amatwl

The United States government is an insurance company with an army.

For the record, NT comes from the codename for the Intel i860 (N10) which was the original target platform for NT.

NetDocs was an effort in 2000/2001 that is sometimes characterized as a web productivity suite. There was an internal battle between the Netdocs and Office groups, and Office won.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/netdocs-microsofts-net-poster-...

https://www.eweek.com/development/netdocs-succumbs-to-xp/

There was reporting that they were scrambling to move some infrastructure off Google since they were going to be cut off after refusing to pay their bills. The deadline was June 30, though there was additional reporting saying Linda Yaccarino restarted payments - https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-google-clo...

Yep, for the record, the project was while I was still at a defense contractor :).

I literally worked on a project two years ago that was still using CORBA. Oof.

All voice assistants seem bad, but Siri seems particularly bad. God forbid I ask it to do something simple such as playing a specific artist or album on Apple Music or ask it to turn off lights I've configured in the Home app.

"Siri, please turn off all the lights in my apartment."

"Sure, which room?"

Sigh.

Footage on Shuttle SRBs was recorded onboard and downloaded when recovered. SLS' SRBs are not recovered, so no footage.

Eh, there's a difference between criticizing your boss publicly vs privately.

IIRC, Twitter was operating at a loss, prior to the closing of Elon's purchase.

See Q2 2022 Results here, net loss was $270 million -https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...

It's still an open question whether Twitter will succeed with Elon, but it definitely wasn't a healthy company prior to the purchase.

The coalition supporting SLS in Congress is much broader than just Senator Shelby, though he's definitely one of the biggest proponents - an old school Senator purely motivated bringing home the money to his state. There are plenty of SLS advocates in both the Senate and House - SLS is not going anywhere just yet.

IIRC - Shuttle autoland capability was vetoed by the Astronaut Office. There was some capability within the guidance software for it, but it was never demonstrated (some early Shuttle flights got close to demonstrating it though).

In my experience, the hesitancy to contribute/ pay open source projects comes more from the contractors versus the government.

Except there are already some House Republicans publicly discussing a nationwide ban on abortion - guaranteed it's going to be on the agenda if Republicans take back Congress (which is highly likely). Also, it's not exactly easy to move to another state.

The Astronaut Office pushed strongly against an autoland capability for Shuttle.

I work in defense. I constantly tell folks that we're doomed once/if tech companies start competing in traditional defense/ aerospace contracts. The only barrier for that I see is the supposed "opposition" by tech workers, which I'm not entirely clear is a opinion shared by the majority of the workforce.

Also once you start looking outside of things like satellites and space systems, defense companies end up looking pretty boring. Also we pay less than pretty much any other tech company other there, most of our offices haven't changed much since the 80s. Overall, it makes it hard to recruit good engineering talent.

A significant number of my coworkers I've worked in the past few years with have left defense. (Also seen plenty of folks move to SpaceX)

Good. To be honest, if the tech companies (i.e. MSFT, Google, Amazon, etc.) ever decided to fully compete with defense contractors, like Boeing, LM, Northrup Grumman, etc., they could clean up easily. There are plenty of defense contracts that don't require you building bombs or munitions.

If it's anything like the Linux files inside File Explorer supported they added previously (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-for-wsl...), it'll be using some derivative of Plan 9.

Dragon 2/ Crew Dragon originally was going to support propulsive landing, but nixed due to future architectural plans (making some of Dragon a bit of engineering dead-end versus Starship/ BFR) and complexities in certifying for NASA use.

The Soyuz fires retro-rockets just before landing in Kazakhstan to lessen the impact. Even with that, the landing is still pretty rough. Land landings are sometimes described as akin to a car crash - water landings are softer. I'm sure there's probably a contingency capability of being able to support a land landing for Crew Dragon in case of aborts.

Interesting history note: there was an actually a concern during some of the early Apollo flights (I'm specifically thinking of Apollo 7) of land landings during an abort. Apollo 7 used a Block II version of the Command Module, however the crew couches were still the Block I variant. There was evidence showing the couches wouldn't perform well during a land landing. The concern was that if the LES was used, winds could force the capsule to a land landing. The resolution was that wind speed was a factor in a GO decision for launch.

It's interesting to note that Starliner is planned to perform land landings (using airbags). Land landings for capsules have been worked on since the 60s with the Gemini initially having plans for a Rogallo wing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogallo_wing#/media/File:Gemin...). There were even plans for re-use of the Gemini capsule! Water landings quickly ended that discussion, since salt water is pretty terrible and corrosive.

I have to say the author's attitude does not come off particularly well in this post, at least in my opinion. Just seems rude.

UWP includes Win32 apps, as well (if they play well with appx/ MSIX).

UWP is WinRT (Windows Runtime). And, you're right, it's COM, but The Good Parts™.

This is where .NET Core gets confusing. They're just able to run on the .NET Core runtime (versus the "full" .NET Framework). WPF uses DirectX heavily, so it's not like Microsoft just ported DirectX to non-Windows platforms.

This is true. A quick example would ZIP Folders in Windows - it uses third-party code Microsoft licensed (who knows if the company is still around today since it dates back to the early 2000s).

source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=...

Might have some issues with ITAR with the first two, since OP is not an American citizen.

A bit of a plug, but for my senior project, my team is working bringing Patchworks (slide 80) to Atom. It's currently not open source (but will be after completion of the project). We are working with an author of the original paper. http://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014VLHCC_Patchworks.pdf

Yup. The whole P2P and Supernode architecture didn't just fail when it came to mobile devices. The Christmas 2010 outage was also caused by the reliance on supernodes.

Google has complained re: Title II for phone service with Google Fiber.

There is so much red tape that's added simply by being classified under Title II.

Apparently, the Tab control is is lifted directly from Edge. https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/931595009177960449)

Part 2: https://hal2020.com/2017/11/14/microsoft-phone-part-2/