Say, what? The leap-day-every-four-years is part of the *Julian* calendar, and that dates back to Julius Caesar. The correction that makes on century years leap years if they are evenly divisible by 400 is the correction that was introduced with the Gregorian calendar.
Posts by Old Used Programmer
629 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2010
It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date
If only it was that simple...
The English-speaking world changed in 1752. Catholic countries changed in 1582. In places where Orthodox Christian churches dominate, civil calendars changed at various other years. Greece, for instance, didn't switch until 1923. At least some Orthodox (e.g. Russian Orthodox) churches still use the Julian calendar as their liturgical calendar.
All of this has led to one of my favorite questions... If it is claimed that someone was born on 29 February 1900, can that be true? Lots of people have such a poor grasp of the Gregorian calendar that they don't see why there is a problem. Those that do understand the calendar ask, "Where were they born?"
India’s homebrew RISC-V CPU goes on sale in new development board
Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks
Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin
Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation
CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves
Re: GUIs were and are intended to demystify the computer
First time I ever encountered a Mac, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. "Double clicking" is not intuitively obvious. (And, no, I couldn't look it up in the manual. The owners of the Mac didn't have the manual yet. It was a test and evaluation system owned by UC Berkeley.)
Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.
I can give it a shot...
vi is dual mode. You're either in command mode or append mode. In append mode, what you type goes into the file. So...<esc> gets you out of--or makes sure you're out of--append mode. Then, because vi is built on top of a line editor (which is why it can do global commands), you use ':' to tell it you're going to issue a line command. Followed by 'q' (quit) and '!' don't save, just do it. Unless I've screwed things up, I'm much more likely to use '<esc>:wq'.
You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
Re: Resilience and redundancy
Some years ago, the University of California at Berkeley had two backbone lines to somewhere on the US east coast. The contract required independent routing of the lines. One day, a farmer in New Jersey took out both lines with a backhoe. To the best of my knowledge a significant amount of money changed hands in compensation for both lines being in the same place, contrary to the contract.
Raspberry Pi OS goes goth
Re: Why dark mode
You might be surprised. There are people that have been using them as "primary" desktop systems. Some have been doing that as far back as the Pi3B, and it became more common with the Pi4B. That trend will most likely accelerate with the Pi5, as the specs aren't that far off an entry level x86 PC.
UK govt finds £225M for Isambard-AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia
Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools
Re: Most-Inappropriate Computer Repair Tool
I knew a retired master machinist whose motto was, "Never use force. Just get a bigger hammer." On one job he worked on, they were putting together a press-fit pipe...6 feet in diameter. The "bigger hammers" were two guys with 100 lb. sledges driving the fitting home.
Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected
Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS
Re: <Shrug>
As regards "most people can't install Linux"... The Raspberry Pi folks have a solution to that one. It's still in beta, but if you update the EEPROM on Pi4B/Pi400, just put in a blank uSD card, connect to the internet and you'll get prompted to install the OS. While that feature will--I'm sure--be in the Pi5, I don't know if it'll be there right out of the box. Still, it'll probably be in the EEPROM as it comes off the production line within the next year. (And, if it comes to that, the Pi5 is probably enough machine for 90-95% of all users. Had a chance to play with one over the weekend.)
Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance
Re: A quick question
For code I wrote for companies, no idea. I retired a decade ago. However, I have a convention registration system that I wrote in 2002 (to run on a Dual Opteron 240 running SuSE 9.2) that I'm still maintaining and using for con reg. Now running on a Pi4B-4GB running PiOS. I'll probably update the hardware next year. Not because there's any problem with the current hardware, but some of the features and add-ons for the Pi5 will make for a neater package.
Russia to ban all VPNs – again – says senator
Re: Everyone's at it..
Well... No, actually. Hilary Clinton got about 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016. Biden topped him by about 8 million votes in 2020. It the 18th century Rube Goldberg contraption of the Electoral College that let Trump win on 2016 and lose in 2020. Biden's EC vote was about the same as Trump got in 2016....and then claimed it was a "landslide".
Beta driver turned heads in the hospital
Re: Landscape/portrait
I was once helping out as the support (is the software installed? is the network working? is everything plugged? if "yes" to all, go sit in the back of the room and wait for something to break) for the trainer to test the *training* instructions on a naive user. Because everything was working as it should, this left me to just sit and observe. The trainee was having a terrible time using the mouse. When there was a break, I went to the trainer and informed her that (a) the trainee had a death grip on the mouse and (b) the trainee appeared to trying to rotate the screen pointer by rotating the mouse. After the break, the trainer worked her way around behind the trainee and checked, then went to back to the usual spot and launched into a lecture on how the mouse worked and that you *couldn't* rotate the screen pointer. The trainer gave me very thorough thanks at the end of day for uncovering why the trainee was having so much trouble.
Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists
Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase
Re: For readers outsie the US
US 1 (or parts of it, anyway) started life as the Boston Post Road.
The other requirement for Interstate highways is to have enough clearance under overpasses for a tank on a transporter to go through. As tanks have gotten bigger, older Interstates sometimes get overpasses re-built for more clearance. (The four in the town where I live got re-done by raising them about 18 inches within the last coupe of years.)
California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots
Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson
Re: Unique keys
Actual Social Security cards have text on them stating that they are not to used for ID purposes. I pointed that out to a bank official when he asked for mine as verification. He said that impersonators almost never thought to carry a matching SS card. Might be different now. The late 1960s was a more innocent age.
Re: Unique keys
My maternal grandfather had a hyphenated last name (Ravn-Jorgensen). He dropped the hyphen and following when he came to the US through Ellis Island and later changed his last name because no one could properly spell or pronounce it (Ravn to Rawn).
My son's fiancee used a stage name, but (like so many aspiring actresses) lacked funds, so my son legally changed his name to the surname of her stage name, and when they married, she changed her name for free.
Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry
Needs to be a floow up...
I look forward to a report on how the conference(s) go. Do the organizers have plans in place if they lose their (financial) shirts?
FYI...the cost of function space in hotels depends, in large part, on how many room-nights get booked and picked up. If you can't get people to show up and pay for hotel rooms, the areas in which you hold the convention get to be *very* expensive.
That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse
Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records
How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores
Re: Licencing Per-Device
Sort of...you can buy Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual Cortex-M0 microcontroller modules. They go for $1 each. A full RP Pico is $4 to $6 per board.
This whole pricing scheme might be pretty favorable to Pis. The retail list price for the most expensive current model is $75 (Pi4B-8GB) with the Pi-400 running a close second at $70.
Unknown actors deploy malware to steal data in occupied regions of Ukraine
John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL
Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss
Re: We have a few names - for people
As regards SMS... There is the problem that (at least in the US), the military is extremely rank conscious even with civilians that don't have a rank. My father worked as a field service engineer (aka "tech rep") first with the USAF, who classed the tech reps as sort of generic commissioned officers, and later with the Navy, who class tech reps as generic NCOs. When he died, he was a civilian employee of the Navy. It was while doing the subsequent paperwork that his boss, a Navy lieutenant, found out that a bit over 20 years earlier, my father had left the US Maritime Service as a Lieutenant Commander. Thus, the "dumb civilian" that he actually liked a lot, outranked him. Ooops...