311–320 of 330 posts
Modern is relative. F-22's first flight was 1997. F-35 development started in 1992, first flight of X-35 was 2000 and F-35's first flight was 2006. There is absolutely noting wrong with using old technology. Being modern just for the sake of being modern is wasteful.
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As near as I could ever find, the format of a VMS executable file did not appear in the DEC manuals. I meant that as a commentary on the "VMS had great docs" sentiment. At one point, I was convinced that understanding the format of an executable file (a.out, COFF, XCOFF, Mach-O, ELF, .com, .exe, PE, etc) was important to understanding the operating system itself. I spent a fair amount of effort and some money buying…
It did, sigh. It was in the LINK'ER documentation. RSX/VMS was all about object modules being shared between concurrently running applications in separate user spaces (because RAM was crazy expensive and DISK was crazy slow and expensive). The format for runtime libraries, executables and memory-mapped sections in general descended from the PDP11 a bit and I believe it changed radically (for the first time in decades…
I had a job maintaining fortran code on an openVMS OS running on itanium hardware. Itanium was intel's failed attempt at a 64bit architecture and that's the platform VMS decided to port to. That made hardware expensive and as of recently obsolete (i think hp discontinued that integrity line of servers) VMS doesn't natively support TCP/IP, because it predates it. The VMS communication protocol was called decnet. So yo…
That's outrageous... 1. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jer…
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> I'd like to say that I'm astonished that modern aircraft still use the 1553 bus... What's wrong with 1553? It's reliable, battle-tested, and the latest revision C was published 28-Feb-2018. In contrast, the RS-232 PHY dates back to 1960, yet it's quite alive and well in modern commercial devices. As a consolation, be glad you've never had to deal with the monster that is STANAG 5516/MIL-STD-6016...if there was such…
As someone who has read all of 6016, doing so cost me a good chunk of my sanity. Never mind the fact that many areas of the standard don't matter because the manufacturers of equipment that use those areas made up their own way of doing things that isn't 6016 compliant. So you can comply to the standard, or you can actually work with platforms in the real world, but you can't do both.
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None of the FAANG companies derive any significant percentage of their revenue from defense. None of them are defense contractors in the real sense of the concept. They're corporations who have a defense business on the side.
You either are or you aren't a defense contractor. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been competing for a $10 billion dollar defense contract. Google just dropped out. Aside, Boeing is considered a defense contractor by many, but only 25% of its revenue is from defense. Where do you draw the line?
You may believe that, the market doesn’t.
Boeing isn’t a defense contractor by most people’s metrics. None of the faangs are by almost any standard.
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Actually I'd be surprised if they're even paying market rate for these developers, regardless of how difficult or impossible it is to find them. COBOL programmers still make about $70,000/year or so ( https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-S... ) even though the entire world is going to collapse if they disappear. It would seem that the laws of supply and demand don't apply here.
I often think about what would happen if all cobol programmers went on strike
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You should apply, and demand an insanely-high salary while pointing out that almost no one has VAX experience now.
Actually I'd be surprised if they're even paying market rate for these developers, regardless of how difficult or impossible it is to find them. COBOL programmers still make about $70,000/year or so ( https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary-S... ) even though the entire world is going to collapse if they disappear. It would seem that the laws of supply and demand don't apply here.
The wiki page shows some stats of a plane that is (publicly) 22-23 years old and VAX is 42 years old. To me, that math does not add up.
Just a curious thought.
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Makes me why we don’t count NASA under DoD similar to DARPA to help with their funding.
NASA exists to be the civilian side of the US’s aerospace ventures. The military side is the Air Force.
Not the Space Force?
> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/trump-spac...
;-)
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I see the "there's nothing wrong with old technology" comment a lot, and in this case I disagree. There's a good chunk of this thread pointing out how hard it is to hire for this position because practically no one is familiar with these technologies. This, to me, illustrates that there absolutely is something wrong with using old technology, especially in this instance. I will grant that there are some things that j…
The point is the F-22 is old technology. The testing and other tooling has been in production for a long time. And yes, it's hard to recruit people with the right skillsets to support legacy hardware and software.
Perhaps you should not fire them, then.