sizzzzlerz

Is Pascal used much these days. I learned it way back in the 80s since several of my MSEE classes used it. Professionally, I never used nor heard of it being used except for Apple. I'm sure it has evolved since the dark ages to incorprorate more modern programming techniques but with the wide range of languages available today and the fact that it is rarely taught anymore, why might some decide to use it on their project?

Hardly transforming. SV has been involved with military contracts since post-war in 1946 due solely to the efforts of Professor Fredrick Terman. Starting first with Stanford, where he taught, he started associating the engineering labs with defense programs. This soon followed by establishing Stanford Research Park and bringing on companies who soon started getting them. The man is a legend and is often referred to as the Father of Silicon Valley.

There were also established companies like Lockheed, Hughes, and Gruman and smaller start-up companies founded in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I started working for one of these, ESL, in 1978 and worked at several others, ArgoSystems and Applied Signal Technologies, up until I retired in 2023. All were mostly involved in working with the Intel community on SIGINT and ELINT systems with other work building SIGINT into aircraft for the Services. During its heyday, late 60s to the 90s, it was nothing to change to a new company every year if you liked as long as you held a golden ticket, a special access clearance. The executive staffs of these companies were closely tied into the Government up to the White House. In fact, the founder of my first company, Dr. William Perry, served as deputy directory of defense under Carter as well as secretary of defense under Clinton.

All this mostly ended when the Cold War collapsed the Soviets. Lockheed is a shell of what it once was as it moved most of its manufacturing elsewhere, keeping only its missiles in Sunnyvale. A lot of the small companies either closed or were bought by the big boys. TRW bought ESL and was, itself bought by Grumann who then partnered with Northrup, Boeing bought ArgoSystems, and Raytheon bought my last company, Applied Signal Technologies.

So, basically, SV has been deeply invested in defense for 81 years.

Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!

Who can afford a steak today without taking out a loan?

Think of it this way. Should this proposal take effect, football will become the sporting world's equivalent to modern day Las Vegas.

And it is so blatant to everyone except the republicans.

FIA has entered the room

However, all all-Africa World Cup won't find too many takers.

I thought I smelled something.

Somewhere in this fetid swamp of corruption, you just know the trump crime syndicate has its greasy hands on the pie.

That's like John Gotti saying Al Capone was corrupt.

Jesus, those pop-over clue are aggressive and super-annoying. The almost completely obscure the cells and they won't go away. Can they be completely turned off?

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing"

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Some years ago, I attended an informal demo of some application we built. The engineer who had worked on the UI was showing an animation of the initial splash screen. It was only 5 seconds or so but I asked him whether there was an option to disable it. He said there wasn't. I then asked if he didn't think that a user, running this many times, was going to get very tired of seeing it run every time and want to just show the home window immediately on start. I said I knew I would. I told him that regardless of how "cool" it looked, when you see the same thing a few times, it can become annoying leaving the user pissed off because its out of their control. I don't know what happened after that. Since I didn't have any authority to request changes, I was probably ignored.

No way they could ever pass an ITAR or SOC 2 audit with employees using their own machines. Data security is critical part of these governmental frameworks and having a set of controls in place that companies must comply with if they are to be certified. Keeping ITAR data on an employee's personal PC that is open to the internet is probably one of the biggest no-no's I can envision.

Now that is an idea for a The Far Side cartoon

Another gift from trump that keeps on giving. Meanwhile, his limited attention span is focused on blue paint and algae and handing billions to Iran.

Well, with them constantly taking selfies of themselves they have no time for normal human activities

I'm not sure distance matters. They're still stranded with virtually no possibility of rescue from the ground. Apollo 13 was extremely lucky that the hull wasn't breached, the spacecraft could still be controlled, that some very smart guys on the ground were able to devise the fix using bits of stuff known to be on board, the filter could actually be made, and, most of all, that it worked.

Sort of like what happened on the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Engineers on the ground were able to devise a makeshift fix to adapt the control module airscrubber filters to fit the lunar module so the astronauts could shelter in the LM for several days before getting back into the CM and coming home.

Of course. I do jigsaw puzzles all the time but they aren't meant to be permanent nor is it difficult to take them apart and redo them. I even did the Saturn 5 Lego kit 8 or so years ago. It's why I asked the question. While the rocket was much smaller in scope (and price), it took maybe 5 evenings to complete. It was, and continues to be, very fragile. I have it sitting on a table on its stand but I honestly get no real pleasure nor satisfaction in seeing it. It, and the table, require occasional dusting so moving it is a challenge to not cause pieces to fall off or to replace such pieces that do fall off back where they belong without causing further damage. If something happens that does cause major damage, it's pretty much toast as trying to recreate the initial assembly is nearly impossible. I was just asking to see what others do with such things. To me, they're like visiting a museum that has a very steep entrance fee that hasn't changed an exhibits since it opened. Why go back?

I wonder when they'll release the Spanish Inquisition set. Nobody will expect that.

Once built, what does one do with this? Generally, these are fragile in the sense that moving them can cause parts of it to become disconnected or fall apart so you don't want to be moving it around to much. It's going to take up a whole lot of space. Your kids can't actually play with it. And if you intend to show it off, you aren't really showing any real skills except for the ability to follow pages and pages of instructions. I don't even want to think about what would be involved in disassembling it such that it could be rebuilt per the instructions.

I still have the Kelty I got in the 70's and used on 15 trips into the Sierra Nevada over about 10 years. It's stained, smells like smoke, and has a number of patched rips including a hole chewed into the bottom by some rodent. Its only fault was it's capacity was too small for longer hikes. One of the best outdoor products I've ever had.

Oh, no! What an unexpected tragedy. In other news...

Very nice. Would it be possible to publish the schematic?

You know there has to be money being passed under the table to the council members, state legislature, and governor's office by the billionaire's wanting to build these things. There is absolutely no benefit to the local's to have this in their backyard. The construction money will go to out-of-the-area contractor's to build it, they'll staff it (minimal as it will be) with H1B visa holders from India, and money that won't see light of day in the community. All they'll have is higher property taxes, water, and electricity bills. Of course, being republican, they'll continue to vote these same people back into office.

There were, and still are, a number of magazines in the electronics industry, EDN, for example, that were available for free to engineers that were 75% ads with a few articles. The publishers and advertisers expected the articles to draw the engineers who would be the ones to spec components for their current designs.

Presenting ads to a target audience IS the purpose for the magazine just as they are for TV, cable, radio, and every other media source. The articles, shows, or music are inducements to get you to read, watch, or listen which, in turn, motivates companys to pay to get their ads presented.

Typing an equation-heavy PhD dissertation in the days before word processors or tools like LaTeX were available must have been only slightly less involved than the research being written up.