Posts by A.P. Veening 3558 posts • joined 15 Aug 2018
The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400.
Your statement is absolutely correct. However, I was not reporting about the calendar but about the date format, [year][day number].
I'm always amused by reports of code that could cope with the end of most centuries except for the one the code was written in. If they'd been either more or less lazy, they'd have been OK.
As long as there is no calendar reform, I guarantee my date routines for all dates between 1582-10-15 and 4000-02-28, the latter date because the year 4000 is the next "exception" in the leap year system. If my routines are still in use by that time (very well possible, written in COBOL ;) ) and need updating, they are welcome to recall me.
I think that's only the second one I've heard of "in the wild"! (The first being all the Perl-based web templates that rang in the new year by advancing the year from 1999 to 19100.)
It is the third I know of "in the wild", the first being a problem with the computer system of the Norwegian railroad company on the very last day of 2000. They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.
In the the days when we had a tea lady who would bring your usual beverage etc. ( 40 years ago), we all had to work the weekend on a major project. The senior manager came round with the tea trolley and gave us all free tea's and coffees (and biscuits!).
He said if he asked us to come in - then he should come in. He thought the most useful thing he could do was to provide us with tea and coffee! He said it also gave him a couple of minutes to meet individuals in his department (some of which he had never met). I still remember him in his little pink apron.
The long gone time of useful management. The only problem with him is that he robbed the tea lady of her overtime payment.
We also had a senior manager who would add more paper to the printer.
Not only useful but also capable at a core job.
And you know what? - in about 40 years' time, the millennials' grandchildren will be rounding on them too. "How could you be so stupid?", they will say. I don't know what they'll be talking about, but there'll be something so stupendous, so overwhelmingly important, so obvious that everyone should have seen it coming before. It's the way of history.
I think it will depend on the country, but for two countries I am pretty sure what that something will be, Brexit and reversal of Roe vs. Wade.
and keep any dumbphone unpowered until needed (otherwise it will ping cells to keep an active service and this could be used to locate you).
And power it off again after use until needed again. And get rid of it when you no longer need it (if you can manage, sell it to an anti-abortion activist to muddle the tracks).
This is not terribly well thought out.
If A has retained their copy of the exchange and knows that B has a retention period which has now expired A has B on toast if so needed. There's no way that B can ascertain for themselves whether what A presents is a true copy let alone contradict it if need be.
That is a problem for the legal eagles, not for the bean counters.
OK, I'm impressed that you can type Greek characters. No doubt it's easy to do if you know how, but still, I'm impressed!
Just add Greek to the languages of your computer (and include the keyboard), after that it is only a matter of switching. And as the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters compared to the 26 of the Latin alphabet, you won't even run out keys.
I recall looking at a list of such deleted files in a utility. MS-DOS had changed the first character of each deleted file to that lower-case Greek character which looks like an "o" with a short tail on the top, sticking out to the right (sigma?).
From your description I first thought you meant "δ" which is delta, but on second thought I think you are right with sigma ("σ").
If you lose half the engines on a quad, the ground will come up sooner than you want. They are designed to lose one engine and keep going, not two.
Not true, a fully loaded B747 freighter can handle losing two engines, even on one side, provided there is no accidental damage (as happens when the engines are forcefully separated from the plane).
I've certainly encountered customer disservice agents who, in the days before chatbots, were probably human but would have failed the Turing test.
On their own they probably wouldn't have failed, but just about everybody fails the Turing test when you have to follow the script*) without any leeway.
*) Or should that be scripture as they religiously have to follow it?
You're absolutely right, but bean counters don't get that, or rather don't give a damn, as they can save some money to give to the C-suite and shareholders.
It is always very satisfying to hear bean counters howling (and see them crying) when a fine big enough to wipe out the savings tenfold (or even more) comes in, especially if you warned them before they made the mistake.
Later, there were CPU chips with internal programme ROM. The ROM tended to come in two varieties: EEPROM that could be reprogrammed after UV erasing, and one time programmed (OTP).
You are confusing EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory), for which you need UV with EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory), no UV needed.
Yes, I have tried the real thing in Seoul and Inchon. Several times actually as initially I could not believe people would sell stuff like that as food but clearly they can and do
That they sell it is one, that others actually buy (and supposedly eat) it is much harder for me to believe.
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A teacher of English, usually dealing with Japanese housewives, got a new class with four Korean housewives, the ladies Kim, Kim, Kim and Park. He told them he would, for reasons of clear communication, call them Kim One, Kim Two and Kim Chee. Four Korean housewives left in a huff.
Things would be simpler if the government abolished IR35, abolished National Insurance and equalised taxation so that everyone pays the same rate of tax on income regardless of source.
True, but that would require something as coarse as common sense, something made from unobtainium where governments are concerned.
Even going from British to American English I've found that some variance in forcefulness and crudeness. The problem now is I've worked with so many non Queen's English folk that I forget what is acceptable where. There in lies trouble.
It is quite easy, Americans get offended by colourful language, British (like Europeans) get offended by guns. As far as I am concerned, those Americans are mewling quims ;)
Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation, except trained professional translators.
It's one thing to speak <insert language> with english words if you are at a conference or somewhere else; but it's an entirely different thing to do translation.
There are some exceptions, experts on their subject and multilinguals come to mind. And for general and IT cases, I am a pretty competent translator (and interpreter) for English-Dutch and Dutch-English. Unfortunately, my German isn't at that level anymore due to lack of practice, but I once did a pretty fair job of translating the UI and help text of some software into German (rough draft translation to give a professional translator a good idea what it was all about, was returned with a compliments and a reduced fee).
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