Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.

Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.

We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.

As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.

Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.

If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody

[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
Once the aircraft was stalled there was a narrow window to recover from it, which obviously did not occur. But the stall was entirely caused by pilot input of full nose up! The procedure for unreliable airspeed (which was in both the QRH and the FCOM) was simply to fly a known safe power / pitch from the tables provided in the QRH.

At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.

Comment · 5 months ago
The behaviour you describe above only occurred after the pilot flying stalled the plane. There was a procedure for unreliable airspeed indication. Had the pilot flying performed it, the situation would have been resolved without incident.

AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.
Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
I can walk down a Bangkok street in my suit and be comfortable. Why? Lightweight Italian wool fabric, silk-lined jacket, cotton shirt. Meanwhile the guy next to me in short sleeve polo and jeans is a puddle of sweat.

Synthetics definitely have their place. Uniqlo's Airism is a game-changer in the tropics and lots of outdoors activities like hiking or skiing are much more comfortable with modern technical fabrics, but natural fibres are far from obsolete.

Comment · 6 months ago
Even a sextant and decent watch should be able to get you to within a nautical mile or two.
Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
> I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently

Probably Singapore, which is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Asia anyway. 10 Gb symmetric fibre is broadly available at around SGD $50/month (about 35 EUR).

Comment · 7 months ago
I had to explain this to some slightly younger colleagues recently. It's hard to believe now, but in ye olde days hardware was not as cheap and abundant as it is now. So you invested heavily in your database servers and to justify the hardware and software cost, ran as many workloads as possible on it to spread the pain.

This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.

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