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."
Mirror of SFGate News (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mirror of SFGate News (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/
Re: Mirror of SFGate News (Score:4, Informative)
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=498
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Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not that it needs saying, but these people all swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles and then ran a marathon (26.2 miles). Also keep in mind there are cutoff times that every competitor must achieve in order to be allowed to continue and everyone who finishes made each cutoff time.
All three parts of the race, on their own, would be beyond the capabilities of most 20-somethings. Most can't even swim 1 mile, let
The plot thickens! (Score:4, Funny)
Isn't reiserfs organized sort of like a database?
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Killer whales ARE dolphins. [wikipedia.org] Quoting Wikipedia:
I know what happened.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I know what happened.... (Score:5, Informative)
An example would be if you have an address book, listing about 50 people you know, with names and addresses (But no phone numbers)
You also have a phone book, with names and phone numbers of everyone in your city. Let's say 1 million people.
Let's say you've got an address ("12 Pear Tree"), and you want a phone number. To find this information you've got to use the address book to locate the name of the person living at that address, then look up that name in the phone book.
In SQL, you'd do that search like this: It's saying "Find every address entry where the address is "12 pear tree", and out of all the possible combinations of address book entry and phone book entry, just give me the ones where the names match."
That'll give you the result you want. However, it's that last bit of SQL that's easy to forget, the "phone_book.name=address_book.name" bit. Without it, you're doing a Cartesian join. The database says "Ahh, they must want every combination of these two tables".
So instead of getting one result, you'll get one million results. The address has to be "12 pear tree", but the database is free to match that up with EVERY entry in the phone book, and it will.
That's what the grandparent post was referring to. SQL just makes that mistake very easy to make, and you'll end up with a GIANT pile of results flying at you if you make it.
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Which is one of (but not the only) reason I explicitly declare my joins. I would have written this query as:
But that's just me..
Aikon-
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That would be more clearly written as:
This way it's crystal clear which is the join clause and which is the search clause.
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Re:I know what happened.... (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, but sometimes you're stuck with the design you're given. :) OP used name fields, so I did, too. But the query could be improved without changing the DDL.
Say, did you hear that Jim Gray is missing? I think the topic is several miles over thataway *gesturing*.
Penguins (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Penguins (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Penguins (Score:5, Interesting)
MySQL [mysql.com]'s mascot is a dolphin.
And it seems like this guy worked on databases.
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The rest of the geek population would consider turning gay in the blink of an eye!
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I know I'd be thinking "Okay, now hum 'the wheels on the bus go round and round'".
But anyway, this made me think of Red Dwarf, as so many things do.
Hm... (Score:5, Funny)
The query returned 0 results.
Re:Hm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hm... (Score:5, Funny)
And I don't like semicolons because one time I accidentally typed "DELETE FROM Table; WHERE
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Why? (Score:2)
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.
Sounds like... (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like Gray's Anatomy is meeting up with Gray's Marine Biology.
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:Was using MS Sailor 2007 XP (Score:4, Funny)
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*Tsunami Premium or Ultimate and supported tidal card required
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And on a related topic:
Lets hope he is found shacked up with something soft and sultry - RAH
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Captains log 8:13am
* Nice weather, perfect day for sailing. Easy trip. Good time to upgrade sailboat using Windows today.
Captains log 8:57am
* Started Vista install on dock but it said "monitor revoked". Must need to upgrade to HD monitor. Cool, this old 20.1" LCD is a relic anyway. Off to Best Buy!
Captains log 10:17am
* Those guys at Best Buy are so helpful! They noticed I didn't have
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While that is generally true, I would point out that the way watches work, unless you have enough people that you can have two people on watch at all times (takes a lot of people), if you go overboard on your watch alone it's functionally the same as if you were alone. While you are drowning, everyone else onboard is snoring away peacefully. I even h
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Cell phone will be useless out there, Marine band VHF will be good for line of sight off the mast (9 to 28 miles, YMMV) and nobody knows if he has a SSB rig on board.
Even with total equipment failure he should be good for at least a week. Pretty obvious that a lot of slash-dot folks don't do offshore sailing. Major concern is if he is solo on the boat, not tethered in, and goes over the side. Then you watch the bo
technologist needs to use technology? (Score:3, Funny)
If he's with Microsoft then has enough $ to buy satellite comms if *really* out of cheap-to-use standard mobile range..
I wish them all the best but if they had his track and time could concentrate in that area straight away instead of 4000 sq km of guessing and save precious time..
Why don't technologists with (or even without!) money USE the readily available technology for such basic primary safety?
Re:technologist needs to use technology? (Score:5, Informative)
These signals are picked up by either the INMARSAT geostationary satellites, or also passing weather satellites. Without a GPS position, the weather satellites can locate the beacon to within about 50 miles. With an integrated GPS receiver, the position will be reported to about 2 miles or so. (The message format doesn't have the space to transmit full resolution).
Re:technologist needs to use technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of these are designed to float out of their holder in case of a sinking and are water activated. The lack of a signal for this size vessel is a good sign it's still afloat. Whether he is alive or onboard is to be seen. He could have had a medical emergency or fallen overboard which would not activate the beacon.
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'This activation code is not recognised. Please contact microsoft on 0800 PIRACY 123'
You don't suppose... (Score:2)
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Uh-oh. (Score:5, Funny)
Negative comments (Score:5, Funny)
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More Info (Score:5, Informative)
Several news stories say that he called his daughter Sunday morning to say he was going out of cellphone range, but he didn't indicate any problems. The weather was clear, so it's puzzling that there were no sightings.
maybe it's true... (Score:2)
Indeed. But the technology to answer those questions has been around for decades, it's just that the database vendors (and academics) were on such a gravy train with relational databases that they simply didn't let anything else in. Gray's own efforts to move in new directions have been far behind the state of the art, but because of his name recognition, he
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)
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It's too bad, it seems like he was (is?) working on some ambitious projects too. Not to mention attaining the Turing award and the first Berkeley CS Ph.D.
I guess nobody deserves respect, not even a distinguished contributor to a field. (That is, if they work for msft.)
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.
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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.
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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 no
Not sickening, only human (Score:5, Interesting)
So what are we to do? Those who have a connection with the man (knew him, worked with him, admire his work, etc.) will have serious and informative comments to make. But for the rest who've never heard of him, there's just nothing to discuss -- the story's not about technology in any way, it's just about a human being who happens to be related to technology. And death is easiest thing in the world to come up with jokes about -- "I bet he died because [a common failure in whatever area of technology he is related to]...ha,ha". Yes, the Microsoft/bluescreen jokes are pretty lame, but the SQL/database ones get a chuckle out of me.
What's the harm?
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Create a btree index over the area where he went missing. It'll be faster to search than doing a sequential scan.
Re:Sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
- George Bernard Shaw
Get of your high horse buddy. (Score:2)
Universal reactions to mortality (Score:2)
This reminds me of the Challenger disaster. At the time, Budweiser ads were running where somebody would get a flaming torch, or a blinding splot-light in their face, etc., and the tagline was, "No, I wanted a Bud Lite". So that got picked up and rolled into one of the most popular "sick jokes" associated with Challenger. The way I see it, this is a common way of coping with death. Morbid humor seems to be particularly popular around puberty, when kids are just becoming aware of their own mortality (and
Pirates! (Score:2, Funny)
Possibly run down by a larger ship (Score:5, Informative)
He went out in a 40-foot C&C 121 yacht [c-cyachts.com]. That's a very nice boat, with a epoxy resin laminate hull, carbon fiber reinforcement and masts, Kevlar sails, and a 38HP engine. There hasn't been any weather lately bad enough to give a boat like that any serious trouble. If it ran aground it would probably survive the experience.
But between San Francisco and the Farralon Islands is a major shipping lane. One with fog. Container ships and oil tankers come through there. Sizable fishing boats have been run down and sunk without anyone on a large ship even noticing. There's a USGS Vessel Traffic Service [uscg.mil] station and established traffic lanes for large ships, but small boats aren't required to check in with traffic control.
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Surely you need more than 38 HP to move a 40ft boat that size in water?
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Surely you need more than 38 HP to move a 40ft boat that size in water?
Displacement hulls are remarkably effecient. A human is roughly 1/8th a hp, maybe 1/2hp in short bursts. You could probably make it move by giving it a good shove from the dock, but I wouldn't expect much in the way of speed. 38 hp will probably move it at close to the hull speed limit. kts = 1.2*sqrt(length) for most displacement hulls.
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Also, geekiness of the owner seldom has any correlation to the level of tech equipment onboard. Most people I know go sailing to get away from their day jobs. I would never take a computer onboard a sailing boat.
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I mean 40 foot private yacht! Damn you Freud.
EPIRB (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
I had the pleasure... (Score:5, Funny)
The rest of you modding and getting modded funny can die in a fire.
Whoa there. (Score:2, Insightful)
Please show some respect! (Score:5, Funny)
Sailing in the SF Bay (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a couple bits of information for those not familiar with sailing in the SF bay. I used to own a small sailboat in the SF bay, a Cal-20. Just about the smallest (and slowest) real keel boat you can find. The SF Bay has some of the finest sailing in the world. Between April and October, the wind at the gate is a nice steady 7 to 10 knots all day long.
Most people think of California and picture the sunny beaches and warm water off LA. This doesn't exist north of Santa Cruz. California north of Santa Cruz has a rocky cliff shore. The water off SF is chilled by a current that comes down from Alaska. This time of year, it's probably 40 deg/F (4.5 deg/C), in the summer, it's not much warmer. The cold water kills people very fast. You fall in this time of year, and you have maybe 15 minutes before you're dead. They've lost experienced sailors to hypothermia inside the bay, where the water is slightly warmer, in the amount of time it takes the crew to pull down the sheets and do a man overboard 180. If he fell overboard without some kind of wetsuit or thermal protection, he's done. A 40 foot boat set up for solo would probably have some kind of steering autopilot, and would sail outside the initial search area on it's own in just a few hours.
The sea will try very hard to kill you. A fellow geek made the good life, and appears to have been settling in to enjoy his golden years. Most of us have similar dreams and aspirations. I don't know him, but I'm going to think good thoughts for him and his family, and hope for the best.
Penguins seen in the area? (Score:2)
It is a long trip from Galapagos Islands (the far-North penguins habitat), but it may be doable for an elite commando unit dedicated to punish Microsoft...
Ubcr, ur vf nyvir naq jryy, bs pbhefr...
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.
Sadly (Score:2)
(Yes, I know they're different people.)
Hidden Dangers for Small Boats (Score:4, Informative)
I have a friend in high places at the Port of Los Angeles, and though the shipping companies do NOT like to talk about it, the ship grounding on the U.K. coast just a week ago illustrated the problem. Some dozens or a hundred containers or so came off the ship when it listed, and then some FLOATED ashore.
The numbers I have heard is about 10,000 containers a year 'go missing' overboard as a result of all sorts of problems in bad weather usually. I don't remember whether that was the Pacific only or worldwide.
Lots of these containers floating right near the water surface with any waves at all, are virtually impossible to see from any distance.
If you hit one in a fiberglass or a thin-skinned metal boat boat, you can take on water and sink in a minute or two if it is bad.
Lots of small boats go missing every year with no explanation.
Maybe he WANTED to go missing?? (Score:2)
I mean, it's possible, just throwin it out there. Doubtful, but possible.
If it's not the case, then I sure hope he turns up OK.
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None of the guests had any idea they were being "Shanghaid". He didn't give them any choice.
See his book titled after his boat's name.
SQL to the Rescue! (Score:3, Funny)
SELECT latitude,longitude FROM t_location WHERE ocean='PACIFIC' AND first_name='JIM' AND last_name='GRAY' AND status='F*CKED'
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Morning news (Score:2, Informative)
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:You don't think (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You don't think (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You don't think (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You don't think (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If he has his cellphone... (Score:4, Insightful)
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troll? (Score:2)
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I seem to recall that the usual carrying method is for the EPIRB to be pressure-released - if the boat sinks, then the beacon is released.
Re:It's OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's OK (Score:5, Funny)
If you come to slashdot for compassion, then I DO feel sorry for you.
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Oh... yeah, I'm full of compassion for a guy who knew what he was getting into.
Meanwhile, I don't care about insane number of children dying every day because of war, hunger, torture, trafficking - and who have no choice in their lives.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Re:It's sad really. (Score:5, Funny)
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Then again, considering the target demographic of slashdot and the ratio of literal wankers thereof, that's even below the expected value. That means, we have a mature day today! Don't fret, however, I'm trying hard to correct that.
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Only a dope would commit suicide knowing that people would risk their lives trying to find him. This guy doesn't sound like a dope.
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Actually I reasd it as "Bill Gates is Missing",, but I think it was just wishful thinking.