Posts by Wanting more

costly in paper

We had a cobol report that had a slight bug in the code. It sent the malformed report to the printer. 18 boxes of paper later (at 5 reams per box) the operator decided that something was probably wrong and killed the print job. Next morning the print was delivered back to the office on a large overflowing trolley, fortunately it wasn't my bug. It was simplex printed so we had plenty of spare scrap paper for the next 10 years.

Ah yes...

23 years ago when I was first starting out as a programmer I wrote an extract to populate the mainframe from the new shiny system that we were developing. I came in one morning to find that that weekend's mainframe processing had all errored and it was all because of my extract had fed bad data to the system (it was the products database that everything else depended on).

Fortunately after 20 minutes of investigation it turned out that I had followed the specification precisely and it wasn't my fault at all. The designer who had wrote the spec and was of supposed to have done the testing got the blame instead. I had no knowledge of the old mainframe systems and there was no way I could of spotted the potential problem.

my worst mistakes

I was supposed to be refreshing the test products database from our live database. Both databases were on the same host. I accidentally mixed up the database names and refreshed the live database with the test data. At least the backup system worked to restore the data when I realized what I'd done. Fortunately this was 15 years ago and most of our workload was batch with a few screens for data maintenance. If I did this now it would of affected online websites and whatnot. The databases were moved on to separate hosts soon after.

Another time I was coding a database trigger so that on delete of one record it would delete some child records in another table. Unfortunately I missed the where clause from the child delete and it emptied the entire table of records. Furthermore the tester didn't catch the issue (it had deleted the record they were expecting and they didn't notice that all the rest of them had gone also). However it was quickly noticed when the code ran on the live database for the first time...

$247m profit on a turnover of £29bn? yeah right

I wish I could afford their accountants to reduce my tax bill too...

I'm glad the code I work on will never kill anyone. At worse it'll lose a bit of money / reputation for the company, but that's it. Can't be nice for the guys who worked on this.

I'm dubious with the fact it was trained against itself. Yes it might play the perfect logical way, but playing against humans is a different kettle of fish altogether and is what makes poker interesting. It might be able to play billions of hands and come out ahead, but what happens when it just plays 30 hands against a human?

Good job...

...she didn't have an icon for minesweeper on the desktop

I had a good view in Milton Keynes, but to be honest the planes also in the sky at the same time looked better with their flashing lights.

mine is fine

My Samsung S3 is "good enough". When I bought it I paid £285 (Oct 2013) which I felt was too much at the time. I'm certainly going to keep it a few years. I don't want a bigger phone (pocket limitations) and this one seems to work fine, so no temptation to spend more money to update to S5 etc. So no more money from me for quite a while and I know I'm not the only person out there who thinks the same.

Inefficent

Isn't inductive charging inherently lossy? So given the limited supply from a battery surely it makes better sense to have a physical connection to the phone to transfer the power.

I do love my QI charging mat for my S3 though, but that's plugged into the mains. It sucks 1.5Amps from the charger, but the phone only charges at 750ma when sat on the mat (approx) if you plug the phone directly into the charger it definitely charges faster. But for overnight charging that doesn't matter and the convenience outweighs the inefficiency for me.

Can it get me a beer from the fridge / put a pizza in the oven and bring it to me in the living room? I don't want it to have emotions or tell jokes. Then do the washing up and tidying up afterwards. In short I want Kryten Series 4000 mechanoid.

But...

Linux is still better than Microsoft Windows...

Bravo on the quality of comments on this article!

Is there going to be a test flight before the high-altitude run? There's a lot to go wrong in there so a shakedown might be useful.

Also looks like there's space for a copilot (or sexy stewardess).

Blackpool for me.

I remember playing this all afternoon in an arcade in blackpool on a school trip circa 1987. I pretty sure I had the C64 version at the time and was blown away by the arcade machine. I assumed it was hydraulics moving things about not motors, was certainly very effective.

More like this please Reg.