Posts by jake

Re: Engineer vs. Business mentality

Back in my day, the conversation went something like this:

Management: MARKETING SEZ WE GOTTA SHIP IT!!!!

Engineer: Sorry, it's not ready to ship. I'm not signing off on it.

Marketing: BUT YOU HAVE TO! WE HAVE ADVERTISING READY!!!

Engineer: Ok, Marketing, YOU sign off on it.

Marketing: BUT WE'RE NOT QUALIFIED TO DO THAT!!!

Management: Now, now, Engineer. Be nice to Marketing. They have ADVERTISING!!!

Engineer: Then you sign off on it, Management. I'm not going to.

Management: We could FIRE you for this insurrection!!!

Engineer: Go ahead. Then you'll never have a working product.

Management: ::sputter::

Management: OK, WE'LL HIRE NEWLY MINTED ENGINEERS TO SIGN OFF!

Marketing: Yeah! That's EXACTLY what we'll do! (BTW, what does "sign off" mean?).

Management: (It's a technical term. I don't really get it either. Don't worry about it.)

Marketing: (Thank heavens for that. Ignoring technical stuff is easy for me.)

Engineer: Good luck with that, guys. I'm taking early retirement. Have fun.

RIP, DEC

Re: You feel "old", huh?

I have a copy of an invoice for an 18Meg drive that set my customer back $4,200 in July of 1980. It was a North Star HD-18, plugged into a parallel port on a North Star Horizon to supplement the overloaded two year old stock 5Meg drive. The system ran a proprietary, home-built inventory and invoicing system for a local indy auto parts store in Mountain View, California. A guy from North Star arrived with the unit to swap out firmware, update the OS, and make other changes so the machine would accept the second drive ... there was no charge for his services, including travel from Berkeley. It worked quite well for about a decade, when I upgraded them to a Coherent based system, which was followed by a Slackware system about 10 years later.

In 1981, Apple debuted their first HDD, 5 megs for $3500.

In 1986 my Sun server had a bottomless pit of a drive for user space. It was a 300 megabyte CDC Wren IV SCSI drive. It cost US$14,000 ... that's just the drive, mind. The computer cost around $65K. (The "user" was a database archiving network statistics, if anybody's wondering.)

Re: The Old Engineer and the Hammer

I am fully aware of that.

Do you always make a point of explaining jokes?

Some of us are old enough to have received pay packets containing old money ...

_{Except we just called it "money" back then ...}

As an IT consultant, I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me". Or, as I tell prospective new clients "It's my job to ensure we see as little of each other as possible".

A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although about four years ago a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly with a screwdriver.

Re: The Old Engineer and the Hammer

I heard it thus:

Giving telly a thump, 6d ... Knowing where to thump it, 19/6 ... knowing how hard, "That'll be a guinea, guv."

The rest is for the service call.

_{I'm a bloody Yank ... and that was Grandad's joke, told in a Yorkshire accent!}

Re: So... an idea like the engine a certain L. of Q. invented?

Tungsten's paramagnetic, so yes.

However, I suspect the added complexity, part replacement schedule and cost of electricity would make the idea a non-starter in this application. ICBW.

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

"Is there a particular temperature at which a septic turns into a Canadian?"

I think you'll find the answer is somewhere North of 49 degrees.

Re: Where can I get me one...

Bump stocks don't work if you demand anything resembling accuracy. Somehow I don't think a fusion reactor is the place for spray&pray.

_{Actually, bump stocks are for idiots trying to look "cool". They fail. Badly.}

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

The lasers are for guidance, not cutting.

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

I doubt anything will be septic after you heat it to 932F.

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

You don't have to go deep for thermal. The GSHPs that heat/cool this place have the coils buried in three loops, twenty, thirty and forty feet down ... and that was way over-kill for my needs at the time. I just wanted to ensure that expansion would be possible in the future, without digging another bloody great hole in the ground. Note that you can always go vertical if you need to minimize horizontal footprint.

Why building codes don't insist on GSHP technology for HVAC and water heating/cooling needs in all new buildings, world-wide, is beyond me. Best thing since sliced bread, in my book.

Before anyone says it, our place in the high desert in Nevada (above 5,000 ft) uses nothing but GSHP for air and water temperature control ... summers get over 115 degrees, winters can drop to 10 below (both F, in C that would be 46 to -23). Indoor temperatures are maintained at 70F (21C) 24/7, year 'round. Power for fans and pumps is provided by solar and battery, with a small generator to charge the battery in stormy weather. TCO is on the order of a couple bucks per month over the projected life of the system (including battery and solar panel upgrades ... the generator, a little 2KW Honda, as used and maintained, should outlive me ... and doubles as portable power in an emergency).

Re: So... an idea like the engine a certain L. of Q. invented?

"Further down they note it takes 3kg of gunpowder - I assume per firing...."

That's an awful lot of powder ...

My favorite .308 varminter (Model 700, old, not flashy, but very, very functional) can push a 220 grain Hornaday ELD-X bullet down an aftermarket 26" barrel at around 2500fps using 58gr of powder. Chamber pressures (calculated, not measured) are probably just under 60,000 PSI.

N.B. This is NOT a recommendation for your own handloading adventures! Always approach extremes like this slowly, and with great caution. Here be dragons. Really. You could kill yourself, and that would be sad. Be careful out there.

Re: I'd rather see HB11's fusion scheme work

Let me know when you've got that containment problem worked out.

Re: "the gun would shoot a projectile every 30 seconds"

The Gatling gun in your common or garden A-10 is belt fed. The belt's motor driven, but it's a belt nonetheless. With a modern electric motor driving it, I'll bet you could get more than adequate timing.

Re: Long Shot

It's ten years now because they've used computers to shave 20 years of sliderule time off the piddly little details.

Eh?

Shirley firing tungsten into pretty much anything at 14,540 mph will generate plenty of light. I sure as hell wouldn't want to watch it without adequate eyeball protection.

"It constantly amazes me that those in government that are responsible for regulating this stuff haven't the wit to understand even the basics of the reality of how it works, even with the world's foremost experts on any given subject patiently explaining it to them in words of as few syllables as possible."

FTFY

Re: We live in a world where con artists rule the day.

The UN still exists? Who knew?

Re: We live in a world where con artists rule the day.

"It wasn't human life, however."

You say that like it's a bad thing.

"I thought we had a monopoly in short-sighted backwards ignorant jingoistic idiots in England"

Good gawd/ess, no!

Sadly, iIt's quite common in all locations that HomoSap has infected.

Re: Tesla

"even something from British Leyland circa 1973"

You're either dating yourself or that's hearsay.

Re: Tesla

To be fair, pretty much anything vintage vs Tesla, and I'll take the vintage option. Teslas are boring.

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Probably not le Rosbeef ... it's a dairy herd, remember?

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Here at the Ranch, all the critters are chipped. Not to run the automatic milker (I don't have/need one), but rather because I'd like to get them back if they are lost, stolen, or strayed.

"so this guy is actually a... let me see if I can get this right - éleveur-exploitant. Or something like that."

Here in the States, the phrase is "pretentious twat" for people like that. They usually call themselves "gentleman farmers". I'm just a farmer. Or Rancher, depending on the mood the IRS is in this year.

Re: Why?

Partaking of too much Yank rot-gut?

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

And the string section?

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Tucows was outstanding in its field, roughly through the '90s.

Re: Not quite...

Mine would be The Dish, at Stanford.

Re: Support as a route to programming

I did tech support all through Uni (on and off) to help pay the bills. One of the companies I worked for tried to hire me as a programmer as soon as I got my first degree.

_{Sadly for them, I had other fish to fry ...}

Re: Assembler, machine-code and PAPER

Regardless, in ther right hands, a fan-fold printer off a parallel port is still one of the best debugging tools I know of.

Re: Never risk it

"Did you create your own precautionary extra account whilst you were about it?"

Mine was built into login. Wasn't yours?

_{This may or may not be apocryphal, depending on context ...}

Re: a massive 456MB of RAM

One of my PDP11s can run 4.2BSD off a 456Meg DEC RA81, perhaps that's the drive you remember? Mine says it was made in October of '82.

Interestingly, I also have a copy of the RA81's baby brother, the 124 meg RA80, which was released in January of '82 ... For many years, this was the single largest percentage leap in size between successive generations of HDD capacity on a given model/type of drive.

"But that is not really a good reason."

As soon as I invent my time machine I'll be sure to go back and let K&R know that you'll disapprove at some point in the future. I'm absolutely certain they will ignore me. As they should.

Re: C of the '80s

Thus the "Portable" component of the name.

All these mewling naysayers attempting to downplay C by claiming "its just the PDP11's architecture" tend to forget that C was designed to port UNIX to pretty much any platform. It is still doing a rather nice job of (almost) precisely that, 50 years on.

Not all things need retiring due to age ... The wax seal under your bog is probably over forty years old, are you planning on replacing it any time soon? When was the last time you replaced your soil-stack? The pipe that supplies freshwater to your house? Your upstairs plumbing? When stuff is built right the first time, for the job at hand, with properly selected parts, there is little need to replace it, until things really go pear-shaped.

Contrary to popular belief, C hasn't yet gone pear-shaped.

The quality of programmers being churned out by the STEMinistas, on the other hand, has changed the ratio of good to bad programmers into a mockery of what it once was.

It ain't the tool that's b0rken, it's the tool wielders.

Re: Does really a single application promote innovation?

And sometimes successful forks and the mainstream merge into a better for everybody whole.

Re: KISS 2: Generic Code

Little known fact: Sendmail's configuration language is Turing Complete.

So naturally, I had to write a C compiler in it, just to prove to myself that I could.

It's slow, ugly, cantankerous, and has few polished edges ... but it works.

_{I'm sure you'll pardon me for never updating it past C89 ...}

Re: "Any fool can write a language"

Only because most COBOL programmers have been coding a lot longer than most C programmers. One tends to learn some things along the way.

_{This used to be true ... these days, I'm not so sure anymore.}