* Posts by MachDiamond

8717 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012

Russia's Cozy Bear caught phishing German politicos with phony dinner invites

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Believing that accepting an unsolicited dinner invitation in 2024 entails downloading and opening a zip file from a completely random website will never not baffle the daylights out of me. Talk about fish in a barrel."

I expect that the people targeted get these sorts of invitations to all sorts of receptions. Some form of automated RSVP system that then requires the person to fetch their invitation to show at the door might be new, but not out and out weird. Was it a 'random' website? I see plenty of legitimate invitation/registration web sites that are branded with the entity hosting the event but the web address is that of the outsourced registration company. I'm careful about not clicking links in emails, but going to the official website and finding the signup link from there for the event. I expect to go to the National Association of Broadcasters convention next month and I know they use a third party company to manage signups and class registrations. This means I'm getting spammed with all sorts of crap leading up the show. It all gets flushed away since I can't be bothered, but there could be some malware in that if a list of attendees was hacked and those people sent something that looks like it's related.

The senior community where my mother lives has all sorts of events going on so it wouldn't be strange for her to receive a notice of something happening and the need to sign up since there's only so much space and they need to estimate food and drink. This is the sort of thing that worries me. She's going to catch the obvious phishing, but something polished enough and not too out of the norm might not.

Vans claims cyber crooks didn't run off with its customers' financial info

MachDiamond Silver badge

Data is money

Even if no banking/financial details are exposed, a big list of names, addresses and phone numbers are still very handy. For a Big Data company, it could be a more current data point for their file on somebody. The sorts of brands people buy is also a data point when it's correlated with other information.

I've tried to make sure I'm not putting data out there about me at all. That includes paying cash for most things. I have a long trip planned in future and, other than two campground reservations that had to to paid with plastic due to demand for those dates, I'll be paying for things like petrol and food with cash. Since I paid well in advance for the camp sites and the charge likely doesn't show the dates I'll be there, it's better than paying with something traceable on the date I show up. I also have a buffer in case the cards get switched off which has happened before while I was on a trip when I carry cash. I'm not bothered by network outages either. If the petrol station has power, I can likely refuel.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Why the Moon?

"Of course if you do set up a permanent moon base then you don't need to keep earth levels of bone density, just not needed"

Assuming one would move to luna permanently. If people are meant to rotate to an from Earth, health issues due to lack of gravity will put limits on the time. Even if people don't need bone density to hold up to lunar G, there are other health issues that could radically limit a person's lifetime if they are a seen in lunar G. Bearing children on the moon is really scary.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Why the Moon?

"1. Lack of gravity (so need to stay fit, keep bone density, etc)."

The human body's reaction to fractional G still needs to be determined. Zero G (or micro G) is problematic as has been shown. Is 1/6 enough? We don't know and won't until somebody has remained on/in the moon long enough to get good data. Radiation is a factor, but it's a good idea to plan to live/work under the lunar surface eventually rather than build infrastructure on the surface. I'd rather see missions aimed at investigating what looks like cave or lava tube entrances over fiddling about at the south pole looking for ice. We know there is ice there. Access to water is important but not if people are reduced to goo.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"To the moon in 2026?

Yeah, right..."

Only if Blue Origin gets way ahead of schedule on their lander.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Starship is 3400t+1200t, with a payload capacity of 150t (250t if expended)"

Based on if the entire capability is used. The reason there aren't competing heavy lifters is there isn't a market for them. On the contrary, advances in electronics, metallurgy and composites is bringing down the size and weight of satellites for a given set of capabilities. For the odd government agency launch (spy sats) that need a heavy lifter, that's where the strapon boosters come into play. They're cheap and cheerful while not adding tons of mass to the base vehicle.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Wind farms do not take vast swathes of land -"

Where I am they are using vast swathes of land, but that land isn't being cleared other than for the bases and access roads. I happen to be near an area with very good wind resources. There's lots of solar farms as well since the land isn't much good for many other things. To keep the solar farms cleared, I've seen an enterprising farmer bringing in a load of sheep and a couple of dogs to knock back the massive plant growth due to having some shade here in the desert. Whenever I see them, I never have the time to stop for a chat. I'd like to find out if they rent the sheep out or if it's an even trade. I'd also like to know if the sheep will eat some of the more problematic plants that plague my garden.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Fuel usage

"As opposed to, say, Ariane second stage, which is hydrazine - horribly toxic."

Yes, but they use that MMH outside of the atmosphere and it's an extremely reliable fuel in that situation. Look at how many issues there have been relighting and keeping lit those Raptor engines. The ascent stage in the Apollo lander used Aerozine/N2O4 for reliability. It was really hard to have that combination not work. If it didn't, there would have been no way for the moon walkers to get back to the capsule for the trip home. Being green or saving a few bucks was not even a factor.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Methane has an energy density of ~50MJ/kg, so a launch uses ~50TJ of energy, that's ~14GWh."

So if the lunar lander takes a depot tanker, 12 fueling flights and the lander itself, that 14 x 14GWh, 196GWh for each mission as a minimum. 700TJ.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"think of all of the wasted energy from having headlights on during the day to prevent"

The solution looking for a problem effect. Sounds great when presented to a political body that will pass a law about it with no further thought, but doesn't make sense just below the surface. There's also the problem of traveling into the sun and a car coming in the other direction masking it's presence by having lights on instead of being a dark spot up ahead.

My "daytime" driving lights draw 21W each. Sometime in the next week I'm going to see about removing that load. I put a new head unit in the car and with the ignition and those lights on, I ran the battery pretty flat. I didn't notice that the the lights were on during the day while I fiddled with getting software loaded and updated. Now I know to back the key off another click when I'm working on updates although that turns off the ECU so I can't do that when debugging Torque Pro. Live and learn. I just found out that the V6 version of my car has a bigger battery fitted so I'm upgrading to that size since what they put in the 4cyl version is anemic and I've added more gadgets. I always thought the space allocated for the battery was larger than what was there.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"How many to refuel the "Starship" to go & return from the Moon? 12 I have read. "

At least 12 if everything goes to plan. If there is any waiting time, it could take several more to compensate for "boil off". There's still some question about whether they will be using an orbital tanker or using the lunar lander directly to receive propellant transfers (which still needs to be worked out).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: I nearly missed this!

"The aim is for another half dozen flights - and they have the hardware to be able to do that."

They don't have general permission for more than 5 flights per year from Boca Chica and even that's subject to reduction. I am waiting to see what the reports from the ecological assays look like. There are a bunch of endangered animals in the area that even a perfect flight will kill/maim or scare off of nests/dens. There may be a ban put in place to during certain periods even if flights are allowed to continue. If there is a big accident that destroys a lot of the infrastructure, that might bring the curtain down on the location since a lot of what's there right now was never properly permitted.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: maximising

"I choose not to live that way."

But you do choose to keep sharp pointy things off the floor so when you get up and trundle to the loo, there's little chance of a foot injury and a trip to the doctor for a Tetanus shot.

Maximizing safety in a rocket program would include things like a high confidence in the rocket performing the mission. SpaceX isn't doing that. Their approach is much closer to "let's light the fuse and see what it does".

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: maximising

"So you'll be calling for banning all cars."

If somebody was going to take their hot rod with bald tyres out on a rainy day to see how fast it will go on the motorway.......

Usually, the belief is that one will use their car to travel to and from with expectation that nothing bad is going to happen. At worst, there might be a concern that the wheezing old wreck might need to be abandoned at the side of the road and there should be tools onboard to remove the number plates and scrape off all of the VIN numbers.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: maximising

"Clearly they are not maximising public safety and claiming so is disingenuous."

When the head of the company is putting out statements that "maybe it might work" but we're not afraid to iterate rapidly and blow things up, there's need of concern. A fuel/air explosion with that much propellant is on a nuclear scale. Sure, no radiation, but all of those adjacent nature preserves would be swept of their endangered species.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"It'll be interesting to see what options they end up with to handle mass/volume and reusability. So the bigger the volume, the bigger the hole needed and bigger challenges to protect that during re-entry. Or maybe they'll have fairings that can jetison and still protect the re-entry vehicle."

The booster isn't going orbital so that can come back, but if you fit an expendable faring on the Starship, it's not coming back (in one piece). It would also be a whole new vehicle. The Pez dispenser is an interesting concept and could work due to the configuration of the Starlink satellites, but maybe not for commercially available satellite busses. I don't see a market for 100t of Cubesats all going up on the same launch. One has to keep in mind that Starlink is an in-house project, not a paying customer (for the F9 as well). Some serious doubt has been cast on that system ever being profitable and could end up just leaving a whole load of orbital debris if it goes belly up. Maybe the concept includes a government buyout to prevent that along the lines of "too big to fail".

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"I suppose it depends on how much remaining pressure there was. Although it was interesting to see a real life demonstration of a pressure loss in space. It didn't look as violent as Hollywood shows us :-)"

It can depend on many things. Was that pressure there due to something leaking/venting or was it due to the rocket being sealed up well and residual? Since there wasn't a need to maintain pressure, it would have been prudent to make sure it wasn't pressure tight. If it wasn't pressure tight, but tight enough that whatever was leaking into that space gave it a little pressure, you won't get a giant decompression blast. To see whispy vapor like that at that stage of flight is a concern.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Capabilities.

"even without re-use it's AFAIK the cheapest way to lift a 100t payload into orbit."

It has to not explode first and THEN they can work on getting the price per kg down to something identifiable. At $2bn/year in dev costs, will there ever be any ROI? The cheapest price quotation also assumes the entire payload capacity is used. Stick another sports car inside sans battery pack and the cost per kg will be at the top end. For grins, let's say they load a whole stack of Starlink satellites in the payload and the rocket goes boom. What's the price tag, including lost opportunity, on 100t of those birds?

MachDiamond Silver badge

"I believe controlling the attitude with just flaps and wings isn't going to work in the thin atmosphere. Reaction thrusters will be needed to quickly correct any attitude errors or they risk the Ship breaking up due to thermal stress."

This makes talk about IFT 2 dumping propellants as part of the flight plan very odd. Why wouldn't they use residual propellant in the thrusters? For that you want them to be gaseous, not liquid, so it's far easier to tap the components off since there's no need to have liquid at the port. If there is, it's not a problem to turn it into a gas before it hits the RCS valves. They could also use hypergolics to simplify things. Or, they can be very complicated and use a bit of both.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"I heard it said that they are using the "waste" fuel that needs venting to keep the pressure at safe levels as the thrusters and that exhaust may freeze on the nozzles, especially on the shaded side and bits of ice breaking off might have been the "debris" we were seeing."

Outside of the atmosphere, there is little chance of ice forming from venting cryogenic propellants. It happens on the launch pad a lot since those are in humid locations. LOx isn't going to form a solid. Methane? I'd have to look that up. If either or both are being used for thrusters, they should be widely separated so they don't become a fire hazard or you'd really get some thrusting.

A bunch of the heat tiles are still coming off. They don't seem to have worked out how to fasten them in a way that accommodates movement of the outer skin of the rocket. A hole in those tile's coverage may explain some flaming seen on the video just before the whole things went pear shaped.

Labor watchdog wants SpaceX's gag clauses to disintegrate like its exploding rockets

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Elon Musk

"Lord of free speech for all *"

It's ironic that he's claiming his "free speech" is being trampled when he post lies and half-truths on Xitter while at the same time tries to put a gag on all of his employees if he doesn't fire them for speaking out. There was also a non-disparagement clause in the Twitter purchase contract that Elon signed that he violated almost at once. Elon went on a rampage to tear down Twitter with claims that it was all bots, there was a shadow agenda, etc. Had he not done that, he might have been able to buy his way out of the contract, but the damage had been done, the contract violated. He has free speech all right, he just doesn't know when to shut up. It seems telling customers to F-off is having some long term effects.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: It is worse [Turnabout is Fair Play]

"Call me an eternal optimist, but I think for every Xitler-type executive there are at least one or two "normal" people. "

You are an optimist!

I'll give that you could be correct, but that "normal" people aren't the sort that wind up on the C-Level of many large firms. Those individuals are the A types that will happily steamroller over everything and anybody in their way to that corner office.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: It is worse

"So, basically, not only can SpaceX basically forcibly buy your vested shares in the company for probably a lot less than they'd go for during an IPO,"

Don't hold your breath for an IPO. That would mean Elon and SpaceX would come under the scrutiny of the SEC and shareholder lawsuits. There's no way Elon could put a dime towards anything Mars unless he could show a fully thought through plan for how that might make returns on the investment. As much as he tries to talk up putting a million people on Mars, there's vanishingly little work he's showing on so many of the details other than the rocket. He doesn't even show convincing CGI for an interior layout. What's out there is all fan-fiction.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Those would be big no-nos under US law"

"because labor laws in the US are so weak and you have self-serving politicians who are always looking for excuses to water them down even more. "

The labor laws vary from state to state, but they aren't usually weak. The issue is people's aversion to putting themselves forward. Companies are also making employees sign contracts that demand arbitration and will point to that if anybody complains so more complaints get dropped at that response even if that might not be allowable. A company I worked at for a couple of years presented everybody with a new contract with all of the outrageous clauses (they hired a legal intern and lawyer) and insisted they had to have that to be able to offer profit sharing. Complete fertilizer and only a couple of people agreed to sign it (company went BK and never did earn any profits). If you want to talk to an attorney, you will really need a well paying job so you have enough money each month to pay them for an hour of their time.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Those would be big no-nos under US law"

"I believe Stellantis have just shed another chunk of jobs as part of their 'EV transition plan'."

If the minimum wage for putting a nut on a stud is $28/hr in addition to a whole sheaf of benefits, they have to move. There are plenty of union automotive jobs that are equivalent to digging ditches. Engineers are always looking for ways to put the expertise into the tooling or simplifying jobs so there's little training needed and less of a chance of making big mistakes. Unions tend to think of pay scales in terms of seniority rather than skill. If a worker has been putting nuts on studs for 25 years, the notion is they should be able to support a family of 8 and a fleet of large pickups and caravans (motorcycles, boats, watercraft, dune buggies). For much less, a worker in a country such as Mexico can make enough to support a large family but maybe not the motorized cavalcade.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Those would be big no-nos under US law"

"They didn’t come pre-packaged with the US constitution."

This is where an interest in history is useful. One has to look at what was considered normal at the time the US Constitution was written. Kids from lower income families often did enter the workforce as soon as their labor was worth anything. Long hours at work "build character" and we all know that idle hands are the devil's playground. We've come a long way since 1779 and that's why the US Constitution was written expecting there would be changes. One of the adaptations was for Congress to form agencies and departments to look after segments of society as opposed to Congress overseeing these things directly. This is why there is a NLRB. Their area of focus is on the workplace and worker law.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Those would be big no-nos under US law"

"I'm sure it's pure co-incidence that the law in the US is largely created by current or ex lawyers. Somehow it doesn't seem to get any less complex or ambiguous."

Job security.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Those would be big no-nos under US law"

"Why is it necessary for the US Labor watchdog to remind US companies of the law ? Isn't the law supposed to be known ?"

Yes, but Elon Musk is a Genius. (for a certain definition of "genius" and we aren't allowed to say "retarded" anymore)

3 million doors open to uninvited guests in keycard exploit

MachDiamond Silver badge

"A real key could be copied and used later."

I've got a collection somewhere of classic motel keys/fobs. I can think of some ways to make physical key locks more secure but it takes a human to reset. Each hotel room can have a lock with several settings plus a master key setting that can be changed. The keys would also be non-standard so it would take an uncommon key machine to make them. The issue is convenience to the landlord with only a passing interest in security for the guest. Having the key cards means they only need 1-2 people on-site and only need the second person during the busiest periods. I don't know how much you'd want to rely on the cleaning staff to advance the key setting after a checkout. Troubleshooting might start taking up too much time but it could be more secure.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Hotel locks are a joke

"Absolutely nothing stops you from waiting until the room you want to access is being cleaned then walking in and telling the maid "sorry I forgot to put up the sign for do not disturb,"

You could also jack the plunger open so when the maid leaves, the door doesn't latch.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Laminate everything

"We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway."

Way back in the early days of home theaters, the company I worked for did house-wide systems so you could watch a laser disc from the machine in the media room, in the master bedroom. Laser disc players were expensive at the time so not needing one in every room was a bonus. The downside was the sorts of people we did these systems for (rich and clueless) were barely able to deal with a local VCR hooked up the local TV. Even the programmable remotes we started using from a company Woz was part of was baffling to them and they were set up so one button would configure everything (with power on/off) to put the downstairs laser disc player on the upstairs master bathroom TV. The kids had the whole thing sussed in about 30 minutes. I recall one system that we installed and were just leaving after the final hookups was already understood by the homeowner's kids. Mummy and Daddy were out of town and they were throwing a party so there was some motivation.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Laminate everything

"Shrink wrap using a heat source from a small jet engine?"

I wish I could post a photo. I have one of a person I know up to his knees in the engine of his Mig 15 fighter.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Useless when everyone works at home, though."

If people "mostly" work at home but come together from time to time, having a digital whiteboard could be a very useful too. Those sessions would be in a space that others might use so whatever gets written down/drawn is going to be erased in short order. Being able to send the work out and save it somewhere would be handy.

At an aerospace firm I worked for, we had tons of whiteboards and I just wished they were digital. Trying to get a photo (years ago) was painful with the crappy camera on my mobe. We had loads of them since we could get them cheap second hand and having lots meant we could leave stuff up for a long time until things got transferred into more permanent homes if needed. I'm so used to using them that I feel handicapped at my home office. There's no wall space left in my office to install one. I'm thinking if I spot a whiteboard going cheap/free that will fit on the hallway wall just outside of my office, I'm going to grab it. As I get older, I think I need one on the back of the front door for reminders.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: But surely...

"Bearing in mind a conference room filled with top of the range gear none of the users are capable of using, then isn't the correct response is to accept a large budget, and spend none of it (except perhaps a can of spray polish) in the conference room?"

Get the large budget and keep adding to it as complaints come in when some nob can't make it go. I can think of a few profitable things to do with a heap of top end computing gear that isn't being used very often for its intended purpose. Crypto mining comes in around #37 since it's very low ROI, draws too much power to not be noticed and makes the fans go like mad.

Years ago an internet connected BBS I was on lived in a few rack spaces of a computing center in the basement of a large company. The operator put a label on it for something that wouldn't be messed with by anybody else. Funding for the hardware came from C-level budgets for video conferencing crap that the execs thought they had to have to be a large corporation but didn't get used much since said executives found it more in character to visit in person using a private jet. Had to be kept up to the latest standards, though. It was, but at a premium price and new gear would be spec'd in whenever we filled up the storage on the BBS.

MachDiamond Silver badge
Pint

Re: The best weapon when dealing with idiots is… another idiot

"As Mark Twain once said: "never argue with an idiot, he'll drag you down to his level and win"."

Good ol' Sam. He's always a good source of quotes for the practicing cynic.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: I was once rushed to a meeting...

"No, that was definitely an autocorrect, but I'll take it."

Turn that crap off.

I just noticed that when I intended to type "friend", I typed "fiend". Of course "fiend" is a real word so the spell checker didn't flag it. It's no longer in the computer's dictionary until the next time I update so it will be flagged the next time I do that. I've been making changes to the spell checker so real words that I'd almost never use will be highlighted and I can manually decide if that's what I wanted to type or if I'm having especially fat fingers/brain farts that day.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: I was once rushed to a meeting...

"edit - then invoice them, individually, for "emergency remediation work" at an appropriate rate (I'd suggest £1,000 per item)"

If you are an outside provider. Otherwise, there's going to be a whole load of overtime to get everything processed quickly in addition to needing to bring in some extra people (friends, SO's, etc) on danger money. If you have to, you can take the OT "in kind" so you can take paid days off when you know there's some days you really don't want to be in the office/on the same continent. Of course, your friends and significant others will be getting paid so they can stand most of the rounds wherever you decide to hole up.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Oh yeah !

"Fit them with those detonator caps, by all means !"

I'm not happy that links for those wasn't provided in the article. I can see how they would be very useful and worth the time to research the best ones to buy (through several dummy accounts) and some coupons for cleaning supplies, but my salary only supports a certain amount of waking time at work per day.

Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime

MachDiamond Silver badge

"What I meant was if the phone needs to act as a phone, I.E. sending or receiving calls or SMS messages, which can't be done without a valid number."

I've had that issue. Any company that requires their services to be accessed with a phone and won't work with a desktop/laptop is being silly. I used to have text/messaging disabled at my telco, but my new provider won't do that. For me, all of it is a waste of time. It's only useful 2-3 times a year and I could work around that. I expect that companies could figure out how to manage 2FA things with just a couple of humans in the loop. Does the phone posting the fake feedback have to be the one getting sent the security code? If that's not a requirement, it's just a matter of coordination. It makes the process more expensive, but not impossible.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"The obvious reason is if you need to use cellular connections. If you need active phone numbers,"

That's the rub. Often you don't need to go through a cellular service since many phones will work via wifi especially for data. If necessary, the phone can have a SIM with a duff number since it won't be required to access a cellular network that would reject it. The unique IMEI and other numbers will be what matters. If the phone will work via wifi, it will work through a hardline connection so you wind up not broadcasting incriminating radio waves. Even reused IP addresses aren't a problem. If each rack of 20 phones has one IP number, each phone in the rack is doing something discrete from the others. Perhaps it's not a problem to have 2-3 phones with the same IP number since that's what might happen with an internet cafe/public access point. So 2 phones in one rack are posting fake Amazon feedback and another couple are building up eBay accounts. Each rack allocates a certain number of phones per task multiplied by as many racks as a firm wants to run so there's an array of IP addresses being reported.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: 1,000 smartphones all hard at work

"I think those halcyon days of just going to the hotel vending machine and getting a SIM along with a snack are well behind us (....and that was in the UK)."

Then it's down to the corner shop for same. It's handy to have a "burner" SIM when traveling to a different country. You get a local number to use while there and that's often less than the 30 days it might be good for. If you are bouncing across the Atlantic, you don't want calls on one side finding you on the other. The bills could become rather astounding.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: maybe it's time Word Processors got smart enough to fix this sort of stuff

"I went through a phase of training most admin staff at a few London hospitals in how to do things properly. Nowadays nobody seems to care anymore."

There comes a point where all of the changes that keep getting made are done for change's sake and make no sense. Instead of making things easier, it makes one sit down and learn a piece of software they'd been using for ages all over again. There's software I use that is quirky, to say the least. The trouble at this point is I've used it for so long I can get things done quickly with it. If they actually fixed the glaring issues and polished up the UI, that would slow me way down again and probably at a time when I've changed/updated my computer and all sorts of things are different. eBay has been really bad with this. Every "improvement" to their selling UI adds another couple of levels of pages and removes information that, while rather staid, was easy to parse a whole bunch of things at a glance with the old layout. The one thing I keep requesting that never materializes is a "blocked seller" list so I can make sure that I never buy something again from certain sellers in the same way I can block buyers who are a PITA.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"When I looked at changing jobs and the application process seemed unconnected with getting the right person"

The problem is companies think that hiring has to go through HR rather than the old way of the department head handling it. The problem is that HR people live in a bubble that excludes knowing what those jobs require, what the company does and, apparently, don't know much about their own jobs to boot. I have a folder of job postings with such glaring errors that I'd never want to work with those firms. If they care so little about that sort of thing, I imagine that working there would be like a room full of chimps hurling feces all over. The bigger the company, the worse the problem. The last large company I worked for never understood that I wasn't "requesting" a day off, I was letting them know I wasn't going to be in that day. The HR people had the opinion they were in charge of my life and where I had to be each day.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"No it isn't because that would just be someone else deciding how I should format my docs and I don't need to be bugged every five seconds cos I don't do things the way that a programmer who never uses the product beyond the odd five-page write-up decides. "

I think that some of the developers don't realize that every industry and even sub-industries have a traditional way of formatting documentation. It's no use fighting those systems as you don't endear yourself to everybody else so it's wiser to just shut up and go with the flow. Just look at what a mess legal documents are. It's archaic and don't get me started on patent drawings. After all of that, look at what the city/county might want in formatting on a solar installation you propose to put on your house. It's like they tried to dumb down technical documentation and came up with something that makes no sense to anybody, but it must be done that way or they'll send it all back and charge you to resubmit it again. The software just needs to let you decide how to format something and provide tools to make that easy and the ability to save the formatting as a template.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"I thought so too, However, the website has a placeholder for a possible WIN binary download link http://www.gnumeric.org/download.html with the clear and consize "We do not currently release or distribute Windows binaries." The "currently" bit, however, leaves a tiny spark of hope. At the same time, it seems to build a lot on GNOME, which, as far as I know, is not a part of the WIN ecosystem :)"

When I started in aerospace it was a small company and I elected to BYO on my computer. I set up a Mac Pro and the others looked at me sideways until they saw me running Windows..... and Linux........and MacOS, easily switching between them at will with copy/paste intact across VM's. It allowed me to choose the best applications for what I was doing while also using things such as Solidworks which was our CAD application. SVN was a bit of a Kludge having to be 3 separate commits, but it got to be habit so no itch.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"Calc does not work well for the analysis and visualisation of bulk data such as traction battery pack charge and discharge curves."

I use Igor. Excel couldn't deal with really large data sets so I found this some years ago and it works well for that. We used it to analyze all of the telemetry data we'd get from rocket flights.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

+1 more for LibreOffice

It's been working great for me. I imagine that if I had very special formatting needs such as what blood sucking lawyers use, M$ might be the only (damnit) option. Not that LibreOffice couldn't do it, but access to templates/forms might be an issue if they use M$ only functions. The crap that 99.9999% of people never need, so isn't a big deal if alternatives leave them out.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Chinese kids won't be voting for a US president any time soon."

Yeah, about that........

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: On every level: no

"Musk like Bezos will say anything just to get contracts from the us gov."

Blue Origin has had one contract for ~~ $165mn other than the contract for building a lunar lander now that it's obvious SpaceX hasn't a chance in hell of delivering on time/ever. Jeff has been funding BO out of his own pocket by selling Amazon stock. He doesn't need to beg for money from the government to keep the doors open.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: On every level: no

"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space. Progress has been so slow that he is likely to die of old age before we find out if this is genuine intent or just public relations."

Jeff is big on that as Gerard K. O'neil was one of his professors. Whether Jeff thinks it's possible within his lifetime is far different than Elon promising there will be a manned colony on Mars in a couple of years. Of course, Elon promised that years ago and the first of the 100 person Starships should have been on its way by this year, at least.