To clarify for the purposes of the Amtrak accideng, there are no Amtrak trains that run with ATC at all.

The NEC and certain other routes have had a limited form of PTC, one called ACSES and another called ITCS, but they do not technically qualify as "true PTC" systems under the emergency order issued after the 2008 Chatsworth accident and the one issued after last week's Amtrak accident.

The Wikipedia article is incorrect. ACSES has operational on the entire NEC for several decades, but ACSES doesn't quality as a "true PTC" system and doesn't penalty brake for violating speed restrictions, unfortunately.

With all the news flying around concerning this accident online encyclopedias will not be a good source of information.

Even Trains magazine's own articles get the terms of art incorrectly sometimes. ATC and PTC are different. You can have PTC without ATC. You can have ATC without PTC. You can have both. You can have neither.

PTC is simply a penalty brake application when a rail vehicle exceeds a speed restriction or when the vehicle enters an occupied block without authorization, or when a vehicle passes a signal showing a stop aspect ("signal passed at danger" in the U.K.). Enhanced versions of PTC show positions of trains independent of any signalling or track circuit.

ATC means just that: automatic train control. The train is controlled directly by wayside and onboard equipment to automatically accelerate, decelerate, stop, and start. The article isn't correct. The Washington DC Metro has run on ATC since 1971 but not PTC. It's not perfect. The deadly crash in 2009 temporarily suspended ATC operations until this year, and that was because the signals were not being properly handled during an upgrade.

Magazine editors make mistakes. I wouldn't get too wound up about it.

I really like Cherry MX Brown switches. I tried MX Blacks, which seem to always be on a discount sale, but after a few days it dawned on me that my fingers were tired because of them.

ALPS don't really seem to have any real standard to weight or click sound--a recent Rosewill had really bad quality problems--but they're usually pretty soft.

Yes, it has a slightly higher power consumption, but at this processor's insanely high 6MB L3 Cache and 6 x 512KB L2 Cache, I can accept it. It is a solid performer.

Yes, but as Edgar Matias explains, we need to use and preserve the far superior keyboards that use ALPS switches.

Unicomp sells several classic-style IBM/Lexmark keyboard with classic TrackPoint nubs. Just have a look.

http://www.pckeyboard.com/

This keyboard at Massdrop is offered with Matias switches. All you need is a soldering iron and an hour.

https://www.massdrop.com/buy/i...

Sorry for the link, it requires an account, but mechanical keyboards are an important legacy to continue, at least so future generations can enjoy carpal-tunnel-free computer usage.

Edgar Matias saved the ALPS switch industry. His company, at significant expense, and through expensive trial-and-error, has succeeded in perfecting the manufacture of clicky and non-clicky ALPS switch clones.

While most of us keyboard enthusiasts extol the virtues of buckling-spring IBM/Lexmark keyboards continued by Unicomp, and the recent introduction of full Cherry MX Green heavy clicky switch keyboards (previously only used in spacebars alone), Matias is a true hero.

Newegg Rosewill/Striker, Newegg ABS, DS International, and Ducky have had reasonably good ALPS clones that have fallen out of production. But Matias continues to be the gold standard for those of us who appreciate the sound and feel of classic ALPS clicky and non-clicky keyboards.

It's a complicated and varied history in the original and clone ALPS switches if you're into that sort of thing.

If everything's so well paid for, why do they keep crying poor with those beggar messages at the top of the screen all the time?

I just retired my 1045T desktop and moved it to a VMware server. With SSDs it performs very well in this application.

It's breathtaking to use systems that are explicitly designed for multiple workloads. I wonder how much energy and space datacenters could save if everyone and their brother hadn't gone whole-hog on an architecture that is only marginally suitable for multiprocessing. It keeps getting better, but x86-64 is just not designed for this.

Why not merge with Android, already?
My Chromebooks are pretty poor performers and as the months move on they get slowly worse.

Why haven't Google already replaced the ad-hoc, stripped-down Linux distribution with their much more sucdessful other ad-hoc, stripped-down Linux distribution?

I'm going to ignore your sarcasm since I believe that sarcasm invalidates your argument.

But, since you asked, AMZN has recently enhanced S3 with cross-region replication, not just cross-availability zone replication, per this announcement:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Am...