Posts by FifeM 24 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2024
I had years of fitting software into tiny embedded systems.
We learned that every piece of software can be reduced in size, given sufficient effort. Also that all software contains at least one bug.
In the limit, all software can be reduced to a single instruction, which will be wrong.
"It will still take years to build and cost loads of money to buy. So what's the point?"
But that is the point. Military procurement is designed to maximise the spend while minimising the benefit. That keeps everyone happy - at least everyone who matters.
Just as long as the equipment isn't actually needed...
A rather strange anti-EU story from the BBC. Even their story eventually admits that names like 'orange marmalade', 'lemon marmalade' etc are permitted. When did anyone buy anything simply labelled 'marmalade' without knowing what was in it? Even the mixed fruit varieties have labels showing what was used.
It's really just allowing for various European languages which have words similar to 'marmalade' covering a range of fruit and sugar products.
As for the 'onion marmalade' offered by some overpriced restaurants .....
But Microsoft thrives on squabbles between competing systems, which come to a sticky end.
We learned that in first year lab at university. We had a very complicated signal generator covered in dials and switches and were unable to configure it to give us the required output. We called the supervisor, who fiddled with the settings without success. He called the lecturer, who also failed. Eventually the lab technician came over, went to the wall switch and went 'click'.
I've remembered that throughout my career, though I've forgotten most of the rest of that course. It's been useful numerous times.
Sun had an IBM system somewhere in the corporate setup (possibly at a third party distribution centre or something similar). We had to design an interface to it. The entire software controlling the production line building Sun workstations ran on Sun workstations. In effect they were self replicating.
The old OS/2 operating system was very effective at catching out of bounds memory issues in C programs. Any process which tried it was immediately halted with a run time error. It took some careful design work if we wanted to deal with a corrupt input message ourselves instead of stopping the application completely.
We experimented to see if we could discover its limits, but were unable to create any plausible code which allowed buffer overruns or faulty pointers to continue.
That was years ago, using standard C.
It used to be part of my job to guide a medical device manufacturer through international standards. One set of EU standards and one set of test results allowed us to sell in every EU country and beyond (Switzerland and Russia, for example). Of course customers expect information in a language they understand, but that's true of any product in any country.
EU standards had a worldwide recognition. Getting Canadian approval was a matter of showing that we had EU approval, plus a small extra test to meet Canadian power supply rules. Even China accepted that an EU pass went a long way towards meeting their own requirements. We were a British company, inspected by a German standards compliance tester, who were themselves checked by the Swiss government.
It was only the USA which wasn't worth the trouble. Their rules were deliberately designed to exclude foreign businesses. Just about every document had to be rewritten in a format incompatible with the rest of the world and every test had to be rerun in a marginally different way. It simply wasn't cost effective when the rest of the world was open to us.
Some years ago the original request for a "Cray online drawing package" was mistyped as "Crayon line drawing package".
I once offered a client a fix for their Y10K problems, complete with money back guarantee. They preferred to take the risk. They also ran a competition for money saving ideas. They weren't too keen on a proposal for saving the company $12 million, by not paying the CEO a $12 million bonus.
There used to be one. The technical standard for cards and readers was called "EMV" where the E stood for Eurocard. Eurocard was taken over by Mastercard although the brand name is still used in some countries.
Most money is digital these days. We move numbers from one bank account to another.
My local branch closed years ago. I might not have used it very often but every time I did there was a queue of customers waiting to be served. That doesn't look like "People not using it". I've moved my account to a different bank. If I have to travel to a branch anyway there's no reason to stick with the old one.
BoS (part of Lloyds) now employs staff to drive customers away from branches. They try to obstruct access to tellers and, if the customer insists, shout their private business across the room. The result of that happening to a friend was the bank's instant loss of two customers.
Lloyds use a black horse as a corporate logo. In the four horsemen of the apocalypse the black horse symbolises economic collapse.
We were producing expert systems over 30 years ago. One of the main uses was interpreting the spew of error signals from large systems. "What's gone wrong with the heating and ventilation system?" "Well, the sequence of events from 200 sensors around the building indicates a fault with ...." . Or "What's that odd vibration from the big machine?" "That'll be wear on bearing number 53. Best replace it before it breaks."
All that knowledge came from real live experts originally. It wasn't just random guesses.
I heard at university that the first generation of German industrialists sent their sons to technical college to learn to become better industrialists. Their British counterparts sent their sons to Eton to learn to become country gentlemen.
We still see the attitude that the best person to put in charge of anything is someone who knows nothing about it. Being "in trade" is seen as inferior, although that can be overlooked if you make lots of money, preferably without actually making anything.
Our magnetic field issues were slightly larger. The equipment was in a steel works which melted steel using electricity measured in kiloamps. That certainly shifted the images on the control room CRTs when it was switched on. I think it was solved by rerouting the power cables.
