BoldUlysses.com

I ventured out to a nearby gas station in the cold this morning before church to buy a Sunday newspaper. Diane wanted to clip coupons in preparation for the upcoming shopping week, and I read the funnies and a few articles here and there. I also picked up the Best Buy flyer from the advertising section and thumbed through it to see what movies were coming out on DVD and what the new music was. I glanced at the computer ads for just long enough to note a couple of things:

1. PCs are really dirt cheap these days, especially desktops. Very respectable machines were selling for around $400, less monitor, and very decent laptops were around $500. It makes me marvel, remembering the top-of-the-line IBM 486DX2 66MHz powerhouse my dad purchased in the mid-’90s for upwards of $1500… And prices were already on the way down by then. Amazing.

2. I didn’t see a single computer advertised with a Linux distribution as an operating system option. This doesn’t really surprise me, but I did note it. It made me think about why people replace computers in the first place. In my family’s history with computers, and in that of most folks I know, they replace computers for two reasons: Either the hardware becomes obsolete and it’s no longer able to handle the more recent software, or the computer gets completely crudded up from disorganization, conflicting files, probably a healthy amount of adware and junkware, among other things. And it’s usually the latter case. People who complain about their computers running slower and slower aren’t usually the types who purchase programs that demand the really high-powered gaming hardware. And to me it really sharpens the appeal of alternative operating systems, whether they be more easy to organize and thus keep clean (Mac OS) or lower profile (Linux) and in both cases harder to hack. When people balk at the price of a new Mac versus a PC they really should think about the fact that they’ll most likely get a lot more mileage out of the Mac. And when you consider that Linux is free… It sounds almost too good to be true.

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I consider myself something of an aircraft aesthetician. I’ve always been interested in aircraft and I’m a vocational designer, and my interest and the skills that allow me gainful employment often converge. As noted in a previous post, a frequent evening activity is to visit airliners.net, the most comprehensive collection of aircraft photography on the internet.

My latest aesthetic focus has been on the size of airplanes’ engines in relation to their visual bulk. In other words, do the airplanes’ engines look like they’re up to the task of powering it? From an engineering standpoint, they obviously are otherwise the plane wouldn’t have been certified or, in many cases, been able to leave the ground in the first place. But do they look the part? I thumb through collections of airplane pictures with that question in mind.

Some planes have engines that look too small: The Boeing 767-400, for one, and the Airbus A330-300 and the Bombardier CRJ1000 are other examples. I’ve always though the Soviet-era Ilyushin Il-86 looked classically underpowered (and it was).

So which planes have engines that look up to the task, or even, in some cases, make their plane look overpowered? The Boeing 777-300, definitely. Just look at those monster GE90s or RR Trents–the power of 100,000+ lbs of thrust each. And the jury had been out on another example until I saw this picture last night and decided: The Airbus A340-500 and -600 series are definitely in. The -200 and -300 series actually look a little underpowered with their 4 CFM56s, but the company decisively rectified things for the larger variants.