Unfortunately, I can confirm this.
1,012 karma · joined October 8, 2021
I've worked on several big (at the time) software products that our company built and shipped to customers for a while, that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire organization within the company that owned the code was disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of the code for those products - code that I worked on for years.
It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left of something that I put years of professional work into, but I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose it's no different than startups that fail and everything disappears.
I also think this is why so many software people end up enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a flash chip somewhere.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
They've already hinted at it with Raspberry Pi Connect.
However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut means that you really have to get comfortable with trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the smart people on the ground are doing their best to make the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you say".
If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle will bring me home safely.
My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
Whatever money Dr. Hipp makes from SQLite it is surely not enough relative to the value that it has provided to millions of people.
I do sometimes wonder if the privacy of amateur radio operator info should be reconsidered - having my name and home address plastered all over the internet just because I have an amateur radio license is rather annoying.
Unfortunately, I use them to host secondary DNS for all my domains, so this Network Solutions stupidity is hitting home for me right now. Then again, I had enough issues with NS back in the 1990s that as soon as that monopoly was broken I switched and never looked back. TBH I'm a little surprised that HE would use NS, but perhaps they did thinking that NS would provide proper enterprise-level support for a major backbone provider and not cut them off on a holiday with no recourse - behavior you might expect or fear from a cut-rate provider.
It's good to know that the "closeness" requirement of decoupling caps is perhaps not as important as I had believed.
It's not really about saving board space. Decoupling capacitors need to be placed "close" to the chip, and at higher clock frequencies this can be an issue. There's enough decoupling caps needed on a RP2040 that doing them in 0805 would require moving them quite a bit further away from the chip just to have room to place them all.
An ATmega (Arduino) at something like 8MHz is really forgiving and you can take a lot of liberties with the layout. The RP2040 runs much faster at 133MHz, so presumably the tolerances are much tighter. Admittedly, I didn't try a doing a design with 0805s for the RP2040 but I read enough from people more experienced than me that gave me the impression that compromising the layout with larger passives had a greater chance of things not working right.
Since assembly is so cheap at places like JLC these days, even in small quantities, it really wasn't worth the hassle. I've done many other boards by hand with 0805s and and agree they're pretty easy to deal with.
Yes. In fact, the official getting started guide[0] is all command-line based, with an optional chapter later on about using VS Code if you wish.
I have a low volume product in production using the RP2040 and I've never once opened up any sort of GUI for developing the software or programming it.
[0] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/getting-started-with...
Keep in mind that it's not just the RP2040 that is difficult to solder. To do a decent PCB layout you'll need to use very small passives in order to get the placement right. I did my layout with mostly 0402 resistors and capacitors - I know plenty of people are capable of hand-soldering those but I think it would be difficult for most. Perhaps easier if you had a decent microscope, which I do not have yet. I don't think my magnifying visor would be nearly enough.
For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at the bottom of the webcast looked broken most of the time since it only updated when a couple major milestones occurred. Boeing even tried to address some of this in the press conference stating that video of the crew riding up to the station will be available after they download it post-flight (which, at that point, hardly anyone will care about).
Meanwhile, Starship had nearly-continuous live HD-quality feeds of video from multiple cameras from both the booster and spacecraft including all the way through reentry, producing some absolutely incredible views, some of which have probably never been seen before. Also, SpaceX puts very user-friendly telemetry displays on the bottom of their webcast that are easy to understand and seemingly have high update rates.
Maybe in the end it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you were a potential future aerospace engineer, I think the Starship launch this week was the one that would have created most of the interest and enthusiasm. SpaceX is winning in the public-relations battle and a lot of that is because they've put focus and attention into their webcasts for a long time. Old space needs to learn a thing or 2 from them.
Additionally, I know when the first Crew Dragon landed, it clearly wasn't hard or expensive to get to given that there were a bunch of small, private boats that (inappropriately) approached the spacecraft. It was quite close to shore, not like the old Apollo missions landing in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific.
The sync between devices has always been flawless for me.
I really doubt it. Even the people who are conscious of this and think of themselves as "one of the good ones" probably don't do this even if they intend to. Is someone who sits in a place for 5-6 hours really going to purchase 6 coffees or lattes at $6+ each? That's a lot of money, but also that's a lot of coffee to drink in a day, and tons of calories if they're the fancier kind of drinks.
I have no doubt that some people do, but I bet it's fewer than many would believe. And places like Starbucks are likely working based off hard data rather than just guesses or feelings.