Posts by bombastic bob 10802 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
If Boeing were to adopt the "move fast and break things" approach, rather than the "drag things out and get that 'cost overrun' revenue" approach, they might be flying astronauts on a regular basis.
I suspect Boing, being a large and old company, has the typical problems + attitudes of a large + old company.
SpaceX is STILL a YOUNG company, with fresh ideas and no need for bureaucracy, internal OR external.
Something to think about...
Luckily some European countries didn't go full Biden and slaughter flocks at the first sign of a false positive from a dubious PCR test.
AND somewhat generously compensate the ranchers financially for ALLOWING the USDA (etc.) to slaughter said chickens!
(well over 100 MILLION of them!)
more generous compensation under Bidas than any recent administration...
Since resuming office, Trump has fired regulators at the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
AND hired Leo Terell aka "Leo 2.0" as the head of the DOJ's CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION!
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
NO! MORE! DEI!
the Federal Election Commission
because of BLATANT tolerance of OBVIOUS voter fraud
National Labor Relations Board.
Again, NO MORE DEI!!!
Ya got to look at the GOAL here. Besides DOWNSIZING, the "Permanent bureaucracy" i.e. leftist-DEI-activism CLOWN PARADE, has GOT to GO!!!
This is "Step 1".
Then a federal judge
read: leftist activist hack in a black robe
ordered the reinstatement of axed probationary US government workers by March 17
who are PROBATIONARY, meaning they can be fired for ANY reason, particularly "downsizing"
after determining that their terminations by DOGE was unlawful
DOGE is only advisory; ONLY the President (and the various department heads by delegation) can fire or hire bureaucrats, etc. ACCORDING TO THE U.S .CONSTITUTION, ONLY the President has the power to run the Executive branch (not some isolated federal "judge" from a local jurisdiction). There are a SEPARATION of POWERS for GOOD REASON.
This along with a few hundred OTHER federal "judges" DELIBERATELY standing in the way of FREEDOM and BALANCED BUDGETS.
Giving them "a room with a view" is a nice touch, though...
we're on daylight time which puts the west coast (PDT) at GMT-7 and the east coast (EDT) at GMT-4
standard time subtracts an additional hour. Hopefully we won't switch back to it.
By the way I watched the launch happen live on X at 4:03 PM PDT (GMT-7) and it went flawlessly. Weather was clear enough to get REALLY good shots of falcon 9 "turning the rocket around and going home" complete with a landing on terra firma close to the launch pad. and no explosions.
Astronauts are scheduled to arrive at the expected time as they chase the ISS and gain altitude.
Why can't people JUST ADMIT that the entire CO2-based climate change concept is JUST a HOAX aimed at advancing "the solution" which is YOU losing MORE of YOUR EARNINGS and FREEDOM to an ever-BLOATING world-wide SOCIALIST "elite-ocracy" where a handful of ELITISTS get to fly, own nice things, and live in nice houses, while the REST of us "peasants" must "decline"...???
SCREW "renewables" and those CCP-CHINA-ENRICHING solar panels and wind turbines!!! Build OIL, COAL, GAS, and NUCLEAR plants that STILL WORK on cloudy and windless days, and AT NIGHT!!!
"How the fuck did Americans ever get to the moon ?"
People had a better attitude and work ethic back in the 60's. ZERO DEI, LOTS of competent engineers who TOOK PRIDE in being "rocket men".
Elon seems to have re-captured this with SpaceX. [catching frickin' rockets with giant frickin' chopsticks!!!]
It also helps to LIKE what you do and be willing to sleep in the office occasionally... and NOT listen to all of those NINNY NANNY BOZOS and their "work/life balance" ANTI-SUCCESS PSYCHO-BABBLE B.S.!!! It is better to go home once in a while PROUD of that great thing you accomplished, and have family members EQUALLY PROUD that you DID IT!!!
Kiosk mode for embedded Linux stuff running local web pages served up by apache - works well. PHP can run utilities, command things, and so on for the back end. One time I even wrote a simple web server in C that controlled devices and served up content directly (including 15fps video of a patient's eyeball while tracking the pupil's position - never made it into production, though).
"web apps" [if that term means what I think it means] MIGHT work well for a lot more purposes if some kind of browser could host them without being a monolithic kludge (like chromium).
On Android you can implement them easily enough [indirectly through chrome] which makes them useful for "silly little apps".
The other REAL use seems to be "kiosk mode" for embedded devices (like an RPi-driven thingy) with a touch screen. I actually have my name on a patent for a system that uses exactly that, developed a few years ago.
For a REAL UI I have a preference for wxWidgets, and for Windows-only, good ol' MFC. Turning MFC into wxWidgets is possible and maybe some day I'll write a tool to do it. I stuck a sample application online that started as an MFC application, that I hand-converted to wxWidgets.
But I have ALWAYS DESPISED .NET (aka dot NOT). It's fundamental design is backwards, FAR worse than the overall object design for HTML in Javascript. Still, people use it, so the best use case *I* can see is more compatibility for Windows applications running on Linux. I really do NOT want MONO **POLLUTING** my non-Wine Linux and BSD systems.
["Tomboy" *SERIOUSLY* *PISSED* *ME* *OFF* back in the day, when that ONE Debian gnome 2 release hauled in Mono *JUST* *FOR* *THAT* !!!]
I thought of a commercial for children's toys that stand back up when they fall down. Also a practice dummy for martial arts training.- they have heavy rounded bottoms. Something to consider, keep weight as low as possible, and inherently stable. Landing legs that stick out at 60 degree angles might do it.
some time ago I solved a problem with passive coin sorting to exclude 50 cent coins with a cheap plastic cover over a coin counter. Part of the design made sure (as much as possible) that correctly sized coins were too unstable to lay flat and would naturally fall through the holes. It works pretty well [very few coins don't "just fall through"] but some of the 'not fall through' coins of correct size do so because of the limits of manufacturing with plastic film, so the peaks that make coins fall had necessarily rounded tops instead of pointy.
various proposals to bolt memory safety on to C/C++
basically something to wrap around 'malloc' 'realloc' and 'free'. THIS is probably a better solution in the long run. I'd suggest start with a simple sub-allocator and go from there. I actuially started on one and stubbed it out with malloc/realloc/free but there's a framework for it at least. It would employ ref counts and report possible memory leaks and have some kind of optional pointer testing for debug code... 'ASSERT_POINTER_VALID' macro maybe, and calling 'free' equivalent would (in debug code) assign the pointer var to NULL to prevent use-after-free issues. Then when debugged you compile for release! also code coverage analysis with the compiler might be helpful, like 'unit test auto-generate' to be in a test build.
kernels often use linked lists of pre-allocated memory. The network stack is FULL of this kind of thing, with zero-copy buffers to speed things up. I do not know how "interoperable" Rust would be with THAT, but as networks get above 10Gbit you can NOT let the stack slow things down... just because, "Rust".
lots of things are possible WITHOUT "migrating lingos just because a bunch of youngin's are FEELing 'it's OUR turn now, get outa the way, grampa!!!'"
Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority".
re-casting pointers makes certain kinds of structure handling ACTUALLY WORK. When you deal with devices you often have to deal with structures, sometimes variable length structures. Doing "type cast magic" is a simple and elegant way of extracting, let's say, a 4 byte integer from a variable length stream, for a low speed processor (let's say embedded controller running el cheapo arm core CPU at 100Mhz) that has to do a LOT of that kind of thing. A WiFi device or Access Point is a fine example. Done that sorta thing a LOT.
I wonder if it would even be POSSIBLE using Rust to do that...
Oh and those embedded devices often use Linux, so 100% relevant.
Thinking back in time, FORTRAN has something called EQUIVALENCE that can be mangled into something that works like a structure. I wonder how much mangling is done in Rust to make it do things that are BLISTERINGLY FAST and WELL SUITED to being done in C (but ugly and kludgy done in Rust).
I was gonna upvote you for the first line but a half a down 'cause of the rest.
Rust is NOT worth the extra pain (etc.) no matter HOW much foot-put-downing they do
It's like a bolt-on for your car engine that never addresses the REAL problem, like maybe needing a new set of spark plugs.
This argument reminds me a lot of the ravings of Lennart Poettering..
My way, though perhaps too convoluted for your tiny minds, is better by some metric of technical merit, therefore we shall do it my way, no matter how much pain, inconvenience and unintended consequences it causes for developers and users!
snark appreciated!
with modern tech it might be time to send a better probe, flying a LOT faster, out into the Oort cloud to study those outer planetoids as well as the "edge of the solar system" on it's way to the nearest star. Ion thrusters (and maybe solar sail tech) could get it out into deep space, and 50 years from now, who know WHAT we'd be finding...
It's a fair bet it was designed to be tolerant. Speculating [before researching], it possibly uses "rope memory" for ROM, and magnetic cores for RAM (note, see article, "plated wire memory", similar). The logic might be TTL (article confirms), like the older minicomputers. This stuff would be pretty tolerant of voltage spikes caused by EM radiation. Any large scale integration is probably on sapphire substrate. They used to do that for satellites, maybe still do.
I found https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/ which explains things. 2 of the 3 computers are like that.
The article also describes the flight data system as having CMOS RAM, DMA capability, and CMOS logic. I would guess that this is why the (somewhat) recent failure happened, as CMOS would be more susceptible to radiation than TTL.
The 20 people who left were career USDS employees, as I understand it. When it was merged into DOGE several people (40?) WERE laid off, and the additional 20 quit in protest of what DOGE was up to. So in reality it may have opened the door to bring back some of those who were laid off, but would (if employed) embrace the "new mission" of the department.
I'm sure UK could use its OWN version of DOGE, maybe "Ministry Of Reasonable Expectations" (MORE)
I've done this in IT before. Someone from the 'Ivory Tower' comes to YOU and has you do "special analysis" for whatever reason, usually for cost cutting or tax avoidance, and you KNOW that in the wrong light it seems "shady" but it is NOT illegal, immoral, nor even unethical. And you say "how about if I just figure out THIS" and you're told, "NO, no, we can't do THAT" even though it's probably what they're doing... so the 20 DOGE employees who protest-quit need to re-think things, because a FULL AUDIT of EVERYTHING using AI and IT tools is NOT an unreasonable request, even if it means people [mostly those who waste time or don't do their jobs well] get fired or laid off; or, even WORSE, some pet project or funding that YOU happen to like gets AXED [which is happening a LOT, as it SHOULD I.M.B.O.]. It's just something IT departments have to do sometimes. You do the audit, the costs get cut, and the company (or nation) does NOT go titsup in financial meltdown/ruin.
Well, IANAL but I have a pretty good understanding of these things, FWIW and all that...
First, the 9th Circus Court is one of THE most overturned court jurisdictions in the USA (if not THE most). These S.F. based "judges" (read: activists) seem to go with FEELINGS and legislate from the bench instead of applying COMMON SENSE, more often than not.
The Supremes, however, would PROBABLY weigh the case on the merits of the GPL. "Is it reasonable for the GPL to compel those who modify the licensed code to keep it under the same license" AND "Is it reasonable to compel those who distribute it in binary form to make it available in source code form under the SAME license" ???
On the first, the user had to agree to the license to be able to use and modify it. Therefore it should be cut and dry.
On the second, is the user allowed to distribute using a DIFFERENT (or modified) license? This may be gray but if the Supremes keep their heads out of their asses, you can make the case that the person modifying the code AGREED to these terms in the license as well, to re-distribute under GPL and NOT modify the license terms. This would include a provision to allow removal of more restrictive terms under AGPL.
So NOW, as feared, GPL legitimacy MAY be on trial, unless conservative judges continue common sense interpretations and liberal judges do not FEEL instead of THINK. But you never know. On the side of freedom they might decide the GPL to be TOO restrictive, and question ALL software licensing requirements, which is unlikely but possible.
I'd rather just use common sense and stick with the INTENT of the GPL. Stupid L[aw]YERS!
IPCC got their BOGUS data which was "cooked" by NOAA and NASA to APPEAR to be warming out of control.
But NOAA lost ALL CLIMATE SCAM funding. So did NASA. So did IPCC. Without NOAA and NASA and USAID funding, IPCC will STOP EXISTING.
It's a GIANT SCAM and Trump and DOGE and the new EPA and MANY of us are EXPOSING it for what it is.
The USA will produce cheap carbon-based fuels again, in export-level quantities, at affordable prices, AND the WORLD will be BETTER OFF!
I already have done all that, which is why I *KNOW* for a *FACT* that CO2-based man-made climate change is ABSOLUTELY a HOAX designed to separate YOU from your MONEY and FREEDOM, and advance a world-wide socialistic group-think society that is easily controlled and manipulated.
Within a year I'll accept your apology.
* Not Agreeing != Not Reading/studying/analyzing/understanding.
In fact, YOU are in the wrong on AGW; you appear to be mindlessly accepting what you have been told, without question, and I doubt you'd go so far as to at least TRY to understand ALTERNATE explanations of actual observed data, such as the effects of atmospheric pressure on the GH effect, or the IR bandwidth saturation of the extremely narrow band affected by CO2, or increase in CO2 concentration caused by ocean warming and underwater volcanic activity due to gas solubility of CO2 vs temperature [you can easily find that chart]!!! And all CO2 does is slow black body radiation down anyway - it is NOT blocked - as it re-radiates every bit of radiation absorbed that is NOT transferred by convection yo whatever atmosphere ocean, or land it comes in contact with!
Seriously, are people REALLY this ignorant of physics and chemistry, and also THAT willing to believe the DOOMER "scientists"? Obviously CRITICAL thinking was replaced with GROUP THINKING in schools!
I usually just focus on how CO2 is NOT the climate control knob. So NUKING economies and TAXING carbon-based fuels just enriches elitists and removes our freedom.
[example, CO2's effect is saturated beyond 200 ppm, a point at which plants typically DIE from too little CO2, so adding CO2 has NO measurable effect except that plants grow faster AND deplete CO2 faster]
"The Earth is heating up." WRONG. Only according to YOUR charts. Then again we ARE in a recovery from an ice age, near the end of the warming portion.
"That heat is exacerbating extreme weather." WRONG. In fact, extreme weather events (like hurricanes) are on the DECLINE.
"The effects of climate change are no longer a worry for the future" This is true. Earth's climate follows a predictable pattern of ~100,000 year ice age cycles. We're due for another some time in the next few thousand years, BEYOND human control
"the 'climate crisis' is upon us now." FALSE. We're in a downward trend in a ~70 year cycle: 1900 cold, 1935 warm, 1970 cold, 2005 warm, 2040 cold, 2075 warm, etc. [do a DFT on it, you'll see!]
"And its driver, global warming, is growing at an increasing pace." WRONG. We're still in a normal cycle, and in fact, the 1930's were WARMER than the 2000's, if only by a little!
The USA has FREAKING STOPPED *ANY* funding to ANY agency, foreign OR domestic, related to the CLIMATE SCAM! NOAA and NASA and others DROVE the IPCC and its LIES, and there will be NO MORE of THAT!!! [it was all WEF and D-Rat LIES anyway, cooked/fake data provably faked for the past to demonstrate a fake "trend", provable by anyone who had access to data 20 years ago and made copies like Tony Heller did] And, it is ABOUT TIME we put a STOP to that CRAP! We in the USA are going to produce, use, and make as MUCH coal, oil and natural gas as we can, and ship it AROUND THE WORLD as best as we can, at very affordable prices, and you will ALL benefit from it being SO inexpensive!
And that's just gonna happen, and NOTHING will STOP it! And we'll use all of those extra "trons" to FORGE AHEAD with AI like 'Grok'.
Or would you prefer COMMUNIST CHINA (a nation that had NO restrictions on carbon according to Paris Accords) get there *FIRST*... ???
I still have not found a really good replacement for OLD MS 'Excess' (Access), so whatever the latest has morphed into ia stil not really in Libre Office last I checked.
If I had a mind to do so I'd write one.
Still when I do DB stuff it's generally with a command line thing like psql or within a web site's server-side code.
But yeah. Libre Office. Works exactly as I need it to.
Recent history would suggest we'll be JUST fine, and PROBABLY better off, with AI doing the menial "monkey motion" stuff.
After hand-held calculators were invented in the 1970's, people did NOT stop learning how to do basic math. Instead we went past doing hours and hours of arithmetic on paper and using slide rules for the complicated stuff, by using hand-held calculators, and then personal computers.
etc.
Veteran C and C++ programmers, however, are understandably worried their skills could become less relevant.
I get the snark, but SERIOUSLY, who actually THINKS like this...?
MY main concern is "too many compatibility layers" and the impact on **PERFORMANCE**
AND: the NUMBER ONE bad thing: that instead of shoehorning Rust to fit a C language Linux, the C CODE GETS SHOEHORNED TO FIT **RUST** and its GARBAGE COLLECTED BOUNDS CHECKING ANTI-PERFORMANCE BLOAT!!!
If you want blistering speed, you do NOT re-check bounds as you call more functions. The functions MUST assume that ALL parameters are SANE!!! And COMPROMISING EFFICIENCY inside of a kernel is "The Micros~1 way" and HAS been since Windows 3.1 with "Oh let's just assume CPU's will get faster and encourage UPGRADING to fix OUR code issues..."
because of critical mass and geometry, it is physically impossible to use 100% of fissionable material in nuclear fuel. Creative re-processing of waste CAN extract remaining fuel, but apparently is too expensive so we let it decay. U235 does not decay that fast, unlike most fission product isotopes, so really we can store it for a while until only long-lived fission byproducts remain, to make it safer to deal with. But it DOES need to be dealt with.
Even if you put "first generation" spent fuel into he center of a reactor, to squeeze a bit more power out of it, there will STILL be U-235 left over after "2nd time around", just less of it. Back when I was at a prototype reactor they experimented with that idea, decades ago, only PARTIALLY refueling a reactor to see what would happen to the remaining (mostly depleted) fuel assemblies. It was de-rated to "less than 100%" but still worked. Just thought it worth being mentioned.
"What would you suggest as an alternative?"
That's the real point: without understanding how nuclear energy is turned into electricity, he criticizes SMR's because they fundamentally use old style power plant designs. Last I checked there aren't any solar panels or peltier devices capable of converting zoomies (neutrons, gamma) and/or heat into TRONS (electricity) at anything resembling "power plant scale". So, until then, we use STEAM TURBINES, a century-or-so old technology that works well and is "buildable"
I'd also like to add that coal, oil, and natural gas plants are ALSO "buildable" and the USA will (soon enough) be producing inexpensive oil and LNG reliably and in sufficient quantity to meet UK and EU power needs.
/me is aware the first nuke power reactor was built in the 1940's, with breeders built before that, during WW2. The technique of boiling water to make steam and then electricity (or propulsion), particularly with steam turbines, is much older.
Why not build BIG reactors, then? Other than construction time, and needing power NOW, that is...
Smarter still, fire up the decommissioned oil and coal plants, install diesel "peaker plants", and there should be PLENTY of electric power. Man-made climate change based on CO2 is a HOAX, but shifting transportation and heating over to electricity is REAL, and places a GREATER DEMAND on POWER GRIDS! If you don't like "brown outs" and "black outs", you should be building natural gas and OIL burning power too.
Maybe what we really need is a much more rigorous C compiler. Something that takes the lead from the Rust compiler to prohibit, or at least warn, when non-safe operations are being attempted.
clang/llvm is doing pretty well these days. It gives me warnings about things like printf arguments, for example. I like enabling aggressive warnings for release builds for that reason [disabling anything irritating that does not matter to the project].
Maybe a 3rd party tool that looks for edge cases...? And, of course, "code smells". A kind of "Lint" but on steroids.
Things to look for: fixed buffer sizes without buffer checks, use of certain stdio/stdlib/string/memory stuff, variable scoping (use of same name in an inner scope), possible use-after-free, ambiguous formulas (use of | instead of || or not using parentheses), etc.
Linux is the last OS left standing accumulating CVEs related to mistakes with memory usage.
I ran this through Grok. It did not fully understand the statement, but DID find relevant info, such as this:
"a post from @0xTib3rius notes that the Linux Kernel team now issues CVEs for every bugfix, even if not security-related, which inflates the CVE count. This practice makes it appear as though Linux has more vulnerabilities, but not all are exploitable or critical."
- and -
"Linux does accumulate memory-related CVEs, particularly in the kernel, but this is not unique to Linux. Other OSes face similar issues, and Linux's high CVE count is partly due to its transparent and granular reporting practices. Additionally, Linux's open-source nature and widespread use in critical infrastructure make it a frequent target for vulnerability research, increasing reported CVEs."
how about if people just STOP spending all of that wheel-spinning time chasing the mayfly of "Rust" and LEARN 'C' REALLY WELL instead...?
But I bet I know what this is about: The next generation keeps saying "It is OUR turn now!"
Perhaps a quick read of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Superiority' is due?
Younger devs have enthusiasm but little experience. Older devs have experience and a desire for stability. Young-uns need to be "Apprentice" for a while until they have a decent grasp of WHY we just do NOT "do those things", after which they'll have experience AND DISCIPLINE to move forward SENSIBLY!
We could have avoided SO much... systemd, Pulse Audio, Gnome 3/4, Adwaita, 2D FLATASS Windows TIFKAM [and KDE], Wayland, the "Dot Bomb" bubble and ".Net" in general, C-pound, adverts as an OS, infinite list follows...
the disadvantages of a multi-language project are significant and unduly burdensome on developers.
YES!!!
First time I ran into this was a FORTRAN wrapper that someone ELSE wrote (and lost the source for) that called into a COBOL library supplied by a tax service to interpret sales tax from a monthly tape update (subscription) so the correct tax would be charged, etc.. The FORTRAN wrapper uses parameters passed by reference. Predecessor altered them in the wrapper function, leading to wrong values in the calling function. (fix was to make local copies, muck with the copies). Thing is, that was fixed BEFORE in an earlier build BUT it came back because "He who shall not be named" DID NOT PROPERLY SAVE THE FIXED SOURCE.
Anyway, the wrapper should have been simple, but "predecessor" found a way to screw it up...
FreeBSD has dodged SOOoo many bullets, from Poettering and systemd to Gnome 3 to the Wayland cancer. Although there are ports for MOST of that "other stuff", the choice to NOT use/install it has ALWAYS been there. FBSD stabilized Gnome 2 and made it bulletproof for a couple of years while way too many Linux distros fell into the pit of Gnome 3. Eventually Gnome 3 became a port, BUT so did MATE. It was VERY nice timing!
Let's NOT *CORRUPT* the perfectly good and well-tested C language BSD kernel with RUST code. Just DON'T.
Adding Rust would make the LOGO CHANGE fiasco and Dragonfly split-up look like CONSENSUS!
[FBSD has a lot of 'Ents' involved, and contributing code gets MANDATORY high standard compliance and lots of scrutiny. Even "Hungarian notation" will get your submission rejected. And that kind high quality maintainability standard helps make the BSD kernel the rock solid powerhouse it currently is]
The single WORST feature is how "out of the box" systemd attempts to turn even a simple embedded device into a general use laptop computer. You have to SHUT DOWN at least 2 "services" to use a serial port to control a device that is NOT a modem or get random CRAP inserted into your control protocol. You have to JUMP THROUGH HOOPS to make your device configurable as EITHER a wifi client OR an access point, ON THE FLY. You have to SHUT THINGS OFF for systemd, then write scripts of your own to turn stuff on and off without rebooting. It is a PAINFUL WASTE and Raspberry Pi (and similar board makers) made a HUGE MISTAKE in NOT going with DEVUAN as soon as they could!!!
Systend is like an UNNECESSARY WALL that REAL engineers (not just hackers) would rather BLOW HOLES IN than go through its RIDICULOUS BUREAUCRACY!!!
and all I want is a touch screen that makes things turn on and off and displays metrics and stuff... with an OS that supports the latest hardware.
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