Posts by disgruntled yank 2135 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Not one for extensive research, was AS? It is very true that economics play a big part, and that yesterday's unprofitable slave may be tomorrow's break-even sharecropper. But in the larger emancipations beginning in the late 18th Century--the abolition of serfdom in various German states for example--on through the 19th, it was not in general the oppressed bringing the force.
I certainly find that I don't miss tipping on European vacations. But the US has a hard time adjusting to the notion. There have been hullabaloos in New York City and in Washington, DC, over lows doing away with the "minimum tipped wage". In Washington one reads of restaurants going out of business and blaming it on the higher base wage. One also reads about restaurants tacking on service or other extra charges without a clear indication whether it will all go to the staff.
@Custard
Data General sold a machine called the MV/2000 DC (department cluster). This had a row of serial ports that were number not from 0, not from one, but something like 18 or 30. I remember a call from a customer who had carefully sketched a picture of the plug layout before moving the machine, but apparently not carefully enough. It was hard to know exactly what to say to her "Well, I drew a picture." I guess that we managed to help her without having to send somebody there.
I have read that Huntsville, Alabama, has more Ph.D.s in proportion to total population than any other city in the US, mostly because of NASA.
But his gentleman seems to fit the expression popular about thirty years ago, "not a rocket scientist".
"""
reviewing the documentation.
Not long into that effort, he noticed it contained an executable, tested it, and found that it produced perfect reports.
""
The documentation mentioned an executable? One commonly found on all Pick machines, or how?
I will say that it would be useful for all programmers to encounter a system like this early in their careers. There is nothing quite like puzzling through somebody else's undocumented, ill-structured code to give one an appreciation for documentation and structure.
>> the much further right and more racist US
Much further right, so far.
More racist? I would never claim that the US is great on racial stuff, but it has worked on this and made changes over the last 70 years. I have limited experience of Europe (and all of it as a white guy). But I'd be interested to hear how (for example) the descendants of the Windrush would grade the UK, or immigrants from Francophone Africa would grade France.
Our two Azure VMs exist for Great Plains/Dynamics. I am on good terms with the comptroller, but if I suggested that we migrate off Great Plains to save on licensing costs, I might not survive the discussion.
The commentariat is free to tell me that this is our fault for not rolling our own AP system with GPL software.
Slavery was deeply unpopular in Europe? England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, all had large colonies dependent on slave labor.
The northern states either had abolished slavery (if original colonies) or were founded without slavery before emancipation in the British West Indies. Don't believe everything you read in the 1619 project.
As for religious bigots, one ordinarily thinks of the Puritans in that context, but Massachusetts was the first of the states to abolish slavery.
I worked for a government contractor at the time of the 1995-1996 government shutdown. The contract was not terminated, the contracting companies simply didn't get paid until government funding resumed. My employer put us on reduced hours, two or three days a week, but continued to pay everyone in the expectation that the government would pay up once funding resumed. The government did pay up.
That particular shutdown was widely thought to have resulted from Newt Gingrich's grudge against his treatment on Air Force 1 on the way to and from Itzhak Rabin's funeral, and was not regarded as having accomplished anything. But I see from Wikipedia that Newt says that 'twas a famous victory.
""Many of these riders are likely using their time riding with Dashers to case consumers' residences so that they can later return to burgle the home, steal vehicles in the driveway or kidnap the children who live there.""
Fifty years ago, I briefly held delivery and pickup jobs. I guarantee you that I did not case residences, or imagine stealing vehicles (though it was a lot easier then than now).
Kidnap children? I would refer you to https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1595/1595-h/1595-h.htm#chap08.
Right. If a member of a minority group cannot get the required SATs, he should do it the old-fashioned way and hire a friend to take the test for him.
Or the new-fashioned way: get a diagnosis of ADHD and have half again or double the time to take the test. Curiously these diagnoses are much more common in the better-off part of town, which is not to say a minority-heavy part.
For some years, I worked for a government contract for the tending of Data General minicomputers. There were a lot of machines and a lot of operators and analysts, so that it was probably inevitable that now and then somebody would
CDIR :
DEL #
Once I was that somebody. What I discovered early on was that the peripheral manager, :PMNGR, was early in the usual order of files and so one of the first to be deleted. But once it was gone, there was no way for the system to delete (or create) files. Owing to our loose discipline in cleaning up after updates, there was usually a copy of :PMNGR.x.y.z that one could rename, and from there begin the recovery. And I think that the CLI used a sort of breadth-first discipline, meaning that the subdirectories of root were not purged until all the standard files were. One did not want to run with an obsolete :PMNGR, so that one then had to go to the latest systape.
Then there was the customer's employee at a previous job who was working his way through the commands and utilities book one evening until he got to FORMAT. It worked as described, but not as he'd have desired.
Thanks to The Register, I know what " Europe's largest local authority" is, despite my never having visited Birmingham. If the question ever arises in a trivia night, I'll be all set.
But why shouldn't The Register include "Birmingham" as one of its standard units of measure? London could be 75 centi-Birminghams, a small city one deci-Birmingham, and so on.
@that one in the corner
> Building a new database - are you using SQL or trying to do it in C?
Here I suspect the answer is C--you will, if you want anyone to use the database provide SQL as the standard language of the database. I recall that Michael Stonebraker wrote that his team thought that it would be useful to write Postgres in LISP; but the need for reasonable performance drove them to C. (Or was it C++? It has been a while.)
But in general, I agree with you.
I have seldom been called on work matters out of normal hours.
But a few memorable incidents have made me prefer vacations east of the office rather than west, though. The crisis discovered when the office opens on the East Coast can lead to a call that awakens the techie on vacation in California at 0600; if the techie is vacationing in Europe, it will be early or-mid afternoon, the techie will be awake and alert, and the techie will have readily understood reasons for not having a computer to hand. (Gee, Mike, I'd like to help you, but I'm at the British Museum right now.)
I wish that I had learned BASIC, given its widespread availability. Eventually I learned VBScript and VB.NET, but I don't know how much they had in common with the older BASICs.
It is unfortunate that Dijkstra is so much remembered as an insult comic. I suppose that to some degree he brought it on himself.
I retrospectively became fonder of Peoplesoft when I encountered the table-naming conventions of Microsoft Dynamics: two or three letters to indicate the kind of data (GL, DTA), followed by five digits to specify it more closely. In my relatively few dealings with Dynamics, I kept a spreadsheet of descriptions handy. Peoplesoft had tables named along the lines of PS_PERSON, PS_COMPANY, and so on.
Peoplesoft was over-engineered for the needs of my employer. I imagine that an organization with an order of magnitude more employees, say five thousand, would have been a better fit. I did like what I saw of it, though.
Forty-odd years ago, Data General took the odd decision to reverse the sense of the arguments of the move command in its CLI. In the RDOS CLI, the arguments were evaluated sh style, with the destination directory at the end of the list. The AOS/VS CLI had the destination directory as the first argument. A fellow support guy, who hadn't worked on an RDOS machine in quite a while, dictated the command AOS/VS fashion to a customer, helpfully wiping out the recovery floppy. Neither party was happy with this.
(Or so I remember the commands: it has been almost thirty years since I dealt with an Eclipse.)
A long-ago co-worker, then in the USAF reserve, explained that one always counted tools before and after working on a plane. A missing tool, if not found, could mean that the facility would X-Ray the plane looking for the stray tool. I assume that crew who let things get to that point were handed a broom and sent to sweep the runways.
During my late teens and early twenties, I worked a few months as a stock boy for department stores. I don't remember us every opening boxes until it was time to put the goods on the shelves.
(This was the days before much of the store's work involved computers. The second stint was the first time I saw computerized cash registers. I was impressed, but I was not allowed near them.)
A friend and co-worker was set to inspecting lists of purported phone numbers and discarding any that weren't apparently standard US, i.e. ten digits. I sat down and set up a table or two and a query in Access and showed her how to to import a list and reject those not matching. She thought it was magic, and I trust it made her work less tedious.
It is pretty hard to break a modern database. There was a maddening stretch some years ago when a switch would reboot itself once a week, interrupting a SQL Server machine's connection to its storage. I ground my teeth a fair bit, and I did get tired of running dbcc checkdb. But we lost no data.
The Congress of the United States suffers from a belief that Daylight Savings Time saves energy. In the winter of 1973-1974, after an early oil shock, the US was on DST. I did not enjoy it. It was a nuisance, though a lesser one, when the government extended DST about 30 years ago--there were operating systems to patch, one had to update Java, etc.
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