Evi Nemeth, retired Boulder computer professor, missing at sea near New Zealand

Yep, cut my teeth on this book. I seriously hope all aboard are OK. I hated that she decided to not contribute to future editions for this trip.

I desperately hope she makes it back, she's kind of an amazing person.

Every edition of that book has been better than the last and it's insanely useful, especially to people who aren't familiar with the way Unix & Linux work at a low level. It's the first book I toss at new sysadmins and devs who need to learn about Unix, even before "Essential System Administration" or "The Practice of System and Network Administration". The latter two are good for why you should do things, but ULSAH tells you what, where, and how and explains the different methods and tradeoffs. I haven't picked it up in a year or two, but I keep it around because when I do get stuck with some random AIX box or creaky old Hockypux system it's essential.

I hope she is OK, I too thought of Jim when I heard she had not checked in as expected. For all of our technology, the ocean can and does pose essentially unbounded risk to mariners to this day.

This is what you are looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System Many of these do not transmit particularly far (especially horizontally). Class B's, like you might expect on a personal ship, only broadcast at two watts.

You have to keep in mind though that for all of our advancements, the ocean is still a fundamentally hostile environment. One rogue wave takes your ship out and by the time that search and rescue people can be in the area any survivors could potentially be hundreds of miles away. They had a satellite phone with them, so I am inclined to think that they also had a AIS transponder, but these sorts of situations are difficult regardless.

While GPS works nearly everywhere, there's no simple affordable system to transmit your location.

Oceans are huge, and even sattelite transmitters don't cover everything. Example:

http://www.gpstrackersandmore.com/spot2-gps-tracker

http://www.findmespot.eu/en/index.php?cid=102

Even if something like that worked perfectly, oceans are extremely dangerous. A huge wave can destroy even a large sailboat in seconds.

It can get quite rough in Summer. The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race frequently claims lives and it's in Summer.

I don't think they were in the Southern Ocean - at least that isn't where they are searching (when they find a non-broken plane to fly). We have had near record breaking bad weather, so so calling it rough out there is a serious understatement. We have a very nice break at the moment, so I hope the search goes A bit better. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=...

We all tried that with Jim Gray (I know I did at the time), and nothing :(

Weirdly enough that article mentions Dyche as the skipper and she's only listed as "a woman named Evi". AFAIK she's the shipowner and has plenty of experience as captain as well as being the most well known person on board(1), but I guess either the reporter didn't do their research or the authorities only mentioned Dyche.

(1) Beyond her general profile in CS and administration a quick google check shows 136,000 hits for her name and 13,000 for "David Dyche", almost all of which appear to be someone else.

She - Evi Nemeth is a woman and one of the most influential on my approach to sysadminning. Even more than the Armadillo book or Limoncelli the handbook she and her collaborators put out was pragmatic, sensible, and incredibly useful. I really hope she makes it back somehow.

You can do the math yourself if you want, though estimating the cohort size may be a bit challenging:

http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2705802-a-morbid-...