Posts by Mo'Fo B'dass 23 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2019
Id like to see - for appearances sake - a pretend magnetic tape machine from days of old that would spin if machine is doing something and slow down when idling along and stop if system crashed. Perhaps rewind on a reboot... Just for the oppos (a quick look up from the screen to see if all is well). A row of PDP 11/70 LED's would do nicely (where's the harm?). Otherwise, where's the charm?
Saw a documentary series recently about how the RAF train its pilots. One eye-opener was how the RAF (or was it RN?) are training their F35 pilots (in the states)
Guy strapped in ready for take-off and a pretend bombing sortie..ready for action...the planes systems wouldn't accept the pilots PASSWORD! A guy in a SUV had to reset it remotely (cameras not allowed)
Imagine that in a carrier defence situation....scramble, scramble, scramble....."er....was it a capital at the start? Dammit I changed it recently...erm...was it the one I use for gmail or my paypal one?".
Sometimes it's bad enough when your sitting at a desk in an office but what about when you've got deadly incoming? No pressure...
I think sticky-note v1.0 may save your bacon (and the carriers). Christ on a bike.
Same here, the stuff that went on when the bosses weren't there...
The BEST laughs, the sort of job where you actually looked forward to going to work to be with your mates and have a laugh. It was literally work hard and play harder.
As you say, never had a more fun job before or since...
Glad I'm not on nights anymore though. Couldn't do it at my age. Miss those days
PDP 11/70's 1980 something (86? 87?). I was a Senior Operator at the time. We'd had a disk with suspected head crash on night shift - by suspected I mean it was definitely a head crash - you could see the scratches on the platters and the plasticy/metallically burning smell at head crash time was unmistakable. It was a bad one. There was a whole bunch of important work that couldn't be done but and - from the looks of it - the data was lost with no backup (if memory serves we could re-create the data but it would take a while and there was a procedure which us oppos where not privy to)
Anyhoo, we labelled up the disk and the 'washing machine' as : 'do not use, head crash' and told the boss in the morning during shift-handover time. He went spare, called us stupid, and proceeded to load the disk into each and every spare drive we had (some were system disks and couldn't be used) but Lewis - not his real name - was on a mission and could NOT be stopped. We tried pleading "Lewis, no, stop it", the day shift joined us in unison. "STOP IT!" I mean you could HEAR drive heads hitting platters like a high-pitched 'pertttthhhhhffff' sound but he trashed those disks like godzilla throwing a fit in downtown tokyo. Finally, with all the spare drives now knackered he stormed off without saying a word. It was left to us to call the engineers. DEC weren't happy and argued the toss for ages about wether this constituted missuse of equipmnt. I think we had to pay up, Lewis kept his job. happy days
yes, physics remains the same but the rockets are better, the computers are better, the materials are better, the KNOWLEDGE is better, the imaging is better. The technology is well established and not necessarily bleeding edge so risk is much reduced. In nearly all cases (probably all) its relatively cheaper requiring much less manpower then before. At the moment we are just making it harder for ourselves by dicking around. Get it done and keep doing it.
If we get there in this decade (the moon) it won't be on a NASA rocket. Mars? Can't see the sense of sending a manned crew to Mars just to come back without landing. How long spent weightless? 6 months? A year? No, I think you'd need so spend some time on Mars before the return journey to build up those muscles and bones and you'd probably need an exoskeleton at that. When the 'nauts come back from long duration missions on the ISS they need people to lift them up and carry them around. Won't be anybody to do that on Mars and although the gravity is lower it could be a showstopper (without some frame or other). This could/should be tested on the Moon. So, if you want to get to Mars in a decent timescale then we'd better crack on with lunar missions. Develop a sustainable plan and stick to it. No more pork projects.
Jeez, UK could develop a sustainable, manned space program for the money it's spending on a single train track (HS2) and if the yankees ain't got the stomach for it I think UK should.
I'm sorry but it's been 50 years! Technology has improved exponentially since then, costs have fallen. It should be EASY to get to the moon by now. I'm rambling, I'm racked off. Where's my meds? Back in the sixties the yanks set themselves a target of 10 years to put boots on the moon. They succeeded. A monumental achievement. Why is now going to take another 10 years (we're not exactly going from a standing start are we?). I despair.
We spend trillions of dollars worldwide on weapons, make-up, smartphones, fashion, iffy drugs and so on - all the flim flam of daily life. Hardly any of this expenditure enhances the lives of the poor. Spend a few million quid on a space program and everybody jumps up and down about "wasting money" and that all our earthly problems should be sorted out first. These very same people probably also pay good money for loads of unessential items and probably DONT send all their money to charity. I just don't get it.
The human race can either sit here with our noses in the dirt, murdering each other whenever a "leader" stands to gain something or we can lift our heads up and reach for the stars and embrace the universe. Our world view would likely change and with that being so we may develop a more balanced approach to life on Earth , abandoning narrow nationalistic and religious concerns in favour of a benevolent society that is fair to all who live here (including the flora and fauna that we share it with)
Just my tuppence
So you've checked every line of code in every application and all it's dependencies? You've learnt how each and every bit of code interacts with every other bit of code in your entire production eco-system?
And your knowledge is such that every single update can be re-evaluated and tested to destruction ensuring absolutely no bugs and vulnerabilities exist? And you've attended to that personally so that you can be sure no one else on your team has taken shortcuts or overlooked something?
Wowzers...
Plausible deniability.
IF the package was deliberately re-routed for intel purposes you might think they'd cover up that fact. However, if the cover-up was detected then the chinese would KNOW it had been tampered with (the US couldn't deny it). If you leave all the tracking info on there it could be passed off as a genuine Fedex fail (which is the current claim). In the spy world there is so much smoke and mirrors it is difficult to know where the truth is (which is, of course, the point of all the smoke and all the mirrors).
Is it all BS? Is some of it BS? Is it all true? and all the shades of truth/BS in between. It's the same with UFO's and Roswell and all that (there's so much BS flying around that if the truth stared us in the face we couldn't see it for what it was). As in Churchills words "...in wartime the truth is so precious it has to surrounded with a bodyguard of lies" - probably a misquote but you get the gist. The spies are always at war...
And the ever-spiralling cost of the British HS2 (not so high-speed train service) is currently in the tens of billions of GBP. I can't help feeling that establishing an outpost on the moon is likely to be of more benefit to mankind than travelling from London to Birmingham 10 minutes faster. The cost may seem high but the benefits and experience gained should pay us back many times over.
Move the money from HS2 to a lunar hyper-loop system. Too much caffeine? At least we wouldn't have to chop down any trees and bulldoze peoples homes. Let's just go for it.
Hmm. ISIS may be bonkers but they are not totally unreasonable. They DID apologize to Israel after accidentally bombing them - you've got to wonder why haven't you? And they HAVE negotiated withdrawals. They are not entirely nuts. Everything is up for negotiation - for the right price - definite. Speak softly, carry a big stick (Teddy Roosevelt?)
As for drones. You hack the tech and turn the drones on the enemy that sent them (probably us). Same for all this top gun AI. if it's hacked it's game over...your whizz-bang super fighter flies INTO the path of danger rather than away from it. Or just nosedives like a certain modern airliner. It may even disable the ejector seat - just for giggles - or even activate it (probably want to airgap that one if not already done). Maybe, just to be clever, make the plane unflyable in a way that looks like a bug in the software - rather than a hack - as you'd want to keep your hacks secret.
People get carried away with tech as the possibilities are endless and it sounds so cool BUT there are always countermeasures.
If you want to try air-to-air refuelling at Mach 5 be my guest! (Mach 5 is just before they put their foot on the gas and shoot on up into space.)
I'd like to see a catapult launch like they have on them there Aircraft Carriers to overcome inertia and save a bit of fuel. Probably minimal gain and you'd need strong ropes ;-) Still like to see it though. Or a rocket sled/maglev...and a big ramp/ski-jump affair. It'd look soooo awesome.
I like the skylon concept coz you can plonk people in them and take off - and land - like an aircraft.
The piggy-back to 30000ft sounds a bit shonky (too many things to go wrong). If my engines aint gonna work for any reason I'd like to know before take off rather than at 30000ft. Whooooosh... splat! If taking people I want the passenger capsule to have ejection capability and a big parachute.
Here, exploding technical achievements and exponential increase in knowledge. (or new and more devious ways of shooting ourselves in the foot and not having the conscious wit to realise it)
We will trust the bigger and better machines, we will ignore warning signs as we will be seduced by the benefits. We will trust then get dependent on the technology we ourselves build and then one day the tech will fail badly and we wont have the capability to fix it (so back to the stone age).
If a car failed you in the period 1950-1990 you could have a go at it with a spanner. You may or may not be able to have fixed it and be on your way. A car fails you now and you cant have a go at fixing it with a spanner so you have to get out and walk...scale that up to society level. Some future tech that our societies absolutely depend on - but cannot fix - fails...
Any human being stranded on a desert island with a sharp stone and a few trees has a fighting chance of thinking up a way of building a raft and sailing off somewhere to safety. What do you do if you're stranded on the moon in a broken spaceship? It's broken? Nothing ever breaks and hasn't for decades. There are no tools to fix this stuff because none were ever required...until now.
There are signs today if you look around that the future may not be rosy.
A seat...you'll be lucky. If it turns out that capacity is freed up elsewhere and people can actually sit down at peak times then - clearly - there's an oversupply of carriages so they will reduce them...so you'll still end up standing at peak times even if there are fewer passengers. Seats are overrated IMO. If you get one then - as sure as eggs is eggs - you'll get a fat bloke standing next to you with his arse in yer face emitting last nights curry farts straight down your gob. Then you'll throw up on your laptop and no worky stuff for you - 3g, 4g or 5g or that H thing that I see on my phone most days. Pah! I spit on the UK train companies.
Same issue here: I'm writing an old-fashioned green-screen app for a nameless company
...
"Enter Qty->"
"Is Qty Correct Y/N->?"
Person in charge of software testing asks...."But what happens if they press 'Y' by mistake?"
Hmm...tricky one that. To be fair "Y" and "N" ARE quite close together...
What chance have we got?
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