Posts by doug_bostrom 96 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jan 2017
Turbo Pascal war story: A project to retrofit Bear automotive pollution inspection stations with anti-fraud measures.
Situation was that mechanics in Pennsylvania were swapping in clean cars for tailpipe readings. For a small gratuity, repairs thereby could be avoided by customers.
So, "just" randomly capture an image of the vehicle with license plate and probe in view, store these and sometimes upload them to state regulator. And let mechanics know about it, and that image uploads without a clear shot would generate a phone call.
This was ca. 1992 or thereabouts so this involved sourcing an affordable digital camera suitable for the job, reasonably robust. As it shook out, this turned out to be the Connectix QuickCam. The Bear machine was centered on an embedded PC so a parallel port was available for connection. After quite a bit of correspondence we negotiated an NDA with Connectix and obtained complete documentation for talking to the camera (and they sent us a handful of free cameras for development!).
In order for the image capture to function with adequate speed, we needed to use assembly language. Turbo Pascal's inline assembly option made this a snap, was a huge timesaver. As well, this add-on was super simple for Bear to integrate as it was a standalone chunk that the machine's main software could call. Almost no effort on Bear's part, and no administrative hassles as the capture/upload process was entirely independent from their process.
Skills in practice: "what about."
In this case, "what about" is a 56 year old booster launched before Kessler did his calculations, before we had a clue about space debris, before there was an ISS to intentionally involve in a orbital path of debris purposely created and long after we knew better.
Falcon upper stages left behind now mostly in service of the orbital kitty video delivery system? That's a legitimate problem, but not one the authors of "what about" worry over, based on their own seemingly pointless action. It's worth noting also that upper stages made by SpaceX passivate as part of their normal procedure, won't fragment unless struck. Unlike the Fregat still used by the "what about" authors which routinely fragments after use, and the continuing problem of SOZ ullage motors which continue to be deployed and continue to routinely fragment due to "we don't care."
Indeed, the puzzle answer for _why_ the Russians did this might lie in work also done decades ago, the exploration of geopolitical posturing with nuclear weapons by Herman Kahn and others. Sending a message to the effect of "we're crazy" can have a strategic purpose.
But the "what about" authors can depend on the reliability of ignorance. That fog can be penetrated in this case by visiting ARES' https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/
[I think I've got my spacecraft mixed up here; the Pegasus stage in question is probably the later Northrop-Grumann variety. But: passivates, isn't intentionally fragrmented in a dangerous manner.]
It's true that he's flirting with disaster. Should the company falter in the shares market, discrepancies like this could really cost.
Grow the tree of talk, no way to climb down because unreasonable expectations have been set for customers of both the shares and the product, so "grow more tree" becomes inexorable.
Heh. I worked for the well (oily type) logging outfit "Welex" in the same era. Our instrument/winch trucks were equipped with the same gear and I wonder if this story has its roots there. Ours sported dual compact tape drives with the classic whir-stop-reverse behavior and extremely nice for the time Tektronix graphics terminals. With those and the mixture of analog and digital displays, indicator lamps etc. it was an impressive concentration of gizmos in a very small space, perfect for making drillers feel they were getting their just desserts for our astronomical fees.
Aside from missing chips (never ran into that), the Versatec plotters were distinguished by their "electrographic" technology for laying output on paper. This process produced toxic gas (ammonia) which needed to be exhausted from the operations compartment of the truck. If the exhaust blower failed during plotter operation, the compartment would become a hostile environment within a couple of minutes.
I can't remember any of these blowers failing, and can't remember if there was an interlock to prevent them running with a failed blower. At the time of my employment Welex was enjoying the benefit of legions of cast-off NASA engineers in their design and production area (Houston headquarters). I have to say that attention to detail and reliability was good, maybe as a result of that crew.
"It’s part of the ThinkPad brand, certainly, but it’s not something you instinctively want to use. Especially considering the T14s AMD comes with a generously sized and responsive trackpad"
Trackpad aka "scrabble pad."
Disable the trackpad if you need to use a laptop while configuring hardware that is over 1,000 miles away and up a tower, in the jungle.
We _told_ our tech to disable his trackpad. He didn't. Dispatch, get flown, hack through jungle, climb tower, plug in, reconfigure. Thanks, Mr. Tech and your stupid scrabble pad.
Trackpads are a cost-containment method similar to the single touchscreen in a Tesla M3, sold to consumers as a feature when in reality they're a human factors disaster.
Shortly we'll come to understand that we never fully realized the real meaning of "lock-in."
This move is essentially irreversible.
At some point Amazon will need to be acknowledged as an embedded part of government. Will it be amenable to being subordinate to government interests, as a traditional IT department?
The "hostile environment," pinch-purse beat-ups on disabled people, library closures, sackings of legions of police and other civil servants along with this particular degenerative event all seem to indicate a general loss of pride in the UK. Pretty much along the lines of not mowing the lawn at home, letting the paint on the walls of a home flake off, etc.
These days, political leadership is an exercise in humiliation of constituents. Let no opportunity for embarrassment go untapped.
This isn't complicated.
Private enterprise exists to make money, not provide goods or services. The whole point of private enterprise is to divert money from customer intentions. Provision of goods and services are secondary considerations to making money. Optimal operation keeps the customer just barely satisfied (or alive) sufficient to pay bills-- anything more is excessive and excessively harmful to profit. The system will always converge on this outcome.
Capita has zero fundamental interest in doing whatever it is we want them to do and which they claim to earnestly support -- they didn't volunteer to do our work as a magnanimous gesture. Duh.
From time to time we have to relearn this, obvious though it is.
"Sir William Cash piled in, suggesting that the UK could simply knock the Galileo £1bn off the eventual divorce bill."
Yes, and next time we change our minds in the middle of remodeling our home and want the old look back, we'll complain bitterly when it turns out we're still on the hook for commitments made to contractors, and them even spitefully refusing to put it all back together for free.
Complete end-end testing of software necessary to land on the moon was not completed until a few seconds after the descent engine of the first LEM to land on the moon shut down. It was deemed acceptable to allow two volunteers to participate in this activity, and they were nothing if not fully informed.
I don't recall "do you want to travel to the moon as a passenger on a freshly designed spacecraft" being the referendum question.
Short of pretending that human nature is inherently good, so-called "libertarians" such as Pai could simply mandate that carriers publish their applied network management policies.
After all, the "free market" ideal assumes perfect information on the part of consumers. Here we're not dealing with a force of nature that really needs scientists to tease it out, just the ripples emanating from boards of directors.
But Pai won't do that, because he's actually still a lobbyist.
Wasting user time in getting familiarized to the latest "design language" is the principal stock in trade of too many software firms.
Although a pencil shaped like a pretzel is a novel "experience," so is chewing-gum in the hair. There's no good reason for either.
All tools reach an optimum utility level and then offer distinction only by dithering around optimum efficiency. See ratchet wrenches.
"I am now contributing to saving the planet by owning a dozen solid plastic reusable cups that will probably outlast all life on it. "
Look on the bright side. Every molecule of HC drilled, pumped, massaged, excreted temporarily into your hand and then put safely back underground in a landfill is a fraction of a millimeter less sea level rise. In other words, a forever plastic cup is better than an ephemeral flame.
The whole plastics recycling thing is crazy. Bury it back underground, as fast as possible before the HC gets burnt or the plastic ends up floating in the ocean.
The promise of cloud is lower cost but with a heavy seasoning of better reliability. Presumably customers are doing the math on this finding the promise to be true?
Trading random, asynchronous private data center outages of the old days for the modern, synchronized 100 megaton variety at least offers a ray of hope: everybody can take the day off, secure in the knowledge that everybody is stuffed. But that presumes they can still communicate.
Perhaps "outage as a service" could be a thing? There must be a way to charge for this.
We can expect plain sailing with MaxFac. History tells us we should be confident. Of course history also tells us that such a project will conclude only after a couple of decades, two or three prime contractors, several low-level ministerial ritual executions, money multiplication factor of 5-10X. But we may be sure that it might succeed in the end.
Considering that inattention is the autonomous driving product, it seems more interesting to wonder why Uber's vehicle was traveling at 44mph in a 35mph zone while overtaking another car in the wrong lane in the middle of an intersection.
The promise was to remove the human factor from driving, but the car was behaving like a human.
Where private sector provisioning of public services begins: unaligned objectives. The whole point of the private sector is to divert money from fulfilling the needs of consumers, what we call "profit."
Capita's intended purpose is to make money first, provide services as an unfortunate side-effect of making money.
So we're not really surprised by this, are we?
Oh, yeah, hydrogen cars.
See the kit involved in transporting slightly more than 200kg of transport fuel hydrogen to a refueling station, and the mayhem resulting when ineradicable human nature encounters a fuel that is even trickier and less forgiving than gasoline:
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HMD18FR001-preliminary.aspx
"...how effective Facebook really is at political profiling and mass manipulation is difficult to measure and an important question to consider."
And CO2 is only a trace gas and how can we tell it's affecting anything, anyway? Answering these questions with absolute certainty comes too late. Precautionary principle applies.
At a certain point we stopped being excited with pencils.
Once we'd seen round vs. octagonal, mechanical vs. traditional, a range of softness and the all-important addition of a built-in eraser there wasn't much left to maintain enthusiasm over what is of course only a tool to make life a bit easier.
But in the "high tech" world it seems we must never be allowed to settle into comfortable coexistence with what are really only prosaic tools. Hence we are challenged with often lunatic "innovations" that are imposed on us, to the detriment of productivity. The ribbon in Office comes to mind.
Phones can indeed benefit from refinements, along the lines of the titanium hammer replacing steel in professional kits. But changing the entire shape and function of a hammer isn't really possible.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
