Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes El Reg's editorial team does not typically cheerlead any tech. We are dispassionate observers sat at the side of the industry's sales super highway. Or something like that. The latest offer from Dell, however, was too tempting to ignore. The Precision 5530 is Dell's "thinnest, lightest and smallest 15 inch mobile workstation …
I really enjoyed going down that Rabit Hole you provided. (The Wiki Link to "Third World Countries"), that has the Emerald Isle, in of all Colours Green. Why should I find this enjoyable you mighr be asking yourselves. Well Blue is considerd First World, Red was given to Russia, and China, (You know those Second World faild Socialist States. Kinda makes sence in a poetic sort of way.), and alas the poorest Third Worlders got stuck with Green.
Perhaps I should donate some Potatos?!
It was because of the way that the forces were color coded at the Louisiana Maneuvers just before the US entered the second world war.
Traditionally, the British Army and the Armies of its dominions and colonies (especially India) was colored red or pink, and it still is if you look at their flag. Blue (or sometimes Black) were always the enemy. The Prussians/Imperial Germans and Russians wore blue, as did the French. The British Army always made plans to deal with any of them hence the OPFOR color was blue. Matched the uniforms.
General Douglas MacArthur, control freak that he was, convinced General Marshall, Admirals Stark and King, and even FDR that it was some British or in some versions Nazi, Japanese or general communist bullshit (or to remind Stalin who was top dog in yet other versions of the story) and that he demanded the US War Department start color coding our forces blue on our maps with the enemy being red. OPFOR became red, and is still red to this day (I was in an OPFOR unit, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, as my first permanent party assignment. We're always red on the BLUFOR maps and such at NTC) which was convenient in the Cold War given the Soviet propensity to use the color red.
Green are neutrals which we consider friendly but don't have any kind of operational control over. We tend to use it nowadays for Islamic governments and movements that we usually have a strategic alignment with (since they tend to use green in their symbols) like the Iraqi Army and the ANA/ANP, with the Jihadis and Iranian SOF being colored black or red depending on who they are and who's doing the coding. I've also seen purple being used for them, usually for stuff like the Mahdi Army and Iranian militias in Iraq/Syria or Hekmatyar's people in Afghanistan because while we've had to kill them in the past and they're still not really "friendly" and you probably don't want to lead a patrol through their territory, they're not usually trying to shoot at us or bomb us....for the moment anyway.
Please explain the joke (for readers who may be foreign). Was the lemonade stand IoT enabled? Maybe a physical 'like' button that only required Lucy's customers to accept the biometric Ts&C? Was she going to ride off on that $100 bike just as Charley was about to kick the ball?
Okay, lesson learned: Attention entry-level Java programming new hires!
a) No more doing currency calculations in real data types.
2) Those huge negative numbers on the monthly sales report? They mean whoever added a second title line to the report needs to go back and look hard at their code too because the word "total" is being read as the total.
*) Perhaps cracking a manual instead of breaking from twitter just long enough for a search of Stackoverflow will save your jobs.
You forgot a couple...
iv) Always add sanity-checking / canary logic to any transaction-processing system.. e.g if ($item_price) > ($maximum_price_you'd_ever_realistically_expect) then flag_for_review();
Session) Also flag for review any abnormal traffic levels to any given page. If a particular laptop is getting 500% of the views of other, similar products, it's either a pricing mistake, or a content cockup of some sort.
Saturday) Can we just settle on a list numbering scheme, please?
Order) Apparently not.
When I was working at a now defunct astronomically named electronics bazaar they would price stock at silly amounts when it needs to be added to the system but hadn't yet been released. It was common with things like video games and Cupertino idiot taxes where the shop would be penalised for breaking street dates.
We didn't usually make it customer facing though...
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