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Comment Crash not computer-related (Score 5, Informative) 179

The Red Line crash was not computer-related. The signalling system for the Washington Metro is a classic electromechanical relay-based system. Just like the New York subways. The Red Line crash was caused by a failure of a track circuit for detecting trains, trackside equipment using an audio-frequency signal sent through the rails and shorted to the other rail by the train's wheels. All those components are pre-computer technology.

As with most railway systems, manual driving isn't enough to prevent collisions, because stopping distances are often longer than visual distances. That was the case here.

The Washington Metro had been sloppy about maintenance of trackside equipment. They do have a central computer system, and it logs what the relay-based signal systems are doing, although it can't override them. They had logs of previous failures, and should have fixed the problem.

Comment Re:White House (Score 2) 138

the US Government use UCAVs to keep the airspace around DC clear.

Actually, the current response to airspace incursions in the DC area is an F-16 and a Coast Guard helicopter. The F-16 is in case it turns out to be hostile, and the Coast Guard helicopter is for the usual case, which is a clueless VFR pilot who needs directions. This happens several times a week. The FAA now insists that all pilots operating within 60 miles of DC (actually 60NM of the DCA VOR) take this online course. Amazingly, there are still clueless pilots wandering into this airspace, although fewer than a few years ago.

Comment Some info seems bogus (Score 1) 408

Some of that info seems bogus. 10,000 CNC mills? Unlikely. 10,000 CNC machines of all types across all of Apple manufacturing, maybe.

There's a nice video about how Apple machines a round can for their round desktop computer. They're going through a lot of steps to make a can, yet they're doing it in a low-volume way. Here's how soft drink cans are made. Same shape, but much higher production volume.

Apple is doing this to justify charging $2700 for an x86-64 machine with midrange specs.

Comment Re:Google's storage (Score 4, Interesting) 408

There are amusing efforts to sell disk drives to Google. Near Google HQ there is a movie theater complex. I once saw an ad run before a movie. Two minutes of sales pitch for bulk purchases of enterprise hard drives, with lots of technical detail. Clearly this was addressed to a very specific audience.

Comment Re:Yes, pipelined utilities, like the logs (Score 1) 385

The awesome structured and indexed log file format has a stable API and structure

Odd, so does a syslog. And you can still use tools to read it. Indexed files could be built from it if you had that much logging done. And since systemd has no option to output the ascii log in realtime, you have to use the tools. If you want to use the body of existing tools which do things with normal log files, you'll now need a FUSE filesystem to treat the binary logs like real logs, or you'll simply be out of date as you read the ascii logs from journald.

Comment Re: Please make this thing useful for development (Score 3, Insightful) 101

android-x86 is a bit of a dog's breakfast. They only kick out a release image every now and again, everything never works, lots of crashes. The latest 4.4 image is way less stable than the last 4.0 image they put out, and they stopped building nightlies and so did everyone else. It's really quite useless and always has been, because they never actually finish a release. Google kicks out a new version, they say "Ooh, shiny!" and they move on before they actually get the system working reliably or properly. Then you get to deal with all the apps that won't work right on x86 on top of that. It makes far more sense at this point to go ahead and run the emulator.

Comment Re:Server is critical (Score 3, Interesting) 174

The chat messages are full of nasty, hateful language. It seems to me that the user experience varies greatly from one server to another.

too true. I like the servers with chat filters, which bring a level of amusement to the situation when the chat scrolls with tales of bananasing female dogs and so on

Comment Re:"Affluent and accomplished" not the criterion (Score 4, Interesting) 178

Frankly speaking, I'm mostly surprised that this doesn't already exist.

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

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