I've seen a number of bids like this where one party comes in with a much higher bid with the expectation that they can be "negotiated" down, especially after pleading their case over an expensive dinner or a trip on a corporate jet to show off facilities/capabilities. The expectation is that they will win but get more money than if they had followed the rules of the bidding process.

It really comes down to somebody thinking they're smarter than everybody else in the room and that they understand the "actual rules".

Sometimes it works out for these people but just as often it doesn't - this sounds like one of those cases.

If the US military goes after TikTok, then it's either incredibly incompetent or trying to protect a senior officer.

As the article says that it's an "OPSEC" (Operational Security) issue and it needs to be addressed at the personnel level - clearly somebody had their phone out and recording when they should know that (if the aircraft in the video is actually secret) that it's a crime to take photographs/videos of anything appearing on the site.

There are (a lot of) times social media is the problem, but not in this case.

According to Nasa (https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-orbit-58.html):

What do you call it when an object is space has a stable (I'm presuming this) trajectory in a system with two or three stars? I would think that the path would be very irregular, which violates the definition of "orbit".

I don't know where you got your information from but for automotive and aerospace electronics are long lead time parts and very few, if any, orders were cancelled. Electronics are relatively small value components in (road or air) vehicles that require minimal warehousing and it doesn't make any sense to cancel them especially when there are cancellation fees and the semi manufacturers pushing back because they don't want inventory on their hands. The people I'm talking to (GM, Honeywell and Boeing) never cancelled any orders and are in the same position I am in, confirmed orders are getting pushed out with no explanation and no guaranteed delivery dates.

I expect that when the truth comes out, the semi manufacturers stopped wafer/die production (or reallocated it to GPU and DDR) fearing that they would have built unwanted devices but when the orders didn't get cancelled they were in a position where being truthful to their customers put their executives in compromised positions and the companies vulnerable to lawsuits.

If the semi companies made bad business decisions that hurt their customers (and left the companies open to lawsuits due to broken contracts with customers) shouldn't their stock holders know the truth? If it turns out that government lockdowns were the reason for semi shortages then shouldn't that need to be understood so that the same problem doesn't happen again?

I don't understand why you think there shouldn't be government investigations.

I'm struggling to get parts together to do a build of the Jade Robot and it has been a nightmare. We have about 75% of the parts required but searching and redesigning to use available parts. It's pretty obvious that the semi manufacturers are playing fast and loose with the truth - parts I ordered from Mouser in August with October delivery are now projected to be available in February. When I complain, all I get is "You think you have it bad..." I know I'm a shmuck-nobody in terms of demand, but when I talk to friends in the automotive and aerospace industries they're getting treated exactly the same way.

The inability to plan one part of a product (like a car) due to changing availability projections has serious ripple effects down the line and is going to make the Covid recovery much more difficult and prolonged. It's absolutely critical that the semiconductor supply situation is understood and enough with the games of broken promises.

If it's a 21st century food, it should be cooked with 21st century methods.

I'm not really sure what the backlog of system/phone processors are, but I do know that there's a huge waiting list for ARM Cortex MCUs with everybody scrambling to see what's available, whether or not the person claiming to have the chips is legitimate and if they can be used in current products.

If AMD or Intel could help with that backlog, it would probably do more to ensure a smoother recovery from Covid than having more systems and phones (many of which Cortex and other MCUs).

They have medication for that now as well as ointments for the burns.

The very routine launch with recovery of the first stage along with the great quality video (with the exception of the first stage landing) is very impressive and really showed a level of maturity in the SpaceX hardware that I don't think is matched by any other company. It should also be noted that a Falcon 9 (with Starlink) was launched two days ago so the team is well practiced.

I'm sure that there was nervousness and cross fingers behind the scenes but a very smooth start to the flight.

I know at some point I'll have to work with a Windows 11 computer but I'll leave that as long as possible and hopefully Microsoft will ease the processor restrictions to the point where I can run it on a '386SX system, where it belongs.

It's great that it's a coordinated message from NASA and ESA saying that the launch is delayed but why? I would think that's a critical question that needs to be answered so that people can understand if it's likely that the launch will take place on December 18th or if this is yet another in a series of technical issues that have plagued the project.

Clearly you weren't around then.

The most popular computers of the early 1980s were the Atari 400, Atari 800, Apple ][, Coleco Adam, Commodore Pet, Commodore 64, home built CPM (usually Z80 processors but some Intel 8080 processor systems), IBM PC, TI 99/4a, Sinclair ZX80 and TRS 80 - they all ran they're own version of BASIC (which didn't fit one standard although for the most part they were pretty close). Publishers, not being very computer savvy (and a lot of the people contributing the programs) really didn't understand the concept of "compatibility" and assumed that if the program was written in "BASIC" and ran on one of them, it would run on them all.

I think publishers kind of knew that the programs in their books wouldn't run on all the different computers but were reluctant to indicate which ones the BASIC programs in the books were written and tested on because that would limit the interested buyers from everybody with a computer that ran BASIC to just a fraction of the entire population.

I remember those books and found them to be useful examples to different approaches to solve problems. I think you're being generous when you say "about half" of them had issues - I think the real number was north of 80%. The problems ranged from specific BASIC version/platform requirements, typos, to logic errors and then there was generally a lot of just really bad coding.

The games in books and magazines that you could type in could generally be solved in fifteen minutes or so (it just takes a pad of paper and some practice with them) so the effort in copying in the code was generally more than actually solving the challenge. A small percentage of the games had some very sophisticated logic as well as different ways of obfuscating the operation of the game so that when you typed it in, you wouldn't be able to figure out how to solve the puzzles. I seem to remember one author that put everything in integer tables, but included a checksum test on them so that you know if you made a mistake in entering the numbers.

Of course, the programs were written in BASIC which made things more difficult right from the start and were written by people who never had any formal training in programming - it was par for the course that you'd have to read through code that didn't seem to be working properly and try to figure out what the author was trying to do. When I was in University, we'd often take a game we liked and rewrite it in Pascal (yes, it was that long ago) for the school's mainframes and share them. I remember one younger CS professor that was part of the group and used text games like this for the course project in a second/third year course in data parsing.

Do you really think Linux would be where it is today without Linus? He's spent 30 years working to keep a huge open source project on the straight and narrow, making sure the latest hardware is supported (which I'm sure a lot more has gone in back rooms at Intel, AMD and NVidia that people know), the crazies don't take over and still find time to send angry emails.

He's the one that we should be celebrating 30 years for.