Posts by anothercynic

Re: Glad I'm retired

Well, the rumours and concerns about the 787s, particularly the ones built in South Carolina, have been around for years. There've been several whistleblowers (including the one recently who 'committed suicide') over the years about that.

And it's claimed that build quality at one point was so shoddy that Qatar Airways' CEO at the time, Akbar Al-Baker, famously gave Boeing the ultimatum that he would categorically not accept delivery of *any* Qatar Airways 787 built in South Carolina until they'd a) sorted the problem, b) proved it was solved (and didn't apply to his jets), and c) guaranteed it wouldn't happen again. Boeing shifted the airline's orders from Charlotte to Seattle to make the man happy. To be fair, as much as Al-Baker was a monumental pain in the ass for the aircraft manufacturers, he also had good reason given that he wanted Qatar to have the best airline on the planet with the best quality equipment (and ask Airbus sometime about his tiff with them over the A350... monumental).

Other airlines clearly happily swallowed Boeing's explanations, just like they did for the subsequent issues of quality control in both South Carolina and Washington. A year or two ago, Boeing shifted *all* 787 manufacturing to South Carolina (which frees up factory floor space in Washington for expansion of the 737 lines, and the 777-X and 767 tanker programmes), so *any* 787 in recent years from the -8 to the -10 could have the issues being raised.

Those who think that Airbus has similar problems, no they don't, because Airbus has a couple more decades of experience with this kind of manufacturing than Boeing does. The concept of JIT manufacturing in aviation and pulling parts from different factories across the globe was pretty much pioneered by the company from the very beginning. Unfortunately Airbus withdrew a book written about its history from Amazon, or others would've been able to read about the amount of engineering effort and machinations behind that core manufacturing tenet in the company.

Re: Irony

Ukraine doesn't fire drones at Zaporizhzhia, a) because they know it's absolutely monumentally stupid to do so, and b) they'd like to actually have it back at some point in a working state when this war ends.

If anyone does stupid stuff, it's more likely to be Russia (even though they have control of the plant at the moment).

Rust is probably in the headline because it was probably found in Rust first, and then the person discovering it tried other languages (such as Go, Erlang and Python) to see if they also were vulnerable to it. The CVE certainly implies that (it's registered against Rust).

I don't see Perl mentioned (which *also* runs on Windows), but it is safe to assume that Perl would have similar issues.

And yes, CMD and the way the batch interpreter within it do parameter parsing is... interesting. This is what happens when you take POSIX-esque things and graft them onto things that come from DOS, which in turn borrowed things from other OSes, including other POSIX-compliant and -non-compliant ones.

Re: Vampire Kangaroo

My thoughts exactly - "ooooooooeerr, Macquarie? That can only go south".

Re: Buzzfeed

The Epson LX-400 dot matrix printer in Windows TTF mode was a LOUD mother trucker. It used to get me in trouble with the other people on my floor in my uni res... Until I pointed out that if they didn't like it, they could always not come to me with requests to print their fancy assignments... :-)

To be fair though - It *was* noisy, even with a pillow over the printer head enclosure.

Re: As a long time Amazon customer...

Absolutely, I have to agree that there is bias in the search.

Regarding the waste heat, I had the same thought - Just pump this through your central heating... it'll probably cost less than a heat pump ;-)

Re: Pentagon thinks!

$2.5 billion is pocket change for them. ;-)

Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

Until one escapes... All it takes is one escapee to breed. I wouldn't quite point at Jurassic Park (since that was frog DNA that supposedly allowed the dinos to change sex in a single-sex environment), but the point is the same. Ditto the analogy of another poster about the rabbits in Australia. Oh, and the cane toads (they were not for shooting, but they also bred like... er... the rabbits, and are now a pest in much of Oz).

Biosecurity is a big deal. Don't ever think of taking anything of biological origin that is not biologically inert to the Antipodes without declaring/quarantining it... you *will* be fined/prosecuted for endangering the biodiversity of the country you're visiting. Same goes for some African countries with concerns about F&M and other diseases that spread via dirt/spores.

Ahhh yes, rigged skills assessments... the classic thing that American managers love to use too.

Speaking from past experience.

Re: isnt this normal for HP ?

And that said, a Juniper shareholder who clearly doesn't understand share classes. By the sounds of it, he just realised that as a public shareholder his shares are just there for funding, not for anything substantial. I'd love to see him get shares in Meta and try this on with the Zuck (who has shares with the vast majority of voting rights). :-)

Re: Jazz Cabbage

I must admit that's the first time I've heard that... its brother "dagga" on the other hand...

Re: Query: the timing of ads

Current. Spooks producers revealed in one of the extras in the early Spooks DVDs that they had to shoot with the US and UK satellite/cable markets in mind, i.e. with 46-50 minutes of 'real' content, and then ten minutes of stuff that fleshed out some things for the Beeb.

I always found that the Beeb episodes made more sense, because the 'filler', as you call it, actually added context that was simply not there in US episodes of 'MI:5' (the name of Spooks in the US).

Chloe, that is a distinct problem in larger cities... I can only commiserate. And if you're in a major thoroughfare (like a major road, or where a lot of pedestrians walk), you can't simply have a charger installed and pull your cable through a window (I've seen this here though). That needs dealing with first before the death of ICEVs is announced and celebrated.

Re: Major major cock-up

This was picked up and fixed at BOEING, so it's Boeing who needs to carry the blame. And I'm waiting for the CEO's little sideways jibe at Spirit to be walked back too.

Re: Am I reading this correctly?

This is also why I refuse to migrate to 'cloud-hosted' solutions like LastPass or the new 1Password services. Nope, nope, nope.

Re: is to gradually push less

Damn those Boxer engines... ;-)

Re: Fushitesu

IS. And ALSO. Fujitsu is also responsible.

Re: Douglas X-3 Stiletto, anybody?

Yes, they've done basics in wind tunnels and yes, you can do a lot of number crunching with CFD. BUT - Nothing beats testing the theory out in real terms with real objects going fast and going BOOM.

Re: Building software is hard...

I have never been confused about HS2.

HS2 has always been a good project. Why? Because it creates *capacity*, something the Victorian-era railway corridors heading north don't have. If you've ever gone on a rail journey from Paddington, Marylebone, St Pancras, Euston or Kings Cross (or Liverpool Street, for that matter), you'll notice how close the built-up areas are to the rail tracks. Often it's only 4 tracks, maybe you have 6 if Overground or the Tube happen to be nearby. The Chilterns are the only real corridor left with some space (and yes, unfortunately, it's greenbelt land and thus should not be built on).

The media plays everyone like a fiddle. Those complaining for environmental reasons missed the point of the project because the media concentrated on the "look, we'll be in Birmingham 15 minutes faster" speed angle more instead of the environmental benefits like "we'll be there faster, but the towns inbetween get better local stopping services because there's more capacity on existing lines, and boy will we be able to pull lorries off the roads by shoving their cargo on trains!" - The former sells papers better than the latter. The constant whining introduced uncertainty, and yes, the councils and politicians protesting against HS2 crossing their constituencies didn't help much either. Unfortunately, several MPs are of the Tory persuasion and used their shmoozing powers to persuade others in their party to vote against various things, and also persuaded the men with the money to start cutting the cost of it. Bizarrely, there are enough local politicians of both camps up North who fully appreciate the benefits HS2 was going to deliver to their areas, only for them to get shafted by their own MPs in Westminster!!

It's a travesty. We deserve the railways we have because we want the best but refuse to pay for them. No, they are meant to magically manifest out of thin air with no environmental impact and money off the magic money tree!

*smirk* And which blue are you? ;-)

Re: Believing office gossip....

Ironically, I recently saw a clip from some podcast where they spoke to a white bloke from Jamaica (I think he was a rapper or something), where he explained that it was hard to persuade people that yes, Jamaica has white people and yes, they do speak with the Jamaican creole lilt, and that no, he was not taking the mickey.

I can fully appreciate that given that one *can* be from Africa and not be black, or not be white and not speak in a specific accent, but rather cut glass Queen's English. It's surprising (well it shouldn't be, this is the problem with stereotypes) how sticky (or persistent, if you prefer) stereotypes are!

Aaaactually, it's to cozy up to the Pentagon. They give the company more money...

Re: Door plug flies off mid-flight ö

It's not a plug door because it isn't one. It's a plug. It's installed and fixed in place by bolts.