Posts by Chairman of the Bored 929 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2017
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."
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!
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
Commonwealth- funded universities in Virginia run the "Dell, Windows, O365, and 'recommended' support package" scam through their for-profit but somehow government owned captive portals. The artsy majors are required to go Apple. Prices are much higher than free market, but not quite as extortionate as, say, the mafia. But the hook is the the monopoly they hold on service on/near campus. If you bring your own, or heavens forbid use Linux, fire and brimstone shall be upon your head.
On the other hand, my daughter's uni has Matlab, Mathematica, MathCAD, SPSS, and other top shelf technical software all on tap for free student use. That's pretty awesome.
I had a solid fiberglass spinnaker pole used on a small sailboat delaminate badly. Size, strength, and flexibility are on the order of an English longbow. As the pole was out of manufacture, the local chandleries had no stock, and eBay didn't answer, I was in a bind.
What I did was rig up a jig to rotate it very slowly and wrap with 550 parachute cord under tension.
About every foot the cord is locked to itself with epoxy, I think 3M DP220 since it's reasonably flexible. Its worked for several seasons and I'm no longer extracting fiberglass from my hands.
...I wonder what it would be like if one plotted 'Apparent Developer Happiness vs Time' over the life of an API.
My hypothesis is that you would see initial positive feelings because the API will probably be used in a community tightly coupled to the developers. Then if the API hits the big time we have high positivity as people fan girl over the new "shiny". Then will things turn more negative as developers realize an API is a tool, not a fad, and using tools effectively is hard. We then transition to a nostalgic sunset as the bulk of developers move on to the next shiny, while the ones who have used the API very effectively still participate...
Aye. Heard an aero engineer say once the reason the Federal Trade Commission permitted the Boeing / McDonnell Douglas merger was to combine the engineering and manufacturing prowess of Boeing with the strong marketing and business capabilites of McD and create a defense and civil aviation superpower.
What we got instead was McD's engineering and Boeing's business capabilites.
I have a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word
RUMP
No T of course. The orange one's supporters look puzzled for a second, think I'm one of them, and smile a little hesitantly. The Dems look at at, do a double take, and smile hesitantly. So I'm flying under everyone's radar and bringing somewhat good cheer to all...
...But if I wish to truly study a document and retain any information, I find it easier to do so from a printed page than a .PDF - no matter how nice the monitor.
I suspect I'm not alone in this.
So if I'm hoping a jury will exonerate me through careful study of documents, I'd prefer if they have hardcopy rather than a cheap govt issue policy laptop.
Or tested 500 apps a thousand times? I'm having a hard time buying that number from a OS vendor who frequently doesn't appear to even test their own patches thoroughly.
Saw an outrageous claim from my company about the effectiveness of a QA function and we found the following haiku on a board:
A number so large
Almost certainly bullshit
But soon we will know
...so if it's just me and a piece of software, I wonder if gaming the software is in scope:
"Okay, AI. I'd like you to know that the rPi running in my coat pocket's got metasploit tailored just for you. I know where your back office is. I know what your comms infrastructure is. If you ever want to see proper maintenance and upgrades again, let's make a deal..."
Understand completely, but I'd say the ID10T is much more likely to be in my senior leadership than the system integrator. The integrator for govt work will generally be a third party contractor working a cost plus fixed fee contract... And there is probably language that allows a fixed percentage surcharge of 'other direct cost' language. Driving up costs by buying the base SAP crap on the main document and the charging ODC for every module and nitinoid license entitlement is pure profit. Sowing the seeds of future work packages through an incomplete deployment radically increases profit - especially if the integrator has to buy more licenses or add more bodies to the team in the out years. The integrator typically gets the contract to run the piece of SAP on behalf of the govt.
Unethical as hell, but standard operating procedure for the integrator. No wonder we are trillions in the hole. Bastards.
Self inflicted wounds-
R&D lab I used to work at would have to buy electronics parts, and we got them from commercial distributors at competitive prices, and could take advantage of price splits on quantity. So far so good. A typical circuit board bill of materials would be about 150 line items at an avg cost of around $1 each.
But some genius reworked our entire organization with SAP ERP, and every single part gets individually entered into ERP, tracked independently, inventoried, and has to be issued from a warehouse - using electronic forms with multiple signatures. ERP labor per line item (or if you're really screwed, per part) is 15min. At an avg burdened rate of $100 per hour for everyone touching these, you burn $3750 just feeding the EEP database. Add in the back end warehouse ops and this doubles. And that's how your $1 part goes to $51. On a good day. For no value added.
...who's dad was a cop, and he had some awesome "stupid inebriated citizen" stories. My favorite is when a crackhead complained that someone had stolen some of his stash:
"How much?"
"Five hundred bucks!"
"Still got some?"
"Yeah! See?"
"Dumbass!"
...click...
Runner up... Cop and his partner are parked in a marked car in skid row, doing paperwork. Bum knocks on the window
"Gimme a ride home!!"
"Why the fsck should we?"
"I pay your salary!"
"BS! You don't pay ship!"
"You know how much taxes I pay on booze???!"
"Sir, I apologise. Where do you want us to go?..."
I guess a guy has to put food on the table somehow, so I know people have to engineer products that die quickly and deliberately. But I cannot see myself doing it, and for the most part I've been able to work with firms and organizations that have some commitment to quality. Been lucky, I guess!
Designing hardware is like having kids. It was fun at the time, but now you're supporting the end product until you die.
Somewhere in my vast collection of abandoned crap is an Intel PROM burner and a matching 386 machine. Every couple of years I have to resurrect it to modify and burn firmware for a 1980's vintage antenna pedestal or two - based on a Z80 - last upgraded in, oh, 1996. Customers think it's too risky to upgrade to something modern, and I think it's far too lucrative to push the point.
Bus size reactors... The sub reactors are pretty small in the scheme of things, IIRC in the high tens of MW thermal power versus 2GWish for the larger civil reactors. In order to get the power density up, highly enriched U is used, which makes things interesting for the nonproliferation chaps if done on the civil side.
Worked for a billion-dollar-plus enterprise that went with SAP ERP tools. Theoretically the ERP solution is tailored to support and augment existing business processes and rules. In actuality what happens is that the organization gets distorted to match the ERP software design. It constantly reminded me about jokes from my ex-Soviet Bloc friends who said Russia is shaping the New Soviet Man with unbelievably uncomfortable train and airplane seats...
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