Posts by RosslynDad 37 posts • joined 18 Oct 2011
OK, I'll bite. Surely you meant your "sixth decade" ? And after spending several minutes picking the appropriate icon for this essential post I noticed the tooltip on the Sherlock Holmes one and decison made. I remember geting my first poo-in-the-bag invite: it arrived exactly on my birthday - unlike the "humorous" cards from my relatives. And now back to reading about Perseverance - seriously good software!
Make sure you read "Flight" - his autobiography. Huge insight to what happened behind the scenes and Mr Kraft isn't afraid to say things as he thought them, both good and bad. One of the best space books. It must have been inspiring and frightening to have worked with him. The word "Legend" is greatly over-used: but not about him. Wherever he is going you know it will be run a bit better from now on.
"This relies a library of pretty much every known material on Earth, and details on how light scatters when it hits their surfaces."
Clearly the Commentards are interested in the world's most important materials' reflection properties: beer and, the $Deity's personal favo(u)rite: red wine. I'd be happy to validate their models - please send a case of Chateau Lafite 1961.
The sidebar mentions that the software is mostly written in C++. Back in the day we were told that Ada was the language of choice for the military. Could someone who knows what they are talking about please give me an update on where Ada is these days and why C++ is now the language of choice? Thanks.
The waters around Benbecula are not "icy" as the North Atlantic Drift comes here and results in wonderfully warm water with huge palm trees along the coast (according to VisitScotland). For a proper Scottish water temperature scale may I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01KVj8kEjMo
OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine. It also came with a DEC engineer to install it, and after it was setup I was left with 400MB and change. So lesson learned that day: never believe the quoted storage capacity.
Look, the man talked about prodding atoms with pointed sticks: how much more technical do you need? I think it is time to "release the tiger".
Personally, I thought this article hit the mark nicely and, as other commentards have said, should be required reading at the sharp end of school Physics classes.
Total agreement on two counts: Encona is merely ketchup. Dave's Insanity Sauce on the other hand is best described as a munition. In case you haven't done so, have a read of the label - something about being useful for stripping concrete. It's the sort of stuff you see getting transported in ex-Sellafield nuclear waste wagons. A real coder's condiment.
It gets worse. I want this pair wrapped in a transaction so that if/when the flight booking fails I don't want a hire car sitting waiting for me having fun with my credit card. At least with apps I can rollback the lot when one part fails. I managed to take the wind out the sails of a web services evangelist a decade or so ago with this same scenario. Still no solution.
I agree on its use as the spousal-conduit. Indeed I believe my wife is responsible for the outage: she tried to get a full history of our conversation (probably to get proof of my wrongness in some regard) and down it went. As we operate a "you touched it last" policy I think the blame is clear (however, she's got nothing to do with the other services - that must be someone else's missus)
The article says that some parts of the tunnel were a bit grubby. Given the tunnel is under Swiss and French territory is the "grubbiness" restricted to a particular country? Having visited both countries I have to say that "grubby" isn't a word I'd associate with the Swiss (in any of their languages).
There was a great anecdote in the Murray&Cox "Apollo" book about how von Braun settled on five-9 reliability (99.999%) for the Saturn booster. He asked his five German rocket colleagues "Any reason why this won't work?" and the replies: "Nein", Nein", Nein", Nein", Nein". "There you are: five-9s."
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