Posts by UCAP 783 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2020
London to Singapore, stop for 3 days, then Singapore to Auckland. Reverse trip was Auckland to Singapore, stop for 3 hours then Singapore to London. Duration of each leg between 11 and 12 hours. Even in business class, its quickly becomes a trial by endurance.
At one time in the not-so-distant past I was involved in the maintenance of some applications used to generate user-facing information from the raw data produced by an Earth Observation satellite. During one meeting, the customer's representative mentioned that one of the applications had failed about 50 times over the last three years (it is typically run daily) with the same error code; the previous company that had maintained the software had declared that they could not find the problem. After the meeting I went into the source code, and about 5 minutes later isolated it to one function - the only one that generated that error code. Unfortunately, the error code was generated for two entirely different reasons which we could not distinguish without further diagnostic log information, although I had a side=bet as to what the fault would actually turn out to be (basically, out of memory).
And of course GovOS will be developed by one of the government's current cronies one bid-less deal, will require about £1 million of kit to run (minimum specification), be completely incompatible with anything else in the universe let alone this planet, and will crash within 10 seconds of booting due to an incompatibility between the software and the hardware. Oh yes, and will have more security holes than a swiss cheese.
Around 20 years ago I wrote some code to support telemetry processing for a new satellite system - the code basically defined a set of pseudo-parameters (derived from the primary telemetry feed) that determined the high-level state of the spacecraft. I developed the code over a 3 month basis, provided it worked according to the spacecraft design schematics I was working from, and then moved on to my next assignment.
A couple of years later I got a call asking if I could come back to make some adjustments - the satellite had been launched and they had discovered that some of the internal wiring (which directly impacted the derived telemetry parameters I had developed) had been done slightly differently. Unfortunately I was busy on another project and had to tell them that I would not be available for several months. The response was basically - "oh, don't worry. I had a look at the code and found that you used a set of tables to represent that spacecraft's wiring, I was able to adjust them to reflect the actual wiring. We don't need you now, thanks for doing such a great job".
Left me feeling pretty pleased even though I had done myself out of some work.
The problem that IBM/Novell had was that Novell were unable to put their hands on a single, definitive document that set out the terms of the sale.
Novell found a copy of the original Bill of Sale of Unix to Santa Crux Organisation (the predecessor of interest to SCO) which detailed exactly what was being transferred in the transaction. In summary (and going by memory) SCO have the right to use and evolve the source code, however all copyright was retained by Novell.
Once this document was submitted to the court, SCO's case was essentially dead in the water.
The unusual thing about the Buccaneer (from when it was used by the Navy) is that it was the only aircraft that would take of from a carrier then descend to its cruising altitude.
It is also said that a US Air Force general who had been given a flight in a Buccaneer got out of the plane afterwards swearing that they had had to climb sharpish to fly over a cow.
Why do you think that? In the downlink direction, neither radio or optical provide any location information for the receiving terminal apart from the footprint of the downlink signal. Granted, the footprint for an optical signal is much, much smaller, but an enemy would have to be inside the footprint in order to make use of it which would probably put them in line-of-site of the receive terminal anyway. In the uplink direction, an optical transmitter generates much, much smaller back-scatter which is about the only way to track a signal back to the transmitter. Plus, what back-scatter it produces is much harder to detect.
So she's not read the report of the Ontario Auditor General, as recently reported by the Reg and others. But let's be clear, the woman has a first degree in English Literature, and a post grad qualification in journalism, so being able to make well formed judgement on complex technical issue may be a challenge.
There - fixed it for you.
The important thing to remember that most (if not all) of the people currently in power are professional politicians with no knowledge of, or any interest in, anything outside of their immediate need to make enough sound bites to get re-elected. They are certainly unable to understand technology or how it's the implications on the "think-of0the-kiddies" legislation that they have produced as a kneed-jerk reaction to the latest opinion poll.
Not quite at te same level, but the first couple of years after getting married my wife & I lived at her house out at the Essex end of London. Very nice semi-detached, probably 1920's build with super-high ceilings.
One day, we lost all power to the house. A fast check by yours truly showed that all of the fuses in the fusebox were OK, but nothing was getting so much as a watt of power. Nothing to do but call out an electrician (fortunately covered by house insurance) - we where a priority visit since we had a baby (#1 sprog) in the house. The electrician duly arrives and after about 45 minutes of head scratching finds two things: (1) the fuse on the input power feed into the house had blown for no readily apparent reason; and (2) nothing in the house was earthed.
The sparky called the electricity board to get them to sort the fuse out while he busied himself getting everything earthed as per regulations. When the engineer from the electricity board arrived, he inspected the blown fuse (remember on the power line coming into the house) and stated that he could not repair it since they had stopped making that type 50 years before - he had only ever seen them in a museum. So, instead of an easy repair he had to spend a couple of hours stripping out the old fuse and fitting a modern one to the power line.
I did some work for a certain major company whose security bods would wander around the cube farm (OK, it was not quite as bad as that, but it came close) and remove any unlocked and unattended laptops they came across. They would leave a note inviting the owner of the laptop to come to security office to recover his equipment, but only after a serious conversation with the company's Security Manager. I'd like to say that it resulted in an atmosphere of paranoia, but paranoid people only think "they" are out to get you - we knew it as a certainty.
The amusing thing is that no-one was above being targeted - this included the CEO who has the subject of these little notes at least 4 or 5 times while I was there.
Back in the 1990s, my desk with next to my boss (someone I actually got on very well with and ended up working with him off-and-on for about 30 years). At that time I was providing remote support for a part of the ground system supporting a space mission which meant I had a big DEC Ultrix workstation taking up a lot of my desk. This turned out to be a good thing since I positioned it at the boundary between my and my bosses desks, which stopped his piles of forgotten paperwork from invading my desk space.
I had to resort to other measures once the space mission was finished the workstation disappeared.
This has always been a problem for NASA - they have to grovel to Congress every year to try to get sufficient funding to for all of their projects for the next 12 months. The only time they have been relatively safe was during the 1960's, and that was only because no Congress-critter was going to dare go against Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
