Posts by Mike 125 241 posts • joined 1 Jun 2010
>Do YOU decide what is a "jollie", and what is "essential travel"?
No, COVID-19 decides. And CO2 decides.
None of the shouty little kids like their nasty medicine, but sometimes they have to suck it up. Can't be much worse than "protein chunks in spiced slurry".
-Arm Launch Escape System
-Load Propellant
-Scrub Scrub Scrub
-Offload Propellant
-Disarm Launch Escape System
That's a good sequence. I like that sequence.
It was oddly gripping, partly because it's been a while, and partly because it's such a relief from the relentless idiocy of politics. At last: real people, doing a proper job, and doing it well. (You too NHS)
Roll on Saturday.
>New versions need to be tested properly before roll out.
Ermmm... BORK?? You had me, up to that point. I think you'll find testing any new version or patch is generally... a good idea.
"but "we're about to upgrade all of our production machines to a custom Linux build to improve their stability and generally operate with more efficiency." "
Excellent!
'Micropoly'
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities," Gates wrote in a memo to Microsoft in 1998.
And nothing's changed.
>but was offered page after page of cheap nasty PPE medical visors. Totally useless,
Yea, the irony being that your 'table saw, big angle-grinder or chainsawing down trees' really matters.
On the other hand, who gives a toss what useless crap doctors, nurses, paramedics, cleaners etc. are forced to use. Lucky their crap is really cheap, since they're having to pay for it themselves. Even stranger times.
And back towards topic: Amazon search has always been useless. It's impossible to search out the 'slightly better quality' from the dross.
>I turn off alignment with #pragma pack. The resultant code generated by the compiler to access this structure is obviously more complicated,
You're forcing the compiler to use a non-native data representation. That is nearly always a bad idea.
The resultant source code is subtly non-portable and dangerous, giving rise to one of the worst categories of bug: it can come and go depending on something as obscure as the exact alignment of the binary in memory. Even on the local machine, its runtime can vary according to alignment, causing further strange behaviour.
Saving memory by sensible ordering of C structures, is a well explored and explained issue.
>you cannot be sure 100% that it will be stopped they claimed that you can be sure 100% that it wouldn't work.
110%, surely???
It's only politicians and nutjobs who talk about 100% certainty in any of this. It's the red flag. Medicine is science and science is hard, and some people can't handle that.
A vaccine will be the real exit. (Corexit? Covidexit??? Here we go again.)
>Failure to comply with using the software is quite simple: Everyone gets to take the piss out of you for causing someone else pain. (Yes, I've been on the receiving end) No management intervention required as peer-pressure is a far more effective stick in this situation.
This is also a tried and tested method for compliance with source code version control rules. Not that I'd know, obviously. A friend told me...
"Currently, it is not possible to enable E2E encryption for Zoom video meetings...."
It's not just Zoom's lie about E2E encryption. It's the way they encourage 'ease of use'. I am regularly sent this legitimate (numbers changed) invite over open webmail, (by an outfit which believes what Zoom tells them).
>>>
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/123456789?pwd=ZXJRchf9h379493JQWQ4Ufjeiweoifnf
Meeting ID: 123 456 789
Password: 123456
<<<
Zoom are lying f'cking idiots.
>and what sort of experience they have in large scale, multi-team, multi stakeholder software projects.
Absolutely.
TFA:
"but for whatever reason, we have to deploy the entire system together as part of a lockstep release. Often this can occur because we've got our service barriers wrong."
In the old days, we used to scream "Sheeat - who checked in that modified header file without warning anyone?"
Kids today.
>(Many/most jobs that claim to be C++ are actually good ol' C ... ... but that's a rant for another day.)
It's a worthwhile rant. 'C/C++' is usually a bad indicator for an advertised job. The *appropriate* use case for each is (correctly) very different. OTOH, if it's just a C++ compiler constrained (caged!) to C, that's fine.
It's one of the first questions I ask these days. The answer reveals a huge amount about whoever's doing the interviewing/ advertising, although not necessarily much about the actual job!
Spending that sort of cash on a machine tool, (or a warship), I'd need to know it was not controlled by *anything* Microsoft. There are high quality kernels out there designed for that kind of job.
Windows has always been at best a machine for light office data processing. Early versions (pre NTFS) were nowhere near mission-ready, even for that. It was *never* envisaged as a control system.
Somewhere down the line, people got lazy specifying what they thought they knew best, and Windows ended up in a 1000 places it had absolutely no right to be.
That's not really Microsoft's fault. It got rich. That was its sole purpose, and it did it very well. And now, it's doing the same, but in the Cloud. It couldn't care less about the desktop. (American translation: it could care less.)
>Carbon "pollution"
>No. It isn't. The carbon is clearly where it's meant to be (since it's, well, there).
By your logic, pollution which exists, cannot exist! But yea, it's a bit odd to classify elemental carbon as such. It would be rather tragic if we successfully move to carbon-free, only to be fried alive by the unexpected arrival of a giant carbon fart.
>referenced memory is always valid, memory references can only be written to from one place, inter-thread data races are prevented
I'd like to see how that's achieved *efficiently*. And by efficiently, I mean in the 'language appropriate for system code', 'language as fast and compact as assembly and yet still portable' sense.
But I'm a sceptical old dog, so I got my favourite old bones...
Come on you people- this fridge has a 'Digital Inverter Compressor'. I gotta get me some of that. That beats the pants off Dyson's digital motor.
When did 'digital' get cool again? It was boring by the late '80s. Everything sprouted red 7 segments- even stuff which needed to show a trend. Nonsense.
Must be a retro thing...
>I'm old enough to remember the early Google.
Me too. The irony of this is that now, Google as a searcher (I refuse to call it an 'engine') doesn't actually work well. Back then, the results were stunningly accurate- it was a revelation. Indexing cross links is a super effective method to get high quality results... until money corrupts the index. Then it all goes to sh't. I could forgive some of the data issues if the search worked like it used to.
Having said that, it's disturbing that some people on here don't seem to appreciate the superpower which Google's data operations yield.
Enjoy the Matrix visuals- classic.
Then go down and follow 'Meet the Team'
'Page not found'
That'll be 'Team not found'.
>I'm pretty sure that if the CPU halts it will be rebooted pretty sharpish.
CNN says:
'In simulator tests, government pilots discovered that a microprocessor failure could push the nose of the plane toward the ground. It is not known whether the microprocessor played a role in either crash.'
I suspect the 'revised' tests force a processor STOP, just to see what happens. Unfortunately, what happens is an aircraft STOP. Hence multiple redundant systems. I bet no tests like that have been done before on this system.
Watchdogs: I've seen a tickle done from a timer interrupt handler. And for his Full Gold Star, the engineer actually claimed he was being clever.
>When I was working with people writing diesel engine controllers 15 years ago
A lot's changed in 15 years, and none of it good.
>Back then people actually applied things. >Waste of time while...
Part 1: Science => Engineering principles => Application prototypes
Part 2: Demand => Application development => Stuff to buy and/or (make world better and/or worse)
Always was, is now, always will be. So, which part is a "waste of time" ?
Large organisations/ software companies don't want "naturally curious" people - too much disruption and threat to the hierarchy.
So smart engineers must challenge and amuse themselves by developing a POConcept in their heads very quickly, and maybe even writing some private 'test' code.
Then it's the POCrap they submit for review. And of course, at the water cooler it's strictly cars and football.
"Bouman, a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope and an assistant professor in the computing and mathematical sciences department at Caltech, was one of more than 200 scientists who participated in the project..."
This is real science. It's still being done! And that's the best news I've heard since the Referendum.
Beers to ALL involved.
From what I heard on the BBC, the changes made to the 737 MAX count as major modifications- new engines, new position, etc. Boeing have tried to use software intervention to make the plane behave like the original. But they didn't tell anyone. So when something unexpected happens, the pilots are fighting an 'unknown' software adversary.
When my boiler was condemned because corrosion made a tiny hole in the pressure path, I wanted to to weld a plate to cover the hole. The guy said "Yea, that would certainly work. But unfortunately, the gas-safe rules state: 'No Modifications' ". That's a very annoying but simple rule, which everybody understands.
It sounds like definitely the plane (and probably my boiler) qualify as 'new', and should have been certified as such.
The Precautionary Principle isn't popular in our neo-liberal culture. Our overlords tell us we must all have the freedom to consume, pollute and degrade. It's our human right. Actually, our it's our duty, they say.
Meanwhile: Ooooh, glyphosate’s on special offer at B&Q, quick let’s get down there in the Subaru.
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