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Underwater Chain Saws

stanleyinfrastructure.com

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#91
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leonard's Law: Software will be as bad as it's users can tolerate, and no worse. VHDL compilers are catastrophically bad, because electrical engineers have to tolerate them and make tape-out. FADECs don't normally crash airplanes because pilots don't like when that happens.

Is there an article/primary source on this that you can point up? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't seem to find anything.

It's next to Neves' Law ("The harder a bug is to find, the smaller the diff to fix it will be.") in the deleted list in Wikipedia.

They both were discovered by former colleagues of mine. And named by me.

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#92
post #9

Around $4100! https://www.amronintl.com/stanley-cs113no-hydraulic-underwat... Amazing how capable tools can be, in industries that simply cannot get their work done without them and are willing to pay a healthy amount. Sometimes I wonder how good our dev tooling would be if we were willing to pay thousands a year, as opposed to the time-wasting bug-fest that is Xcode. Not singling out Apple, I’m sure all are comparab…

Visual Studio does cost thousands for some versions. And yeah. It certainly is a better tool than Xcode.

Enterprise is $6000 for the first year, then $2000/yr, but the main thing is it’s a perpetual license and includes (also perpetual) licenses for all MSDN downloads going right back to Windows 3.11 and QBASIC for DOS.

Apple don’t even let you downgrade iOS on your own devices.

Compare and contrast.

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#93
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an article/primary source on this that you can point up? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't seem to find anything.

It's next to Neves' Law ("The harder a bug is to find, the smaller the diff to fix it will be.") in the deleted list in Wikipedia. They both were discovered by former colleagues of mine. And named by me.

Thank you!

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#94
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's at atmospheric pressure! 100ft would be 4x the pressure at the output, requiring 4x the flow rate to do the same work. (Assuming you don't have some sort of magic low-pressure high-volume chainsaw "rebreather" apparatus.)

> requiring 4x the flow rate to do the same work. I strongly suspect that this is incorrect. A given amount of oxygen and fuel releases the same amount of energy at any (reasonable?) pressure. 4x oxy (and fuel) --> 4x energy... this is the principle of turbochargers and superchargers (although the limiting factor is compression). Interestingly, and paradoxically, I suspect that at an appreciable depth you mitigate th…

I think we're both right and describing different things.

The air in the engine will be 4x as dense, but the flow rate will be the same.

The air in the tank cannot change density, and will therefore have a 4x higher flow rate.

The result is that storage is worth less strokes/breaths at depth.

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#95
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least the vendor would guarantee, in writing, some minimum baseline of performance?

At most, it would be something like "our examples work, and we can provide support". I've never seen things like "IDE does not crash" written into contracts.

"Our examples are guaranteed to work (99.9%+ of the time...) on X configuration(s) in Y environmental conditions with Z functions." Is a pretty normal expectation when your paying thousands or tens of thousands per month per seat.

If you've literally never seen a guarantee like that and your company is actually paying that much money for a product, then it would be wise to shop around.

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least the vendor would guarantee, in writing, some minimum baseline of performance?

Yes! And if you're willing to spend tens of thousands of more dollars in court, not to mention the months litigation may take, you may even get that minimum baseline (at the expense of other features or bug fixes that don't fall under the written contract) after another 18 months of development time.

Obviously one should buy from trustworthy businesses, that wouldn't drag their customers into court for every deviation.

I'm sure there are shady vendors of high end software products, but at those price ranges there's no reason to choose them over established names.

Re: Underwater Chain Saws

#97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only aware of the opposite pattern

Confirmation bias? Yet here we are on a thread linking to a site showing an industrial underwater chainsaw, and someone has managed to connect it to tech (possibly, and normally hinting at the importance of FOSS) and managed to have a dig at Apple, Microsoft or Google.

Correct
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