As part of Dennis E. Powell’s twentieth anniversary remembrance of the second shuttle disaster, we are republishing this crucial investigation into NASA’s space shuttle safety practices that he wrote for TROPIC, the magazine of The Miami Herald, on April 9, 1989.
As part of Dennis E. Powell’s twentieth anniversary remembrance of the second shuttle disaster, we are republishing his groundbreaking piece on the earlier Challenger disaster that was the cover story for TROPIC, the magazine of The Miami Herald, on November 13, 1988.
I’ve never lost the excitement of snow days. Remember anxiously anticipating the moment when school was called off thanks to that wonderful, fluffy white ice of freedom? Though “inclement weather” may do little to change my obligations now that class schedules are a distant memory, there’s still nothing like the feeling of being snowed in.
The Linux operating system for Intel-architecture personal computers wasn’t exactly new when I switched to it. There were already a number of publishers — I choose the word carefully; you’ll see why — who were offering their own versions, which were similar in some ways yet mostly incompatible with each other.
The Boys are back and ready to discuss New Year’s resolutions; the growing crisis around the last two presidents and confidential papers; the death of Pope Benedict and some insights from the Minor Prophets.
There used to be a joke — well, we said it was a joke — among photographers: when shooting family groups and weddings, put the inlaws at the ends of the line of people. It would then be easier to crop them from the picture if things didn’t work out.
The AI revolution is a threat for artist and information gatherer alike. Like a speeding train, machine learning threatens to disrupt the work of a huge number of workers, and thus the “R” word has started to appear with increasing frequency: regulation. Such does not bode well for the futures of any of us.
Once per generation, it seems, those who have any money at all go berserk and, soon thereafter, bankrupt. It happened in 2000, plus or minus about three years, and it’s happening again now.
My good friend and fellow OFB writer Dennis E. Powell and I met years ago on a group that championed Free/Open Source software, much for the same sorts of reasons he advocates for his new phone configuration over Apple’s offerings. OFB itself was founded, in fact, to promote such open software, especially Linux, so why would I defend locked down systems from Apple? That’s a story that started 19 years ago, before the iPhone even existed.
The IOS update that killed my original iPhone SE was the last straw. I was done with Apple. They’d already skated far out onto the thin ice when they killed the excellent Dark Sky weather application and replaced it with their more-is-less Weather application, which took what was once quick, convenient, easy, and comprehensive — Dark Sky — and replaced it with a jumble of information, often not the information being sought, on a too-busy screen. It would have been forgivable if they had provided a setting that restored the look, feel, and functionality of Dark Sky. They didn’t. They never do. Apple knows best.