Re: Unable to Upload data/stats?
Wot abaht Excel, indeed!
Or even pencil and paper: completely immune to power failures etc.
53 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2020
At one point I had the job of writing modem firmware. It ran on an embedded 6502 and I wrote it in C with the Hayes commands interpreted by Flex, all cross-compiled from my 486DX2.
The fun part was that when it came to testing against as many different existing modems as we could lay our hands on (interoperability yer know), I found that not one of those modems met the CCITT specs; every single one of them was buggy. No wonder dial-up comms were unreliable
That was the model for women's fashion over 60 years ago, when I was in the business*. This is merely the logical extension.
As an amusing aside, you can probably blame much of this on Gen. Grivas and Archbishop Makarios. When the Enosis troubles started in Cyprus, many Greek Cypriots came to Britain and they displaced the Jews who then dominated the cheap women's fashion manufacture. The Jews moved into men's wear and started Carnaby St as a men's fashion centre. The Cypriots were subsequently displaced by Pakistanis, and now much of the manufacture is in either Pakistan or China, rather than Britain.
* Yes, the beard is grey.
<q>At no point do I need to know exactly how much my pint weighs (or its volume), so long as I know it's consistent - I have never once needed to order 1.35 pints of beer, and the smallest 'useable' fraction is a half. It functions quite reasonably as a unit of food delivery, so getting mightily offended by it not being defined by a number conveniently ending in a series of zeroes seems a bit of a waste of drinking time.</q>
Where I am a.t.m. beer is sold in 1/3 litre
The OP seems to be confusing several different issues: rationality, simplicity, standardisation and convenience.
The metric/SI system is undoubtedly simpler than the Imperial system, and is more or less standard around the world. But even in France, the home of the metric system, bread was still sold in pounds when I last visited. They also have a measure of land which is the area you can walk round while smoking a pipe of tobacco. The British rod/pole/perch (the length of the left feet of the first sixteen men out of church on Sunday), or the yard (the distance from Henry VIII's nose to his thumb) are quite well-defined by comparison. And the inch/pouce/zoll is still widely used in Europe.
I was brought up on metric and had to learn Imperial units in a pre-computer age. For mental arithmetic the mixed units of the Imperial units are much more convenient: lots of factors, as opposed to merely 2 and 5 in the metric. There are still calculations for which I convert to Imperial, do the arithmetic, and convert back.
Problems only arise when you bring computers into the picture. The mixed radius arithmetic of Imperial units is a real PITA, though ICT did build a computer with 48-bit words which could be used as 12 4-bit digits, with each digit working in a different radix so as to enable direct calculation in £sd or ton/cwt/lb/oz.
But as for rationality, each system is rational, but (in-)convenient under different circumstances.
As a contractor dealing with such companies, I used to put a note on my invoices that late payment would be subject to rather more interest than they were earning. About 2% pcm was enough; it really compounds up.
I did not often have to invoke the interest clause.
"Isn't SQL just COBOL for databases?"
Sort of; [original] SQL is RDBMS for Cobol programmers.
SQL is a relative late-comer to the RDBMS field. Before it were things like QUEL on Ingres, which I used from around 1981; my QUEL manual is dated 1977. The original SQL was rather lacking in functionality and did not implement the full relational algebra. The lack of functionality was because Cobol programmers generally did not understand things like data types and recursion. (CS courses at university were a very new thing at the time.)
With the passage of years, SQL has become more capable, but also more baroque. No two vendors implement the same syntax, and where they do overlap they frequently have different semantics. This lack of standardisation in both Cobol and SQL has paid my wages for a good may years ;-)
" maybe they had to insure vehicles to comply with the Road Traffic Act(s)?"
If you are rich enough you can (could?) just deposit a suitably large sum at the Bank of England to cover possible claims. When I were a lad it was about £200k, but now ...
"In terms of qualifications, the older IT crowd is less likely to have higher education qualifications – 64 percent versus 84 percent among those aged 16 to 49. And nine percent are likely to have an IT degree compared to 12 percent among the more youthful grouping."
When I started, < 3% of school leavers went to university, and there was no such thing as an "IT degree". Nor was there any such thing as "computer science"; it was called "computing" and was regarded as a craft and not as a science. I don't know that the change in terminology has changed reality in any way.
The results of the survey are not surprising.
"On the other hand, try asking someone to saddle a horse these days and see how far they get. I wouldn't have a clue where to begin."
Simple - the saddle goes on top of the horse.
Now a double bridle - that is tricky, and easy to get in a tangle. And driving harness can be really complicated.
<q>
I did enjoy some sums such as timesing (multiplying) something like £5 3s 18¼d
What are you some sort of masochist?
(ok might be fun a few times in class but not everyday in the sweetshop)
</q>
Most prices, discounts etc were magic numbers that were easy to multiply in your head. You did not need a calculator or a ready reckoner (anyone remember those?)
In fact, I still sometimes do calculations by converting £p to £sd, doing the arithmetic, and converting back.My head is still stuffed full of magic numbers.
That reminds me of a Cobol job that ran perfectly for a couple of years and then, one Monday morning it crashed. It turned out that it would always crash on the 100th day of the year (2-digit day number), but for the previous two years the 100th day had been on a weekend, so the job was not run on that day.
Firms are now paying £600 per day for COBOL contracts and finding it hard to get people. I'm wondering if there are enough capable retirees left to attract back to the workplace.
As a retired programmer (inter alia Cobol) I was earning that much 15 years ago. Factor in inflation, tax, IR35 etc. and I'm not getting out of bed for that money.
The way we used to when I were a lad back in the 60s and 70s. If you have a von Neuman architecture (not always true nowadays) then nearly all the possible optimisations can be done at source language (or IR) level. Even cache coherence can be handled largely (not totally) in source code. Register allocations/spillage is about all you need to worry about at the machine level.
If the compiler has to work hard to optimise your program you probably chose a bad data structure or algorithm. Don't blame the compiler for your own poor work.
When choosing whether to go to permanent GMT or permanent BST you have to remember that Edinburgh, on the east coast, is west of Bristol on the west coast.
When I were a lad we did have permanent BST (British Standard time they called it) for a few years. The Scots, in particular, hated it because they are so far west that it puts them almost two time zones away from "local" time.
Oh no it wasn't!
The Ferranti Atlas got there first and had been running it for years before IBM even thought about it. I remember a face-off at an IFIP conference around 1968 between an iBM-er discussing certain problems that they had discussed while *emulating* virtualisation and paging, and an Atlas man who just said " We have been running it IRL for 10 years now without hitting that problem."
At my first (commercial) job in 1972 at BP we were just thinking of switching from /360 to /370.
<quote>Years ago I had an old (~1930s) chemistry book. Not only did it tell you in detail how to make explosives(*) [snip]
(*) To the extent that these days it would attract a charge of possessing material likely to be of use to terrorists.</quote>
I had, maybe still have somewhere, a Schoolboy's Pocket Book that contained all this info. It also contained much other useful/useless info. I also remember at least one children's novel that described how to make explosives.
What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo---
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:---
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!
--Alfred Denis Godley
Twenty years ago, when I moved in to this house, I had the whole place cabled up for phone and networking. The installer asked me why I wanted a data port in the kitchen, but it has proved useful: the kitchen has the best light and the best work surface for fiddling with hardware.
At my desk, the laptops (plural) have both wifi and wireless, and with a static IP, I have two servers keeping me toasty through the winter. Don't ask about the summer (what summer?).
"Guns are not the problem in US, people's attitude is. In Israel, for example, percentage of gun owners is higher than in US. How many mass shootings have been there in Israel in a month?"
AFAIK in Israel you can own a hand-gun, subject to controls, but you are allowed only 15 bullets. Not 15 per week or 15 per month. Just 15.
110Baud acoustic coupler and a DecWriter-> 300 baud modem -> 1200 -> 9600 ->19.2k; I never went higher with modems. (As a side note, writing modem firmware in C with Flex generatng the AT-command processor, and then shoe-horning into a 6502 with an 8k ROM was a fun project.)
After that, Demon were offering the experimental ADSL at 2Mb with static IP addresses. Now, FTTC is sufficiently fast that I no longer care.
"With that said, to the degree that Apple would still be forced to create code it does not want to create, and cryptographically sign – i.e., vouch for – code it does not truly stand by,"
If all the encryption methods are deliberately broken of what value is the signing of code?
Nowadays that is called a lambda and is supposed to be the dog's wotsits.
Tinkering with a component of a parameter inside the called procedure was called Jensen's Device and could be very useful - if kept under control.
e.g. thingy(a[i], i)
if 'i' is altered inside 'thingy' then you get a different array element. Happy days.
I also wrote a Coral 66 compiler. It really was a godawful language. Not only was I/O undefined, arithmetic was too.