sizzzzlerz

Joined 12 years ago

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2,067
Submissions
784
Member since
Sep 25
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Recent submissions

Comment · 13 days ago
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?
Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 2 months ago
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!
Comment · 2 months ago
Who can afford a steak today without taking out a loan?
Comment · 3 months ago
Think of it this way. Should this proposal take effect, football will become the sporting world's equivalent to modern day Las Vegas.
Comment · 3 months ago
And it is so blatant to everyone except the republicans.
Comment · 3 months ago
FIA has entered the room
Comment · 3 months ago
However, all all-Africa World Cup won't find too many takers.
Comment · 3 months ago
I thought I smelled something.
Comment · 3 months ago
Somewhere in this fetid swamp of corruption, you just know the trump crime syndicate has its greasy hands on the pie.
Comment · 3 months ago
That's like John Gotti saying Al Capone was corrupt.
Comment · 3 months ago
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?
Comment · 3 months ago
"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing"

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Comment · 3 months ago
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.
Comment · 3 months ago
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.

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