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raddevus wrote: saw a low-flying helicopter over a local strip mall
Peter_in_2780 wrote: Is there an open space where it was headed, sports field, etc?
Mall parking?
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I wonder if they actually had all of the permissions for that landing.
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jschell wrote: I wonder if they actually had all of the permissions for that landing.
I'm so glad you said that. I thought the same thing. Before I started recording the action, the chopper had circled the parking lot at a very low altitude (low enough that I was comparing it to the lamp-posts). When it finally hovered above the Kroger I decided to record it because it was so odd.
I'm usually too lazy to even turn the phone on and point it. 
Anyways, I thought they were flying way too low in the area and wondered if it was legal too.
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Flying very low just before you touch down is pretty much mandatory. I'd like to see a regulation that prohibited low flying before a landing. 🤔😉
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raddevus wrote: When it finally hovered above the Kroger
That doesn't seem legal. If they were doing an air survey they would not have landed.
If there was a special event on a field then they should have come in higher.
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Thanks for posting that. That is exactly what I was thinking. It was really all very odd.
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I am surprised by how surprised you were 
I am probably wasted, living in a big town (by Norwegian standards). All the major hospitals in Norway have rescue helicopters, and they are used all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more victims of accidents brought to the hospital by helicopter than by ambulance. One good reason for that is that we have countless inhabited islands along our coast with neither ferry nor bridge to the mainland. We have vast inland areas with no roads for an ambulance to drive (yet with lots of activity, like forestry, hunting, hiking, ...). There are accidents aboard ships, fishing vessels and smaller boats.
Even for road accidents, helicopters are frequently used for patient transportation, to avoid traffic jams. They can go in a straight line to the hospital, and at much higher speed than an ambulance. They have a landing spot at the roof of the hospital.
So, seeing a helicopter over your head is almost as commonplace as seeing an airplane. If you see them landing in some random field, or a highway, or a flat rooftop, it catches about as much attention as the sound of an ambulance siren: Not very much.
Take a look at NORWEGIAN AIR AMBULANCE - BALANCING ON GUARD RAIL - YouTube[^] The rescue helicopter arriving at the site of a car accident finds no suitable landing spot, so it goes down on the guard rail, keeping the rotor spinning for balance.
The pilot became a nationally known hero after that landing. (The story is quite old, from 2013.)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I know what you mean - same in London, lots of choppers of various types, often see chinooks but the one time I was surprised was when I saw a Boeing Osprey flying along the Thames - that looked like something out of Quake II
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There are several consumer-owned helicopters in my area. They fly them to/from work, other towns, sporting events, etc. Convenience, yes, but also a bit of "I have money and I'm going to show it" type of thing.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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Helicopter's are fascinating when I lived in the Grand Canyon National Park for 8 years I became friends with a number of helicopter pilots. One of the most fascinating pilots was the fellow who flew the rescue chopper for the Park Service. My two close friends that were former Vietnam Warrant Officers started a helicopter tour company. The fellow who flew for the Park Service was not a Park Service employee. And they both told me he was quite the legend as he flew diamonds in New Zealand. Seems he would on occasion encounter pirates that would try to bring his bird down. Because he lived outside the park the Park Service Paramedics complained he was not ready to go when they got to the heliport.
NOT TRUE he was always sitting in the bird rotors turning ready to go.
One day he had enough of the complaining. So the correct procedure to descend into the canyon is hover over the area to land and spiral down. Well he told the paramedics to hang
on. Trust me you do not do this! He got the bird over the canyon and rolled it in.
That ended the complaining!
Side note every Saturday I flew to Hualapai Reservation with my Warrant Officers friends who had a contract to fly the Hualapai in and out of the canyon with their grocery's
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Quote: I love to hear about how people live and work. Very interesting.
Because you are in Ohio I Think
I can share some great stories about out of High School working at Diebold Lock & Safe
I drilled all the holes in the vault doors lock mechanism
Drill was guided by a computer that used a paper tape with holes to feed information to the drill NO electronic info like we know computers today.
If the paper broke life was not fun
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Choroid wrote: If the paper broke life was not fun
There were tape variants made from mylar, so strong that you could use surplus tape to wrap heavy goods onto you car trailer. The negative part is that it was so strong that most tape punchers wasn't able to punch it.
And there was the plastic coated aluminum variant, also extremely strong, but stiffer. When winding the tape back onto its spool, at high speed: Keep your fingers away from the running tape edge! It was sharper than a butcher's knife. Some people I met could tell about really bad cuts they had had before learning due respect for fast running tape.
Both of these two variants never broke. They were difficult to break deliberately even with tools.
Disclaimer: Last time I worked with punched tape (both paper, aluminum and mylar) was in the summer of 1978, but I still have a few lengths of the paper variant laying around, to show young people what it really looked like.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I was just a employee not involved in any decision making
But my uncle who worked in finance told me how we ended up with this drill press
The company suggested the Aluminum Tapes but the engineering guys did not like
automated tools so they recommended the paper tapes knowing they would fail and slow production
This was a highly controlled Union place of employment
When they asked me if I wanted to join the Union I said NO Thanks
I got a pink slip the next day, My uncle saved my job and they called me in the office
and asked "Why I refused to join the Union?"
I said he asked if I wanted to. Seems it was a right to work union shop.
Which meant you had to join the Union if you wanted to work there.
I don't remember but I think the drill press was Swiss Made.
Curious what machine were you running in 1978 with tape readers?
Thanks for sharing the info
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Choroid wrote: Curious what machine were you running in 1978 with tape readers?
If you have ever heard about them, I'd be very surprised
In the mid-1960s, the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE, or FFI in Norwegian) developed several small computers for military purposes. I am not into military terminology and do not really understand how they were used, but apparently, they controlled weapons directly, e.g. Penguin rockets. Some people at NDRE got the idea that the SM-2 machine could be a model for a computer aimed at the civilian market. So they gave that task to Kongsberg Weapons Factory (KV). In 1970, KV brought SM-3 to market, a couple of years later the SM-4 (I am not sure about the difference between these; they were binary compatible) and in 1975 the KS-500, also binary compatible. The KS-500 had semiconductor RAM, while the SM machines used ferrite core.
These were machines in the 'PDP-11 class' - 16 bit, single 19" rack general machines. The SM-4 and KS-500 were the ones I was "working on" in 1978 - this was before I started my studies, in a summer job, so I was mostly a runner boy: I didn't develop software. One of my tasks was duplicating paper / mylar / aluminum tapes for shipping to customers - punched tape was the "floppy disk" of those days
The SM-4/KS-500 never made a hit in commercial markets by themselves, but KV produced some highly recognized pen drafting boards (typically of A0 or A -1 size, the biggest one was 2.6 by 3.7 meters) controlled by these machines. Also, they were used for computer controlled cutting torches and welding machines, considered very advanced technology in the early 1970s. There were some significant military uses as well. (In peaceful years, in spite of its company name, most of KV's production was civilian, but in a crisis, it could all be switched to military production within a couple of weeks, I was told. So it is not surprising that the military products made use of the SM-4 and KS-500.)
My supervisor in my summer job was rather military oriented, and could never accept the KS-500: Semiconductor memory is just a fad! Completely useless, when you take the computer out in the field, and it looses the contents of the program memory if the power is broken - noone can live with such unreliability! (I guess that a paper tape might useless in muddy trenches, but with the software on an aluminum tape you might be able to reload the memory as soon as power was restored The SM-3 could run on 24V and could take a shock of 50G!)
So, if you were into computer controlled drafting, steel cutting or welding in the 1970s, you might have hear about these machines. Otherwise, they are rather obscure.
Bonus chatter:
You might have heard of NORD-1 and NORD-10 computers, and then came ND-100. These were highly successful in the commercial marked. When NDRE wanted to commercialize SM-2, they let two different companies have a go at it: The old, established KV, and the newly established Norsk Data (ND). In theory, the SM-3 from KV and the NORD-1 from ND should be more or less identical, binary compatible. They were not, and the story behind that is why I mention Norsk Data:
KV was no doubt old and established, with classical work patterns. They do thorough planning, and write the documentation before starting to solder components onto the board. The technical writers didn't know much about computers, and made a few mistakes. For shift instructions, one bit in the instruction word indicated rotational shift, another bit was "don't care" - and the TW mixed them up, different from the SM-2. He also misinterpreted the role of the B register (Base, i.e. stack pointer) in the calculation of the physical address; the description didn't match that of SM-2. (The way the B register was documented made it almost useless!)
This was discovered before the assembly line was started, but after 500 copies of the reference manual had been delivered from the print shop. So KV had a choice: Throw away 500 copies of a thick reference manual (printing was expensive in 1970!), or build the machine as documented. They chose the second alternative.
At the same time, the ND people built their NORD-1 with the circular shift bit and the B register use like the SM-2 "template", but different from the SM-3. So the two machines were not able to run each others' software (as originally planned).
Bonus chatter #2 - on tape readers:
The historical corner in my tech. university had a 1961 vintage Danish GIER computer with an optical paper tape reader that would read 2000 characters/sec! A well known secret was the purpose of the yellow tape on the floor in front of the GIER, with another short strip of yellow tape across, a couple of meters to the side. The cross was were you should place the basket to collect the paper tape after it shot out of the reader at a speed of 200 in/sec!
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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WOW that is some History
Did a search on google for Nord 10
There are several Nord-10 and Nord-10/S systems known to remain, many of which are in near-operational condition, and several are in the care of NODAF. Restorations of systems are planned in both Oslo by NODAF [1] and Trondheim by Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Quote: I was mostly a runner boy
I was mowing lawns & trimming hedges for a landscaper in the daytime
and working the night shift on the drill press
You made a wise decision embracing software development
While at the University of Toledo in the College of Pharmacy
I took a BASIC computer course on a PDP 11 Deck Writer and was enamored
I ask the course professor about switching majors he said
"I don't think you have what it takes to be a software developer"
"You will make more money being a Pharmacist"
My first paycheck as a Pharmacist I bought a Apple ///
Learned to peek and poke and BASIC
Real claim to fame in programing I taught my friends son to program in VB6
when I switched to Windows
He went on to be the lead developer manager for the speech side Alexa
Thanks for the very enjoyable reply
Dwight
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I am thinking about using a static code analysis to identify security vulnerabilities as I and my team write code. (Like Sonar lint but for security).
I have come across some extentions like
Security code scan[^] or Synk Security[^].
Do you have any experience with such extensions?
If yes do you think they are useful?
Do you have other recommendations?
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You do know that Sonar can help identify security vulnerabilities don't you? If you're using Visual Studio, you can also use security analyzers to help detect OWASP errors. To be honest, and I speak with a lot of experience in this area, SAST can be more dangerous because it gives you a false sense of safety. All SAST tells you is that the code you checked in doesn't have a vulnerability. It's not that great at determining that a dependency of a dependency of a dependency has a known vulnerability, or that you have an unpatched container or OS vulnerability. You need to consider security as a top to bottom thing, so you would be looking to leverage SAST, DAST (the dynamic version of SAST), IAST (the infrastructure version), and so on.
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We forced to use Checkmarx One - the most annoying thing is that 90% of the 'findings' are BS... For the first time - after that it is 100% BS (if you fix the real problems)
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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I can recommend the free OWASP Dependency-Check.
I found Snyk disappointing, for .NET it only scans NuGet packages and ASP.NET applications are automatically marked as "high security risk".
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GKP1992 wrote: static code analysis...If yes do you think they are useful?
No.
At best it might help junior developers.
At worst it makes senior developers think that is all or even most of what is needed. Or even significant.
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I have experience with Sonar lint and so far I find it pretty annoying.
Lots of annoying micro (more like pico) performance recommendations: use Count/Length > 0 instead of Any() or use TrueForAll instead of All (TrueForAll didn't even exist when I wrote this code).
Sometimes it wants me to make code less readable by changing foreach (var something in somethings) { something.Whatever... } to foreach (var whatever in somethings.Select(s => s.Whatever)) { whatever... } (which kind of negates the prior performance recommendations).
On very few occassions it gave me recommendations that changes the meaning of the code and one time even to code that didn't compile.
I've seen lesser programmers changing JavaScript code to the latest greatest that wasn't supported in client's browsers because Sonar lint told them to.
I've tried hiding some recommendations, but can't get it to work (in the free version).
I haven't seen really good suggestions.
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We use Veracode here. It seems to be pretty good at scanning your .NET code and suggesting how to fix it. I know it scans other languages, but we only use it for .NET.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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