Posts by Chairman of the Bored 957 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2017
After a couple hours of normal interview technique I went into this one-on-one in a quiet room with a guy speaking in a monotone saying adjectives and nouns, and I had to say the very first word that came to mind. I guess they wanted to test my mental health.
Any idea how hard it is to not say "clam" when "bearded" is spoken when you're nervous, irritated, and trying to game an idiotic test?
Any language that allows one to write expressively enough to create poetry, yet arcane enough that optimized code is indistinguishable from line noise rocks.
Obligatory Black Perl reference:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl
Sometimes I look at a Perl script I've written and have to say, "how the ....does this work? It's unreadable! What idiot, er, I did that? Damn.. " Perl really is a write-only language
UUCP. That was a real man's file transfer protocol. Store-and-forward message passing over dialup connections. Plus email and netnews in one go! Try that with this newfangled ftp stuff!
Admittedly most people only experienced the joy of using these tools through uudecoding pictures of, er, kitties they downloaded from Usenet using rn in the late 80's
I'm getting seriously old.
I've been informed that I'm the one guy on the face of the Earth who asked for something like homed. In my defence, I have no recollection of any software discussion that night. I have dim recollections of a great many decent shots of whiskey, some awful fruity crap, something about bras, and some other stuff my barrister says I should not discuss. So when did I talk about systemd-homed? Can't recall, must've been the booze talking.
I wonder why the heck the garage was redlining your vehicle. If your car is new enough for OBD-II fitment I'd expect the emissions check to primarily consist of reading any emissions fault codes from your ECU.
I think there is a MOT test that checks whether your exhaust system is louder than a typical vehicle if the same type. Im not sure how redlining is an appropriate test for that...
El Reg needs a 'screwed' icon
Your garage problem has a solution:
In my town there are two principal garages. I will take the vehicle to one and say, "Please do the state inspection... But remember that Billy Bob down the street will get the repair work. I'm here for inspection only". Swap vendors as needed. Rinse, repeat.
Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule.
Many years ago I took my then 85-year-old grandmom to the doctor for an annual checkup. He gave her the traditional lecture about her crap diet: full of saturated fats, caffeine, sugar... And she asked him, "So, I'm 85 and I've outlived every one of my peers. So what you are saying is that if I eat a crap diet I won't live to old age? Well.....?"
Doc: "umm.... er...."
Grandmom, "With respect, young man, I've outlived three of YOU docs despite your fancy diets..."
Where did I get that? Apologies, I forgot the British context and tea culture of El Reg. My wife's family is from China, and in that context the higher end black teas are for export, the swill is consumed domestically, and green tea is a premium product. Therefore people with higher socioeconomic status will generally grab the green... In part because it's a status thing. But these people will live longer anyways. Confounding factors.
FWIW, if you order tea in a Chinese restaurant in the USA, you will invariably get an exceptionally weak cup of green. Ask for "whatever the manger is drinking"
Understand what you are saying, but many of us develop embedded systems and I for one am not particularly concerned about t your infrastructure examples.
Why? Most real time (critical) code does not use time_t for several reasons: first is most control applications could care less about system time/date. Logging and admin is usually not handled in your real time, critical code - that's sent to general purpose machines elsewhere so the beancounters get their beans. Second, for applications that do care deeply about time/date, experienced system developers do NOT depend on system time because of its notorious errors and unreliability, especially in harsh environments. Third, in this day and age of GPS spoofers and wankers mis-configuring NTP servers so badly I don't know what decade I'm in, many developers adopt a healthy attitude of total distrust for time_t
Banking and financial... That concerns me.
No downvote because I understand where you are going with the post, but the time I took Space Dynamics definitely gave my math skills a run for the money. I still remember the outline of an exam problem: high speed aircraft flying a circular path at such-n-so altitude, speed, rate of turn... passes over point X at time Y. Satellite in a highly elliptical orbit with given elements. Compute relative Doppler shift if a 200MHz beacon on the SV as seen by the aircraft. For the next two passes as well. Arrrggghh!!! What also killed me was computing transfer orbits by hand. And I'm an RF engineer, with high confidence in my math skills.
Now the aerospace engineers with their compressible flow problems... And compressible flows when your fluids are actively combusting and adding energy to the system... Those men and women are the real deal. A pint, I think, is in order
She is neglecting an entire universe of insults. For creativity and vehemence one needs to look at drill instructors. From my DI:
DI: "[chairman!] Yesss! I figured out why you're such a total waste of sperm! You've got a glass stomach!"
Me: "Sir, yes sir!"
DI: "Do you even know what a glass stomach is?
"Sir, no sir!"
DI: "It means your head is shoved so far up your ass you can see through your f_____g belly button! No wonder you can't even stand up straight!"
So I've gone from glass stomach to geek. I'm good with that!
My current employer is ten years into a SAP ERP rollout. It's still not fit for purpose, and that's even after abandoning SAP's repeated attempts at customization. We now contorted our business processes and organizational structures until they fit ERP's inbuilt, mainframe era business rules and processes. I'm starting to curse in German. The only people making money at this point are our legal firm, we are in round two of litigation.
Should have stayed with IBM. And, yeah, they suck too.
Five years to migrate? Most days it feels like five years just to print out an effen financial report!
While the scantily clad women are a marketing trope, yet possibly still effective, I think they could have done better:
Have photos of sad looking, heavily tattooed men doing hard time, with expressions that say, "I used to own the world but now life sucks."
Put a caption underneath: "Secure phones. If I'd had one of these, I wouldn't be here."
Yeah! Turtles, er I mean documents, all the way down! When your team starts stamping each other's foreheads with property management stamps before the inspectors come in, and labelled every toilet in the men's room "This container is not authorized for the storage of sensitive information" ... and "report any information spillage to your security officer!" on the floors under the urinals ... you're approaching compliance.
I worked in a firm that became ISO-9000. A worthy cause, but some bureaucrats become a little too aggressive.
I had a caesium primary time reference in my electronics lab, adorned with a good half dozen ISO-compliant inventory tracking stickers, but no Cal Lab sticker.
Cal lab: "You have a piece of equipment we need to cal! And you refuse to send it to us! Waahhh!"
Me: "It's ... A primary standard. You, uh, should know already that by definition we Cal other crap off it IT! Given that you don't grasp that, I'm ... concerned."
Cal lab: "Bad boy! It has stickers on it. That means it can be cal'ed! You're just being a poopyhead!"
Me: "!..!"
From what little I know about atomic clocks, the typical caesium and rubidium clocks work off the microwave lines from hyperfine transitions. Electronics transitions allow use of light wavelengths and correspondingly higher precision. For higher precision yet one needs to cool the atoms. All this is established art.
What I'd like to know more about are what specific claims are made for these clocks and how they differ from the chip-scale rubidium references NIST is publishing on. Specifically, what's the root Allan variance? Settling time? Time transfer methodology?
The real neat trick is time transfer from device to device and handling the bookkeeping appropriately as one transfers time from stationary devices to moving devices such as aircraft. At caesium stability, relativity becomes apparent even for modest accelerations.
Mines the one with the 100 gram atomic clock in the pocket: https://www.orolia.com/products/atomic-clocks-oscillators
Some years ago, around the time Windows 8 was pinched off, Sperry Bridgemaster navigation radars ran XP. In all likelihood doing to was some combination of bespoke drivers and stability. Their excellent application software meant the user never had to interact with the OS anyways, and I'm sure the OS had been stripped to the bare minimum.
I was a guest on a ship's bridge and got to see a Sperry tech interact with a Win 8 bigot who had his laptop and demanded to know why the radar still ran such an ancient OS. Tech points towards the harbor and asks, "Would you rather see shit?". Points towards laptop and asks, "Or see... Shit.?"
...they didn't go screaming to Congress that their 5G tech is "too big to fail" and "critical to national security". How I was expecting this to roll is that Intel was going to play the national security card, try to get multiple billions of taxpayer dollars in a bailout, THEN try to make a marketable product. Or spend the cash on biz jets, entertainment, and blow.
Ken,
Quite right. The way I look at it is that Physics is the general case of science. Mathematics is the language of physics. All other hard sciences (bio, chem, electronics, mechanical...) are special cases or simplifications. Unfortunately non-trivial problems are too difficult to handle in their entirety, so must divide problem domains into understandable chunks. Integrating these chunks together is the role of the systems guy/gal
Good textbook definition. Let me give a concrete example: take high power RF system design.
The actual RF propagation in a system can be handled in a number of ways: direct evaluation of Maxwell's equations, Method of Moments, Finite Difference Time Domain, etc. One output of such calculations is absorption in dielectrics and current densities in conductors. These give rise to heating...
Heat transfer will involve a finite element model (FEM) to determine steady-state temperatures, cooling requirements, etc. Given material mechanical properties and loads, FEM will also tell you how much your structure will distort...
And that changes the boundary conditions on your FDTD electromagnetic sim... Maybe you have to change the design and re-do everything, but regardless you have to re-compute the energy deposition. If it's really high power I might do particle-in-cell codes to figure out whether air or other gas will break down.
And so it goes. Iterate, and try to succeed before you blow through your budget. Make sure the system is affordable and manufacturable. (Monte Carlo over mechanical tolerances... Do not specify pure unobtanium...) The ultimate multiphysics tool will do it all. That doesn't exist. Instead you need specialists ... Usually a team of RF people, mechanical engineers, systems engineers, HVAC, etc ... armed with many tools and a big, scary, expensive, fast freakin' computer. That's real-world multiphysics
Bloat... Yes, software is a gas. It will expand to completely fill any volume.
A new hire observed my gray hair and similarly aging HP-12C and -48S calculators and started yapping about the glories of modern software. I told him, "Yes, when I started this game in the 80's, PCs were new. Really new. The only real applications I had were games, word processor, database, spreadsheet, presentation software, and a comms package so I could get my email and hit the bulletin board service - kind of like a web browser, but without the decent pr0n"
And he starts saying, "Uh, today we now have. Hmm. Better pr0n?"
"Definitely"
Software firms not a charity... Quite right.
My exposure to MathCAD and Matlab at school have definitely made me a MathCAD and Matlab bigot. These days, though, my Matlab habit is starting to fade as the open source Octave answers for most needs, and now python + matplotlib + scipy.
But, then, victory goes to the bold. Companies take a real risk putting fully functional software out there, and this takes more guts to do so than - say - corrupting education officials with free holidays.
As a manager I've had to spend some time educating college interns, new hires, and even senior employees moonlighting as college faculty that it is unethical and illegal to use their academic software licenses for work. No matter how bad out organization's procurement processes suck, we cannot abuse license terms. Lately this seems more and more like a novel concept (!)
Ok, fair enough!
Thing is, though, the First National Bank of Dad (*) is paying almost full freight on this ... Provided of course the major and degree are ones that have value in the real world of employment and careers.
How people can think that getting a fine arts degree financed with $250k of debt will ever work out is totally beyond my understanding. But then if we get in a politician that somehow magically erases all student debt, I guess I will be the fool and not them.
(*) Supplemented by years of, "Oh, you want cash? Get off your ass and work for it!" Kids are not going to take the studies seriously unless there is some skin in the game
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