Posts by eldel 179 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
T'was explained to me many eons ago that the whole 'this page intentionally left blank' was due to government references which specified a page number for the information and they would get huffy if you changed the numbering.
Seems plausible but I have no confirming data.
Of course they are - they just have a more realistic idea of what needs to be done to do that. Boeing (and ULA) are fixed in a mindset of cost plus contracts where finding issues and fixing them was a profit center. Now it's a cost center and the companies are run by MBAs and their magic spreadsheets. SpaceX on the other hand have more skin in the game - a lot of those launches are 'internal' so they have a real interest in them being as reliable as possible.
In the last century I was doing a short notice customer call in Stockholm. In February. Customer had arranged the hotel, I got in at about 9pm. Dining room had closed and I'm not a fan of hotel food anyway so I went out to look for a pizza or something. Clearly I wasn't going to hang around in those temps and once round the block, even having failed to locate any food, was enough.
Next morning I'm on site and some of the locals, who I knew quite well, were asking me if I'd been out the previous evening. When I said yes they were asking me if I'd seen anything interesting and seemed disappointed when I answered in the negative. Apparently I'd walked around the red light district. Either the local "suppliers" aren't venturing out in those conditions or I really really don't pay attention to my surroundings when it's food I'm looking for.
Probably both.
Glad it's compressed air now. Apparently the first underwater launches were started by steam. Let a load of seawater into the bottom of the firing tube, point a small solid fuel rocket engine at said liquid and the resulting vapour is at high enough pressure to eject the missile.
I mean - what could possibly go wrong?
A couple of summers ago I was visiting the museum at Ellsworth AFB. Didn't know it at the time but that's where they do all the flight training for the B1B. The day I was there they were doing scramble practice. When that sucker goes off with full after burners it makes one hell of a noise. The docent I was talking to assured me that it's the loudest plane that's ever been in the USAF inventory. I have no reason to doubt her.
As an aside - if you're ever in South Dakota - they have a trip round an old Titan missile silo as well. That's "different" to say the least.
Yeah. My closest colleague is 1 time zone (albeit 1200 miles) away, the others are all between 3 and 11 time zones away. There's an office only 15 minutes away. The conversation normally goes
Why aren't you working from the office
What for?
To cooperate closely with your colleagues
Sure, which one?
Well, all of them
Great, a round the world trip, there goes your travel budget for the year.
Ah, hmmm, well then, we might make an exception. But you really should be there
Sigh
Which is provably incorrect. The development costs for space-x in total is less than that of the SLS. Systematic simulation is great, as long as it's accurate. How do you get that accuracy with no actual testing.
Sure, you can spend 13 years and huge amounts of money if you are the recipient of the bottomless pork barrel. On the other hand you can test to destruction with lots of instrumentation and know where it went wrong then fix and try again.
The orbital launch totals for space-x this year stands at 62 out of the global total of 144. Pretty damn good for the result of a process that does not work well anywhere.
In my last job we had a director who was an ex naval aviator. Nice guy but with a zero tolerance for bullshit. We were starting up a new project team and all the techie types agreed that the perfect person to be the tech lead was a guy who had left to join a startup the previous year but was now available. HR objected on the grounds of "we don't re-employ people with X months" (I don't remember the actual number). The response from the director was along the lines of "You seem to be under a misapprehension. You work for me not the other way around. Either you send the offer this afternoon or your replacement will do so in the morning".
The guy took the job. Never saw that HR flunky again.
The Theranos case is a learning opportunity for con men (no gender implied). Don't rip off the rich and powerful they will bury you. As long as you stick to denuding the peons of their meagre wealth then you will get the traditional slap on the wrist.
In the States it's even more unbalanced as the supreme court is now shown to be just as corrupt as the rest of the government. Not that anyone should be surprised, after all look who does the selecting.
Yeah, I've been a Hitachi loyalist for HDDs for years and was really smug when the Backblaze stats seemed to validate that bias. Now that they're owned by WD though I expect them to reduce the QC and thus fail more often.
I did the last refresh 2 years ago so I'm hopeful that by the time they are ready for replacement there will be viable SDD options (home NAS).
Which is, just about, justifiable. However ...
How many 'business critical' meetings are just about some asshat middle manager exerting his/her ego or wanting to justify their existence?
Why does that 'business critical' meeting need to be in person anyway? Because you have a luddite who can't deal with simple tech?
The point is that zoom/teams *are* available - at least they are to the vast majority of businesses.
If your management knows what you are doing and are measuring output, not input, location is largely irrelevant for most office workers. Unfortunately most middle managers have no freaking idea and just want to measure input as a function of bums on seats. Upper manglement seem to just think in terms of ego and viewing their empire.
I think it's a volume issue as much as weight. You're still, more or less, restricted to the same volume as an F9. Unless you design a whole new 3rd stage. Which would change all the aerodynamics for a start. So I can see why they only want to use starship.
What worries me is that a whole lot of things appear to be reliant on that working. I'm sure they can make it work, eventually. I respect Ms Shotwell's abilities to get shit done as much as anyone but it's huge step from F9 to where they need to be.
Which is, on the face of it, total bollocks. I have Brave, Firefox and Chromium on this here Mint box and they're all up to date (I just checked to make sure) and it all happens automatically.
I rather think you've not configured the update manager correctly - which, in itself is quite a trick. File | Software sources | Restore default settings.
My preference for laptops is Dell as they seem content to keep drivers available until the heat death of the universe. I have a couple of 2014 M4800s which, probably due to their brick outhouse build quality, are still running beautifully. One on Win10 (needed for Fusion360) and the other on Mint. Bought as refurbs for about the same cost as a chromebook.
I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyone - but that particular reference can get you into some fairly heated (on one side at least) arguments where you have a participant going through incredible mental and conversational contortions trying to avoid the 'b' word but still telling you are are wrong.
As I recall from those dim and distant days the argument was that TR was deterministic, i.e. you "knew" that the data packet would get to its destination whereas ethernet was merely statistically probable. In real life this just meant unnecessary overhead on TR but the banking, legal and health types seemed to think it was the killer argument.
Probably the technical knowledge free screening in HR. In a previous job I was amazed at the applicants that HR was trying to reject once a (very senior) VP decided to bypass them as we weren't seeing anyone vaguely suitable.
What was more interesting was the responses when they were challenged on the matter. It consisted basically of <shrug> and the HR director backed them up.
I resemble that remark.
Signed a boomer who is pig sick of the fuckwits that think screwing up a planet is a virtuous act and are now hell bent on screwing up the political system for their own short sighted advantage. That's without considering the theocrats that are turning the US into a radical christian theocracy - and they have a habit of exporting their crap.
24 I think since they perished. Loved working there. Not unlike the 60s if you remember the parties ( Xmas, launch etc) you weren't there.
When they went into liquidation everyone had to go get their personal stuff from the office and the receivers had a couple of heavies on the door making sure that nothing else was taken out. What they didn't seem to realize was that the 'machine room' was on the ground floor and had opening windows. Apparently by the time anyone twigged to this there wasn't a lot left. It would appear that the windows were large enough to get HP 'N' (?) Class servers out through. Allegedly.
I hadn't realised that we had a cross posting agreement with THE TRUTH. 4 posts in the last month - looks like we got all of it as well.
I do love watching the trumpettes whining about "globalists" when the USA has been exporting its inflation to China for decades to allow it to finance its military empire. Of course when their fuhrer employs dubiously documented peons to work in his money losing ventures that's somehow OK. Or the MAGA hats made in Pakistan. Note to trumpettes - Pakistan is not a town in Pennsylvania. It's an actual country out there in the grey mist called "not the lower 48".
I think the python example is a little disingenuous. Putting proper unicode support into P2 broke so many things that they just said "screw it - let's put all the breaking changes in at the same time". Which made the transition larger than anyone wanted (anyone who's had to port some badly implemented nested dictionaries that 2to3 can't handle can probably appreciate this) but hopefully a one time event.
Yes - this was caused by the poor initial design of P2 - but given where they were it was probably the correct decision.
And if you design and build sensitive enough detectors to actually measure that amount of ionized debris in the atmosphere (not just at the putative point of "impact" with said atmosphere) then I suspect you've got either a Nobel prize or a very lucrative DARPA contract coming your way.
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