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Saturday, September 30, 2006
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 Saturday, September 30, 2006
started 9/30/2006; 7:07:52 PM - last post 10/1/2006; 1:51:17 PM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, September 30, 2006 
9/30/2006; 11:07:52 PM (reads: 3883, responses: 3)
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P3 air tankers vs. DC-10s 
| | While attending an aviation show at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA) today, the kid and I wandered over to the U.S. Forest Service Air Attack Base, where three of the Service's fleet of air tankers were being washed down and prepared for deployment elsewhere. Clearly they were no longer required to fight the Day Fire. |
| | The Forest Service folks didn't mind our showing up, and gladly answered a bunch of questions. |
| | Among our questions was "What was the story on the DC-10?" Which had made a single drop on one ridgeline. |
| | The short answer was "Politics". The longer answer was more technical. The P3 airtankers like the three we visited are part of a fleet that can be deployed continuously like a serie of water buckets, out of bases like the ones in Santa Barbara and Lancaster that were used for the Day Fire — each is about the same distance on either side of the fire. The P3s are also more maneuverable. As smaller prop planes, they can make drops in narrow and curved valleys and canyons, while the DC-10 and 747 airtankers are best at deploying large drops on ridgelines. Also, drops by the bigger planes are far more expensive. |
| | So there ya go. There are at least two sides of the story; and it was helpful to get this one. |
| | By the way, the Forest Service dude explained that the fire retardant was basically fertilizer. It comes in dry form, and is mixed in tanks at the attack base. It's not explosive when still in dry form. And it's harmless to the environment. If anything, it helps plants grow after the fire is over. |
A wide open place to start
| | I, of course, like. A prototype for this is a movie review system where I own and control my data. Today, I rate movies on Netflix and Yahoo, but I can't get them to share the data with each other, so they make recommendations without info the other one has. If I had a place where I kept my movie ratings and gave each of them a pointer to it, they could read it and I would control the data. It would be very easy to set up, the technology is no trick at all. The hard part is getting enough users to do it this way to gain critical mass. This is also the idea behind Edgeio and Marc Canter's People Aggregator. Open systems, users own the data, silos smell of sulfur. |
| | This is great. We need a place to start with VRM. How about here? |
discuss
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Mike O'Dell - Re: Saturday, September 30, 2006
10/1/2006; 12:23:41 AM (reads: 795, responses: 0)
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The latest issue of "Airways" magazine has a big article on the conversion of the 747 and DC-10 into supertankers. there's some discussion about the economics - one 747 drop is the same volume as
at least 10 drops from smaller tankers, but that doesn't
mean they are interchangeable subject to the conversion ratio.
there's been a lot of work getting them certified, too.
interesting reading and amazingly prescient.
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Julian Bond - VMS, VRM
10/1/2006; 1:07:23 PM (reads: 861, responses: 1)
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Haven't we been here before? Last.FM is excellent at aggregating listening habits. But books can't tell a system like that, that they're being read. Whihc makes it damn hard to build a similar system and so systems like Librarything rely on painstaking data entrty by humans.
Then there's Amazon. They try hard to recommend stuff to you. But although they know your buying habits from Aamzon, they know nothing about stuff you buy from other places. And actually I find Amazon's algorithms irritating because they tend to narrow you down into a smaller and smaller niche rather than adding enough serendipitous randomness to widen your views.
So anyway, Video and DVDs played on a PC should be easy to do in a Last.FM style. It's not a significantly different problem from plugins to Winamp and iTunes to track your music habits.
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LouF - Re: VMS, VRM
10/1/2006; 5:51:17 PM (reads: 930, responses: 0)
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To me, any attempt to discern my buying habits seems obnoxious, however inobtrusive the software tries to be. It's just an attempt to limit my choices to a subset of what I'm interested in, namely, everything. It's one of many reasons I clean my computer of cookies after each visit to the internet.
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