Fail fast
Maybe the software was smarter than we thought and the bug was that the negative altitude reading overwrote the original target altitude of zero.
Posts by larryk78
13 publicly visible posts • joined 4 May 2013
'Data saturation' helped to crash the Schiaparelli Mars probe
Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one
You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors
Microsoft: Even cheapo Lumias to get slimmed down Windows 10
Monday 9th February 2015 16:10 GMT 
No such thing as "future proof" hardware
Any moderately capable programmer knows that you have to respect the constraints of your environment. Failure to keep your peak RAM usage under the available physical RAM will lead to paging. When that happens, performance and user experience deteriorate.
Meanwhile, for an OS to have an identical feature set on every possible target device would mean developing for the lowest common denominator. That would mean building the experience for $50 phones, original purchase prices of older generations of hardware notwithstanding.
Being able to flex the feature set to maximise yet not degrade system resources on multiple hardware platforms is not just common sense, it's business sense. Dropping out RAM-hungry features on older hardware is what all software vendors do when providing upgrades for older hardware. Not news.
What could possibly go wrong? Banks could provide ID assurance for Gov.UK – report
Sunday 7th September 2014 09:42 GMT
Re: Meh
A human rights issue? What a load of sensationalist codswallop. Shame on you for polluting the environment for actual human rights issues by proclaiming false ones.
Yes, not everyone has Internet banking. So what. That's not the only way to access government services (it's not even the only way to login to a government website, before you go spouting off about having to queue at staff-cut-affected offices).
Being able to login with Internet bank credentials is just a sensible convenience.
Friday 5th September 2014 08:25 GMT
Meh
I moved to Helsinki a year ago and this is standard practice. The Finnish banks have been handling identity for government websites for years. And it's nothing about personal data. It's just your internet banking login used as a secure delegated access (think OAuth2) rather than creating yet another insecure username/password combo. In fact, it's pretty much the same as clicking the Login with Facebook/Google/Twitter button on any other website, except your bank probably has multifactor authentication (token generator, codebook, etc.).
Feminist Software Foundation gets grumpy with GitHub … or does it?
How to spot a coders comment
Sleek Nokia Lumia details EXPOSED ahead of Thursday's disrobing
Wednesday 10th July 2013 08:17 GMT
Get a grip on your massive storage requirements
Why on God's green earth would you need more than 32GB of internal storage on a cameraphone?
I have a "prosumer" DSLR with a 32GB card and have never even come close to filling it, even with thousands of photos taken over many months and being a ridiculously lazy bastard when it comes to offloading onto my computer.
Even if you also install hundreds of apps, dump gigs of mp3s and full-length movies and install offline map data for multiple countries on there, provided you do actually offload your photos once in a while, you won't use all 32GB.
The only silly choice here would be to not offload your photos. If you're "that" kind of person, remember to turn on the auto-upload and I really hope you don't lose your phone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
