Re: The Worst...
What about IF YEAR > 50 MOVE 19 TO CENTURY
?
This hack created a million jobs between 1997 and 1999
1934 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2014
As I've recounted here before, I was once tracking a mainframe bug report (a bit over 25 years ago) and got a message on my terminal stating that "if you reached this point you're fucked".
Although the original coder was no longer working with us, I eventually confirmed his prescient statement.
Well, with O364 under Win11, Excel recently started to hang every time I applied any kind of formatting (bold letters, table outlining, etc.), sometimes requiring me to kill the process and restarting from wherever I was.
Some online searching found me the solution: change the default printer do PDF. Applied it and didn't have a problem anymore.
Ah, evolution.
Re: Blu-3 said it was "currently supporting an external SFO investigation and is fully cooperating with the agency. We take matters of this nature extremely seriously and are committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity and ethical conduct across all of our operations."
A £3M bribe couldn't be approved at mid management level, right?
Power on or off... It was the late 90's and I had twin 21-inch Samsung CRT monitors at the office. I learned the hard way not to power them on or off at the same time. The few times I did that, I managed to trip the whole floor. And each of those times several angry looks followed my walk of shame from my post to the electrical board to switch it on again.
AI Overview: "It takes approximately 0.000000094 seconds for Google to generate $2.4 million in revenue. This is calculated by dividing $2.4 million by Google's revenue generation rate, which is roughly $25.5 million per minute."
Can you spot the itsy bitsy arithmetic error?
Re: "a customer is more likely to purchase a $2,000 computer advertised at 50 percent off its regular price than pay full price for a $1,000 computer"
Customers are dumb like that...
As an example I'm pretty familiar with, supermarkets love selling at outrageous discount prices. They'll go to a wine producer and tell them they want to have an exclusive brand they'll sell for 5€, BUT they want to mark it at 15€ and have regular sales at 67% off. While it's a widely known tactic, and it's been reported in the media as marketing gimmick, I frequently hear people talking about those great buys they made - even people who should know better.
As a junior dev, when business attire was mandatory I used those more comfortable rubber sole dress shoes. It charged me up quite a bit, and I would frequently distribute my energy around the office. A particular favourite was my IT director, which I liked very much to shake hands with. Sometimes even my colleagues saw the sparks!
I bought 2nd hand hi-fi equipment from a US store and local customs invoiced me for VAT am import duties as if I'd bought new from the maker, even though I had the PayPal slip proving the price I paid. I would have had to pay more in taxes than what I'd paid for it.
My belief is that someone wanted it for themselves - unreleased stuff is usually auctioned, but some goodies never make it, being reserved for those in the know...
Although Kissinger made that statement in the specific context of the Vietnamese war (he was referring to Ngo Dinh Diem, the American-supported president of South Vietnam who was assassinated by his own military after the US removed its support), those words are right once again.
Even stopped clocks and stuff...
While in uni I recovered a dead hard-drive by buying an exact same model (and version and revision) and moving the actual disc from the dead drive to the good one. All that done in my room (it was clean, 'guv).
In those days with single platter drives it was risky but feasible. Now, with multiple platters, helium filled and sealed drives, good luck with that...
Apparently you can have any colour you want, it's just a registry key value
In my first employment, as a junior dev, circa '97, I was working with an expert contracted for his extensive DB2 knowledge. He was supposed to set up a battery of DB tests on a Friday for me and my mates to follow up during the weekend (as this was a Y2K project and time was running short, we, the minions, would be there - but not the expensive contractor).
The bad news is that he managed to screw up every single test he was supposed to prepare by not allocating disk space for it as z/OS required - and then leaving logs of it for us to see. That meant he had just wasted the whole team a Saturday. By the end of that day I'd managed to redo - this time correctly - everything the expert was supposed to have done for us and our team got it's work done for others to pick up the next Monday.
The good news it that, on Monday, our manager heard us arguing about what had happened (I may have been expressing in not very pleasant terms how pissed off I was about all that sorry affair) and, after investigating it, called me apart and told me I wouldn't need to worry about it any more as the 'expert' was no longer working there.
Even better news is that I also got promoted a month or so later, with the way I handled that incident being a factor.
Unfortunately tariffs have a cascading effect.
As an example, if motor vehicles are more expensive, then agriculture is more expensive. If it is more expensive in the US, US grocers will buy more from the outside where it is less expensive, adding to the existing demand and driving prices up for everyone.
This is the real trickle-down effect...
People seldom know the "E" is there for the shell size (as is the "B") , so a DB-9 connector would be a large shell (like a DB-25) but with only 9 pins sticking out (or holes, for a female socket)
The size order being, from smaller to larger, E-->A-->B-->C-->D, makes it seem like the E shell was a later addition to the standard
Nice way of talking about boring subjects, and on top of that, the first video is really funny!
The only way it could get better is having two people working in tandem on a single keyboard for extra speediness
In my early life, I taught some basic computer intro courses for people who -mostly- never had used computers before. Once there was a lady who complained about the difficulty in using the mouse as the cursor moved on the wrong direction(s). Sure enough, the mouse's cord was under her wrist and all went smoothly after showing her the right way to hold the device.
Then, it was because mouses were somewhat new (wireless didn't even exist at the time); now it's because those wired ones are somewhat old.
Where I live some traffic lights are always at red during dead of night, unless a sensor detects a vehicle waiting for the light to change and then, eventually, goes green (this happens for intersections between main traffic axes and secondary ones).
If the waiting car isn't close enough to the sensor, or if the sensor malfunctions (something not that uncommon), then red never goes away.
Humans know what to do in a situation like that, self-driving cars would be stuck there forever