roedog

I made my largest gains in programming competence almost 10 years ago when working on a system with no connection to the internet and no cell phone at hand. I was working a development assignment on an air-gapped network. Not being able to search google every time I got stuck forced me to actually read the documentation, man pages, and reference books and think through what was going on and come up with solutions. The internet terminal was a 10 minute walk away so I treated it like a trip to the library for research only after I had spent time working on the problem myself.

A reset could be after the big one hits and we have to rebuild cities.

It indicates that writing and editing thousands of pages of documentation will be contractually required. Word proficiency can save a lot of pain for everyone on that team.

Ah, I wasn't thinking about their commercial business. I can imagine how that would be more price sensitive.

hmm. So they could be losing money on each launch? But, why would they would they choose to sell at a loss when they could beat the competition at twice the price?

Yep, attrition was over twice that last year at some firms in the area. Partly demographics, lots of folks who can retire do. The rest due to competition for staff.

Well, Space X costs less than half than a ULA launch. I suspect that ULA spends that additional money on large sub-contracts to Boeing and Lockheed for the Delta and Atlas vehicles. This makes me think that when we add up the employees on the subcontracts the space X staffing number will be much more impressive in it's leanness.

I hope they all join my company, we've got a lot of work they would find interesting. With the retirement rate increasing it's the time to change things for the better. I want their experience at Space X on how to do things faster and better. But perhaps that's wishful thinking...

The SoCal aerospace job market is hot right now. The driver is multiple large program starts at multiple contractors who are competing for people. This should make it possible for everyone to land on their feet. (I've reached out to my former colleagues who left to join Space X)

What's odd is why SpaceX is cutting staff with the new development underway on the larger rockets and the satellite business. I'm curious about how they're going to increase development while cutting staff. The big aero firms have room for improvement on productivity. But SpaceX has been lean from the start. I wonder how they'll get more out of an already highly productive team. That'd be something to learn from.

Or transition to a system test role that has embedded software with lots of real world hands on work. Your software experience is relevant. Troubleshooting is the hard and rewarding part in common with software development. For example track testing drivetrain software, flight testing gn&c subsystems, testing robotics controllers. Lots of new testing will be needed with autonomous systems.

Yes, many. See the company's career page.

The job listings and applications for cleared and uncleared jobs can be found on http://northropgrumman.com/careers/Pages/default.aspx

It can also be a fun/technically challenging niche job that avoids the paperwork endemic to many jobs in large contractors.

I reboot my Nexus 5 daily and have not seen these kinds of performance issues.

It's not tech. It's a rental property.

Testing flight software is very intense. 50 KSLOC of C will take a few dozen man years to develop.

As a side note on terminology, QA means a very different thing in the aerospace industry. The function of QA in this world is to witness the tests and attest that we did indeed run the test as written. Usually in the form of stamping a printed procedure as it is followed. This mirrors the process used to test the mechanical and electrical parts. The testing of the software is called verification and validation testing not QA.

I think Mearls said somewhere that the staggered release was because their copy editing pipeline couldn't handle three releases at once.

In a large company, such a change only has a chance if it is mandated from the top and then the mgmt team is very committed to push the change through for as long as it takes. Without both pieces it will get killed by apathy at the middle management layer and below. Without that support the technical solutions will gain no foothold.

Well, if Sandberg takes that position in her book then she shouldn't deserve finger pointing I suppose. But since she talks about leveling the playing field in the workforce and fixing the salary gender gap is part of that I'd say she believes that cash money is a key source of empowerment.

But those other big companies with unpaid internships didn't publish a book about how they believe in empowering individuals (albeit women individuals in this case). Some finger pointing seems warranted in that her company's actions do not match her words...

The last paragraph of the story talks about how "the German city of Freiburg voted to end the city's experiments with a free and open source office suite. In that city, the IT department had been struggling for years to support both an decade-old proprietary office suite as well as an outdated version of OpenOffice. Increasing frustration by the city's civil staff prompted the city board to revert to use only proprietary office solutions"

The conclusion I draw it that any kind of software adoption depends on how well IT departments support it. In addition to lobbying budget conscious city councils it is also necessary to evangalize and train the government IT workers.

Did you mean to to type 'oh for Peet's sake?'

Keep in mind that the email account was a private, personal account. His CIA email account wasn't compromised. I'm guessing that they know pretty well how to keep their email safe.

Yes. For his security clearance he was required to self-report any adverse information, which includes an affair. The FBI uncovered the affair, so he probably did not self-report. That the FBI discovered it probably made the situation even worse.

Consider the contemporary development programs RAINBOW and GUSTO and these specs don't seem so far out. Rainbow was to add radar stealth the to U2 (cloaking). Lockheed started development of what became the A-12 in the late 50's. It flew reconnaissance 10 years later. The A-12 could fly at mach 3.35 at 75000 ft. and had a range of 2200 nm.

Those specifications were achieved in that era on other programs. I think the answer requires a deeper look.

A blended wing body and flying wing configuration have been flown. There are similarities to the saucer in that they use lifting body effects. They benefit from high lift-to-drag ratio.

However, the other handling qualities of these designs make them difficult to fly. Stability can be a real problem. I would guess that air handling problems were the issues that cancelled the saucer program. Perhaps the modern fly-by-wire computer control systems used today might make it easier to fly a saucer.

I had this problem. Then we cleaned out ducts from the dryer to the exhaust vent on the outside of the house.

The duct was jammed full of lint. So, no air was flowing out. The dryer had a safety interlock that disabled the heater. This is why the clothes took so long to dry. It is also why we didn't start a fire and burn down the house.

Now we clean the ducts every 18 months and the dryer works great.

This process results in low bug counts. But, even then, NASA still programs the software to accept patches as they fly.

I don't know how applicable the NASA way is to commercial firms. They have different goals. National Mission Success vs. shareholder returns. The commercial firms are still making money and happy shareholders with a lot of bugs. While a single unit conversion bug on the Mars Climate Orbiter resulted in the loss of a multi-billion dollar spacecraft.

I keep both an electronic diary and an engineering notebook in a physical lab notebook. I find both helpful to getting organized and developing my thoughts. I would never publish any of these. They are for my use only.

I format my diary very simply. The key for me is to not get distracted while I'm writing. I use two formats: a dated journal: a date and entries that follow. This works in any kind of editor. The other format I use is more subject based, with org-mode, and headings to split up topics.

org-mode has a tag feature, where you can add lists of tags to a header. I might try that for categorizing my entries for future sorting.

Don't be cruel. I'm reading this on a machine running XP alongside my 100,000 co-workers running with the same. The company-wide upgrade to Win7 has been running late for the last few years...

All the dealers in my county have websites with an email address or web form to contact them. After doing some research on models, pricing, etc. I sent an email to each dealer describing what I was looking for and requested a quote. Some did not reply at all. I took the most decent offer. They dropped it off at my office. I never set foot in the dealership for the whole transaction.