setitimer

Triggered!

OK. Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of embedded development. The mentality tends to be that "nobody is going to see" the code, so only the external interfaces are well documented and understanding of the internals resides in comments and institutional knowledge.

You need to talk to the person you report to at your employer. Dragging the contracting agency into this at this point is not reasonable.

And, unfortunately, you may find that this is the situation and you have to live with it. My first job was very similar. I worked as an embedded C developer at a laser printer manufacturer, and I had to fix bugs in a giant codebase with basically no documentation on the software itself. It was a sink or swim situation, discouraging at first but once I got over the learning curve I did fine.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian W. Kernighan

A stopped clock is right twice a day.

The thing that kills me is people who reply to emails with a phone call. I actually quit putting my cell number in my email signature because of this. If I wanted to talk to you I would call you; if I emailed you for something then I expect a reply via email.

Italians, Germans, Russians, Irish are all just White? It's such a degenerate, lazy, anti-white breakdown. It's a disgrace.

Assuming the paper's optimistic predictions are feasible, the amortized cost per passenger of a one-way ticket is $20 plus operating costs. So, sure, the round trip cost will hopefully be somewhere below $100, if we ignore the cost of local transportation at either end. This is, as I said, too expensive for most people to afford on a daily basis.

Beyond that, the paper also claims a total annual ridership of 7.4 million people, so approximately the same ridership as currently served by air travel. So, other than acting as a jobs program, in what way will this alter the economic landscape of California?

How? It's still too expensive for most people to use on a daily basis. It still requires some way to get from the train station to your final destination, which adds yet more cost. The end result is that the only people who will really use it are the same people who currently fly regularly between LA and SF, which means about 12 million people annually. Nowhere near enough ridership to support the kind of prices that are being bandied about.

Edit: more like 6 million people fly between LA and SF annually. I was thinking of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor ridership, which is about 12 million annually.

You might be able to replace some of the long-distance Amtrak lines with such a system, but over half of Amtrak's ridership is on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. Those trains make stops at all the major cities (and some minor ones) along the way. This is why the "Acela Express" is high speed in theory only. In order to keep the same ridership, any new train would have to do the same thing.

That's apparently the idea. But there is a reason it's being called the "Train to Nowhere". It will be yet another huge boondoggle that nobody uses and has to be subsidized for its entire lifetime.

She said it herself: it's another Segway. It's a solution in search of a problem. We already have mass transit between northern and southern California: airplanes. I know, I know, this would be "better". But the existing system serves the people who need it at an adequate cost and level of service.

Government doesn't have to care about risk or tangible profit, and they have a longer time horizon than most business can afford. Look at the space race, for example; the potential gains were purely political and the project certainly stood no chance of ever recouping its costs directly. But the technological by-products are things we now take for granted and which have spawned whole new industries.

I don't really care for the template model; it won't look like your actual handwriting because most people don't write individual letters in little boxes the same way they write sentences.

I would be really impressed if the template consisted of a set of phrases you had to transcribe, and then it asked you to confirm the letter choices if there is doubt, and created composites where there are more than one of the same letter in the sample.