Re: Vile
"...a tree or some clouds."
..or a Macbook.
The flameproof suit please.
9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
The other thing worth mentioning is that the touted alternatives often prove to be mayflies. Go on, put your hand on your heart and state now which of the new hawtness will still be the de facto standard a decade down the line.
If it's done in C, it'll still be maintained in years to come. If it's done in ${hiptrendy_this_week} it may well be more robust now, but good luck finding someone to build on it in 5 years' time.
...decided to store the date of birth with only two digits for the year.
Dunno about PL/1, but in RPG dates are natively six digit. So, while you can define an eight digit field to hold a date, the system supplied dates are all in six so you were making work for yourself on comparisons.
My bet is that RPG was on a '36 somewhere[1] and not on the mainframe and that's where the core data was coming from.
[1] Because for data entry and validation, 5250 block mode beat the shit out of 3270 and serial for efficiency until quite recently. So, if you gave a rat's arse about your hardware budget, that's what you did.
...doesn't necessarily mean Cash only. If you look closely at your contactless card, you'll find a chip in one end and a black stripe on the reverse. These allow you to use a card reader to pay by either swiping or plugging the thing in.
Sheesh. People have such short memories these days...
Seriously though. Contactless payment involves an additional set of exchanges with the payment provider over and above chip 'n pin or swipe 'n sig. Losing the ability to process contactless often doesn't affect the other options.
I agree and I'd go further.
Any organisation should be granted immunity from prosecution under data protection laws in such circumstances[1]. It should be a crime, with draconian penalties attached, to pay the useless parasites.
[1] i.e. when a third party has broken in and nicked it for publication. Let's face it, if your house is burgled you do not get done for "aiding and abetting" if you do not have the best locks available installed.
Hmm. Guess who Austin Rover bought their OEM in-car kit from?
Guess what always goes wrong first on any Austin Rover / Rover Group car...
Later high-end models have Alpine OEM kit common to contemporary BMWs. That's far more reliable, but the sound quality makes the Philips stuff sound good. This is such a low bar to fail to clear that I have to suspect that Alpine is staffed by limbo dancers.
To be fair, that is the way of things these days. It's so ${luser}'s iThing can print to it from ${wherever}.
If you can get into the config and change things well, it's not the fault of the manufacturer that ${user} didn't completely run through the setup and SECURE THE BLOODY THING.
It's provided open so $(user}'s iThing can access it wirelessly OOB[1] and then, once it's connected, secure it. The problem occurs when ${user} gets it to print and immediately crashes out of the setup process "cuz it worx nows innit".
[1] You wouldn't believe the number of one-star reviews that requiring a USB connection for setup gets your product. While teh internets allows sheep to post reviews and that, in turn, controls how well it sells, there is no answer to this one.
I have working 5G. I suspect that this is because my SIM is only a 4G one and the fact that the phone often reports a 5G connection is a software glitch somewhere.
However this does mean that I can show people it's on 5G and it'll talk to stuff without falling over which, seeing what's written above, makes me think I may be better off than I would be with "real" 5G.
...that politicians ever approve state investment in infrastructure.
It doesn't matter what a government builds, there'll always be some bunch of ungrateful tossers to slag it off[1]. They'd be better off just staying out of it and allowing whatever it is to merge into the usual background drone of "We should be doing something about this".
[1] For a start, in any proper democracy there'll be something called an "opposition", who get paid for doing this.
It always suffered from...
Another inconvenient feature is that it absolutely requires continuous care and feeding by skilled and experienced Teradata types[1], who know and care which, what and how to add/configure as it expands. The alternative is something that looks more and more like a massively overpriced disk array as time goes on.
As a very wise man once told me; Ask anyone in any business what their largest overhead is. If the answer isn't "payroll", they're either an idiot or lying.
[1] Who, when it was trendy, looked and felt like Storage Admins, but were paid in sacks of gold doubloons.
Aha! You must be right as, every time he unlocks it, you can see his lips moving as he hums along to Manfred Mann.
Who was it recently who found that their in-house designed, purpose built for cloud, middleware turned out to have a hard scalability limit? For added "blast radius" fun and games, when they hit it, it turned out to utterly bugger their services until they rolled back their server deployments and be unfixable so they'll have to chuck pricey hardware at the problem.
Yes, I wonder who that could have been?
See also: Pots, kettles, stones and glass houses.
I blame Soshal Meejah. Not for the bullshit, but for the massive drop in the standards of the science on offer.
Trouble is that many scientists want to get f1rst p0st on Tw@ter as much as the next ADD-afflicted toddler-alike. After all, the more drooling morons who like or share your post the more famous you are, right? As a result, a large amount of what's been published and reported is half-cocked or unverified.
For a classic example, look up everything that's been written on the subject of post-infection immunity. First it was a Big Thing, then it was effectively nonexistent and now we have vaccines, which sort of relies on this to be effective, it's actually more of a thing than anyone ever guessed. The truth? Answers on a postcard please to...
As for ...the world's top health organisations..., what doesn't help here is that one thing that does seem to have emerged is that the WHO is as bent as a nine-bob note and their actions did as much as anyone else's to ensure that there was a pandemic. Then again, they'd been crying wolf on the subject for so long that I can't help thinking that they really needed one...(!)
...fall back to the PC's cassette interface...
I remember a mate telling me of an ICL mainframe they were trying to boot into engineering mode. The problem with doing this was that to get 'em to admit defeat and come up off the internal diagnostic ROM, they had to find absolutely no device attached which it might be possible to boot from.
He and his colleagues were sure they'd powered off every disk, unit, tape device, etc ad nauseum in the computer suite and yet the damned thing was still stopping at Load Boot Media.
After some considerable searching, they found, alone and unloved, hidden behind some cabinets in a dusty corner, an antiquated 800bpi tape drive with its Load Media light flashing away.
Kept "just in case" they ever needed to restore some ancient backup and thus unused for many years, everyone had forgotten its very existence.
Well he's dead on trend with the message. Self-flagellation of the human race is where it's at, right down to revising history to denigrate anyone who looks like a good example.
Maybe, one day, we can leave the pessimistic hand-wringing losers behind and just bugger off to do the locust thing.
We really need an "opinionated wanker" icon, the "Twitter bird" would do nicely.
When young and skint, I made one for LARP. Your local charity shop will give you wire coat hangers for free as long as you take them away.
Snip off hook bit with sidecutters and straighten wire.
Clamp one end in vice with dowel.
Wind wire around dowel (yes, this method does get painful after a while).
Hacksaw through "spring" resulting.
Repeat until gibberingly insane and hands are in shreds.
Assemble chainmail.
Win 3.11 ran on top of DOS on a FAT filesystem.
Habitually turning it off and on again was guaranteed to get the Disk Corruption Fairies[1] to sit up and take notice.
[1] As in: "Did you turn it off with the power switch again?".
"No I didn't!"
"Right. Must have been the Disk Corruption Fairies at work then."