Posts by I don't know, stop asking me. 43 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2022
I remember snooping around in the executable for WordStar on CP/M. The string "Nosy, aren't you?" was what caught my attention.
There was also some obscure error in one of Oracles packages some decades ago. I don't recall the exact message, but it was something like "It looks like you don't know what you are doing."
> Somehow DEC never got the memo that the power switch could use a little protection to prevent accidental or impulsive shutdowns.
Actually, I have had a microVax - don't remember the exact type - that had the on/off switch and the power sockets in a locked compartment at the back of the case.
It was impossible to even unplug the power cables without unlocking it. At least, on that end of the cables. ;-)
But most other Vaxes I have seen just had a big on/off switch at the front without any protection.
Ah, good times. I remember my first "real" job as a developer.
We had 1 bookcase full of the VMS (+DCL) manuals.
Another bookcase was filled with manuals for the development tools: Rdb, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Forms, Rally and some others I never touched.
But then the Web happened, and I never again opened another bookcase like that.
A stange is originally 6 oz, which is actually less than 0.2L.
But beer always finds a way, so nowadays a stange can be anything from 6 to 12 oz.
10 oz. sounds about right for a beer, since that is approximately the contents of a regular sized can.
Only week beers —like lagers, guinness etc.— are fine in pint sized glasses.
But feel free to disagree.
Working hour restrictions only exist for a very limited amount of professions. Professional pilots and truck-/bus-drivers are the only ones that come to mind right now, but there are probably some others.
AFAIK the penalties are fines only, not incarceration.
Note that penalties for employers who force or willingly allow people to exceed working hour restrictions, are much more severe than for the employees. As it should be.
> Stories about one branch or another being able to drink the other branch under the table (or country vs. country, etc.) have been part of military lore since Sumer and Elam were at odds 4,700 years ago or thereabouts.
Impossible. The table was not invented until about 200 years later.
After reading all these comments, I am flabbergasted nobody seems to be using transactions. A simple rollback would undo the damage.
Anyone using autocommit should not be allowed near a production environment.
Any database not supporting transactions, has no business being a production environment.
Any company not using transactions, should not be in business.
I mostly agree, having used Word since 4.x (4.1 I think) on DOS, and before that WordPerfect and WordStar.
Addmittedly, I am not a professional writer, more a typical business user, I think.
Word 95 had every conceivable feature that 99% of user would ever need, and more. Just like Google Docs (is it still called that?) has today.
Word 97 only added more unnecessary stuff, which did not improve the user experience.
The main problem with Word 95 was that it crashed. A lot.
I think it had more bugs than any other version of Word.
> You were lucky it wasn't an even older Mouse Systems bus mouse. I'm not sure any kind of adaptor ever existed for those other than the 8-bit ISA card it plugged into :-)
> (Or even older mice with OEM connections/protocols for anything from BBC Mcro, Amiga, ST or any of the many other unique "personal computers" that used mice in one form or another)
Those weren't necessarily older, but contemporary.
The Mouse Systems bus never really caught on, and RS232 mice became the standard, later to be replaced by PS/2 and then USB.
The home computers of the 1980s did often not have a standard serial port, so the mice had to be different, usually connected to a joystick port or similar.
I've still got all kinds of mice somewhere in a box, next to the Centronics printer cables and the 5.25" floppy drives. :-)
I had something similar in my 1930's appartment. One group powered the kitchen, the bathroom (with washing machine and optionally a dryer which I did not have), and some other odds and ends.
I could use the washer, the dishwasher OR the coffee-maker, but never more than 1 of them at the same time.
When I got a new kitchen installed a few years later, I had a group added.
Only afterwards did I find out that one of the other groups powered the doorbell. Only the doorbell.
In the 80s on some home-computers (possibly some models MSX?), switching it off and on again very quickly stopped execution of the otherwise unstoppable program, but left the memory intact.
It was an established trick to "debug" a game (otherwise known as "crack"), until the rise of hardware-based solutions that could trigger an interrupt, stopping execution without having to switch the computer off and on again.
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