Posts by englishr 48 posts • joined 15 Jun 2014
> I've seen apps under 30MB using this method
Oh, how things have changed since I were a lad...
I remember writing a "student database" program for a high school in the early '80s, on a dual-floppy TRS-80, using Z80 assembler. The machine had 32k of RAM, most of which was needed for holding data. The program ended up being about 10k, and now a 30MB app is considered small. Sigh.
Obligatory "Now get off my lawn!"
Buying a new laptop and popping in a 16GB SODIMM and 1TB NVMe drive from somewhere like Amazon is vastly cheaper than purchasing that spec. from the manufacturer.
You also get a clean crapware-free installation of Windows/Linux on the new drive, and can quickly replace the original vendor drive if required by technical support.
Oracle databases have an optional embedded JVM, which is necessarily Oracle Java. The embedded JVM allows stored procedures, triggers, etc. to be written in Java rather than PL/SQL - and alas, if the vendor of your ERP platform requires an Oracle RDBMS with embedded Java, then you just have to suck it up.
I just updated my mother in law and next door neighbour from Win 7 Pro (OEM) to Windows 10 Pro, simply by doing a clean Win10 install and typing in the Win7 Pro product code. Worked like a charm.
I did hit a temporary snag though - one of the motherboards had a USB port failure, so I swapped it out for a replacement. Win10 said "hmm - this looks like a new computer" and de-activated itself, and nothing I could do would convince it to behave - other than "wait a few days". I left if off for four days (didn't have time to deal with it), and when I turned it back on ready to humbly call Microsoft customner serice, cap in hand, it magically reactivated by itself.
When I was in primary school (Wales, 1970s), it was quite common to here the expression "I could care less, but not much!" (with heavy emphasis on the "could"). I've always assumed that "I could care less" was a shortened version, with "but not much" being implied.
In the mid-90s I once received a $1000 video card where the outer packing box had a mysterious triangular hole (roughly 20mm per side) on both sides. Upon opening the box, the video card retail packaging also had a 20mm triangular hole on both side.
You will be unsurprised to hear that the video card exhibited the same defect; it looked like a pretty clean cut, and where the hole intersected chips, the chips were neatly sheared. Needless to say, I returned the card without actually testing it's function.
I have no idea what might have punched such a hole - any thoughts?
I can highly recommend the classic text adventure Bureaucracy (written by Douglas Adams) where the goal of the game is to have your bank recognise your change of address without having an aneurysm from elevated blood pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
Thank you for the link, but my reading of the page is that it is contrary to your understanding. Could you draw attention to the parts that support your argument that orbital velocity in a solar orbit is a function of the mass of the orbiting body?
From the web page referenced:
So does the mass of the planet have a significant impact upon its orbital period (or orbital speed) about some star? Given that planets are by definition almost always much less massive than the stars they orbit, the practical answer is "NO."
While working for a software startup in the mid-90s, about a month after the company moved to new offices in a refurbished brick and poured concrete industrial building, I was hacking away at some code at about 9:00pm when the (locked) main office door burst open with an enormous crash.
Four burly firemen charged in, axes, oxygen tanks, full-face breathing masks - the works. They rapidly went office to office, checking for anyone still there - seeing me, one yells "You! Get out now! Can't you hear the alarm?" Now that the main door was open into the central stairwell / lift area, I could hear a very faint "ding, ding, ding...". I shakily beat a retreat (not enough blood in my adrenaline stream) out of the building, to find multiple police cars and fire engines in the parking lot.
Turned out to be a false alarm.
"Keyboards last about a year max."
Dang, you're hard on your keyboards; I'm typing this on an IBM buckling-spring keyboard manufactured in 1996, and used 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I have the same thing at home, used for extensive gaming, and still going strong.
Maybe you should try one (I've no affiliation with UniComp)?
https://www.pckeyboard.com/
@Herby
My most common sudo use case is to allow users to become another non-root user in a logged shell, e.g.
%dba ALL=/usr/bin/rootsh -i -u oracle
So, the DBAs can become the oracle user, but the session is logged. If you have a better way to achieve this, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
"Those who give any kind of meaning to white-space in source code other than to separate one word from another is a heretic and has to be cleansed!"
But...but...what about the awesome programming language 'whitespace' ??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
"You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise..."
...and the printing costs of the 1000-page report, with 10% of pages marked "This page intentionally left blank".
"And yes, I did once take an axe to a particularly recalcitrant PC many years ago :)"
I have 20+ years of accumulated hard disk drives in my basement (MFM, RLL, narrow SCSI, wide SCSI - you get the picture), which I'm always going to take to the electronics recycling once (paraphrasing Zaphod Beeblebrox) "I've found a very large pickaxe to reprogramme them with". Never seem to get around to it though...
"Why do coders fail to code for input validation
First rule - assume users are idiots and expect them to do stupid things (even by accident)."
That's a good start, but doesn't go nearly far enough.
Assume that users are evil geniuses with access to the source code and have embarked on a personal vendetta against you, and code to handle input of that nature!
Me calling Gateway 2000 technical support after taking delivery of a ludicrously expensive 17" Trinitron monitor (mid 90s): I just plugged in the new monitor, it made a loud pop and some smoke came out the back.
Gateway support: Uhhh - I don't know much about monitors. I'm going to transfer you to my manager.
Me: Hello - I just plugged in this new monitor, it made a loud pop and some smoke came out the back.
Manager: I don't know why you're talking to me! I'll ship a new one out today, and you should have it tomorrow.
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