Say gang,

Steve Jackson Games has been running this daily blog for right at 29 years.

They think they may be the longest running blog around. Does anyone know of a longer running blog (and even where to find such information)?

Thanks!

Thanks - I'll give this a try.

The key here seems to be the word "many." Alaska Airlines has 289 airplanes (per wikipedia).

All the other arguments seem to assume a large consumer type of load - tens of thousands of users, etc...

I just can't see an undue strain being placed on a well designed system from < 300 data points. And I haven't even accounted for the distribution of needing to compute takeoff data over the course of a day nor how many planes are NOT taking off at the same time, etc...

Also, to somewhat change the topic, didn't Alaska Airlines disband their QA org a few years ago as part of cost cutting? IIRC, they did this to model the software company models (that ship bugs regularly to consumers) and seem to be getting some data that they need to bring back that org...

They also mentioned American was using the same system too. So it may have been load from more than one company.

Good observation. I had assumed each company had their own instance, but that's not necessarily true.

This, but with one twist: "... plan through how you could lower your expenses if the hammer falls."

Don't just plan - implement that plan now. You won't be any worse off, and will be much better prepared if the hammer actually falls.

If the hammer does NOT fall, then the money you saved while in this mode is just a nice little problem to have - pay down other debt, save it, etc...

I went through the 2000 .com bust and learned this lesson in time for the 2008 slowdown. It really helped and also allowed me to trim some unwanted expenses long term.

That’s fair advice, it’s just that it can be quite difficult for many people to keep their expenses cut to the bone. Many people don’t even know what they are spending. I think a first step is to understand your budget, maybe then make some easy cuts to start increasing your savings, and have a plan how you might cut to the bone quickly if you needed to.

For example, you might analyze your spending and realize that you’d save a lot of money by cutting daily Starbucks and avocado toast and that it’s trivial to make that at home. So you do that now to get some extra savings with no pain. You might also realize that moving back in with your parents is the single biggest thing you could do for your budget, but not a thing you would do unless you were laid off. But you could still have the conversation and be ready to pull that ripcord fast instead of waiting till you were out of money after a layoff.

Sparkfun measured the forces applied to packages during shipping.

'good product people' jumped out at me.

Disney has _passionate_ engineers, not necessarily good. Disney also has the mantra of "we will tell you if your idea is good," rather than empowering their software team to make positive changes. Finally, they pay far less than the industry average, so if you believe in a correlation between good pay and good people, you can see where they come up short.

It seems Disney relies on passionate people will do what is right for the customer in all aspects of their business. That's fine for working in the theme parks, but when you miss out on talented engineers, the folks that work there are passionate but get either blocked by lack of knowledge on how to make a desired change (they don't hire the best), or lack of management support to make the change (we will tell you if your idea is good).

All in all, in sums up to mantra "Disney is bad at tech."

Other data points - their website is horrid. I figured out once that only 23% of the page showed me information I wanted (reservation availability, park hours, etc...) and the other 77% was branding, whitespace or terrible nav UI.

D23 attendees had to install 2 apps, log into 1 and then were able to buy merchandise in the 2nd app.

And so on...

And their TV app is also buggy. I have 2 shows that I have watched all episodes that won't clear from the "currently watching" list. There is no way to 'give up' on a series and remove it from the currently watching list either. It also logs me out if I walk away for a few minutes to grab some food or whatnot.

I'm going to go way out on a limb and assume no one received anything from them. Before I let my cynicism completely go awry, though, I wanted to check if anyone has received anything from them (cash, help with the impact of the breach, restoration, etc...).

FWIW, my status continues to show as

Your claim was received by the Settlement Administrator and is under review.

Please note, the Court gave final approval to the Settlement and overruled all objections on January 13, 2020. However, some of those that objected to the Settlement have now appealed the Court’s decision to approve the Settlement. By order of the Court, the Settlement cannot become final until all appeals are resolved and there is currently no timeline for the resolution of these appeals. Benefits cannot be distributed until the appeals are resolved and the Settlement becomes effective.

When the appellate court enters a schedule for the appeal, we will update the Settlement website to provide individuals with more guidance as to the timing of a decision. Please periodically check the Settlement website at www.EquifaxBreachSettlement.com for further updates.

Initial commit was 38 years ago. Heh.

Sort of. The "rules" to establish a contact generally state that you have to exchange some data, but doesn't define "data". Mostly this devolves into a simple piece of data - your grid coordinate is one example. During contests (yes, there are amateur radio contests), a signal report (strength and clarity expressed as 2 digits) would be accepted.

With a low bandwidth mode like this, there is not much possibility of transmitting more than a few bits of data. So a grid square and callsign are about all that will fit.

I can't get the math to work to reach 475 million American adults.

Our current population is only 347 million and the birthrate is about 1.25%. Running a total for the last 20 years or so I can't get more than 300 million adults or so.

Any math folks that want to analyze the number of unique adults entering/leaving the US from 1990 to 2011?

I think idea is the sample size of 60k was varied enough to represent a population size of up to 475M. More than enough to reflect the real population and then some.