On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 4:43 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> wrote:

On Tue, May 08, 2018 at 04:14:54PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> For example, there is a NATO-standard "10-line" message

When did they add the 10th line? What is in it? I was trained on the
9-line during my service, and I'd be fascinated to know what extra info
was judged important enough to update the manuals.

Oh man. I had to go look it up and I found a copy on some website at Lejeune and another one at training command. It looks like the NATO standard *9* line request plus a line for patient information (name, initials, last4, etc). Odd considering that if you've got multiple patients you'd need more than one "line". Anyway, there's a copy in this document: http://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/THULS.pdf (search for "CASEVAC").

>
> Yup. Troff. I took it to war.
>

It's been well over a decade, but there were QRF bases in Kabul whose
security manuals and operation maps were generated onsite in TeX on my
ancient Thinkpad. I suspect, however, an academic study of combat-zone
typesetting would be dominated by the inevitability of Powerpoint.

Neat. What branch were you?

I used to get super-annoyed when higher would muck with my manifests which were, of course, Excel documents. "How do you know these total numbers are correct?" "Because that cell is a formula that is the sum of all the other relevant cells and unless you think that Microsoft can't ADD then there's no reason for it to be incorrect. Please tell Lance Corporal Schmuckatelli to stop overwriting my shit because he definitely can't add. Oh, and he should probably get counseled to go take, 'Math for Marines' again; this time without cheating and copying the answers out of the back fo the MCI."

I've often noticed the battlefield is ruled by Windows (e.g. those
pilots were probably poking at Falconview)

Those helo pilots were just sitting on chairs eating potato chips in an otherwise empty shipping container out at MOUTown and making things up as they went along.

while the research side is
extremely tied to unix and its ilk. Obviously BRLCAD and other ARL
involvement here, and just about all of of the DoD HPC program skews
toward unix and linux.

Funny, the BFT in my M-ATV ran Linux. I got the guys down at the maintenance depot to give me login name and password for their account so I could play solitaire when nothing was going on.

- Dan C.