Posts by M Gale 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007
Mainframe Computing.
Apparently IBM are rather desperate to take people on with zOS/JCL/COBOL/etc experience, hence they encouraged the university to offer the module as an option.
Well. Everyone and their mother knows PHP, Ruby, Java, 'web design' and possibly even some C/C++. COBOL though? Not so much.
And after a couple of days of studying it, I can see why. Godawful excuse for a programming language. You think Python enforcing whitespace indents is bad? Wait until you get a load of "well it means different things depending on which column you put the character in." A real throwback to the days of punchcards and tape.
But hey, that's what a lot of critical finance software is written in and it's not going to get ported any time soon. I already know the usual languages.. why not put something obscure but valuable on the CV?
(and why the hell does z/OS use right control instead of enter?)
I still remember when that retail reward shit started up.
Saved up just enough points for a full copy of Win XP or Office. Went to reclaim.
And they'd pumped the points value up to insane amounts, impossible to achieve even if you did every single damned test on the site. I might be waaaay out of retail sales now, but if that's an indication of how Microsoft is (still) treating people who sell its products... well.
Fuck you, Microsoft. Fuck you with a barbed wire dildo.
"There is this little thing called "Stop-Start" just thought I'd let you all know :)"
You know I wonder about the whole stop-start thing. Sure you might spend a little less in fuel, but doesn't stopping and re-cranking the engine every couple of minutes cause extra stress to the parts? As soon as the thing stops, the oil starts flowing back into the sump unless you have some kind of sticky MagnatecTM-like addition to it.
Then you get that lovely metal-on-metal contact until it starts flowing again.
You mean like buying a device where the case is made entirely of flammable metal?
If this were a car design, the first exploding chassis would be a recall. When the first Surface explodes in a brilliant white flare, will there be a redesign?
Or are you saying that lithium batteries do not periodically go pop? Like a lot more often than the LHC destroys the earth?
But hey, let's throw petrol on the fire. That'll help.
There is still a massive difference between melting a hole in a can (been there, done that) and causing magnesium to start going off.
For one, the aluminium stops reacting when you take the heat source away.
Seriously, what the fuck do people teach kids in science class these days? How the fuck is THIS anything whatsoever like the puny non-self-sustaining glow you get from a thin aluminium can while hitting it with a fucking blowtorch?
I say again, encasing lithium in magnesium is a disaster waiting to happen.
Actually the S/P is equipped like most Notebooks/Ultrabooks that come with an SSD. If you want more than a 128GB SSD there are not that many choiced left. You either go "spinning metal"(1) or you go well above 1000€ even for a notebook and there are few COTS units available.
Question is, do you really need SSD? Wouldn't a flash cache + spinning metal give you a load of the advantages and some actual storage space? Not that any buyers will have the option of finding out.
Wow, that's remarkably ignorant, check out the size of the boost library and platform SDKs
1.59GB for v1.51.0 of a framework that contains so many millions of lines of code that it makes your average Linux kernel look tiny. If you're stupid enough to link to every single library, then no wonder your code is bloated. I'm using Boost right now. What's your point? Asides to prove that 80GB really isn't enough?
Unless you're recording media, video at that, how do you (permanently) use up 80GB in a few minutes?
GB != Gb. I could fill up 10GB (or 80Gb) in a few minutes while copying 5-10 films over. Or maybe 2 films, Boost, a couple of other frameworks (hello, 961 megabytes of Ogre) and a compiler. Let's say Code::Blocks, because the full MSVC is just a weeny bit on the huge side and #pragma once can kiss my bell end.
Even with 80GB free, that's a big chunk of space gone and I'm only just started.
Yeah, cause that's *exactly* the work process of a software developer...
You make it seem like that.
M Gale = Eadon?
I disagree with you, therefore I'm Eadon.
On top of being a shill for Google, that's the best accusation yet.
A standard Bic lighter will burn at somewhere between 420C and 800C. A windproof or "jet" lighter will go to a thousand-and-odd with the maximum temperature of a butane flame being about 1970C.
So instead of some nasty bastard putting a ciggy mark or a hole in your laptop, they get to cause a metal fire that will practically burn itself through the floor. That's if the battery doesn't explode on you. If Microsoft ever get to make enough units for the miniscule chance of a battery failure to rear its head and go "oh hai statistics", you're going to end up with a hell of a lot more than some warped plastic and and a nasty smell.
Incidentally, magnesium flames are rather blindingly brilliant.
And I have a terabyte on this machine that's getting dangerously full after two years. Your point is what?
I also have laptops, and I'm constantly fighting with the Available Space issue. But then, I do think it appropriate that a hard drive is a good place to put, oh I don't know.. films, music, all that kind of stuff that you might want to use a media consumption device like the Surface for.
80GB? It might last me a few weeks. 80Gb? Probably a few minutes. I know plenty of less-technical people who also bought cheap computers with small (funnily enough, around the 120GB mark) drives, and they are also fighting for free space because these are people that actually use their computers for stuff. They don't just sit in the corner looking pretty and occasionally get switched on to edit a text file.
Now you as a software developer can probably make do on 80GB. It's not like a bunch of C++ source code for a project really takes up all that much space. However, saying "it's not meant for that" when Microsoft are trying to tell us all that the Surface is "everything at once" is disingenious at best.
The Surface Pro is sold as a premium product. Priced as a premium product.
And specced like a toy.
"You possibly don't realise how much space 80Gb is..."
I've worked with computers that have winchester hard drives. 10MB of double-height 5.25" fun with a worm gear powering the read/write head and separate ribbon cables for address and data. 10MB is an enormous amount if the only thing you work with is early 1980s software and text files.
And 80GB is a tiny amount if you are working with modern software and images.
Pah, Components! American components. Russian components.
All made in Taiwan!
Now *CLONK* THIS is how we *CLONK* FIX problems on *CLONK* RUSSIAN space station *CLONK* because I *CLONK* want to go home *CLONK* and I *CLONK* DON'T want to *CLONK* STAY here *CLONK* ANY MORE!
"The proprietary memory card/charger thing was always annoying too, at least one of these has been ditched"
Not sure about newer Sony-only phones, but my old SE Arc S uses standard Micro USB (which fits annoyingly loosely) and Micro SD (which fits more snugly but is hidden under the battery).
Does get a bit toasty when it's busy though.
Eh. I've willingly installed a Gnome panel widget that's the equivalent of Mac's Finder. Type in a word. It searches your documents. Then other files, then Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia online dictionaries and a bunch of other search services (or no search services) in whatever order you desire. I think it also has a calculator option, though it's been a while.
Though having it all on by default is a bit of a pain.
Every single PLC on the planet is governed by rules that dictate they be bastards. I don't hugely trust Google either, but they still make the biggest phone OS on the planet and.they are distinctly unbastardly about letting you have a copy. Source too, if you like.
Now, about the lack of a post-install permission denial... Get your shit in order Google, before someone else does it for you.
Well, IPv4 uses 16 bits to store the packet length. Basically, 65,536 combinations or 0-65,535. IPv6 has the same limit unless the "Jumbo Packet" option is turned on, in which case the packet can be up to 4GB in size.*
So basically, it was an IPv6 attack with the Jumbo Packet option turned on. Why routers will even process a ping that's a Jumbo Packet, I don't know.
*Wikipedia is your friend. Even if it isn't an academic source.
"Without the 'biz, we would never have heard of Elvis, or Fleetwood Mac or even Haydn"
The question is, would we care?
"filmed on a mobile phone"
I think you're trying to imply that it's impossible for an amateur band to buy an hour or two of studio time and an engineer for the duration.
My problem with the iPad wasn't that it was an iPad. It was that I was expecting something more like a Mac and less like a games console.
Maybe at £500 I was being optimistic about something like that coming from Apple.
It is an optimal communication device, not a dumb app launcher like iOS and Android.
I'd suggest you've never used Android's widgets. You know, those things that Microsoft ripped off, limited to blocky squares and called "tiles"?
You want the mail icon to show you how many unread mails? It does that.
You want your contacts all on a home page of their own complete with pictures? Not hard.
Perhaps a media player with its controls on the widget?
A flashlight app that works by tapping the widget rather than launching an app?
Social networking widgets? Device hardware toggle widgets? Calender widgets? Map widgets? Browser widgets? Widgets for things you'd never have even thought of?
All there, you just need to look for them. I suggest long-pressing the home screen and selecting "widgets". Or just selecting "widgets" from the top of the app drawer on an ICS or greater tablet. The phone manufacturer has likely included some. The Play Store has a load more.
And Beautiful Widgets is rather nice.
The article might say "cookie", but last time I tried writing a "cookie filler" page, the end result was that the cookie got as utterly huge as I had patience to wait for, but the web browser then failed at subsequent efforts to read any page from that site.
HTML5 local storage definitely ain't no 2kb text file.
Once you have a fuel cell with enough kilowattage, you'll find electric motors are damned potent things. More potent than internal combustion (even a big V8) for less weight, and torque all the way from 0RPM up to max. Problem is a 50kw+ PEM fuel cell is rather pricey right now.
Meanwhile in the UK, we get Rebecca Loos wanking a pig. Yes, really.
Caution: Contains corkscrew dong. And bloody hell, that little bugger's productive.
It's probably fashionable to throw rotten tomatoes at me now, but I do quite like that little language. Simple to get to grips with, but with enough capacity to be brainbendingly wierd if you want it to be, and enough syntactic sugar to be oh awesomely sweet in places.
The only problem it ever had is it's not the fastest interpreted language in the world. Faster than BASIC but not by all that much. 1.9.x improved that. Let's see what 2.x does!
Friend of mine was trying to tell me how shit my phone is and how his contract is awesome because his iToy was "free" from EE and he'll be getting a "free" 4G upgrade soon.
I did the math and pointed out that buying a sim-free phone and going for a rolling monthly contract meant that after the first 12 months I have already spent less than him, and with each passing month I spend even less than he does, for more-or-less the same type of phone plan. In fact I could buy a new phone outright every couple of years and still pay less than he does.
He didn't like that.
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