Re: A Y2.1k problem...
Actually, the fact that 2000 WAS a leap year broke a lot of stuff.
1208 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
"COBOL has been a fossil since 1980 at least and that's over a working lifetime ago."
And yet here I am, not yet at retirement age, nor even yet officially considered a senior citizen. At least not by U.S. standards. I started working in 1975, I'm only 60, so you're off by at least a decade.
Not that I am interested in retiring at 65, but just using that as a standard.
There is some kind of column skip function... Been a while, sorry. But I know, because I used to use it all the time... with drum cards. I was really good at making drum cards.
The end result was that the tab-equivalent inserted spaces.
I don't consider my experience with the 029 OR the 026 to be directly relevant to my work today, though I've never broken the bad habit of using left-side-only control keys that it forced me into.
"Isn't 2.4 years the amount of time a front end, JavaScript-framework programmer has to become expert in what they do..."
I wouldn't know. When I had 2.4 years' experience, JavaScript had at least a decade before it would be a gleam in its father's eye.
I hate K&R style, so I gave you a thumbs up. Apparently it's still popular, though, given the three thumbs down.
On Windows there's a free pretty-print editor called Artistic Style that works very nicely if you're on Windows and insist on K&R. But you'll never read my code anyway nor I yours, likely.
I find it fascinating that Swype has K&R in its stock dictionary.
"Depending on the quantity of data to be treated, 200 critical devices might be just right. They are all critical, on the other hand if some of them are going down, the others should have absolutely no problem to hold the load. At least in theory."
But that's the whole point: not that they are critical, but they are critical path. Which means that if any one of them goes down, the entire system goes down. These aren't redundant devices -- they're each one necessary for the whole to work.
I never took a statistics & probability class, but if I'm not mistaken, the chances of failure in this scenario increase exponentially with each device added. (If I am mistaken, I'm sure somebody will cheerfully point it out. I just want it to be the guy who actually took S&P classes and not the guy who thinks the probability of getting 10 heads in a row is 1 in 10.)
"...we cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed."
...Said every fascist dictator ever.* Are you sure you want to be seen in their company?
"But as the nature of the threat we face becomes more complex, more fragmented, more hidden, especially online..."
So you feel that stopping them using the Internet will drive them into the open, instead of further underground?
* I think... I may have technically Godwinned this thread. Apologies.
There's never been a period that I've NOT heard SCSI pronounced that way.
Vowel sounds are frequently added to vowel-deficient acronyms to make them pronounceable. I see no reason SCSI should be any different.
Or inconvenient consonants removed. I leave you with the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, pronounced "Spebsqua," which features both. In the same letter, no less.
Mobile but pressed for time.
Mobile but hate shopping, esp. waiting in line. Me myself personally, I hate waiting in lines.
Only quasi-mobile, e.g. wheelchair-bound. Or not wheelchair-bound, but walking is difficult and/or painful.
There are three scenarios that may not apply to you, but may apply to other people.
The Dick Tracy two-way wrist TV is cool because the only phones available are landlines wired into the wall. And they only do voice, nothing else.
Only that ain't true no more. Damn near everybody in the world having an insanely powerful multimedia computer slash telephone slash message system that fits in your pocket and costs a couple weeks' wages (YMMV) causes a MASSIVE perspective change. We were right then, that it was cool, and we're right now, that it's not. The whole world has changed, and us with it.
Give this watch (along with the necessary infrastructure) to somebody back then without the 40 or 50 years of intervening buildup and they'd pass out from the geekgasm, and rightly so. Don't be too hard on your younger self.
(P.S. "Dwarves" is a plural noun. You want "dwarfs.")
Personally, I'd buy a Lenovo before I bought an HP.*
I happen to have one of each Lenovo and HP laptops. Bought the HP from a friend who needed the cash. The laptops are about the same vintage and performance, so comparisons are reasonable. I'm using the HP because it's got a bigger display, and gave my daughter the Lenovo.
Most of it's little stuff. The Lenovo has more USB ports, one of which is a combo ESATA (thus powered). Fewer USB ports is annoying, especially since the HP doesn't have Bluetooth. I grabbed a spare combo WiFi/BT module from the Lenovo and stuck it into the HP and... it refused to boot. Oh, it POSTed fine, it just stopped with an error. Not a hardware error -- a configuration error. The BIOS knew that it wasn't the module the HP was set up for, and wouldn't let me even try to boot. Basically, HP doesn't want you upgrading without taking the unit back to HP and throwing money at them.
Whereas the Lenovo would run with any module I threw in there. Doesn't care. Swap modules; one Windows driver installation later and it Just Works.
So if I want BT I have to use one of my precious few USB ports, which normally isn't a problem, except now I have a USB dongle sticking out and taking physical damage every time I get the least bit careless.
Anyway, you get the idea. The HP isn't bad, but I resent their attempts to lock me in. Oh, and how much do you want to bet if I take the laptop to HP for an upgrade, they'll just try to sell me a new unit? (Or tell me to go play in the street.) It's pretty old. I bet they won't even service it any more. So the money grab attempt is pure avarice and only serves to obsolesce the unit more quickly.
HP aren't at the bottom of my list -- I'd buy an HP before I bought a Dell, f'rinstance -- but they're pretty far down.
Fortunately for my sanity's sake I ended up with a tablet and I now use that for watching videos instead of the laptop. It's more convenient, and it has BT built in.
*Pretty much literally true, since I bought the Lenovo first, then the HP. Hah hah. See what I did there? Nyuk nyuk.
"If you like the sound, its ok."
And that's the real point in the end, isn't it? People can sneer at you or rattle off specs and statistics all they want. But if you like it, that's all that really counts. Anybody who says differently is an effete snob.
(Please note: I'm not saying that being a connoisseur makes you a snob. Only when you try to dictate your tastes to others.)
>>send the needle skipping all over the place
>Did no-one tell you? A ha'penny, balanced on the tone arm, fixed that.
And ruined the record. If you have a needle that won't get damaged doing this (instead of a stylus which more likely will), you'll also ruin the record on a single playthrough, so you're scrod anyway.
You can talk about the high quality of vinyl or you can talk about adding weight to the tonearm, but not in the same sentence.
Not all of us old geezers complain about how much better it was in the old days.
Those damned albums were impossible to keep clean, and scratched if you looked at them funny.
I personally preferred listening to the tape hiss to turning the treble all the way down. I'd rather hear the flaws of the medium than miss 3/4 of the music. (Yes, I'm implying that the treble is more important than the bass. But I don't buy $3000 woofers for my car, either. And it's entirely a matter of taste. That's just me, OK?)
As for The Old Days, feh. You can have 'em. Yeah, I get nostalgic too, but I'm more likely to sit on the loo and marvel that I can sit on the loo and hold a computing powerhouse in my hand that's not only several orders of magnitude smaller, but also several orders of magnitude more powerful AND cheaper than the computer I used at university, and I can slip it into my pocket once I'm finished the paperwork. Printer extra, but the one on my desktop can print a page every few seconds in high-quality color graphics on ordinary paper. And I don't even need wires to connect them. I can get the printer and supplies around the corner for modest amounts of money.
Whereas the IBM 360 at NDSU (Fargo) took up a whole room (larger than some apartments I've occupied), required half an hour of meticulous work monday morning to get powered up and running, and cost so much to run and maintain that nowadays the Smithsonian can't even be bothered. They stuck theirs in a closet. Let's not even talk about the air conditioning.*
My phone is cheap enough that I can throw it away right now, order a new one that will arrive in the post in a few days, and charge it to my credit card. A used one I can pay out of pocket. And not only can I watch movies on it, and post snarky comments to my favorite rag, I can actually -- sit down for this -- MAKE AND RECEIVE PHONE CALLS.
I know, weird, right?
Seriously. Sometimes I do that. Just think about all the changes I've seen in my lifetime. Then I think about the changes my grandmother must have seen, that I've only seen the end of. And I let it blow my mind for a while, then go back to watching porn and cat videos (not at the same time) and under-appreciating my pocket-sized, battery-powered computing powerhouse that OBTW also lets me double-check with the wife which of a myriad of feminine hygiene products she wanted me to buy.
Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.
*OK OK, the air conditioning is probably equivalent to a modern data center of the same size. The difference being that the operator can carry several orders of magnitude more computing power in his pocket, let's not even talk about the computing power of a single rack, and he can probably assemble and install a whole new computer in about the time it took to IPL one of those old mainframes.
So much for not talking about it.
I saw an early HP PC clone when my company was evaluating for inclusion in our product. 1980s. Pre-Compaq. It was frikken amazing. Solid build, gold plated EVERYTHING. No corners cut, it actually weighed more than the other clones.
The HP I was running in the 1990s was constantly breaking down. I frequently had to pull the cover off to reseat the memory. It was awful.
HP used to have a well-deserved reputation for quality.
I don't necessarily see more competition in the wireless space to be a bad thing.
Unfortunately, this isn't that. They're going to be an MVNO. Yawn. I like my current MVNO quite well, thanks. I like Ting's pricing and their customer service is top notch. NFW I'm going from excellent customer service to the worst in the industry -- sorry, the worst in ANY industry -- even if my experience using phone service that depends on VOIP hadn't been crappy to begin with.
"There is, of course, nothing to the fact that it was Verizon's decision to legally challenge the previous net neutrality rules..."
...which Verizon helped write. https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20170501/08442637282/new-verizon-video-blatantly-lies-about-whats-happening-to-net-neutrality.shtml
I had something similar happen through Newegg Marketplace, bought a pair of 64GB microSDXC cards and got fakes. My first clue was that they were marked SDHC...
Ran tests (h2testw and FakeFlashTest) and of course they failed. Looked up the part number on the back and discovered that the part in question is used for fake SD cards a LOT. (http://www.happybison.com/reviews/how-to-check-and-spot-fake-micro-sd-card-8/)
After some back-and-forthing (for some reason their e-mail stripped out ALL LINKS as well as inline non-text content making it nearly impossible to send evidence; they ignored it when I said "look up my tumbler post...") I included a text copy-and-paste of the test results. They refunded my money. I wrote a review that explained everything, carefully written in a neutral tone but laid it all out. (Included the fact that they didn't refund the sales tax, though Newegg refunded that later... it was under $2, I wasn't planning to pursue it.) When I checked the review a couple days later to see if the vendor had posted a reply, I found... nothing. It had quietly disappeared. Since I had meticulously kept a neutral tone, avoided accusations and abuse but merely laid out the sequence of events and the evidence I'd collected, I can only assume it had been swept under the rug.
I haven't bought a single item from Newegg since then. If their policy is to silence negative reviews, then I can't trust them.
I've avoided cheap SD cards since then; found an honest vendor on eBay who sells genuine SanDisk media, and have been buying from him ever since. (dz-tech, in case anybody wants to know. No relationship except as a satisfied customer. US-based.)