It's life, Jim, but not as we know it,
not as we know it,
not as we know it.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it,
not as we know it, Captain.
691 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2010
The millennium bug wasn't nothing. I worked my butt off replacing a banking package that wasn't Y2K compliant. Got a shit load of frequent flier points enough for a round the world with accommodation for two people.
It didn't happen because a load of people did a load of work.
but interfaces between disparate systems
You could be on to something! The EFTPOS interface ISO8583 or equivalent should not be a problem as other things would have stopped as well. But I'm interested in the firmware in the actual pump. Strange that it just happened this leap year and not last leap year...
Just who the f~1 are they getting to write their software?
Exactly! When I did my compsci degree I remember one of the first year assignments was a date calculator and it had to manage leap years. Pay peanuts get monkeys...
I'm just gobsmaked as to how anyone could make this mistake!
why not have spring in July
This type of dating actually depends on governments. Here is Australia the government defines that the season start at the being of a month regardless of nature. Other places define the start of a season as starting on the equinox or solstice. To me nature defines when they start,
There is a shit load of legacy code that has kept people like me in work for a long time. It will not go away and while it just does what it does it will not be replaced.
Rust will need to integrate and interface with this existing code to provide the level of functionality that needs to remain. It is all well and good taking the moral high ground and saying that it should all be rewritten in Rust, but the issue is time, cost and in some cases no one actually knows how the old legacy code works...
The issue I had with the brother HL-2150N laser was it was sold with a near empty cartridge and the replacement cost almost has much as the original printer.
I ended up buying a non brother toner cartridge and that ended up leaking toner and stuffing up the photo roller.
If I wanted to drive a forklift, I have to take a course and get a cert to ensure I don't accidentally drop a crate on someone and ruin (or even end) their life. Well, Barb's desktop computer can destroy the lives of everyone in the business if she clicks a dodgy attachment...I'd sooner have her drive a forklift without a qualification than a PC.
The big difference is if the forklift driver kills someone and it was determined that they were at fault then they and possibly their manager could end up in prison.
One other possible take on this is about the information that is taken.
The concept of privacy becomes important. Why the hell does company X require all this personal details about a person? If they need credit card details, for example for a bill payment. Then why the hell should they keep them after the payment is complete.
It appears that there also need to be laws around what information can be held and for how long. These should be CRIMINAL laws and come with jail time as well.
The one big issue with all versions of Linux is getting all the 3rd party windows apps to run on it. Yes, I know there is this fantastic thing called WINE. But this is not something that an every man in the street can use. Also little things like getting the various scanners, printers, screen cards etc working properly.
I know that I am going to have to make the move from W10 to some form of Linux as there is no way that I will use W11. But I am not looking forward to the pain of transitioning. And I know it will be painful no matter what all the members of the Church of Linux say.
There is also one thing I will not be doing. I will no longer support friends and families computers.
Now let slip the downvotes of war...
Lucky you! Here in Oz we get a lot of fraud messages. And it has nothing to do with browsing habits or anything else. They just spam SMS to a random list of mobile phone numbers.
And of course these all contain a link you need to click on. There have been times when these are coming every couple of hours 24/7. That is why I ended up putting my phone onto flight mode.
Telstra seems to have deployed 4G at 700MHz. Doesn't this work well to fill in the gaps?
No! And this is only telstra, the other carriers are even more flaky. The big issue we have in Oz is the distance and population spread. You will (but not always) get coverage on main highways (A roads to you poms) but once you get away from those (B roads etc) there are huge gaps.
I still don't understand why that kind of data cannot be sent over the power lines
Need to be able to step over/through transformers etc. Also be able to handle transmission issues caused by signal refection from branches.
I'm actually curious as to why 3G needs to be switched off?
the use of hex is a hint that it should be unsigned
Yea, but there is no indication as to what those HEX numbers mean... Ok in char 0x20 is space and you should use char(' ') to be clear if space is what you meant. But as an unsigned char what does it mean?
Also what will it mean to the next developer in a couple of years time when they are maintaining this shit code!
It was never meant for doing the kinds of things you can do with C
The big issue with that is just because C allows you to do all the things doesn't mean you have to. I have seen unmaintainable code written in C full of gotos, continues, breaks, returns everywhere in a function and try throw and catches. All legal and all possible.
???
Everyone of those code segments is syntactically correct! So it will compile. But it will depend on the compiler on exactly what machine code is created and the hardware on how it runs.
If I saw this during a code review you would get a major bollocking. For the use of magic numbers, variable names that mean nothing. The != in the for loop
One way to make C/C++ more of an application language instead of a Systems language is to max the warnings level and to carry out all the initial testing in DEBUG mode as this should catch stupid programmer level errors like "not all paths return a value" or "variable not initialized " or "mismatched variable assignment".
The one thing I have seen so many times is a bad programmer can still create bad code even in a good language. Shit code is still shit code not matter what it is written in.
As for why it wasn't use commercially, the short answer is performance
Wrong I used it in a commercial environment for industrial process control. The MAIN reason was it was considerably safer than any other language. In process control the last thing you want is your oil refinery or chemical plant to explode!
Also you cannot compare a commercial release of a PASCAL compiler on proper hardware to MS PASCAL on a PC. They are completely different beasts. For example at the time there was no way you could safely us a PC for any real-time or near real-time work they were just a toy.
A friend once described such as "oh my GOD, she talks in CURSIVE!!"
When I was doing my OE I met and married an english lady (had to marry as the NZ govn would not give me an import licence). Anyway moved to NZ and after a couple of years went back for a holiday and to meet her family again.
Sister immediately commented to SWMBO "Oh you sound so posh!". Me thinking WTF as she came from the Midlands and the base accent was anything but posh. Then I realised she was now pronouncing all of her consonants. Because she had been living in NZ for a couple of years it was the only way for kiwis to understand what she was saying.