9659

not blood, but the DNA of cancer cells. really.

If your software kills someone (by mistake), personal guilt is a punishment one never completes.

On paper, this all makes a lot of sense. What is going to happen when these airplanes start falling out of the sky because they are just too old?

50 years is a long time for a piece of machinery. There will be many failure modes that will be discovered in these planes.

The C-130 was thought to last forever. Until about 10 years ago, well used planes being used for firefighting starting having structural failure in flight. Suddenly, organizations flying the older airframes decided that it was no longer effective to take the risk of failure.

USAF now has Cyber Warrant Officers.

if gnat (the gnu ada translator) from NYU had come out 5 years earlier, ada might have caught on with the masses.

yes, this is true. mainly due to a perceived lack of ada programmers on the market.

Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples.

I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.

This was almost true in 2000. It is not true now. Things change. Slowly.

Just because it can be measured, doesn't mean it should be.

These 'measures' would be much more useful if they were used to determine the control limits of the software process being used.

'hours from pull request to merge' for an open source project is silly. who cares? 'number of commits a month'? who cares. what is the value of those commits.

why the focus on 'constant churn of software'? I don't see it.

They do! The big platform OEM's have been saying no to extended tech data and source code access, but the smaller contracts require govt rights.

Either you give up your IP (drawings and source code) or you are non-compliant.

The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80", which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.

Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.

s/some/most/

engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.

You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).

It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.

It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.

Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.

And thus WalterBright describes to us how VC's make money... risk and reward.

(Hi Walter. Love your posts...)

SpaceX will lose a vehicle. Not a question of if, rather one of when.

relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.

space flight is a dangerous business.

many years ago, i was working as an electronic technician. we had a stack of processor boards (from a Perkin Elmer 7/32) that were removed from service. broken. many different revisions, and only schematics for one revision of each board. i thought it was hopeless. an older wiser tech taught me how.

plug a good board on an extender. run a diagnostic that fails in a loop. using a scope, look at every pin on the connector. write down what you see. replace with a bad board. repeat.

which signals are different? chase them back. if the schematic does not match, get out a voltmeter and your eyes and draw a schematic that reflects how the board is wired.

he called this "good card - bad card".

and it worked. not going to make any claims about cost effectiveness, but we fixed every board. and my troubleshooting skills in digital electronics were greatly improved.

this was a 'fireman' kind of job. waiting for the system to break, so it didn't matter if 2 techs put a week into 1 circuit board.

space shuttle looked safe for the first 24 launches. not shilling for Boeing. just pointing out that space is dangerous. and a couple of successes does not make the risk go away.

The SpaceX vehicle may look like the safest choice. But is it? A handful of manned flights does not prove that a vehicle is 'safe'. Likewise, some anomalies in 1 flight do not prove 'unsafe'.

Perhaps the knowledge of Starliner issues makes it more accurate to assess the risk.

Either vehicle could lose the crew on the return. "Astronauting" is a risky business.

I do not envy anyone on the decision chain.

incompetence and poor leadership is not a crime.

target was x86_64 / linux. just updated the rpm spec file for the gcc build to enable ada. rebuild and install.

so, changed wordsize, processor, operating system... minimal source code impact.

it was depressing when RH dropped ada support. sure, it was gcc, but it was so nice to have an ada compiler part of the default gcc installation.

gnat needs money. well deserved. but adoption needs a free, easy to install compiler.

5 years ago i had the pleasure of resurrecting a dead system. it was about 30k of ada, lets call it ada 87 (!). unknown compiler, 32 bit, 68K processor, 16 MB memory, unknown OS.

code was compiling in 2 days, running in 2 weeks. i needed to change from using 32 bit floats to 64 bit floats (seems positional data is a little more accurate in 2020). 1 declaration in 1 package spec and a recompile, and all my positions are good.

i love that language!

Do you know what fear is? Getting in an airplane where the flight controls use NPM.

ada does not require 'pushing'.

once the maturity of the users advances to a sufficient point, then ada is the only solution.

"ada. used in creating reliable software since 1983"

when i first saw ada, i didn't understand the why. now i understand the why, but ada is effectively gone.

-- old fortran / C / Assembly programmer

It is everywhere. Look for a Lavendaria or a standalone, laundromat. without attached dry cleaners.

Laundromats that hire an attendant, want to keep the attendant busy. "wash and fold" is how they do it.

for a family of 4 with towels and such, this would cost a fortune. a single person, it is a bargain. $25 to $30 a week.

in years past when i used to travel and be on customer sites for weeks at a time, i would get my laundry done before i went home. pick up the clean clothes on the way to the airport. eliminated one task when i got home.

Do you still have an Advanced class license? I think that Advanced class is the only license that is currently around (and able to be renewed) that required a code test.

The Novice test was something else. 20 questions. 5 WPM code. I was thrilled when it came in the mail. 40 Meter CW, look out.

Well, he wanted to put his shoes on. Priorities!

yes, he will 'want' a third term. he is owed one, due to the "Russia Russia Russia" hoax.

Just ask him. He will tell you all about it.

civil unrest vs. disruption of the US congress.

neither is acceptable, one was attempting to usurp the transfer of power. the other, was to express anger with society.

The adhesive would be specified on an engineering drawing. The drawing would be used to assemble the plane.

You change the adhesive by issuing an Engineering Change Order. This is an engineering approval step.

In this situation, the specific adhesive probably was no longer available. Happens all the time.

The manufacturer recommends it, the airlines will do it.

When you buy an airplane, it is a 30 year relationship. The airlines listen.