Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
The reputation of the FAA is now officially ruined.
Not only did it allow private interests to game the system, but it also ignores possible safety issues without due analysis.
The FAA was once, like so many official bodies, a bastion of integrity and reliability.
As with all the rest these days, that has gone to Hell in a handbasket.
What a shining future we have, protected by all those corporate interests.
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone, while you're still alive . . .
I had a case where a script I had written on client site just refused to work.
I know how to write code. I've been writing code for practically all my working life. This code should have worked. But it didn't.
Try as I might, I banged my head against a brick wall for more than an hour. The I called for help. The project manager (who knew code) came to take a look. He didn't find any fault. That was fine and dandy, but it didn't solve the problem.
He called a colleague. After a full half an hour of code review and discussion, someone (not me, but can't remember who) mentioned : "hey, shouldn't those be points in the mail address ?".
Problem solved, with three sets of eyeballs after an hour of debugging.
Sometimes there are things that you just can't see for yourself.
Yup, happened to me too.
Client was ranting about a script that wasn't doing its job anymore. Instead of asking the coder (who had apparently left), I was the one it fell on to try and find a solution.
Thankfully, my 30 years of coding experience in another language (and ample what-the-frak-is-this experience) allowed me to pinpoint the solution, and leave the client happy.
I have never done coding so by the seat of my pants as that.
Well great.
Here we have this utterly useless tool and now we find that we're just going to have to use it, instead of ignoring it entirely.
Since when has Humanity abandoned the idea that a tool should be efficient and its use justifiable ?
We are all just running downhill without a care in the world for what is waiting at the bottom.
Take a step back, breath, and start thinking about where you're going and what you're doing.
As usual, confusing a right with a commercial platform that has nothing to do with Free Speech.
You have Free Speech. You can go to the street and yell and rant against the President, the Government and whatever other political figure you want, you will not get arrested for it.
Tik Tok (or any other "social media" platform) has nothing to do with your right to Free Speech.
In a just world, that appeal would be trown out on that basis alone.
Well duh, ya think ?
Who wants to write code like
ASR A
BCC ASC
LDA A ACIA+1
AND A #$7F
Not me. I prefer writing
Function getASC(data as String) as Integer
Dim Char as String
Char = left(data,1)
getASC = ASC(Char)
End Function
When I look at Assembly code, I have no effin' clue what it is supposed to be doing, whereas even a non-developer can take a guess at what my preferred code is doing.
There is an astounding amount of adults who just blindly trust anything they see on their smartphones (because that is where the action is now).
Just last week one of my wife's friends complained about her phone having been hacked. Turns out my wife had sent her a URL to a shop store following one of their (lengthy) discussions, and instead of using the link my wife sent her, she went to FaceBook instead, and obviously she clicked on some scammer link and now her phone is in tatters.
She's a retired schoolteacher. You'd think that she'd have enough brains to use the link her friend sent her.
I guess not.
Well, there's a chance that Bezos won't be going cutting off countries at a whim, and Bezos is entirely more mature than Musk, so I'll have to agree with that assessment.
That said, Starlink is operational, even if Musk blows a gasket now and then, so it might have made sense to go there first and negotiate with Kuiper when it actually gets off the ground.
Typical Borkzilla.
Copying a piece of text is a select text-CTRL-C affair. You want to replace that with a bloody "assistant" that is going to take me through three popups and five mouse clicks to end up not getting me where I want to go ?
Fuck off and die.
Interesting link. I learned something, there.
I still don't see how that can apply to tanks, which work best on level terrain.
There will be no regenerative braking to help much, and they're not supposed to take on 65 tons of ore at any point.
But it's nice to know somebody got this working.
I wonder what it will cost to replace the batteries when the time comes . . .
In what world do you live where you think that an Abrams is going to have any battlefield mobility whatsoever with batteries ?
As far as planes are concerned, yes, we have experimental, one-person pseudo-gliders with long wings covered in solar cells, but if you think that will in any way be efficient on the battlefield, you have read too much science-fiction.
I'll believe your words the day I see a Caterpillar 930G survive a day's work on batteries.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I'd love to see that. I'd love to know that we have fusion that works.
But I'm aware that we're not there yet.
I don't want you to follow me.
Stop following me, I said I don't want you to follow me.
I said don't follow me !
Stop following me !
Where's the police when you need them ?
. . .
Okay, fanstasy aside, this DNT "feature" was thought up in the last days of an Internet that was thought to still abide by moral behavior.
Unfortunately, everyone saw the writing on the wall from the start, and here we are now. You cannot ask corporations to behave nicely. You go in with the law as a reason and a vicious cluebat (aka penalties) as "encouragement".
But of course, then you have lobbyists crying that you are stifling "innovation".
And Capitalism rolls on . . .
That's rich, coming from Meta, a company who is constantly trying to find new ways to invade user privacy.
And, given that since Windows 1 0 there is Ctrl-Win-Shift to grab anything on screen, all of this argument is only valid for people who use Facebook on their smartphone.
I've heard that the youngsters have abandoned Facebook, so it's only the older generation that is using it - and they generally don't like smartphones, right ?
My layer of protection is Firefox + NoScript + Ublock Origin. You go ahead and try to beat that, Meta.
Investors ?
I resent that term.
An investor is someone who believes in the company, who sticks with it because he believes that the company has a vision, an idea that is useful and worthy.
Today's "investors" are nothing but but money-grubbing Scrooges who bitch as soon as they don't get the returns they think they deserve.
Investor my ass. Go make your own company and show the world just how incapable you are.
Oh yeah. It was way back when Lotus Notes was Release 4. LotusScript had just appeared and I had been tasked for creating a Content Management System for an international customer.
Now, you need to understand two things : the first is that, in those days, a Notes database was limited to 2GB in size. The second thing is a little quirk in the system when you're cycling through all the documents (or records, for you RDBMS people) in a particular view.
The manual says (still to this day) that using view.getnextdocument(olddocument) will give you the next document in the view, which it pretty much does. What the manual does not say is that the old document is not deleted from memory when you do that.
So, in those days, it wasn't much of an issue because Notes databases did not contain hundreds of thousands of documents.
But then R5 came out, and the 2GB cap was lifted. And oh boy, did those databases start filling up. That is when I learned, the hard way, that cycling through 85K+ documents, with attachments, in a view could crash the script (thankfully, not the server). The bug report came in from the customer, and I spent days trying to understand why because the script never crashed on the same document (thank God computers are supposed to work on zeros and ones - God only knows what would happen if fuzzy logic were to be used).
In any case, after much head-scratching, I finally clicked that the script always failed after more than 80K documents had been processed. It took me another few minutes and then I wrote this :
Set olddoc = doc
Set doc = view.getNextDocument(olddoc)
Delete olddoc
With that, magically the script always completed successfully from then on (Delete removes from RAM, not from database).
That is one lesson I have never forgotten.
No. Management (aka beancounters) conspired. The objection was not "from some quarters", it was from engineers who knew their job and knew the risks.
It's manglement that threw caution to the wind because of some stupid idea that another delay was not acceptable.
I would venture that, in every country that delivers passports, having a second one is against the law.
Of course, in democratic, civilized countries, you most likely don't need one unless you are a foreign agent (aka spy) or a hardened criminal. In Russia, however, I fully understand that perfectly innocent citizens might need one other magic want to ensure the safety that the Kremlin does not.
Now, I'm glad that this guy got out with his wife - very happy for both of them. It's good that he was techno-proficient. The ham-fisted way his phone was compromised speaks volumes about how poor the FSB is in true technical ability. Gosh, I guess Tom Clancy was wrong about a few things.
But saying that you should no longer trust your phone if it has been confiscated by a tyrannical regime is like saying brush your teeth before going to bed.
Duh, man. That thing is burned. Throw that shit away and get another one.
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