How to explore land [Archive] - SUBSIM Radio Room Forums

shift-E

06-23-06, 07:20 PM

After getting the "mission cannot be accomplished" message last night after a gruelling 4 hours, I got frustrated and decided to give some of the commercial air traffic a little loving, USS Vincennes-style, when I discovered the following, rather cool bug.

Check it:

1. Lock onto an aircraft above land (or headed toward it) and take it down with a SAM.

2. Select the air track on the map so that it comes up on your 3-d view, and follow it until it hits the ground.

3. At the point that the aircraft hits the ground, it disappears, leaving you free to move around freely in the 3-D view. You can explore the platforms, vegetation, and buildings' exteriors to your hearts content. You can also "walk" right into the sea and explore that above (or below) the waterline.

Kinda fun...

LuftWolf

06-24-06, 05:10 AM

when I discovered the following, rather cool bug

Does anyone actually know the etymology of the word "bug"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bug#Etymology

Usage of the term "bug" to describe inexplicable defects has been a part of engineering jargon for many decades; it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. For instance, Edison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison) wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1878):It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [I]then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bug#_note-0)

Problems with radar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar) electronics during World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) were referred to as bugs (or glitches), and there is additional evidence that the usage dates back much earlier.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/H96566k.jpg/250px-H96566k.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H96566k.jpg) http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H96566k.jpg)
Photo of what is possibly the first actual bug found in a computer.

The invention of the term is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper), who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is given by this quote:In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book September 9th 1945. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's [sic] in a program a bug. [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bug#_note-1)

Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. And the date was September 9 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_9) of 1947 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947), not of 1945 [4] (http://www.ticam.utexas.edu/~organism/bug.html) [5] (http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=30). The operators who did find it were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story. [6] (http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm)
While it is certain that the Mark II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_II) operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term "debug".
[edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software_bug&action=edit&section=2)]