Posts by Scene it all

Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern

I remember how the "Revised report on Algol 68" used literary quotations to help "explain" the concepts. In the section on "comments" appears this quotation from Gilbert & Sullivan: "Merely corroborative detail, intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

This made up for the difficulty in understanding the two-level "Wijngaarden grammar" that was the formal definition, as well as the not-invented-here use of unusual words. You did not "execute a program"; rather the computer "elaborated the definition" of the program.

Re: Make it so

I used to work on a small part of Fusion at Oracle and your description is exactly what it was like.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this ....

That is called "normalization of deviance" and NASA does this a lot. "The wing fell off but nobody died so the mission was a success."

Re: Oracle as innovator

It was not any fun being an employee there either.

Re: Surveillance functionality

AT&T technician Mark Klein reveal the existence of those intercept facilities back in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It uses optical beam splitters to be able to look at entire fiber contents at a time while introducing no delay.

Re: He probably shouldn't give up his day job for auto mechanic or electrician.

The single-phase converter that is used to charge the batteries from the wall is separate from the three-phase process used for dynamic braking on the road.

Re: don't try this at home...

I once did the ancient equivalent of this, on an IBM System 370. What I was SUPPOSED to do was copy the disk containing all the operator "procedures" to a backup disk. In those dark days, a "procedure" is what today you would call a command script, and the operations staff had a big book of scheduled things they had to do, like run the company payroll, or inventory updates, or something, and the book would tell them to "Mount tape number 2375 and run procedure XYZ". And a disk pack, weighing ten pounds, could hold about 250 Megabytes. With an "M".

But I got the device definitions backwards and copied the empty disk on top of the the live one, erasing it. Under the glowering gaze of my boss, I went to the tape library, fetched the most recent backup tape, and copied it to the proper disk as the operator staff stood there waiting. No timesharing here - this computer system that filled a room could do ONE thing at a time.

Re: Tight constraints

Presumably it is bolted to the rest of the spacecraft, weighing hundreds of kg, so would be contributing something to the mission.

Re: Full names please.......

Was it a pink Rolls-Royce?

Re: 'Exit interview'

My 'exit' was like that - just the facts on a checklist. And it was done online with a form. I particularly enjoyed the question "Would you work for <this company> in the future?" I was disappointed that there was no "HELL NO" choice, so I just checked NO.

We covered this in one of my EE classes. Thermo-powered electricity generation, by boiling water, has a thermodynamic limit on efficiency of about 40%. (look up "Carnot Cycle".) The electromagnetic process of converting the power of a spinning turbine into electricity is over 90%. The transmissions network is also over 90% and battery conversion about 85%. Compared to an internal combustion engine at ~12%, electricity still wins and that is assuming fossil-fuel use to heat the water. With any other source of electricity not involving thermodynamic limits, the efficiency of the electric car is WAY better. And this does not count the environmental factors. Using fossil fuels could be 100% efficient and there would STILL be an excellent reason to get rid of them.

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

"You drink beer out of a porcellain mug?! (sorry...)"

I have had beer out of a porcelain mug. It was in Germany, where they do such things.

Re: Honourable mention

The big thing I noticed during this time was that the Intel 8088 and 8086 architectures (the instruction set that the programmer sees) was very clumsy. As though it was designed by hardware people who were not programmers. The DEC PDP-11 clearly was designed with programmers in mind, most noticeably in its clever addressing modes based around truly general-purpose registers. And the Motorola 68000 clearly copied some ideas from that. Then later the DEC VAX line instruction set was *heavily* designed for the convenience of programmers and also for small code size. (I know - I was there) This was before the modern ideas around RISC designs that did simple things very fast.

Used to be, you would hire an army of guys with green eyeshades and sleeve protectors to just *do* it. Forget the automation.

In my county in the US, the county supervisors just signed a multi-year contracts with a new company to handle the residential trash collection. It has been, in the words of one supervisor, "an unmitigated disaster" with trash not being picked up on time for thousands of residents, going on several weeks. They are looking for ways out of the contract. But in the meantime, they have been redirecting existing county employees in the road maintenance department to pick up the trash, and then they send the overtime bill to the under-performing contractor.

Re: Mötley SÖC

Yes, it is a bus multiplexer limitation. There are two of them, and each one can select ONE Arm or ONE Riscv.

All manned spaceflight could end tomorrow and it would not affect life on Earth one bit. Unmanned things like weather satellites, yes we depend on those a lot.

See, it was Delta's fault because they installed the CrowdStrike software in the first place!

I remember listening to a presentation by an IT guy at one of the world's largest online travel reservation companies. Their allowance for downtime to do upgrades of the production systems was 15 minutes. *Per year*. And they knew exactly how much it would cost them per minute if the downtime exceeded that.

Re: Insurance may have to eat more of it

It is CrowdStrike that needs to replace their staff. All of it, up to and including the CEO.

Re: Space, the messy frontier

Yes on the reboost. The cost of getting all that mass up there was greater than the cost of the materials in it, and once people figure out how to do Aluminum smelting in zero-G it can be turned into useful things.

Re: (I'll see you on) The Dark Side of the Moon

Michael Collins actually wrote a book about it, titled "Carrying the Fire".

It is not musicians who are the target. The musician computers become unwilling participants in the botnet that are then used to do DOS attacks on the REAL targets. And the 'musehub' downloader really *does* run at root level - I've seen it in action and quickly deleted it.

Re: When execs are spending other people's money....

Isn't Safra Catz supposed to be the M&A expert? Whose idea was this?

Re: Clown.....

The way you get more energy into a car faster is to charge at a higher *voltage*, not just a higher current. Some models (Porsche?) reconnect the battery units in series to accomplish this. The non-Tesla high speed chargers also only use two pins for high voltage charging. The car is sitting on rubber tires and the whole system "floats" electrically. And it is the car that controls the charge rate, through communications back over the small control pins.

Re: Mixed bag

It is not a walled garden if this platform uses standard data formats for files, images, audio, and network. LibreOffice for example can easily deal with Microsoft Windows files. Just like it is of no concern to most people if your computer uses Intel, AMD, ARM, or RISCV hardware. Even with the Great Firewall, the internet protocols used *within* China are the same ones used everywhere else,

Re: Coders vs Developers

Perhaps the database vendors can take some responsibility here and just not expose any "execute this string" functionality in their APIs. We all got used to programming without GOTOs.

Re: Capabilities.

It was probably close to vacuum already. I have been in "explosive" decompression at significantly lower altitudes (in an Air Force training facility) and it was more violent than this.

I just looked up my University's supercomputing center and it has more capacity than NASA's HEC. All Nvidia Volta V100s.

Re: Yutu 2

Anyone who has played Lunar Lander on the PDP-11 knows it is a McDonalds.