Fogbow

northland10 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 19, 2021 9:29 pm Now that newer cars like Hondas and the GMC Terrain have the, maybe kids will be able to handle the old tech that flustered my grandmother when it was new tech, push-button transmission. Apparently, she had trouble with it.



The kids also probably don't realize how to do donuts in the snow with a front-wheel drive, manual transmission Ford Escort or Plymouth Horizon. Either you have to do it backward, or you accelerate, start turning, and hit the parking brake (which is conveniently a lever to the right, not a pedal). It is not quite a donut but an out-of-control spin, but it was fun back in the day.

I had a friend that had one of those push button transmission jobs. He got it used... it had been a Taxi in a former life ... the Taxi company had disabled the buttons for first and second gears so the drivers wouldn't just leave it in first or second all the time.

northland10 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 19, 2021 9:29 pm

'64 Dodge Custom 880.

My dad had a '64 Dodge 880 wagon when I was a kid, which did not have the chrome-ish skin on the lower part of the dash.

I had a 19 sixty-something corvair with a push button transmission. He was named Old Snort, was a blast to drive, and he Died the true Death on the 55 somewhere between Costa Mesa & Tustin. RIP, Old Snort, you were a good ride.

I’m not sure why I thought of it now, but I remember hearing sonic booms when I was growing up in Wisconsin. We moved from there to Iowa in 1966 and I don’t remember sonic booms in Iowa, but that was probably because of the location.

Anyway, that’s something that younger folks have probably never heard. Do any of you here remember hearing them?

Yes!

MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:04 am I’m not sure why I thought of it now, but I remember hearing sonic booms when I was growing up in Wisconsin. We moved from there to Iowa in 1966 and I don’t remember sonic booms in Iowa, but that was probably because of the location.

Anyway, that’s something that younger folks have probably never heard. Do any of you here remember hearing them?

Probably depends on where you live.

I remember hearing them in Tucson, certainly in the 60s not so much in the 70s. Davis-Monthan Air Base was(is?) a major A10 base and I'm pretty sure U2's were there too. I also heard them sometimes in the late 70s when I lived in San Diego a few miles from NAS Miramar and the beach. The Navy flyboys seemed to get a kick out of waking people up at 2am and making them think that an earthquake had just gone off.

I don't think A10 or U2's were breaking the sound barrier over Tucson (or anywhere else - they ain't that fast), but there were other planes based there and they did do a lot of training for just about any aircraft. There were periodic booms over Tucson when I was there, but in general they don't like to do it over populated areas. Most of the training flights would go out beyond Avra Valley west of the Tucson Mountains and beyond to the Tohono O'odham Nation where there weren't any people that counted and they could do anything they damn well pleased over the reservation lands. Any complaints there could be conveniently ignored.

Sonic booms over cities where white folks live is pretty generally frowned upon these days - too many irritating complaints for the PR people to want to deal with.

MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:04 am I’m not sure why I thought of it now, but I remember hearing sonic booms when I was growing up in Wisconsin. We moved from there to Iowa in 1966 and I don’t remember sonic booms in Iowa, but that was probably because of the location.

Anyway, that’s something that younger folks have probably never heard. Do any of you here remember hearing them?

Until I was 5, we lived on the departure path for flights out of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County. They would go supersonic right after takeoff while heading out to their training areas off the coast. Even though it was only about 5-10 miles from the runway to the coast, they just had to go supersonic immediately, even though it rattled the windows of hundreds of thousands of people.

The house was a typical SoCal tract house, but with large plate-glass windows overlooking the back yard. The boom caused the windows to shake visibly, for each of maybe 10-12 flights a day. The lead pilot would go and then maybe 30 seconds later you'd get another sonic boom from his wingman. One of my most vivid memories of early childhood.

MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:04 am I’m not sure why I thought of it now, but I remember hearing sonic booms when I was growing up in Wisconsin. We moved from there to Iowa in 1966 and I don’t remember sonic booms in Iowa, but that was probably because of the location.

Anyway, that’s something that younger folks have probably never heard. Do any of you here remember hearing them?

I remember a past teacher telling a story of when he would be fishing on Lake Superior and be greeted by sonic booms from fighters out of KI Sawyer in the UP. I imagine Wisconsin could have also had more jets flying over on their way to the military operation area over Lake Michigan. In the older days, you could have had plains from Sawyer, Glenview NAS in Illinois, and whatever ANG and Air Force bases were in Wisconsin and Minnesota. All the base closures and consolidations, along with stricter rules, have likely cut down on the number of military jets breaking the sound barrier over land.

northland10 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 9:52 am All the base closures and consolidations, along with stricter rules, have likely cut down on the number of military jets breaking the sound barrier over land.

Those things are a factor, but there's a lot more going on that means supersonic flight isn't as common as it was before. The ban on supersonic overflight of the US included the military, with only rare exceptions (example: SR-71 training flights, which weren't really all that frequent). They can go supersonic at the vast Nellis range complex in Nevada, but not many other places in the Continental US.

The whole paradigm of "faster is better" in air combat is also less valuable than it once was. In the early 1960s, that was replaced by Col. John Boyd's "energy-maneuverability" theory, which argued (with actual data behind it from early computer simulations) that the ability to turn inside the enemy's turning radius was always the key to victory (and for survival, if someone snuck up behind you). This influenced the design of the F-15 and, more importantly, the F-16, which is rated at over 9 g's in turns. The F-15 is still in production after a 50-year run because it's a very high capacity ground support bomb truck as well as being a capable interceptor and air-to-air combat machine. The F-16 is also still in production, and it's the most popular jet fighter in the world today.

Missile range has improved, along with "fire and forget" capability, where the pilot does not have to keep the missile tracking the target. The intent is to enable pilots to acquire targets and shoot them down from beyond the missile range of the other guy, without having to expose yourself in order to keep the missile on target. In other words, pilots don't have to engage in dogfights where speed is valuable to enable you to bug out of a fight you aren't winning. Now, you never get in a fight in the first place.

This goes to an even higher level with stealth technology. The F-35 has a published top speed of Mach 1.6, far below many other fighters in the air. But its stealth capabilities are intended to allow it to complete the mission before opposing planes or ground-based defenses even know it's there. There's a disincentive in stealth to going too fast, because a hot exhaust trail from an afterburner-fueled dash is easy for missiles to home in on. So when designing a stealth plane, you have to go for the best speed you can get while keeping exhaust temps low enough.

And the final point arguing against more supersonic capability, and thus against more sonic booms, is the need to get as much range as possible out of your combat aircraft. You can blow through your fuel reserves in a couple of minutes at full afterburner, and slice your range to almost nothing. That's a problem when you're trying to execute an attack in heavily defended airspace. Tankers are the opposite of stealth, and they're unarmed, so they have to operate outside contested airspace. If afterburner were required in a mission profile, that would mean that tankers would have to be too close to contested airspace to be safe -- no air force in the world has enough tankers to risk losses of even one tanker aircraft from flying too close to contested airspace to support a fighter with only 50 mile mission range.

We had sonic booms in the 60's in central Arkansas. The Little Rock Air Force Base was 20 miles from our home.

Princess now lives near that base and she sees C130's fly over her house regularly. When the air base had an air show Princess's barn was in the flight pattern. A neighborhood preteen went with me to the barn and got an air show and a horse visit. The pilots flew so low you could almost see their goggles. One of the pilots saw my preteen friend waving and dispersed some red smoke just for her. Excitement!

Estiveo wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 8:26 amYes!

Me too! Lived just a couple of miles south of a naval air station.

What would the kids think this was?

Sex toy?

I went to the old train station in my town with the grandkids. It’s all beautifully restored. One of the exhibits was an old telegraph key. I was explaining how it works to the grandkids, and the old docent came along and codger-splained how I had it all wrong. I explained to him that once upon a time I was a telegraph operator in the military and he shut up.

Maybenaut wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:15 pm I went to the old train station in my town with the grandkids. It’s all beautifully restored. One of the exhibits was an old telegraph key. I was explaining how it works to the grandkids, and the old docent came along and codger-splained how I had it all wrong. I explained to him that once upon a time I was a telegraph operator in the military and he shut up.

northland10 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:04 pmSex toy?

Now we know how your brain works.

Why, Maybenaut, you's just a woman. What would a little lady like you know about mechanical things?

AI to the rescue.

The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore
An alarmingly large portion of the world's business and finance systems run on COBOL, and only a small community of programmers know it. IBM thinks Watson can help, but it's not guaranteed.

Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore.

It's called COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), and despite the fact that most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the top mainframe programming languages used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance. According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT), 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL, which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions.

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody's learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are an increasingly hard to find. Many of these "COBOL cowboys" are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-pla ... ith-watson

Has anyone posted this? I saw a teenager fumbling with a dial phone a few years ago. All the adults were amused.

17 year olds dial a rotary phone

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody's learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are an increasingly hard to find. Many of these "COBOL cowboys" are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

Yahbut . . . While there is a ton of COBOL code in use every day. The amount of new programming done in COBOL is extremely small. What is going on every day is fixes and mods to old (often very old) code. This is a challenge in itself but not as involved as creating new data-division entries. If a major change is required you could Perform a procedure that linked to a piece of code written in you preferred language. We used to do that all the time to incorporate a hunk of assembler into a COBOL program. Who remembers 'Compile-Link and Go'. As far as time to compile goes that can't really be an issue on today's hardware.

I've been out of day to day contact with this stuff for 15 years, but here's my 2 cents worth.

A sh1tton of COBOL coded systems was replaced when business moved to SAP and coded in ABAP. ABAP is to COBOL as BASIC is to FORTRAN (simplified and interpreted). So ABAP programmers CAN be upskilled if need be. But SAP has moved on too, and even when I was involved they were moving into more Java and Javascript. Lord knows where their ERP platform is these days.

Now not everybody is on SAP, and not every system has reasonable replacement in the SAP environment. There are other ERP multimodule systems from other companies of course, but still there are few options for some systems. Backoffice banking systems are probably available as turnkey systems, but Banks tend to be really protective of their inhouse developed systems.

Customers facing systems like ATM's are probably still driven by COBOL systems, I would think - IMS was the number 1 platform for ATM development and that was really COBOL oriented. Has IBM let other languages in? Dunno. CICS platforms (more backoffice oriented) are the same, COBOL and assembler (though back in the day I figured out how to make FORTRAN routines usable in CICS).

Anyway, this COBOL 'problem' has been staring people in the face since 1998 and the Y2K bug days. That's 25 years ago. Computer systems, as a rule, have 20 year lifespans. This stuff should have been cleaned up years ago - and the folks who let it fester should be fired.

I'd volunteer to come back to help if you paid me a fortune, but it would I don't have the 'superprogrammer' skills I used to have. It might take me a couple of weeks to do a 1 day fix these days.

keith wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 10:41 pm Backoffice banking systems are probably available as turnkey systems, but Banks tend to be really protective of their inhouse developed systems.

As you say (with much greater knowledge than I have), banks are very reluctant to change their systems. In Europe we are seeing new bans setting up which aren't encumbered by legacy systems originally designed around batch processing, overnight runs, cards or card images, etc. These banks' sparkly new systems can be designed around a do-it-now transaction processing model with mobile devices to the fore, and flexible hooks provided for further extensions.

But if you are a senior IT person in An Old Bank, are you going to ask for a huge budget and permission to rip out the existing code base and build a modern new one? Where the request you make is "I want X zillions to build something that will look almost exactly like what we have now, will disrupt current operations, but will be better in the future, and I can't guarantee that we won't have major problems in customer-facing operations on the way?"

It seems a thankless job, one with scope for huge amounts of blame and very little praise. Perhaps something for someone nearing retirement?

I suspect change of this sort only happens when forced, for example by one old bank taking over another and they might choose to build a new all-electric system rather than weld together their two old jalopies, one horse-drawn, one steam -powered.

I have experience with one bank taking over another.

First they set up a task force to evaluate both sets of systems and to recommend a "best of breed product set". Then when the target bank's systems turn out to be clearly superior to the senior partner's systems in almost all ways, they switch to "preferred product set".

Thanks keith. That's way outside my field IT-wise, but I have a suspicion that combining parts of two systems is a nightmare anyway, and the best strategy would usually be to choose one system, and where it has deficiencies relative to the other, to extend the first system, using the second system as a reference and possibly a source of useful nuggets of code. But I guess that is situation-dependent.

So much of IT/DP/computing is about shifting data (the French have always referred to computing as l'informatique), very little about actual calculation. Even in engineering and science where the calculations appear complex with large matrix manipulations, integral and differential equations, etc., the bulk of the coding effort is always getting the right data into the right place for the numbers to be crunched.