Barnyard BOb -- wrote:

Smart ass punk, Ernest Christley...

If 50 years of flight, all my ratings and many thousands of
hours make me a snot nosed ****er, where do you think
that places you in the food chain?


I was waiting for you to reply with that, Bob. Such a predictable fish.

Straight out of college, I started with a Fortune 100 that will rename
nameless, except to say that they built business machnines
internationally. All smart, green and full of vigor. Got put on the
leading feature for the next release.

Not to get to technical with something other than aviation, but this
product depended upon a hash table as a central data repository. A hash
table is a data structure that is designed to make storing and finding
sparse data fast and efficient. You take the data you want to store,
'hash' it to get a value, and use that value as an index into a table
where the data will go. The central element here is speed. The system
was limited by the speed of the hash table, and the speed of the hash
table is limited in many ways by the efficiency of the hashing algorithm.

My team started to base our hash table off of one used in the product
the we were extending. I took a close look at the hashing algorithm
used, and it was based on an even earlier product. But the earlier
product was a totally different beast that had only a cursory simularity
to what we were working on. Did I mention that hashing algorithms
should be application specific? For our application, the proposed
solution was dog slow.

Fortunately, the previous 'engineer' was still around. So, I went to
ask why she had used that particular solution. She got huffy and
practically screamed that 'it had worked before!!'

OK. But this was a different situation. I set up test cases for a
head-to-head comparison, and demonstrated a 30% speed increase on live
code. But still all she had to say was, "It can't be changed, because it
worked before." The team unanimously chose to implement my algorithm
over the one chosen by a engineer with 30yrs of service. Why? Because
I applied my brain to the actual situation, improved the product, and
was able to test and document substantial improvements.

All that to say, 50 years of sniffing pesticides while just barely
managing to not get decapitated by a powerline doesn't necessarily mean
that you have all the answers. In fact, it doesn't mean that you
necessarily have ANY answers. From what you post here, I'd have to
assume that it means little more than that you're a trained monkey who
knows little more than how to handle his own stick.

What do you add to the conversation? How have you advanced the state of
aviation? Have you ever tried an experiment to improve an airplane's
performance? Did you document what you did and what your results were?
If you did experiment, how do you justify departing from the safe
status quo, and more importantly how did you avoid becoming a statistic?
If not why are you such a blow hard dragging down our discussions with
your chicken little, "You're gonna die" dead weight?

As for food chain...

Where the hell do you think you are? There is no food chain. There's
just you and me, and we just disagree.

--
----Because I can----
http://www.ernest.isa-geek.org/
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