By the standards of 2014...

Holy crap. Fuck you, non-editors.

It seems likely that it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere. A really surreal option I thought about was that all the passengers could have been in on it and wanted to go somewhere else for some reason. That seems very unlikely, but hey, if it turns out that's what happened, I called it!

We'd be better off if I just rewrote this entire application.

How many times have we witnessed this? We know how it goes down. That shitty application has two decades worth of bug fixes and business process embedded in it. Some of the business process might look like bugs or random side effects. An effort will be launched to rewrite it, and it will fail miserably, well over budget and several years late.

If the team is unfortunate enough to actually manage to create a working executable, they will find that it doesn't offer half the functionality of the old application and does not deliver the correct results half the time. So the team will start hurriedly patching code, accumulating rushed bug fix after bug fix until the entire thing is an unmaintainable quiltwork of patches and side effects. At which point the company will decide that the new application is awful and attempt to rewrite it. It's just the circle of life...

Bwahaha! A few years back, they had a contest to rename The Gimp. I can't help but notice that it's still called The Gimp. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to shoehorn an acronym for "GOATFUCKER," but petered out at 4 or 5 letters. You know if I'd managed to pull it off, that's what they would have renamed it to...

Indeed! My 70's-era assembly language book speculates that in the future we may have 32 bit processors but 64 bit processors will most likely be too expensive to ever enjoy widespread availability!

You weren't at the last PAX Prime, nor will you be at the upcoming PAX East. Any story behind that?

...well, once you've blocked the content, and once you've blocked the tracking, there's not much left to work with, yeah?

:D

"Well if you let the programmers run the show, things would be so much better."

Well once we get good at this we COULD just grow the tusk part, in 3' by 3' cubes. Then you could glue a bunch of them together to make a minecraft-style ivory castle.

I'm used to it now. Especially with people who have good analytical skills. They really pay attention to details and I can get quite lazy with my speech/writing.

I've stopped using nbcnews.com because they went to this big box look. Then my primary source for local news in my home town switched around and now not only is it impossible to find stuff or read much information, almost all articles go to an autoplay video about the story. I have to wait for it to load and then pause it before I can start reading the article.

I'm pretty much down to the bbc site for news.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

That was my immediate thought. Any decent system needs to ensure that it isn't running at a loss. To make that happen, they need an accounting system in place.

Rather than a loss, they managed a significant profit. The profit didn't go to the company.

I've seen lots of affiliate systems (sign up for a sight, the referring webmaster gets x%). In the adult industry, it's called shaving. The referring webmaster has a percentage of their sales (I've seen up to 25%), where it isn't recorded that they got the sale. Instead, it is credited to another account. The owner of the system doesn't always know. They see sales come in. They see payments go out. The shaved sales go to one of the developer's accounts (usually to a difficult to trace 3rd party).

If I were the developer, I'd have a friend in another country set up his affiliate account. The "lost" sales get paid out to him. He keeps a percentage, and pays me the rest. It can be very difficult to trace until there is a code audit. The audits don't usually come until the boss knows there's something funny going on. As long as the boss is getting a large profit, they have no reason to audit.

In the rest of the corporate world, it's skimming. Accountants can make it look like the missing funds are going to nondescript costs.

In both skimming and shaving, it becomes obvious when the person doing it gets too greedy. Like, it's difficult to justify that $1M/yr goes to miscellaneous custodian costs. And yes, I've seen exactly that, in a company that only made about $3M/yr profit. Sometimes it goes to consumable costs. It can be tricky to track if they're smart. When they get greedy, smart falls out of the equation.