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Greg Utas wrote: I just realized that it must be Musk's secret plan for a Dyson sphere!
If they were in Solar orbit, you could have a point. The problem is that you seem to have dropped quite a few decimal points in calculating the necessary number of satellites, to say nothing of the dynamical instability problems.
(See Larry Niven's Ringworld, and why he had to add thrusters to the rim in its sequel, The Ringworld Engineers)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Swarm or bubble?
There are multiple types.
My personal favorite is the shell.
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On December 21st, 2021, the "tokamak" reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five second fusion pulse, more than double what it managed way back in 1997. "Jet, I thought the major was a little lady suffragette"
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Highlights:
- "JET hit a Q value of 0.33, meaning it produced about a third the energy put in."
- "On December 21st, 2021, the "tokamak" reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five second fusion pulse"
- "researchers must solve several challenges. Principally, they have to deal with the heat created in the exhaust region"
Doesn't sound good for global warming.
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In the same way that Grammarly finds grammatical errors or opportunities for improvement in essays and emails, r2c’s tool, called Semgrep, parses lines of code to check for thousands of potential bugs and vulnerabilities. Hopefully it checks for passive voice in your function calls
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With Microsoft detecting a 1070% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks between July 2020 and June 2021, the company has now announced a "Security Insider" program to keep business leaders updated on the latest trends in this space. Find out about security from the people that give you reasons to know about security
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Intel's software-upgradeable CPUs to be supported by Linux 5.18 this Spring. Insert 25 cents for an additional three minutes of GPU time
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Given Intel's track record with software, this is cracked in 3..2..
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According to a short Western Digital press release, the contamination issue has affected "at least" 6.5 exabytes of flash memory, which works out to a bit under 7 million terabytes or 7 billion gigabytes—that's a lot of NAND that will suddenly be unavailable for SSDs, phones, memory cards, and USB drives. An analyst speaking to Bloomberg suggested that the final total of the lost capacity could be as much as 16 exabytes. "I remember the time I knew what happiness was, let the memory live again"
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What a loss of memory that is ? How will our computers think now?
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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A new crop of server-side tools is making it possible to build web UIs without JavaScript. Sorry, this might not be kid-sister safe
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The French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, said today that an unnamed local website’s use of Google Analytics is non-compliant with the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — breaching Article 44 which covers personal data transfers outside the bloc to so-called third countries which are not considered to have essentially equivalent privacy protections. If you outlaw Google Analytics, only outlaws will know that 49% of users bounced off your home page
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Sony taught an artificial intelligence system to outplay the best humans in the venerable PlayStation series. Computer plays better than humans. Millions of chess players ask, "And?"
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Whenever I see one of these articles, I wonder if a non-AI system could beat the AI.
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If you’re using an older version of Visual Studio, we have several reminders about upcoming events in the Visual Studio support lifecycle. This might come as a total shock to people still using VS2012
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One such user is here. Last version supporting SQLCE IDE design. Still one of the best embeddable SQL conform databases.
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CNBC Tech:
Computers are getting better at writing their own code but software engineers may not need to worry about losing their jobs just yet.
DeepMind, a U.K. artificial intelligence lab acquired by Google in 2014, announced Wednesday that it has created a piece of software called AlphaCode that can code just as well as an average human programmer.
So programmers are programming a program the programs programs...
Welp, lookout Grif  ...
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A light year is a measure of distance, not time. When they start using the correct terms, I'll start ready these articles.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Do you know the difference between a tech journalist and a sales entity?
The sales entity knows he/she/it's inaccurate.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I know, I wanted to punch the author...
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This article goes back about 2 years before I wrote any code so I wouldn't have originally read it.
It touches on amazing things & really gets to the heart of what _Designing Software_ is actually about and why it is so tough.
What Is Software Design? by Jack W. Reeves - developer.*, Developer Dot Star[^]
Article Length
Our modern sensibilities make this article seem extremely long but much of everything that is really true about Software Design is actually in this article. I'm quite amazed, because I can see that many things grew from this article -- or at least the same kind of thinking as this article.
Summary of Best Points
1) Documentation of any Significant Software Project is necessary.
2) Documentation is always wrong (or will be in 2 minutes when the code is changed).
3) The only true documentation of a Software Project is THE CODE.
-- This is true because the code eventually becomes the instructions to the machine (CPU) and reality of the code is contained in the code itself.
-- Also true because natural language can contain numerous interpretations so that simply reading the documentation may result in X number of individuals understanding that the software _should_ do entirely different things.
4) Since the only True Documentation is in THE CODE, the better the Programming Language, the better it allows you to Design Software. That is where C++ and OOP came in!
5) Suddenly with OOP (via C++) you had a tool that allowed you to create Structures (classes) in Patterns to Design your software which self-documented.
There's a lot more in this article & I encourage you to read it if you are interested in Software Design.
I'm actually going back to read it a 2nd time now. 
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I used to get C/C++ User's Journal on a regular basis back in the day. It had many articles of this calibre.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I agree with all those points.
Documentation is obsolete as soon as it's written. Documentation also never contains bugs.
But don't forget about SmallTalk and Turbo Pascal as other early OOP languages.
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Thanks for posting. The article was worth reading. Most unusually, it didn't say anything that I'd disagree with. 
There are actually three parts to the article: the original (1992), a follow-up (2003), and the letter to the editor that became the original article, and which is very similar.
What really resonated was coding simply being part of design. It's what refactoring and "letting the code speak to you" are about. Detailed design, before writing code, is a waste of time, because the details invariably change, so all that documentation becomes waste. I would even go so far as to say that the code is not only the design, but the primary documentation. There should be a high-level design document as a roadmap. But beyond that, the code must be well commented, because it is the only thing that will document the code at the detailed level. No one will bother to update a parallel, detailed design document. To be usable, it would have to hyperlink to the code fragments being discussed. Even if tools for that existed, I'd rather read plain text comments in the code.
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Greg Utas wrote: I would even go so far as to say that the code is not only the design, but the primary documentation
Absolutely! Code is the documentation. Whenever there is something considered wrong (a bug, etc.) where do people look? Do they look in the docs? Not really. Instead they go to the code to determine what it is doing.
Greg Utas wrote: There should be a high-level design document as a roadmap.
That's how I see it too. A over all plan / road map. You can use the map to get their in many different ways, we just know that your starting here & you must end up there. 
The specifics of how you do it will be worked out along the way -- yes with some planning, of course.
As I was reading your comments I was thinking, "hmmm... I would most likely enjoy working with Utas on a project." That made me think that maybe we should force someone we are hiring to read this doc & then ask them their real feelings on it. If they answer similar to you, they are hired. Otherwise...
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