Posts by Saruman the White

Re: PSU fun

At the start of this century I was a part of a team developing a highly specialised network simulator for a customer. The network that the simulator supported also included RF (SATCOM) components, and the simulator was designed to calculate the intermodulation products that all of the various RF carriers generated. The simulator was actually quite a beast; written in Java with a lot of work put in to optimise it, but with some settings you could more-or-less see the JVM (and the PC it was running on) scream.

The customer originally was planning on installing the simulator on a desktop machine running a mid-range single-core Intel processor. However when they saw the simulator running in the lab they decided to upgrade the target platform to use a dual-processor SMP motherboard with higher-specification Intel processors. This was 100% a customer decision, we did not recommend the upgrade, or (to be honest) gave it any thought at all - our responsibility stopped when we delivered a working simulator.

Eventually the day of the initial delivery dawned, and I went to the customer site, installed the simulator, and ran the delivery checks that verified that everything was OK. Customer sign-off of the delivery was obtained, and everyone was happy at that point.

About a week later we got an e-mail from the customer say that the simulator was causing their desktop machine to blow up! Off I went to the customer site, to be greeted by a very irate representative who proceeded to demonstrate how, when they ran a test scenario on the simulator, the desktop machine it was running on would shut itself down with extreme prejudice after about 20 seconds. I checked the simulator software that we had delivered - no problems. I then asked, casually, whether they had upgrade the desk machine's PSU when they upgraded the processors - I got about 30 seconds of silence before a muttered "Oh shit ..." was heard.

We never had any further problems with the delivered system.

Re: "When we see the landscape at Jezero Crater for the first time"

... before the area is covered with a green mist ...

Re: Is this Fraud?

It certainly seems pretty close to it at first glance. Registering a .uk on behalf of a third party without their explicit permission, then sending out letters demanding money to renew the unwanted domains is definitely something that the police might get interested in, particularly if enough people/companies complained. In fact if the amount of money heading into their coffers is enough, it could bring the SFO into play.

Re: Not quite the same...

I can remember doing a summer programming job when I was at university for a certain company (I'll leave their name out of it - you can try to guess). One of the full-time programmers wanted a print out of an application he was working on. However this was on an IBM 370 running CICS - one of the most evil systems around. Anyway said programmer submitted the print job, but managed to miss the print queue and hit a punched card queue instead. He ended up with an 18 inch stack of punch cards on the corner of his desk and a very bemused expression on his face.

Those where the days ....

Re: Optional?

Let them mandate it, I will not put it on my phone no matter what they say or do.

Re: "more than a dozen initiatives focused on enhancing workplace safety and product quality"

Boeing don't need FAA clearance to build the planes. They do, however need clearance to fly the plane commercially - this is something that I believe they are unlikely to get in the near term.

Re: I, as President, will not allow it to happen!

As the Texans would say: Trump is all hat and no cattle.

Re: Stelios & EGM

Accusations are easy for Stelios to make. Maybe he should ante up some evidence to support his claims.

Re: An excellent result

I prefer boiling in oil - slowly, paying lots of attention to all of the very sensitive bits.

Nothing is too much for a patent troll.

Re: Privacy and data ownership are critical for wide support

I will not be installing this app on my phone under any circumstances, even if they try to make it mandatory. If they try to prosecute me, I'll use the Human Rights Act on the basis that my phone is my private property, and HMG has no authority to tell me what I should, and should not, have installed on it.

Re: Even easier to get wrong with Sun optical mice

Thanks for the reminder. I've spent the last 2+ decades trying to forget about them.

Re: Honest question....

Generally satellites destined for GEO are initially launched into LEO, then (once everything is checked out) moved to a transfer orbit before finally ending up in its GEO slot. A GEO satellite can spend up to 2 weeks in LEO, sometimes longer if there is a problem, hence the increased risk.

Re: As it happens I've got a Webex tomorrow morning

As it happens I have being doing 4 or 5 Webex sessions every afternoon since the start of April; tomorrow finally wrapping up the last one. However I have to agree; clunky, unsophisticated, but it does work.

Re: Fraudsters will likely clone the app

And seldom disappointed I suspect.

Re: Admiral Grace Hopper to post in 3, 2, 1...

Admiral Hopper died 1st January 1992. RIP.

I have just replaced my printer at home (which I also use for business purposes) which had basically worn out after 10 years. HP was never even on my list of acceptable replacements. I settled on nice big Epson printer, and am more than happy with it.

Re: Paranoid Android

It also does not work if you simply don't download and install the app.

I suspect that trying to force it on to everyone's phone without explicit permission (which is effectively granted by someone actively installing the application) is going to result in HMG being taken to court for breach of privacy.

Re: Mindset

When I was a research student (several decades ago) I used to take tutorials on COBOL for under- and post-grads. I loved to start the first tutorial comparing a C "Hello World" to a COBOL one. Made people realise that you actually had to think to be a COBOL programmer.

Oh yes - the reason why I took those tutorials? I was the only other person in the Comp Sci dept (apart from the lecturer in charge of the COBOL course) who had any sort of practical experience in COBOL. Or at least, the only one who admitted to it :-)

Very probably, although it is possible that there is a resonance between it's orbital period and it's rotational period. Mercury has exactly that (a 3:2 resonance).

Yep, it was. Then they realised that their Most Hated Foe (at least for Rugby and Cricket) might actually be on to something.

Re: wait, what?

GCHQ operates in a purely advisory role in this case; it is the Cabinet Office which is actually responsible for providing secure communications links. As I understand it, GCHQ heard that Zoom was going to be used and basically blew a gasket in response, however the Cabinet Office ignored them and went ahead anyway. the rest, unfortunately, is history.

Re: Battery

The question is: who is the cattle prod being applied to?

Re: Signal?

Pretty much the same here.

Implementing these measures is pretty easy in countries that are heavily urbanised, and where good mobile signal coverage is pretty much taken for granted. Achieving the same result in countries with significant rural communities who have poor and/or erratic signal strength is going to be more of a challenge, and attempting to improve the rural coverage (by putting up more base stations) is not going to be a viable option since it will simply take too long to do.

Re: I was particularly amused...

Blame management. He has someone to sack when it all goes runny on him.

I have always held to the view that any other that sounds too good to be true, probably is just that!

I have rarely found any evidence to contradict this.

Re: The Deep Space Climate Observatory

Yeah, but he had 18 months with little else to listen to. That would be enough to drive you completely around the twist.

Re: Let's face it

First problem with that statement: there is no American made kit. At alternatives are Nokia or Ericsson, both Nordic.

Re: How mental is Texas?

The only question here is, can Texas field a sane judge?

Do you really need to ask this question?

Re: Capability Maturity Model ?

Unfortunately CMM turned out to basically be a fad - once the bean counters realised just how expensive it was to implement (a company like Boeing would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get to Level 5) they very quitely dropped it.

This and the 737-Max fiasco has me thinking that Boeing is starting to suffer from a hardening of the corporate arteries. Management have lost sight of what the company actually does (aircraft, spacecraft, ...) and have become far too concerned with the bottom line. As a result of this shortcuts are being made in the engineering (software, mechanical, ...) that are having major Safety of Life implications. The only solution may be a radical overhaul of corporate management, starting at the top and working down to the bottom: the corporate equivalent of "nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure".

Re: Where will the bits go?

There are 3,600 seconds in an hour. 3000 m/s = 3 km/s, multiple it by 3,600 results in 10,800 km/h.

180 km/h = 50 m/s