Posts by Dom 3

Re: The coders are dead! Long live the coders!

"Coding is the process of telling the machine what to do."

Good code tells the next human to look at it (or yourself

a few months down the line) what it is you are telling

the machine to do.

Re: Why

https://msis.jsc.nasa.gov/sections/section14.htm says equipment is to be tethered at all times.

If you've disconnected both at the same time it's a breach of procedure.

It doesn't take much to enter "thrust ssc cockpit view" into a well-known video site and you will see that certainly in 1997 there was a *hell* of a lot of vehicle control involved to ensure that it didn't just turn into a massive fireball. Perhaps these days such a beast might have a bit of computer aided steering but the rules don't allow it: http://bloodhound1.efar.co.uk/project/car/controls/steering

Plausible nonsense

"The English Electric Lightning was a supersonic fighter aircraft developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the British aircraft manufacturer English Electric. It served as an interceptor for the Royal Air Force (RAF) and was known for its impressive speed and climb rate.

The Lightning was capable of reaching speeds of over Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) and had a unique vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability."

Re: perhaps

GPS status works for me: lat, long, altitude, speed, direction, in fact oodles of information. Free with unobtrusive ads. No data connection needed.

Re: Ingenuity's initial mission called for just five flights,...

It's in the maths. I've said it before but here goes again... if you want to make sure that the thing as a whole will last the initial mission duration with 95% probability, then each subsystem (let's say six of them) needs a 99% chance of getting there. In which case there's an 80% chance (whatever) of lasting ten (whatever) times longer. Particularly with the rovers - jammed wheel? Drive backwards.

Obvs helicopter more of a go / no-go situation.

Still, it's marvellous that a technology demonstrator has been turned into a useful instrument.

Re: Unique keys

In Spain, no such thing as a maiden name - women do not change their surnames (and why should they?). So in general use you use the first (your father's first) and if being more formal add the second (your mother's first). So many systems there assumed that my middle name was my surname. But my favourite was signing up with Renfe (railways) for a Points card - I got a PDF to download and print which was in the name of... John Smith NULL

Re: Just?

I've said it before with respect to the rovers: if you want a 98% chance (or whatever) of the system as a whole achieving the initial goal, then each subsystem needs to be engineered to have a 99.5% chance (or whatever) of lasting that long. Given that, it's quite likely that it will continue way beyond the initial mission. Particularly if it can carry on with a failure - e.g. dragging a broken wheel behind it. A helicopter pretty much needs everything to be working, though. It's still *very* impressive that a technology demonstrator has turned into an important scientific tool.

Re: UAPs, previously known as UFOs

It's "unidentified anomalous phenomenon", and therefore covers a $thing observed underwater as well as $things in the air.

I'm surprised this article hasn't trotted out the infamous Pentagon videos - gofast, gimbal, etc.

I watched one Youtube video about one of these showing how the HUD info (speed, bank, etc) combined with a bit of maths was more than sufficient to show that the UAP was *entirely* consistent with a weather balloon at lower altitude. I didn't bother with the rest.

The *real* mystery is how come the Pentagon's boffins couldn't do this and end up getting shown up by some random Youtuber.

Obvs., lack of mobile phone vids and pics is cos the visitors from Tannhäuser Gate disable electronics in the vicinity. Unsurprising, cars conking out and so on are a common theme in reports of close encounters of the second kind and are in fact part of what classifies it as "second kind".

I suspect most commentards are like me - would *love* to see something dead weird, but utterly unconvinced that anything's ever happened that couldn't be explained - in normal terrestrial terms - with sufficient data.

If you want a giggle, find a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spaceships_of_Ezekiel, the cover of which is a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Re: Saying the US can't do it now?

"For spy flights we can do that much more cheapily, and with zero risk using satellites" - the entire SR71 fleet (32 of them) cost a total of one billion dollars. If we assume that's 1966 dollars, multiply by ten. One KH-11 satellite costs about 3 billion. Satellites are nowhere near as flexible as aircraft - they are pretty predictable and if you are Terry Taliban you know what time of day to stay in your cave.

"Concorde [...] never made a profit" - BA certainly ran it at an *operating* profit, once they'd found out that the passengers had no idea what their tickets cost.

"The schedules looked funny in California if they all used Chicago time, but you couldn't have a local time for each station."

Historically, "s/California/Bristol/" and "s/Chicago/London/".

OSLT.

Apollo astronauts *did* receive geological training. I believe with some initial reluctance but if you go here

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a15/a15.spur.html

and scroll down to 145:41 there's no denying that these two fighter jocks are genuinely excited about

the rock they've just found.

Re: The grand spectacle of Diversity

"A gymnast might be a good fit". In pre-Mercury days NASA considered recruiting from all sorts - circus performers even. Going with test pilots might seem obvious in hindsight, and I believe that the fact that they all already had security clearance was one of the factors.

"smaller people with lower calorific requirements" was a nod to the double X chromosome.

Re: This is getting silly now

Perhaps you are thinking of the terms used on the Indian sub-continent?

"lakh" = 10^5

"crore" = 10^ 7

Re: Is it neccesary?

These US Navy videos are not "hotly disputed" - they are thoroughly debunked. For instance the "go fast" video has been shown to be entirely consistent with it being a weather balloon - using only the information on the screen itself (speed, altitude and so on) and a bit of maths. Why the US Navy couldn't do this themselves is the *real* mystery.

Re: Built In

Wordpress is *great*. All those bugs and problems I've fixed, the hacked sites I've repaired - serious earner.

Yes, unmaintained plugins are a great source of trouble but the core code is still seriously, uh, sub-optimal.

I was doing a site migration recently and found duplicate usernames. Because there is no unique constraint on the field, and it checks for duplicates programmatically, if you're getting hosed by some sort of bot you *will* hit a race condition and ping! duplicate usernames. I could scarce believe that such a widely-used and developed piece of software could still contain such a beginner's mistake.

I thought maybe this was a legacy issue - no, the default schema *still* does not have a unique constraint on usernames. Unique keys are used in *other* tables so there's no stupid excuse that they are trying to support a MySQL version released in 1963.

Zip drives...

I was looking for a driver for one, and typed zip.com into the browser. Oops.

IIRC it was a gay dating site. Nothing there now.

Anyway, I once went into a small company as a freelancer to help a mate who had a part-time IT contract there to do some sort of systems audit. We discovered that there was one individual who'd clock in very early, and then spend the 30 minutes before anyone else turned up looking at VNSFW material. I think we decided it wasn't our problem.

And then there was the director of another small company who asked me to look at his teenage son's laptop...

At least none of them were MPs.

"a rover can almost certainly do just as good a job" - really? I read one estimate that two years worth of robotic geology on Mars could have been done in a single morning by a human with a hammer.

Re: Insight?

"The people who worked out you could land a thing the size of a car on Mars using a crane turn out to have thought of other things too"

Not just *could*, but that it was actually the *best* way. There's a good video out there with interviews with the engineers involved, where they explain that they were *constantly* asking themselves whether or not the sky crane was both feasible and the best engineering solution.

Would any of our commentards^W regular posters claim to be able to have come up with, and justified, the sky crane idea?

Extending solar panel life on Mars is, we think, much simpler than getting there in the first place. But maybe it is not.

The idle speculation is entertaining; there's still the infinitesimal possibility that someone here has an insight [1] into the problem that has escaped everyone else.

[1] Pun intended.

Re: Keyboard / Mouse

"Some tasks are best handled with a keyboard. Others are best handled with a mouse."

Or both as in this instance. Select text with mouse, copy and paste with keyboard.

Re: Long hours <> productivity

Productivity doesn't just go down downhill, it goes negative (for coding at any rate). You end up writing such crap that you then spend ages fixing it. Or if you have the sense, you throw it away and start again.

Ah, the myth of "maximising shareholder value" by withholding payment for as long as possible.

Re: Time to change the rules

Sorry, I have to disagree. They did the *testing* not the *training*.