Posts by muddysteve 160 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2013
I spent many happy years working with COBOL on IBM mainframes. The way data was defined made immense differences to the compiled size of programs (and presumably the run times, but memory usage was more important in those days). COBOL was very good at converting data from one format to another, but it generated vastly different amounts of assembler code.
"I had a look at some of the nicer electric bikes and then had a look at the quantity that are stolen here everyday, no thanks, it will probably disappear in less than a month"
And that is why we can't have nice things. Because there are scumbags around.
According to what I have found out just now, she was nearer 500 tons. Don't know how much of that was keel, but probably not that high a percentage, as it was a bulb keel, nearly 10 meters long. At a guess, somewhere around 100 tons (purely my guess). The keel would rise vertically though the boat, in a housing, and would normally be operated by hydraulics.
Japanese tea culture generally uses lower-temperature water (about 80C, if I recall correctly). For every Brit asserting that the water must be boiling, there's a Japanese tea guru demanding that it isn't!
Japanese tea tends to be green tea, which requires a lower temperature than the black tea the Brits tend to use. So both are right.
Written out on datasheets.
Given to the Data Prep department to be turned into punched cards.
Submitted to the operators for an overnight compile.
Next day, check errors, correct and resubmit for another compile the next night.
Once it compiled successfully, start to debug, one run a day.
Once, when the Data Prep department was busy, I produced a program on punched cards using a hand punch.
Mind you, from the article - "2 million coders producing 1.5 million lines of code a day". Must be still using the same process.
-> thinking the other person MIGHT want to see it, and if the other person says "do not send me this ever again" and you do NOT, there's no JAIL involved, just irritation and need to apologize.
"So if I whack you painfully around the head with a baseball bat, and you tell me that you didn't want me to do that, it's OK if I apologise, and I won't be charged with assault?"
It also sounds like a flasher's charter "Didn't you want to see that? Sorry - I won't do it again".
"Depends how you worked. I started at a place where we wrote on coding sheets (it was assembler) so it would have been sensible to get a fast typist to bang it in after you'd written it."
I started COBOL programming on coding sheets, which then went to the data prep girls to be typed up and a card deck produced.
You tell that to youngsters today and they won't believe you.
These were told to me in the Eighties by a PC supplier, and I have no cause to doubt them.
The first was one told earlier, where a user had sent a floppy through the post with evidence on, and a compliments slip stapled to it.
The other was where a new PC was supplied, and the dealer gave the user two floppy discs to start them off as backups. Let's call them A and B. Things worked well at first - as the data on the machine grew, floppy A no longer had enough space on , and floppy B was inserted when asked for. The problems started when the amount of data grew further. Floppy A was inserted - when full, floppy B was inserted, and then, when full, floppy A was inserted again....
Once slept at a friends flat which had one of those motion-sensor lights in the wardrobe. I like to sleep with the window open, and every time there was a gust of wind, the wardrobe doors moved, which turned the light on. As it was a friends place, I didn't want to dismantle the light.
