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marsRoverDev

626 karma · joined March 31, 2017

On-board Software Engineer for European Space Agency ExoMars Rover 2020 and Solar Orbiter missions.
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marsRoverDev··on UK's hardware talent is being wasted
I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.
marsRoverDev··on Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
He's in this thread
marsRoverDev··on Deutsche Bahn introduces "MetaWindow"
I fly to germany when I can, or take any other operator's train. I am way, way more familiar with Karlsruhe than I would like to be.
marsRoverDev··on Pacific castaways' 'HELP' sign sparks rescue mission and family reunion
Dropping things is one of the primary purposes of the P-8A. They drop sonar buoys for submarine warfare.
marsRoverDev··on New seafloor map only 25% done, with 6 years to go
I would put good money on the US Navy already having a map that is superior to this.
marsRoverDev··on Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing
The purging has really picked up pace in the last couple of years, and I think a major highlight will be the upcoming cleansing of Place de la Concorde.
marsRoverDev··on Uber agrees $178M payout to Australia taxi drivers
Taxis in Australia, like many other places, used to abuse their customers. Uber truly made a difference; these days, Uber may represent questionable value in Australia, but at the very minimum they managed to change the behaviour of an entire industry, which is a huge positive.
marsRoverDev··on Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"
Have worked at both, Airbus pays worse but has a much better engineering culture. Also arguably, because of the location(s) the quality of the engineers is quite high despite the pay as they can afford a pretty good lifestyle.

Airbus also functions very much like a quasi governmental institution in many parts, so there's less interest in squeezing everything to death to save money.

Finally, Airbus generally has a KISS mindset, and are very conservative w.r.t change in engineering practice and tooling. When I was there we spent way, way, way, way, way more time testing than writing software - and the software was written in a way that any software engineer could walk off the street and understand it.

Oh, and quite low levels of outsourcing in critical software - they save that for things that don't have people's lives on the line.

marsRoverDev··on AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity
A propos the likeness point, a question to get people's opinions. What is the difference between your skills today which lead to earning potential and an actor's likeness which gives the actor more rights to a continued income stream?
marsRoverDev··on Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews safety debate
Same reason why the car industry encountered chip shortages, despite there being plenty of chips. They don't want to have to go through the time and expense of re-certifying everything due to all of the red tape. As a result, you end up with the system "that always worked fine".
marsRoverDev··on Stuxnet Source Code
// TODO: תקן את זה
marsRoverDev··on NASA officials sound alarm over future of the Deep Space Network
Our connectivity to mars is on the order of 12kbps, presumably better for the moon.

My other question would be whether this is due to the need to radiation harden stuff? We were developing for what effectively was equivalent to an arduino in terms of processing power due to the need for radiation hardening (and other legacy / slow moving reasons).

marsRoverDev··on Please don't be spooky
They probably do this because they don't want anything committed to text. It still doesn't excuse it, but yeah, they're doing that intentionally.

At a minimum they should say "this is not something you've done wrong".

marsRoverDev··on RTEMS Real Time Operating System
Me too - ESA is a pretty heavy user of RTEMS.
marsRoverDev··on EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications
My understanding of this technology was it was usually a hash or fingerprint of some form of the material, to be compared against a database of hashes of known-bad material. I doubt EU countries have the infrastructure or budget to run models across everything, no?
marsRoverDev··on EU to mandate public salary information for all job postings [pdf]
Lots of French employers will ask for multiple months of pay slips so they can screw you in pay negotiations.
marsRoverDev··on EU to mandate public salary information for all job postings [pdf]
The problem at least in France is that prospective employers will demand your pay slips from your previous job. If you are early in your career, they will use this to depress your wages as much as possible, making arguments like "well, we can't just give you a 40% uplift". So if your first employer screws you, the ones that follow can as well.

Personally, I would just forge one with a much higher pay level - but most people who play by the rules get screwed royally.

marsRoverDev··on Mysterious aircraft spotted at Area 51 in satellite image
The US knew when <X> satellite imagery company's satellites were going to go overhead at some US base, waited for the image to be taken and then moved all its aircraft before a missile attack recently by Iran (or Iran proxies).

They know 100% who is buying what imagery, and when the satellites will be overhead.

There is 0% chance that this is a mistake. I wouldn't be surprised if the US can OK or not OK the images that make their way to Google Maps - in France, every government site gets censored before it makes its way to Google Maps.

marsRoverDev··on IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
Yeah, that is patently untrue.
marsRoverDev··on Samsung Ads – Demand-Side Platform
I now have ads on my expensive Samsung. Teaches me right for not heeding the advice and getting as dumb a TV as possible.

I should not need to run a PiHole to deal with this.

marsRoverDev··on Neurotoxic peptides isolated from venom of giant Australian stinging tree
For context, there is a completely different plant affectionately known as "bushman's toilet paper" (an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachyglottis_repanda). It grows more or less in the same places as the Gympie Gympie (the plant referred to in this article).

An easy mistake to make, and a very, very dangerous one.

marsRoverDev··on Airbus Chooses GNAT Pro Ada for Development of Unmanned Aerial System
Airbus seems to use ADA mainly for drone software. Everything else is MISRA C, or MISRA C with a layer of abstraction overlaid that allows for generation of assembly from the same codebase as well.
marsRoverDev··on Solar Orbiter first images revealed
That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd ironed out the kinks.
marsRoverDev··on Use Unix Pipes to Improve Chromecast Playback
Do you have a chromecast ultra or a standard chromecast?
marsRoverDev··on EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers
HSBC in France have the same, it's a huge motivator for me to switch away.
marsRoverDev··on KH-11 spysat design revealed by NRO’s telescope gift to NASA (2012)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-207
marsRoverDev··on Scraping Recipe Websites
They're being rightly trashed because it's a SEO tactic and nothing more. Between the preamble ranking them higher and Adsense requiring "substance" in order to monetise the page, there is a systematic issue that's leading to what is essentially useless information to what I would say is the majority of people.

They're very welcome to write their life story, but I bet if google changed their algorithm slightly you'd see it disappear - and I'd say that would be a good thing.

marsRoverDev··on Crypto AG
> Typical American companies aren't controlled by the CIA or other government agencies.

Unless the CIA has any interest in them, in which they get pwned pretty quickly.

marsRoverDev··on Crypto AG
So can we assume that companies touched by In-Q-Tel are compromised to the same level as Crypto AG was? I'd like to collate a list.
marsRoverDev··on Lego ISS
There is a space shuttle lego set in existence that is big enough for that. It is absolutely massive - and at that scale, I think the ISS would be absolutely unwieldy.
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