Posts by Doctor Syntax 42402 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"On completion, the tape and sheets were passed to the checkers. The checkers then fed through the tape and typed the data from the coding sheets again."
Same thing happened with cards and probably with key-to-disk data entry.
It probably got ditched on grounds of expense.
"This young chap hesitantly approached his boss and explained he got the impression that the engineering department had designed a 100 km subsea pipeline, but that the procurement department was about to invite bids for 100 miles"
One of the first tasks I had as a young researcher was proof-reading a paper based on someone's thesis. This was in the days when papers were set in metal type and I think this was final page-proofs. The subject was sea-level changes and the original levelling was done in feet with both imperial and metric quoted in the paper. I realised that all the metric conversions were wrong; the error went all the way to the thesis and nobody, not even the external examiner, had noticed. No nice meal, though.
* The levelling staff was calibrated in decimal feet: feet and 10ths of feet which I think was quite common back in the day.
"A single byte can store 256 years."
You can also use a longer integer to store whole dates or even date & time depending on the length and resolution of time but at some point you have to convert between integer and human-readable form and vice versa. Part of the the issue is the formats which those humans wish to use. In particular people like to write years as a couple of digits and if that's the case the programmer has to make some assumption about how to fill out the missing digits. Prior to late C20th the assumption would be that those were 1 and 9. Nowadays we tend to have assumptions based on some sliding window - it the provided digits are less than some amount it's 2 and 0.
indexing by the numeric column ID is measurably faster
If you only need a few columns but SELECT * then you're losing performance in the amount of surplus data you're cramming into the pipeline from the database.
Personally, I value readability over "optimisations" like this
It's not just readability. It's the fact that such "optimisations" are just errors waiting to happen - as in this example.
Interactively I might write a SELECT *, but that's only the first step to putting together a proper script to get out the data I want. More years ago than I care to think of I wrote a few little programs which would delve into the Informix system catalogs to write code snippets of SELECT, variable declarations & the like which could be incorporated into a program (!! in vi lends itself to that) which would then be edited down to what was needed; just as effortless lazy as SELECT * but a good deal safer.
This was the same accounts department that wouldn't let us buy computers because the computer budget had been used up.
We instead purchased a number of "electronic logging machines".
According to legend a Botany prof at QUB was having problems getting the University to allow a departmental vehicle. Successfully smuggled into a list of things such as microscopes was a VW Microbus.
Unfortunately it got written off by someone making a rather sharp turn into the road where the glass houses were; by the time I got there the vehicle was a rather ancient Mini. We probably knocked a few bits off the sump cooling fins driving it up mountains.
"Similar problem back in the 1970s with an insurance company. Memory is expensive"
And not only in the '70s. In the '90s I kept saying -and being ignored - that we needed more memory in an HP-UX box. Then an OS upgrade put it into thrashing. An engineer with new memory was summoned up PDQ with promises (huh!) to take more notice of what I said in the future.
"Old code only referred to the fields by number, $row[0], $row[1], so a new column in the middle offset all the subsequent ones."
There's your problem right there. It's an SQL system so nobody of any competence should do that. Had the code been adapted reused without changes from something older?
I do recall working on a system that took a series of rent payments for a period, stored them in an array and then put them into a series of columns in a single row on the basis that it would be more efficient - not when you had to search all the columns to find out which payment had been missed rather than look for the row with a zero in it.
They may not get the same level of "analytics" they are used to but they get to know you saw the ad and if you clicked on it, which all they really need to know to get paid.
For which, frankly, the advertisers are probably better off. It enables the advertiser to put the advert on a page where it's relevant to the content. That context is almost certainly going to be more relevant to the viewer than any amount of "analytics" which are, of course, just something for which the advertising industry can con more money from the advertisers.
"They try to disguise the junk mail as government mail, and since there can be consequences for not replying in a timely manner to government mail (say a tax audit notice), it makes things difficult."
I have one sitting here waiting for me to take it to post (PPI bastards). It came in a brown envelope very like OHMS stuff.
"As for trying to return it, they'll probably just repackage it and RE-resend it. They have the infrastructure you lack to outwait you."
However it had a return envelope inside to send it back. If everyone did that that they really wouldn't be able to cope. Their infrastructure will be set up to handle a small percentage of returns. Overwhelming that means that they would lose their genuine responses.
As the phrase "this generation" typically refers to the youngest generation of adults/consumers, this generation has never been the target audience of salaried journalists, unless you're specifically talking about gaming hardware.
And "this generation" is particularly ridiculous in terms of el Reg readership's age range which must span at least 40 years.
"They aren't targeting you, or almost all readers here. They are targeting those too stupid or uneducated to figure out how to block unwanted stuff. "
The difference between those who block ads and those who don't isn't necessarily one of education or of a desire to be targeted, it's just the technical knowledge.
A few weeks ago a Times columnist, archetypal arts graduate (1st at Oxford apparently) so not entirely uneducated wrote an article about GDPR welcoming the end of spam by not responding to "Please may we continue to spam you" emails but then adding something about ads in terms suggesting he didn't know* about ad blockers. Apparently he'd already posted the gist of this online to great popular acclaim, something those castigating GDPR as yet another unwanted bit of Euro red-tape should not.
* It could be the case, of course, that as the Times is available online as well as in print, he did know about ad-blockers wouldn't be allowed to let on about them in public.
"It makes it very convenient to drop all that crap off."
At election times if a party worker comes delivering bumf when I'm working outside I'm often tempted to point to the green bin.
(OT A few years back instead of the usual single sheet of most parties the Greens produced a multi-page newsletter. Whoever delivered that one couldn't even be arsed to put it in the letter box or even get as far as the doorstep.. They simply dropped it as litter on the path So much for green.)
"I'm fine with ads as long as they are static and not making any noise. Can't stand anything moving in the corner of my eye!"
That was my point of view until a site I use quite a lot repeatedly showed a jiggling animated GIF. That's when ad-blocking went in and it's stayed in. It's a shame for that site but if the couldn't or wouldn't curate their ads then that's the consequence.
"Every ecosystem contains parasites."
You mean like advertisers who use the bandwidth that users paid for to send them ads they don't want for things they don't want just so the advertising industry can con the advertisers* into paying them to do that?
* Strictly speaking, of course, it's not the advertisers paying, its the advertiser's customers who actually want the product, might well have bought it without the adverts but, because of the advertising tax, are having to pay more.
"In the old days newsgroups - rather than web pages - were a major source of everything. It soon became obvious that only a few big players had the resources to catch all the postings in all the possible groups. That was worth a subscription"
Until recently I paid a subscription for a newsgroup service as, unlike the ISP bundled service they did a reasonable job of spam filtering. A few months ago one of my regular groups started to get lots of spam which they failed to filter. I didn't renew the subscription. I do, of course, still pay for newsgroups - it's part of my ISP sub.
"The problem with advertising on the Internet is that it doesn't actually generate much income - either for the publisher or the traditional advertister (the intermediaries seem to do OK...)"
As I keep saying: the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising. It's the only thing they're interested in selling.
"PETA doesn't benefit much from the exposure they get over this kind of thing."
I'm not sure. Going back to your previous post, it probably brings more crazies into the fold. It also provides them with the satisfaction of getting publicity; their most appreciative audience is themselves.
"wonder why MS can't let you override it by group policy that you can apply to only certain laptops as needed while you wait for the big wigs to finish approving the migration to the new cloud based ERP"
Perhaps you could arrange it so it's just their salaries that don't get paid one month...
"When you're standing up in court being confident that you can quickly find the piece of documentation you need, and see its contents, probably while also paying attention to what someone else is saying or while speaking yourself, is fairly important."
I'll second that from the point of view of the witness box. I'd want both my original statement of witness, reception forms listing exhibits (double sided) as submitted to the lab and lab notes (single sided as lab notebooks took carbon copies) to be quickly accessible.
In my day there wouldn't have been any alternative to hard copy but I can't imagine any electronic form being as rapidly accessible other than a very wide hi-res screen capable of displaying several A4 images side-by side. And, going back to the OP's point: A4 not A5.
"The reason they ask for clarification is not because they don't know, but because they want precise details in the court records."
And not only that, they want what's on record to have been agreed by both sides so one of them can't turn round later and say "That's not what we meant".
Also, a moment's thought should be enough to realise that judges the cases flowing through the court rooms keep judges very much in touch with current life
"That makes them very difficult to hack in to."
That was my immediate reaction. In the case of court documents there's not only the risk of data being copied, there are obvious incentives to change or delete documents. And that might not just be the result of deliberate hacking; the Atlanta ransomware incident resulted in some permanent loss of data: https://www.myajc.com/news/local/atlanta-police-recovering-from-breach-years-dashcam-video-lost/dowuJGBMcW7PLOdK0UhgJJ/
"It's very funny that now Google being the new Microsoft, people who complained a lot about MS behaviours 20 years ago now are fully ready to praise them from Google."
I'm not sure about that. I think people who complained about M/S then are also complaining about Google now.
