The result is that the English still use trains (because their large population requires them) but get to import their trains from France, Italy and Japan.
Quote from OP
"The Italian firm Fiat bought the patents for the APT's tilting technology and used it to help develop its Pendolino trains, now manufactured by the French multinational Alstom."
Export of technological know-how is something of a UK speciality (ARM chips, fluidised bed furnaces for efficient combustion of coal &c).
"A six-car APT, including a driving trailer and buffet carriage, is in place at Crewe Heritage Centre. It's clearly visible to passengers passing by on the adjacent West Coast Main Line where it ran for a few months."
I go through Crew on a regular basis, and the APT is easily seen from the track. Along with the rather impressive dents along the side of the coaches resulting from a failure of the tilting mechanism.
On the other hand I use the descendent of the APT (the Virgin Pendelino) to commute into work and back. The tilting mechanism is really sublime and incredibly comfortable. It was ahead of its time.
Glitches are errors that happen outside of the design parameters of the system. For example, when you touch the antennae on an AM radio and you hear a pop or buzz from your own electrical field in the radio.
Defects are errors that occur within the design parameters. So a train that can't handle some snow on the tracks, or a national health insurance enrollment site that falls over after only a few users show up, those are defects.
Bugs are a type of insect. Using the word "bug" to describe a defect implies that the "bug" showed up, an external factor that got in and gummed up the works or something. But that doesn't happen in software. The defects were always there.
I think it's important to use the terminology correctly and make a habit of using it correctly because I think it puts the emphasis on the fact that we create the defects, and the defects were always there, they didn't just develop, they just had to be found. That's also why I don't like the term "software maintenance". When you have to take a site down for several hours every 3 months for "routine database maintenance", that's a defect in design, not just "changing the oil".
It was our fault. Calling them "bugs" or "glitches" or "maintenance issues" diminishes that.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/September/9/
Convention has stuck which is why we have software debuggers, and the word bug in computer science has come to mean any unintended result, not just the presence of insect wildlife.
(I myself debugged a floppy drive in '87 which had an earwig stuck behind the read head backstop resulting in the read head being misaligned to the sectors)
A problem is the beginning of a curve. If the straight simply becomes an arc of a circle, the lateral centrifugal force (see xkcd) goes instantaneously from 0 to maximum. One might think an Euler spiral, whose rate of turn increases linearly, would fix this; but now, although the lateral force increases linearly, the onset of change in force is instantaneous, and is felt as a jolt by passengers. Apparently it is possible to create turns giving a smooth ride, but requires sophisticated dynamic models that are presently beyond me.
I started making a game with very smoothly transitioning banked turns, but it's a lot more complex than I thought! (Other games use tilting-like mechanisms, such as suspension, and the natural averaging over the four contact points of a car, but that's not applicable to what I want to do). If anyone has some pointers, I'd love to hear them!
P.S. Re trains: Of course, another problem is that banked turns are "static", the same for all trains regardless of velocity; whereas the "dynamic" tilting can adjust to current velocity, on-the-fly (in addition to smoothing out transitions). The rail camber/cant can remain suited to the typical velocity of non-tilting trains using the same track.
An instantaneous change of force (and thus acceleration) create a jolt, I understand that. But taking the derivative again - 'the onset of change in force' - I don't see how that is felt as a jolt.
[BTW: Like a bob-sled track, I did find that cross-sections that were sine waves or quadratic did feel strikingly smooth - those being smooth, with smooth deviratives, smooth derivatives of derivatives, and so on.]
If you imagine an x-y graph of force over time for a track that went like (start in a straight, an Euler curve to begin the turn, some time in an circular arc, and a reverse Euler to straighten it, end in a straight), the graph would be (level, slope up, level, slope down, level):
_
_/ \_
Apparently, humans are sensitive to the change between levels and linear slopes. Lines are uncommon in nature [though gravity is constant acceleration...?]. Perhaps related to inverse kinematics in limb movement? "Jolt" may be the wrong description.When I read stuff like this, I want to kick people.
And also spending £47m for heavy industry technology project is what I would call cheap. And except for the rare exceptions where the engineers nail the design all of these are janky initially. Which of course provides a lot of cud for the naysayers.
Sadly it's replacements focuses on efficient brakes over tilting.
Using the data from http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-... and picking 1975 nominal GPD (28,742 mGBP) vs 2013 nominal GDP (399,834 mGDP), the 47 mGBP in 1975 become 654 mGBP in 2013.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bug&allowed_in_fram...
At the time of Grace Hopper, the term was used in engineering contexts to refer to defects in general, quite unrelated to insects. Per your link, that's why she wrote "first actual case of a bug being found" -- it was amusing and unusual to find a bug (defect) caused by a bug (insect). If this were not the case, there would be no need to use the words "first" or "actual", or even note the event.