>"...if I can still make it crash within ten seconds, like all the previous versions. :-p"

I have 150 people using it every day. It is nowhere near that unstable. Having it crash is actually a very rare event.

> They added MS style ribbons, all in the name of UX

Thank God no. But they did add a somewhat strange "Sidebar" type thing a few versions ago and it has progressed enough that they turned it on by default. Unfortunately, it is riddled with lots of pretty major bugs (the sidebar; lots of unresolved bug reports but work is progressing).

At least you can turn it off... for now. I hope we can continue to do so....

Anyway, LO is a great program and there are lots of improvements with each release.

You are aware that there are still some 707 and 727s in service, right? :)

The reason they landed at Manchester was not because they burned more fuel, but it was because they thought that the fuel on the outer wing tank on the wing that had the shut down engine on was inaccessible - this turned out to be false, they could have made it all the way to LHR without issue.

That entirely depends on the use you have for the aircraft - high oil price or not, no aircraft has the CASM of the A380 (not even the proposed 777X), which puts it in a league of its own. Consequently, the 747-8 falls foul to the 777 so the sole VLA competitor to the A380 would be killed by its own sibling...

Oil can go through the roof, but if you can fill an A380 then thats the aircraft you need for the job. You can't shoehorn 600 into a 777 no matter how hard you try.

Fully aware of the KC-X contest, NG was the prime contractor but it was actually Airbus that did all the work.

The KC-X contest was only ran because Boeing got caught firstly trying to lease replacement tankers to the USAF at a rate which was several times more than they cost to buy, and then Boeing got caught in the first round buying the Airbus bid details from the US DOD procurement officer in charge of the bids.

Even with a US prime contractor and a US assembly line, there was massive uproar over the fact that Airbus had won the second round of bidding, before it got out back out to tender and Boeing magically found a way to make the 767 offering several billion dollars less than their previous bid...

There is no way the US political arena would accept a non-American plane as AF1. Which raises an interesting problem when the next replacement comes round...

The 747-8 has new engines, a new wing definition and loft, new winglets, new avionics and significant aerodynamic improvements across the board. The only thing left to do is switch construction to CFRP or another modern material, and its cheaper to do an all new aircraft for that as you have to redesign the framework completely for the new material loading. The -8 will be the last 747.

Plus, while iconic, the 747 carries a lot of unnecessary weight around due to its short upper deck (there is a lot of wasted dead space behind that hump in commercial aircraft, so much so that they considered putting a dozen sleeping berths up there), so compared to single deck aircraft or the A380 its not as well optimised weight wise for its structure.

There will be hundreds of 747s flying for the next three to four decades, so parts are not an issue - Boeing makes the majority of its money on aftermarket care and parts, they won't close those lines down fast.

Also, Airbus refused to submit a proposal for this when approached several years ago (while there was no bidding process, basic proposals were requested from both Airbus and Boeing) because they knew it was a no contest decision.

Not 1957 but 1958 which is close enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....
It was in production in 57 with a live test shot in 1957.

They do but then they take a big expensive ship find the cable and bring it to the surface to fix it.
The real issue is not if it is possible because it is possible. The big question is if it is worth it?
Removing all the 02 mean no fires and reduced corrosion.
It also means more cost for fixing thing that go wrong.
The simplest way to do this would be to flood the bunker with Argon since it heavier than O2 and N2 it should displace the O2 but again the question would be why?

Or how about having the array swap in spares.
Every few weeks or so one of the spares could start to act as a mirror of an active drive and once that drive is mirrored you swap the active drive to the spare and the spare to the active?

The phased array will have to be even larger than the dish to get the same beam size.

Its about the same here - the technique they are talking about here is for the (typically) bank owned ATMs which are fixed in place, in a wall.

The technique for the independent cash machines is simply to break into the store, tie a chain around them, attach the chain to a 4x4 and drive off - it yanks the cash machine off the fixture and usually breaks it open as well.

I output Toast.