enough to today. So, that leaves the 20th century. Leaving aside issues of racism, sexism, jingoism, and so on, which scientist were equally prone to, I ask you -- what period of the 20th century did not feature, alongside good journalism, sensational and prurient reporting? (The phrase "respected news outlet" is something of a red herring as reputations change and defining what is and is not 'respected' begs the question.)
Just as there has always been bad, junk, or psuedo-science, so to there is bad journalism. But instead of simply writing off "the media" as some monolithic entity and ignoring the fact that there are many good outlets delivering the kind of reporting you seem to want, maybe you could buy a subscription or two so that they can keep doing it!
I was going to ask if it is possible to make a Christmas special that doesn't suck
You have obviously never seen the Christmas specials for either Father Ted or The Office, or actually a whole bunch of UK television shows. It only appears to be the Western side of the Atlanltic that dictates that Christmas Special = Sacharine Pap.:)
What was interesting about the Firefly sets (according to the DVDs) is that it was designed in such a way that most of the lighting required for shooting is built into the set already. Combined with the deliberatly 1970's style cinematograohy (lens flares, shots which would be considered under- or badly- lit by today's standards), and the fact that the Serenity was built as two huge (for the upstairs and downstairs areas) contigious sets complete with ceilings, this meant that shoots could be done a lot quicker (and therefore cheaper) than one would expect for a sci-fi show.
But you know that the Celts weren't native to the British Isles either right?
Ireland's first homid settlers were probably the Neanderthals. Then, on the homo sapien side, the first to arrive were the aboriginal Maglemose, then the Neolithic Danubians turned up, who were there for thousands of years and built the great stone tombs and momuments, before being followed by the "Bell-Beaker" people (who may have been early Celts), followed by the arrival of later celts, and so on.
Only when the Tuatha De Danan take their rightful place as the sole heirs of Ireland can Ireland be free!
If I take Linux in it's purest form, the kernal and add a whole bunch of stuff to it (filesytems, device drivers, windowing systems. etc), at the end of the day I have system that people will still identify as Linux (with the exception of pople like RMS, who has an ideological objection).
Here's a cut and paste from another post of mine which discussed how layers are talked about and the difference between saying "-based" and "derived":
***
there's only so much we can do with our company communications
True, but, given your explanation of the relationship between Unix and OS X. I would suggest "Unix Derived" would be a more accurate phrasing that wouldn't clog up even mass market communiques.
To say that something "is" something and that something is "based on" something are two radically different things.
Well, that depends on your context, and given that the domain is operating systems, the contextual interpretation doesn't customarily run the the way you want it to. Remember, tech people have the concept of layers built in. If I say my computer is Intel-based, or PPC-based, it's taken to mean that inside that box is an Intel or PPC CPU, or something that's so close as to make no difference (e.g. an AMD chip instead of an honest-to-God Intel processor). I certainly couldn't get away with saying PPC-based, and then revealing the CPU is an ARM processor, just because PPC and ARM processors both use RISC architectures.
When I read "XYZ OS-based" on the outside of a OS box, while I'm going to expect that the vendors of the OS will have added their own desktop environment, tool set, services, kernel extensions and modifications, etc, I'm also going to expect that under all that stuff beats the heart of a OS that is essentially XYZ.
To use another analogy, no-one ever describes C as B- or BCPL-based, or Unix as "Multics-based" because the the current product and it's ancestor are so radically different that the phrase "-based" is meaningless. "based" is used as much to imply similarity as to imply difference, if not more so. It's unfair to try to blame punters because for refusing "to understand what words mean," when they're using a perfectly valid interpretation. If Apple doesn't want people to draw the conclusion that "OS X equals Unix", it's up to Apple to communicate the distinction unambigously, something "Unix based" fails to do, especially when the word Unix is often used with out any qualification such as "based" e.g. "Combines the power of Unix with..."
***
You just don't understand English very well.
Well, given I earn my paycheck, often have my articles put on college course reading lists, and even won some awards for my writing in the English language, I'd say "Bzzzzzt. Ad Hominen attack. You're not too good at avoiding the logical fallacies." Again, indeed in reality (and as ASOTV has ably argued), OS X and Unix may be quite different, but you can't make that claim based on the Apple documentation you cited.
there's only so much we can do with our company communications
True, but, given your explanation of the relationship between Unix and OS X. I would suggest "Unix Derived" would be a more accurate phrasing that wouldn't clog up even mass market communiques.
To say that something "is" something and that something is "based on" something are two radically different things.
Well, that depends on your context, and given that the domain is operating systems, the contextual interpretation doesn't customarily run the the way you want it to. Remember, tech people have the concept of layers built in. If I say my computer is Intel-based, or PPC-based, it's taken to mean that inside that box is an Intel or PPC CPU, or something that's so close as to make no difference (e.g. an AMD chip instead of an honest-to-God Intel processor). I certainly couldn't get away with saying PPC-based, and then revealing the CPU is an ARM processor, just because PPC and ARM processors both use RISC architectures.
When I read "XYZ OS-based" on the outside of a OS box, while I'm going to expect that the vendors of the OS will have added their own desktop environment, tool set, services, kernel extensions and modifications, etc, I'm also going to expect that under all that stuff beats the heart of a OS that is essentially XYZ.
To use another analogy, no-one ever describes C as B- or BCPL-based, or Unix as "Multics-based" because the the current product and it's ancestor are so radically different that the phrase "-based" is meaningless. "based" is used as much to imply similarity as to imply difference, if not more so. It's unfair to try to blame punters because for refusing "to understand what words mean," when they're using a perfectly valid interpretation. If Apple doesn't want people to draw the conclusion that "OS X equals Unix", it's up to Apple to communicate the distinction unambigously, something "Unix based" fails to do, especially when the word Unix is often used with out any qualification such as "based" e.g. "Combines the power of Unix with..."
Hang on. Saying C plays nicely with A and B who are members of class X, does not automatically imply that C is not in class X. For example, say I'm marketing a new car, the Auton, and here's part of my blurb:
"The Auton can use wheels made for cars such as the Mini-Cooper and the Volkswagon."
In fact, given that Linux is not technically Unix, but is certainly Unix-based, while Solaris is a Unix, establishes an equivalancy between "Unix-based" and "Unix". Apple states that OS X is "Unix-based" and therefore OS is Unix. QED. Now, in reality, OS X may indeed not be unix, but you can't draw that conclusion from your parsing of the Apple statements listed.
Even though the Unix name does not feature heavily in Apple's marketing now, it certainly did in earlier versions (the phrase "combines the rock-solid reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh" commonly accompanied releases, along with a logo that, while it may not have been an official trademark, read "UNIX"), and to this day, the first paragraph of Apple's OS X's tech specs page reads:
Mac OS X is a super-modern operating system that combines the power and stability of UNIX with the legendary elegance of the Macintosh.
Note that it says "combines the power...of Unix." Not "derived from" or any other qualifer. Any reasonable customer is going to assume that when Unix is listed as one of the ingredients on the outside of the tin, that's what they're getting inside the tin.
Mass marketing aside, the PDF labelled "UNIX" in the sidebar, is sub titled "The power of UNIX with the simplicity of Macintosh. " and the first two paragraphs go on to state:
Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" combines a robust and open UNIX-based foundation with the richness and usability of the Mac interface, bringing UNIX technology and 64-bit power to the mass market. Apple has made open source and standards a key part of its strategy to deliver an industrial-strength operating system that is both innovative and easy to use.
There are over 15 million Mac OS X users--scientists, animators, developers, system administrators, and more--making Mac OS X the most widely used UNIX-based desktop operating system.
Sure, OS X not 100% UNIX certified, or compliant, but then that didn't stop people (quite correctly) considering Linux as Unix.
So while I agree that OS X is not techncially Unix, and Apple has done a great job in by marrying BSD with Mach as well as a slew of other innovations, Apple has not been shy about using the Unix name liberally in its marketing and technical documentation, and it's not unreasonable, as a first order approximation, to call OS X a Unix. (And traditionally, the difference between Unix and Unix-based has been pretty meaningless when categorizing operating systems) If calling OS X Unix is an unreasonable approximation, and OS X is truly a horse of a different color, then the claim that OS X is "the most widely used UNIX-based desktop operating system" is a meaningless tautology: you've never seen a press release from, say, Be, reading that "The Be operating system is the most widely used Be operating system in the world." On some level, OS X must be a member of a larger equivalence class -- Unix and Unix-based OS's -- for that statement to mean anything.
While I'm equally dubious about the parent post, you should know there was a burn before the PC+2 burn on Apollo 13, and it was done relatively soon after the explosion in order to get the spacecraft onto a free-return trajectory prior to pericynthion. Here's part of what I wrote about it in the original Spectrum article:
There was, of course, a fly in the ointment. During earlier Apollo missions, the outgoing trajectory of the spacecraft had been selected so that if the service module's main engine failed for any reason, the slingshot effect would aim the command and service module perfectly at Earth, a so-called free-return trajectory. But this trajectory put very tight constraints on the mission timeline, and for Apollo 13, it had been abandoned.
"We were on a non-free-return trajectory. If we did nothing, we'd whip back towards the Earth but miss it by several thousand miles," the Trench's Bostick explains....
"In 2 or 3 hours we were able to come up with a free-return maneuver. I think it made everybody feel a lot better--including the astronauts." Bostick remembers talking to the crew after the mission. "When we executed the free-return burn it made them feel that they might get out of this thing alive," he says.
Cheers, that was a big part of my motivation to write the article in the first place: while the movie was good, I felt there were useful insights and lessons in the events of Apollo 13 that could only be expressed through a more detailed and factual telling, in particular the importance of mission control's overall culture.
While I'm sure they prayed, the crew was in fact trained for this: (from the original Spectrum article):
But Swigert and the rest of the crew powered up the Odyssey, seemingly effortlessly. "Therein lies the reason we chose test pilots" to be astronauts, says Kraft. "They were used to putting their lives on the line, used to making decisions, used to putting themselves in critical situations. You wanted people who would not panic under those circumstances. These three guys, having been test pilots, were the personification of that theory," explains Kraft.
Nor are the facts "highly classified". You can read them in excruciating detail here, and the air to ground audio is also available, as is quite a bit of the mission control loop audio.
They did get lucky, but as the saying goes "chance favors the prepared mind." The huge amount of preparation, skill and teamwork, onboard and on the ground, made the difference between success and failure: the gods help those who help themselves, after all.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article
Unfortunately, as Jerry Bostick, the head of the Flight Dynamics branch notes in the Spectrum article, the bottleneck was that they didn't have the software in the Real Time Computer Complex (big bank of IBM mainframes) to compute the correct burn for the cojoined CSM and LM's trajectory using the LM's descent engine. The limiting issue for the Dynamics branch wasn't the trajectory options, it was executing them with the descent engine, without even the aid of the primary navigation system for later burns.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article!
Actually, if you read the original article in Spectrum, you'll see that a lot of it was simulated: in particular critical lifeboat procedures (including the important power-the-CSM-from-the-LM-through-the-umbilicals bit) were developed after an Apollo 10 sim where three fuel cells were failed at almost the same point that they did on 13.
And they did have a bunch of mainframes on the ground for the heavy lifting with the trajectory calculations.
While there was some brilliant improvisation (the LM controllers hack to power up the LM for example), the controllers were by no mean 'winging it': thanks to leadership, teamwork, dedication and skill, when it came to crunch time, they'd already had a lot of the work done.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article!
Actually, special relativity, (to my pleasant surprise) doesn't require much heavy maths at all. It's general relativity that'll cause your brain to dribble out your ears.
I guess it's one of those six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other things: for example in his book, Lovell calls it the LEM, while in his book Kranz uses LM.
Slashdot Mirror
Validation from the possessor of a two-digit /. uid? Take that, Lisa Simpson!
Well, it was tough, I wasn't sure I was going to pull it off -- and then I just thought of those inspiring words from a man who knows how to ski: language lessons.
(I figure if you're a B7 fan, you're probably of the right age / mindset to get a Savage Steve Holland / John Cusack reference...)
Thank you, thank you. I hope to use my prize to Further World Peace and hit on Katie Couric during my Today show interview.
You think print journalism is immune to what I'm talking about?
:)
No. That's why earlier I wrote "alongside good journalism, sensational and prurient reporting..." I'm just asking you not to take one notoriously subpar segment of journalism and apply to the entire media.
just because 60 Minutes was successful doesn't mean it was bad.
I didn't say 60 Minutes was bad, but that it started certain trends in motion, and these were bad. A similar example might be Lord of the Rings -- a brilliant work, but one which also inadvertantly spawned the low-grade Orcs-and-Swords fantasy genre. Read the linked article, especially the bit where Hewitt, 60 Minutes' creator is noted for his observation when "Almost three decades later Hewitt flippantly claimed 60 Minutes destroyed television by equating news with the profit motive." The 60 Minutes theory isn't mine alone!
Curious to know what news outlet you work for.
Actually, it shouldn't be too hard to figure that out from my posting history and profile. I leave it as an exercise in investigative reporting.
Okay, but what you're complaining about here is not "the media" but a subset, i.e. "television news and magazine shows".
It's this type of use of blanket terms, which conflate all media into a monolithic entity that I'm unhappy with. Just as geneticists get annoyed at having to deal with the fall out from some people running around trying to set up reproductive cloning clinics, so I, as a print journalist, get annoyed when I'm tarred with the same brush as some lightweight passing off some prepackaged newstainment as journalism.
Incidentally, the shift you're describing started not with CNN, but with 60 Minutes in 1967. Why? Apart from the instantly-imitated pre-packaged magazine segment format, 60 minutes was the first news program to make a profit. Previously, television news organizations were not expected to make money: they were seen as a public service, part of the cost of maintaining the station's license to monopolize part of the public airwaves. Before long though, TV news organizations were expected to make money too, and this led to changes in format and content, and to spiraling cost reductions.
Interestingly, this has meant a return to having the news agenda set, not by TV, but, by and large, by print publications. TV news organizations rarely have the resources any more to go out and find new stories, but must wait until stories are broken in print. This is especially so with local news: manys the time I'll see a story pop up in, say, The Daily News, and two or three days later the same story will appear on the local news. Even in the heyday of US journalism, generally considered to be the early and mid 1970s, most of the action was driven by newspapers.
And the terrified eyes of Doctor Constantine as he morphed...
At one time,...
Not to be snarky, but just when was this? It certainly wasn't during the 19th century (when the term "Yellow Press" was coined), and we can rule out the entire 21st century as being close enough to today. So, that leaves the 20th century. Leaving aside issues of racism, sexism, jingoism, and so on, which scientist were equally prone to, I ask you -- what period of the 20th century did not feature, alongside good journalism, sensational and prurient reporting? (The phrase "respected news outlet" is something of a red herring as reputations change and defining what is and is not 'respected' begs the question.)
Just as there has always been bad, junk, or psuedo-science, so to there is bad journalism. But instead of simply writing off "the media" as some monolithic entity and ignoring the fact that there are many good outlets delivering the kind of reporting you seem to want, maybe you could buy a subscription or two so that they can keep doing it!
I was going to ask if it is possible to make a Christmas special that doesn't suck
:)
You have obviously never seen the Christmas specials for either Father Ted or The Office, or actually a whole bunch of UK television shows. It only appears to be the Western side of the Atlanltic that dictates that Christmas Special = Sacharine Pap.
free shoes
free... s'what?
What was interesting about the Firefly sets (according to the DVDs) is that it was designed in such a way that most of the lighting required for shooting is built into the set already. Combined with the deliberatly 1970's style cinematograohy (lens flares, shots which would be considered under- or badly- lit by today's standards), and the fact that the Serenity was built as two huge (for the upstairs and downstairs areas) contigious sets complete with ceilings, this meant that shoots could be done a lot quicker (and therefore cheaper) than one would expect for a sci-fi show.
Heh.
But you know that the Celts weren't native to the British Isles either right?
Ireland's first homid settlers were probably the Neanderthals. Then, on the homo sapien side, the first to arrive were the aboriginal Maglemose, then the Neolithic Danubians turned up, who were there for thousands of years and built the great stone tombs and momuments, before being followed by the "Bell-Beaker" people (who may have been early Celts), followed by the arrival of later celts, and so on.
Only when the Tuatha De Danan take their rightful place as the sole heirs of Ireland can Ireland be free!
If I take Linux in it's purest form, the kernal and add a whole bunch of stuff to it (filesytems, device drivers, windowing systems. etc), at the end of the day I have system that people will still identify as Linux (with the exception of pople like RMS, who has an ideological objection).
Here's a cut and paste from another post of mine which discussed how layers are talked about and the difference between saying "-based" and "derived":
***
there's only so much we can do with our company communications
True, but, given your explanation of the relationship between Unix and OS X. I would suggest "Unix Derived" would be a more accurate phrasing that wouldn't clog up even mass market communiques.
To say that something "is" something and that something is "based on" something are two radically different things.
Well, that depends on your context, and given that the domain is operating systems, the contextual interpretation doesn't customarily run the the way you want it to. Remember, tech people have the concept of layers built in. If I say my computer is Intel-based, or PPC-based, it's taken to mean that inside that box is an Intel or PPC CPU, or something that's so close as to make no difference (e.g. an AMD chip instead of an honest-to-God Intel processor). I certainly couldn't get away with saying PPC-based, and then revealing the CPU is an ARM processor, just because PPC and ARM processors both use RISC architectures.
When I read "XYZ OS-based" on the outside of a OS box, while I'm going to expect that the vendors of the OS will have added their own desktop environment, tool set, services, kernel extensions and modifications, etc, I'm also going to expect that under all that stuff beats the heart of a OS that is essentially XYZ.
To use another analogy, no-one ever describes C as B- or BCPL-based, or Unix as "Multics-based" because the the current product and it's ancestor are so radically different that the phrase "-based" is meaningless. "based" is used as much to imply similarity as to imply difference, if not more so. It's unfair to try to blame punters because for refusing "to understand what words mean," when they're using a perfectly valid interpretation. If Apple doesn't want people to draw the conclusion that "OS X equals Unix", it's up to Apple to communicate the distinction unambigously, something "Unix based" fails to do, especially when the word Unix is often used with out any qualification such as "based" e.g. "Combines the power of Unix with..."
***
You just don't understand English very well.
Well, given I earn my paycheck, often have my articles put on college course reading lists, and even won some awards for my writing in the English language, I'd say "Bzzzzzt. Ad Hominen attack. You're not too good at avoiding the logical fallacies." Again, indeed in reality (and as ASOTV has ably argued), OS X and Unix may be quite different, but you can't make that claim based on the Apple documentation you cited.
there's only so much we can do with our company communications
True, but, given your explanation of the relationship between Unix and OS X. I would suggest "Unix Derived" would be a more accurate phrasing that wouldn't clog up even mass market communiques.
To say that something "is" something and that something is "based on" something are two radically different things.
Well, that depends on your context, and given that the domain is operating systems, the contextual interpretation doesn't customarily run the the way you want it to. Remember, tech people have the concept of layers built in. If I say my computer is Intel-based, or PPC-based, it's taken to mean that inside that box is an Intel or PPC CPU, or something that's so close as to make no difference (e.g. an AMD chip instead of an honest-to-God Intel processor). I certainly couldn't get away with saying PPC-based, and then revealing the CPU is an ARM processor, just because PPC and ARM processors both use RISC architectures.
When I read "XYZ OS-based" on the outside of a OS box, while I'm going to expect that the vendors of the OS will have added their own desktop environment, tool set, services, kernel extensions and modifications, etc, I'm also going to expect that under all that stuff beats the heart of a OS that is essentially XYZ.
To use another analogy, no-one ever describes C as B- or BCPL-based, or Unix as "Multics-based" because the the current product and it's ancestor are so radically different that the phrase "-based" is meaningless. "based" is used as much to imply similarity as to imply difference, if not more so. It's unfair to try to blame punters because for refusing "to understand what words mean," when they're using a perfectly valid interpretation. If Apple doesn't want people to draw the conclusion that "OS X equals Unix", it's up to Apple to communicate the distinction unambigously, something "Unix based" fails to do, especially when the word Unix is often used with out any qualification such as "based" e.g. "Combines the power of Unix with..."
Hang on. Saying C plays nicely with A and B who are members of class X, does not automatically imply that C is not in class X. For example, say I'm marketing a new car, the Auton, and here's part of my blurb:
"The Auton can use wheels made for cars such as the Mini-Cooper and the Volkswagon."
In fact, given that Linux is not technically Unix, but is certainly Unix-based, while Solaris is a Unix, establishes an equivalancy between "Unix-based" and "Unix". Apple states that OS X is "Unix-based" and therefore OS is Unix. QED. Now, in reality, OS X may indeed not be unix, but you can't draw that conclusion from your parsing of the Apple statements listed.
Even though the Unix name does not feature heavily in Apple's marketing now, it certainly did in earlier versions (the phrase "combines the rock-solid reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh" commonly accompanied releases, along with a logo that, while it may not have been an official trademark, read "UNIX"), and to this day, the first paragraph of Apple's OS X's tech specs page reads:
Mac OS X is a super-modern operating system that combines the power and stability of UNIX with the legendary elegance of the Macintosh.
Note that it says "combines the power...of Unix." Not "derived from" or any other qualifer. Any reasonable customer is going to assume that when Unix is listed as one of the ingredients on the outside of the tin, that's what they're getting inside the tin.
Mass marketing aside, the PDF labelled "UNIX" in the sidebar, is sub titled "The power of UNIX with the simplicity of Macintosh. " and the first two paragraphs go on to state:
Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" combines a robust and open UNIX-based foundation with the richness and usability of the Mac interface, bringing UNIX technology and 64-bit power to the mass market. Apple has made open source and standards a key part of its strategy to deliver an industrial-strength operating system that is both innovative and easy to use.
There are over 15 million Mac OS X users--scientists, animators, developers, system administrators, and more--making Mac OS X the most widely used UNIX-based desktop operating system.
Sure, OS X not 100% UNIX certified, or compliant, but then that didn't stop people (quite correctly) considering Linux as Unix.
So while I agree that OS X is not techncially Unix, and Apple has done a great job in by marrying BSD with Mach as well as a slew of other innovations, Apple has not been shy about using the Unix name liberally in its marketing and technical documentation, and it's not unreasonable, as a first order approximation, to call OS X a Unix. (And traditionally, the difference between Unix and Unix-based has been pretty meaningless when categorizing operating systems) If calling OS X Unix is an unreasonable approximation, and OS X is truly a horse of a different color, then the claim that OS X is "the most widely used UNIX-based desktop operating system" is a meaningless tautology: you've never seen a press release from, say, Be, reading that "The Be operating system is the most widely used Be operating system in the world." On some level, OS X must be a member of a larger equivalence class -- Unix and Unix-based OS's -- for that statement to mean anything.
While I'm equally dubious about the parent post, you should know there was a burn before the PC+2 burn on Apollo 13, and it was done relatively soon after the explosion in order to get the spacecraft onto a free-return trajectory prior to pericynthion. Here's part of what I wrote about it in the original Spectrum article:
...
There was, of course, a fly in the ointment. During earlier Apollo missions, the outgoing trajectory of the spacecraft had been selected so that if the service module's main engine failed for any reason, the slingshot effect would aim the command and service module perfectly at Earth, a so-called free-return trajectory. But this trajectory put very tight constraints on the mission timeline, and for Apollo 13, it had been abandoned.
"We were on a non-free-return trajectory. If we did nothing, we'd whip back towards the Earth but miss it by several thousand miles," the Trench's Bostick explains.
"In 2 or 3 hours we were able to come up with a free-return maneuver. I think it made everybody feel a lot better--including the astronauts." Bostick remembers talking to the crew after the mission. "When we executed the free-return burn it made them feel that they might get out of this thing alive," he says.
Cheers, that was a big part of my motivation to write the article in the first place: while the movie was good, I felt there were useful insights and lessons in the events of Apollo 13 that could only be expressed through a more detailed and factual telling, in particular the importance of mission control's overall culture.
Engineers at the contractors built the spacecraft to NASA specs and oversight, and a whole different bunch of engineers acted as mission controllers.
While I'm sure they prayed, the crew was in fact trained for this: (from the original Spectrum article):
But Swigert and the rest of the crew powered up the Odyssey, seemingly effortlessly. "Therein lies the reason we chose test pilots" to be astronauts, says Kraft. "They were used to putting their lives on the line, used to making decisions, used to putting themselves in critical situations. You wanted people who would not panic under those circumstances. These three guys, having been test pilots, were the personification of that theory," explains Kraft.
Nor are the facts "highly classified". You can read them in excruciating detail here, and the air to ground audio is also available, as is quite a bit of the mission control loop audio.
They did get lucky, but as the saying goes "chance favors the prepared mind." The huge amount of preparation, skill and teamwork, onboard and on the ground, made the difference between success and failure: the gods help those who help themselves, after all.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article
Today is today, and 35 years ago is 35 years ago, so YMMV, but Kranz is very complimentary about the contractor support during the Apollo 13 mission.
A note of caution: as Sy Liebergot says (the White EECOM on 13), says, you can't always trust the transcripts.
Unfortunately, as Jerry Bostick, the head of the Flight Dynamics branch notes in the Spectrum article, the bottleneck was that they didn't have the software in the Real Time Computer Complex (big bank of IBM mainframes) to compute the correct burn for the cojoined CSM and LM's trajectory using the LM's descent engine. The limiting issue for the Dynamics branch wasn't the trajectory options, it was executing them with the descent engine, without even the aid of the primary navigation system for later burns.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article!
Actually, if you read the original article in Spectrum, you'll see that a lot of it was simulated: in particular critical lifeboat procedures (including the important power-the-CSM-from-the-LM-through-the-umbilicals bit) were developed after an Apollo 10 sim where three fuel cells were failed at almost the same point that they did on 13.
And they did have a bunch of mainframes on the ground for the heavy lifting with the trajectory calculations.
While there was some brilliant improvisation (the LM controllers hack to power up the LM for example), the controllers were by no mean 'winging it': thanks to leadership, teamwork, dedication and skill, when it came to crunch time, they'd already had a lot of the work done.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Spectrum article!
Actually, special relativity, (to my pleasant surprise) doesn't require much heavy maths at all. It's general relativity that'll cause your brain to dribble out your ears.
I guess it's one of those six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other things: for example in his book, Lovell calls it the LEM, while in his book Kranz uses LM.