Red Dawn Remake

The original Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze, came out in 1984.  Ill omened year that.  It was gripping, and carried a strong message of patriotism and American exceptionalism.  In fact so strong that my lefty Protestant minister preached a sermon against the movie one Sunday in 1984.  I'm assuming everybody saw it back in the '80s, or later on TV.  The actors, unknowns except for Patrick Swaze, did good, camera work and sound was good. 
  So, 20 years later, Hollywood does a remake.  Remakes are easy.  It's easy to get funding, and easy to do the screenplay and do the plot.  And so, just to check up on 'em, I netflixed it last night. 
   Big mistake.  It was a terrible remake.  Camerawork sucked.  Interior shots were so dark you couldn't recognize the characters.  Few of the grand panorama shots of western mountain scenery.  John Ford made his rep with movies set in super scenic Monument Valley.  None of that kind of camerawork in remade Red Dawn.
  Actors mumbled their lines.  At least the sound man didn't let the score override the dialog. The dialog omitted character names, every one wore pretty much the same costumes (urban grunge mixed with combat fatigues)  making it hard to tell one character from the other.  The relationship between brothers Jed and Matt was confused.  In the original, Jed and Matt were quite close, in the last scene we see Jed carrying a wounded Matt in his arms off an urban battlefield, thru a heavy snowstorm, back into the hills.  In the remake, Matt is not much of a team player and Jed does a lot of snarling at Matt about it. In the original the characters make it clear that this guerrilla warfare thing is scary, as well as cold, lonely and hungry.  Very little of that in the remake. 
   Props were disappointing.  The enemy shows up driving Humvees, whereas we expect the enemy to drive enemy manufactured vehicles.  No horses, everyone gets round in cars and pickup trucks.  No sign of the big ivory handled six gun that Jed used to shoot down the nasty enemy colonel in the original.  The Wolverines fight with popgun assault rifles, no 12 gauge pump shotguns, no Model 70 scoped rifles, just full automatic popguns.  No scary enemy helicopters either.    
   Era is sort of blurry.  We see Obama and Hillary Clinton on TV in some of the opening atmospheric shots, that makes it after 2008.  Then we see the Wolverines escaping an enemy ambush in a Detroit station wagon.  I haven't seen a station wagon on the road for 15-20 years.  Every drives SUV's now. 
   The cast all seemed too old to be in high school.  In the original, everyone looked like real high schoolers, in the remake. everyone looked old enough to have graduated college.   
  Anyhow, Hollywood has lost it's touch.  They can't even do a decent remake. 

Would you buy a used jet fighter from this nation?

The Israelis are offering used, but refurbished, Kfir  fighters.  $20 million apiece.  Mach 2+,  Datalink compatible with NATO standards.  Phased array radar, missiles.  Guaranteed for 8000 more flying hours. Air to air refueling.   " The Kfir was designed to be a tough fighter jet. well-built and 'young in spirit'.  The Kfirs we are selecting for refurbishment logged only a few hundred flight hours , their structure is intact, without cracks or fatigue," says Yosef Melamed, general manager of Israeli Aircraft Industry's Lahav division. The aircraft were retired by the Israeli Air Force in the late 90's and stored in the Negev Desert, where it's dry and doesn't rain often.  The Israelis claim the refurbished Kfirs are as good as any other 4th generation fighter. 
   Compared to used F16's at $51 million, or used Tornados for even more, the price is right. 
   Owned by a little old lady and driven only on Sundays.
   Such a deal.

    

USB to solve the energy crisis

Or so thinks The Economist.  I don't think so myself.  Universal Serial Bus was added to computers  not so long ago, claiming to replace the multitude of special connectors (keyboard, mouse, printer port, RS232 serial port, mike and speaker plug) with one size to fit all USB connector.  It's done fairly well on the computer front, all computers have some now.   As a side effect, USB will furnish very modest amounts of low voltage DC power so the low draw things like mice can omit the customary "wall wart" power supply.
   Cell phone makers have started offering USB cables to allow recharging of cell phones off computers.  Which makes a certain amount of sense, computers are everywhere, and with USB you can recharge on the road and only have to carry a cord, rather than a heavy little wall wart. 
   Groovy and all.  The Economist hails this development as a major break thru in energy conservation, claiming that the hi tech power supply of the PC saves juice compared to the "always on" wall wart left plugged in all day.  
  Not really.  At least not in the real world.  We are talking about nit noy amounts of power here.  USB only supplies 10 watts.  Compared to the current draw of air conditioners, stoves, water heaters, clothes driers, oil burners, and TV sets, 10 watts is nothing.  Ten watts left on for an entire month is only 7 kilowatts hours.  My clothes drier uses  that much juice to dry just ONE load of wash.
   Methinks The Economist needs to consult a real electrician.  

Five million lines of code

Fox News just reported that the Obamacare website contains five million lines of code.  Wow.  Old rule of thumb, a programmer can produce 10 lines of code a day.  So, five million lines of code, is 500,000 mandays, or 2000 man years.  ie, one man for 2000 years, 2000 men for one year, or any combination in between.  Wow.  We know they only spent a year or so on the job.  Which means a 1000 man project at least, which is a night mare.  To get any good out of 1000 programmers, you have to divvy up the job into 1000 pieces, and give each man one piece to code.  In order for the 1000 pieces to work together, you have to write a spec for the inputs and outputs of each piece.  That's a 1000 specs.  And then someone (a small army actually) has to make sure that the output specs all match the input specs and vice versa.
  Let's see, a manyear costs at least $100,000 for experienced programmers, so 2000 manyears is only $200 million.  The TV news says Obama spent $632 million on the job.  I wonder where the other $400 and some million went. 
   Incidentally, five million lines of code sounds awfully high.  Like maybe made up by newsies.  Just as an off-the-wall guesstimate, ( my day job used to be estimating this kinda thing ) I would think 100,000 lines of code would be plenty to do health insurance signup.

Europeans can over regulate with the best of 'em

According to The Economist, the EU has regulations limiting/forbidding subsidies to airports from local/national governments.  You have to wonder why.  If  cities/provinces/countries want to spend taxpayer money on airports, why not?  What business is this of the EU? 
   The urge to get an airport is understandable.  No business is going to locate in a place without air service.  You need air service to get your salesman out to customers, your customers in to your plant, your servicemen out to customer sites, and overnight air parcel delivery for crucial spare parts.  Manchester Regional Airport NH is a good example, a vast network of businesses in New Hampshire depend upon flying out of Manchester.  In fact the place had the chutzpah to re name itself Manchester-Boston Regional a little while ago.  I don't know just how much taxpayer money went into that airport, but that new exit for the airport we put on I93 last year wasn't cheap. 
   Anyhow, the urge to get airports is understandable.  And I don't see any reason to regulate it.
   But, read on.  The subsidized airports have lower landing fees, which attracts low cost carriers like RyanAir.  The European legacy carriers mostly fly the big airports, and they see the low cost carriers eating into their business, "stealing passengers" from them. 
   So, the EU regulations are really crony capitalism, the big boys attempting to squash the upstart newcomers. 
   I'm sure the Obama administration is watching this one. 
  

The History Channel and the Crystal Skull

I saw the movie, actually Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.  Fun flick with some good scenes, like Harrison Ford and Shia LeBeouf riding a Harley thru the Yale library reading room.  Later they discover an alien crystal skull which becomes a clue that leads them to lost cities and so on.  Great movie prop.  I had never heard of crystal skulls before and I assumed it was a product of  Spielburg's fertile imagination.
   So the other night I am channel surfing and on The History Channel I find a "serious" documentary on crystal skulls.  Ten of them are known, the show had some pictures, and claimed that one had been scientifically analysed.  Groovy.
   Of course the show didn't say whether these skulls had been discovered before or after the Spielburg movie.  Nor did it say what the "scientific analysis" had discovered.  For openers, what was it made of?  Quartz? Glass? Calcite?  Rock salt?  Lucite?  The History Channel was less convincing than the Spielburg movie.

Airbus wins Japan Airlines Order

Japan Airlines just signed a deal to buy 31 A350 airliners from Airbus.  At $200 million each, this is $12 billon in sales, quite a chunk of change.  The A350 is so new it just made it's first test flight this summer and has a year or two of testing and certification before it can be delivered.  It's carbon fiber (fiberglass) construction, intended to compete with Boeing's 787.   Boeing could have had this sale, if their 787 had not been so late, and if it hadn't had those battery fires.   Up until now, Japanese airlines were all Boeing fleets, Boeing and the Japanese industry had numerous joint ventures and cross sales arrangements.  Now that JAL has bought Airbus, the other Japanese carriers are expected to follow suit.
   Aviation Week credits the Airbus sale to effective work by top Airbus executives, Leahy (no first name given) Head of Sales, and Fabrice Bregier, CEO.  They also mention JAL's new chairman, Kazuo Inamori saying that an airline as big as JAL ought to have more than one supplier.  Which is true.
  Also interesting is the backlog of Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 orders.  Although Boeing has 979 orders for 787's, Airbus is running hard with 725 orders for the A350.  Each backlog represents about $2 trillion dollars worth of business.  Staggering.