Jim Gray Is Missing 283
K-Man writes "Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies, was reported missing at sea after a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. Gray is manager of Microsoft's eScience group. The Coast Guard is searching for his vessel over 4,000 square miles of ocean, and there have been no distress calls or signals of any kind. Gray is 63 and a sailor with 10 years' experience."
Good one Slashserfs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If he has his cellphone... (Score:4, Insightful)
Was using MS Sailor 2007 XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, there's a good chance he's OK. The weather out here has been great today, and he hasn't been gone that long. One of the following probably happened:
Re:It's OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:technologist needs to use technology? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sickening (Score:4, Insightful)
Please have some respect for the man. I can understand joking about Hans Reiser because there is a motive behind what he did.
But this man hasn't done anything (at least to the best of my knowledge) to warrant any sort of morbid humor.
The man has 10 years of sailing experience apparently, so I can only hope for the best for him.
Re:Sickening (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Slashdot, and this is the world (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you show compassion for people you don't know? Or at least heard about? I have a hunch the reaction would be slightly different if, say, Hawking was gone missing or even dead.
People dying is no longer something that bothers us. That's not even a Slashdot phenomenon. We see and hear it all the times, in the news. People die. Deal. That's what we get told, and thus death (as long as it's not someone we care about) has become something to shrug off. When you get told that people dying in a war as innocent bystanders are brushed aside as collateral damage, you tend to get quite cold inside.
So I wouldn't really wonder how that comments come into existance. It's simply the normal flow of operation.
Re:If he has his cellphone... (Score:3, Insightful)
EPIRB (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's the ANSI standard... (Score:4, Insightful)
- It's a lot easier to read.
- It keeps operations that are conceptually seperate (joins and filtering the data set) syntactically seperate.
- A few other advantages, including: full outer joins are possible which had to be fudged with UNIONs before, and cartesian products cannot be created accidentally but have to be explicitly specified.
Whoa there. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
- George Bernard Shaw
Re:EPIRB (Score:3, Insightful)
Its funny how many times you think oh yeah he's dead for sure and they get found in the end. Its worth searching. Tony Bullimore [wikipedia.org] survived.
Re:The plot thickens! (Score:1, Insightful)
--
ReiserFS: It puts the "stab" in fstab
ReiserFS: The Killer Filesystem
ReiserFS: It's to die for
ReiserFS: How do you want to die today?
Re:This is Slashdot, and this is the world (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're desensitized to a stranger's death, fine, most of us are, but let's not pretend that you don't cross the threshold of being an asshole when you begin cracking jokes about it because of a Microsoft affiliation.
Already said, but (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's probably calloused to be talking about the Darwin award, but this is something you simply have to expect when you go on these solo sailing expeditions. Sure, there's the allure of "one man against the sea," but the sea often wins (has a very long history of wins, in fact), and if you don't take the necessary precautions, well... when you want to take your life into your own hands like that, by definition everything that happens to you is your own fault.
Re:This is Slashdot, and this is the world (Score:3, Insightful)
That's one way of dealing with death. It's good practice where I come from to sit around after a funeral, having a feast and telling anectotes about the deceased (and not necessarily in his 'best behaviour', quite the contrary).
But, and here's the catch, he's not dead. At least not officially. I'd at least wait 'til they either find the body or a week passes before claiming that he's really gone. Personally, I'd hate to read my own obituary, and I doubt that he enjoys it when people talk of him in the past, like they already consider him dead. I'd like people to wait 'til I'm really gone before they start to scold others for telling jokes about me.
Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Several bad things that could have happened (Score:3, Insightful)
1) He fell overboard. With or without a PDF (life jacket) he'd be dead. Th water is cold up there, low 50's I think so hypothermia will get him even if he does not drown.
2) A common danger is the boom. If the boat does an unplanned jibe and the sailor forgets to duck he can get hit hard on the head with a fairly massive chunk of aluminum boom. This could knock him out, kill him outright (not likely) or (more likely) knock him overboard. (see #1 above)
3) His boat could have hit something and sunk. Then we are back to #1 above. If he was very lcky he could have goten a life raft out. But them most rafts are equipted with a GPS and a radio.
4) some kind of a medical problem. Then it's not really a boating accident but just not a good place to have such a problem
It's hard to understand how any of this could happen. An experienced sailor would have himself tethered to the boat at all times with a tether short enough that he could not fall into the water. He would know not to let a boom hit him and would maintain a watch for ship traffic.
Re:I know what happened.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT! (Score:2, Insightful)