Actually it is to fend of PHBs and consultants. Back when I was with a service company, several of my contacts told me of some of the letters they got from OO consultants which warned them that if they were not using the latest OO techniques, that they could be sued by thier share holders (and of course offered thier services to help with the transition). Of course much of the code is some of the most reliable code that exists in the world is beside the point.
So using COBOL for MVS means that when the CEO calls the CIO and says "are we using an object oriented language?" the CIO can say yes with a straight face.
In other words the standard abreviated structure reference that Cobol and PL/I have had since the 60s. Cobol and PL/I do not reqire you to specify the intermediate names when the name is unambiguous. When they are ambiguous then you have to specify some (but not all) of the intermediate names to disambiguate the case.
There is nothing new under the sun - Aurther Conan Doyle.
Not really. A balloon of this type can take a few holes. All that happens is that the balloon starts to loose presure and comes down. Last summer there was an interesting case here in Canada where a scientific package was sent up by weather balloon. It had an eject to release the instruments which would parachute down. The eject failed. So they sent some military jets up to shoot the balloon down. Put many 50 cal. holes in the balloon. The balloon was in Northern Europe before it finally came down (even with the holes).
In this case, all a hole means is that they don't set the altitude record.
Not exactly complete. My research area is reverse engineering. The book only talks about low level reverse engineering (i.e. executable code). Most of the research in the area is at the source level.
This is not a criticism targeted at theauthors, but at the submitter.
The virus forges the return address from. I'm using a
non-windows machine and as such am not infected,
but as the local IEEE Section chair, my email address
is in many other people's email address books. So
I'm getting all sorts of irate email accusing me
of being infected. Its getting a bit of a pain.
It would be nice if the companies that write the virus
scanners put in a bit of useful information in the detection notices, so that the users would know that sending email
to the forged return address is most likely pointless.
Unfortunately competition doesn't work when most of the industry moves together. Take banking for example. I've watched the general decrease in banking service and the general increase in service charges over the past 25 years. Since all of the banks (with a few small exceptions) have moved together on this, there is little consumer choice.
Given that Bruce Sterling is not his real name, and he suggests that google would be a simple way to find out his real name, I wonder what the stats are for searches on google for Bruce Sterlling right now?
Unless I'm mistaken it's only slander if it's not true
Unfortunately, this is not the case. While IANAL,
I do remember from the one law class that I did
take is that libel can happen even if the facts
are true, just as a company can be held accountable for a promise made by its agent
even if the agent did not have the authority to make the promise.
The libelouse even if true has been held up in court on numerous occasions, including this one.
The case depends, in part, on how the information is presented.
As with most job markets it depends on what you want to
work in and what you expect. If you are looking to work
in the latest web/ecomerce/insertyourownbuzzwordhere
at $120K then the tech downturn is as bad up here as
down there. Networks in particular are badly hurting.
But there is certainly is solid work at reasonable wages.
One of my graduate students got two offers in less than
two weeks last summer and tells me that they are currently hiring several more.
The AS400 is based around persistent object store and doesn't require special language features to support it. On an AS/400 there are only objects in memory, and adding disks only adds more backing store for the VM. Files, programs, everything are just objects in VM. Shutdown just flushes all of the ram to the disk. The machine has a built in UPS to handle shutdown if the power is lost.
The system operator has the ability to tune the VM and ram by reserving pools of ram and vm for specific categories of objects or users of objects.
Back in the early 90s Nasa flew the Macintosh Portable (a bulky 13lb pre powerbook brute) on the shuttle. I remember that one of the more humourous issues dealt with the macs power eject of floppy disks. In Earth's gravity, the floppy catches on the edge of drive, so that it stops partway out. In space, when the floppy was unmounted, it flew accross the compartment.
Also marking the finals for the fall classes that the students took in December. Takes them 3 hrs to write, me days to mark properly. 71 students x 1 hr per exam. (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Many students don't appreciate the work that goes into making and marking an exam.
A slightly less cynical view. Although the CG celebrity may not be demanding a salary increase, the use of the CG will demand better and better hardware. Since the popularity of the CG celebrity will depend on the quality of the rendering and the AI, this will require the "owner" of the CG celebrity to continue to invest in better and better hardware to back the celebrity up.
I rember a particular compiler for Windows that had a clause in the EULA that prohibited the compiler from being used to build a compiler, a database, or any of several other applications. That is: you could not use the compiler to build anything that would compete with products from the company that sold you the compiler.
Old News. It was reported in Jan 2000.
I was involved in Y2K remediation at the time and I remember it being reported in mainstream news media, although it was ususally (but not always) reported as "DoD Satellite Intelligence".
Living in Kingston, I was a bit put off at
first by the comment of SNO being near Kingston.
Probably someone saw Queen's associated with
it and assumed it was close to Queen's.
But then I got to thinking... From the point
of view of a neutrino, travelling millions (billions) of kilometers, only to run smack
into a heavy water molecule, Kingston would
be considered close to Sudbury:-).
How would they know? Companies with serious problems are not going to call press conferences. The PUC (local distribution) billing system was not Y2K compliant, and the new system was 4 months late. They had to make special arrangements for people to pay the wopping big bills they got in May over the rest of the year.
Speaking as one directly involved, the Y2K
was definitely not a hoax.
The infrastrcture was never really at risk. Of the approximately 400 Billion spent on Y2K, less than 1% was spent on infrastructure. Our local Hydro utility spent a litte more than a few 100M$, mostly in the billing department.
The biggest problem was in IT departments. It is important to note that other than embarassment, reporting incorrect dates on screens and on statements is not critical, and was never considered critical. The only critical points are where dates are used as keys (sorts, etc), compared, or used in arithmetic (subtracted, incremented, etc). This is typically less than 4% of the code, in less than 40% of the files in a typical COBOL application. But there's the rub. Which 40% of the files and which 4% of the code? If I give you a declaration of ACCTPSTD with a picture of 9(6) [a 6 digit number], would you recognize it as a account posting date?
I know I have personally seen code that would not function correctly after Y2K. It would not have crashed, it would not have printed reports with wierd dates, it would just produce subtly incorrect results. This is the worst kind of error.
Sandbox testing (simulated Y2K testing on an isolated machine) turned up many problems.
One of the state goverments left an uncorrected system running, anticipating the very real posibility that they might have to account for the Y2K money. The uncorrected system failed rather spectacularly.
Our company never pushed the fear aspect of it (we never needed to with our clientelle). We did see some of the outrageous letters written by other firms. When contacted by media, we gave a middle of the road response(I.E. there may be some problems, but in all everthing will be fine). We never seemed to get any of our quotes in anything other than the local media for some reason. I wonder why? (sarcasm intended)
How would the media or anyone else know if a company had Y2K problems. As long as the problem is small enough that it can be solved behind the scene, (probably because enough had been done ahead of time), how would you or anyone else know? Do you expect them to call a press conference and announce to the world that they had a problem? Good-bye stock options! (Yeesh!!) For that matter, would you recognize if your paycheck was correct, what if an extra $1 was deducted on one of the line items (tax, employment insurance, etc.)? On your pension statements (for those with pensions) would you recognize a reporting error? Think about it.
All in all, I've grown rather tolerant of the idiots claiming that it was all a hoax. All of our clients were satisified with our work, and have told us so as we kept in touch with them after the big day. They knew the problem that they had, and knew what service that we gave them. In the end, that's all that really matters.
Is anyone else bothered by the phrase "world's top scientists"? It conjurs up some phony sci-fi image of a bunch of people in white lab coats around a blackboard, or Brosnan's character on Mars Attacks. My pick of the worlds top scientists probably don't even know that the pyramids are aligned, and couldn't care less how it was accomplished.
Another pet peeve: the continual use of the generic term 'scientist'. Why can't they use the proper titles. Is it such a stretch to assume that the public would understand the term vulcanologists when refering to volcanos? To come back to topic, the story would be much better in my opinion if the story used the phrase: "the world't top archeologists". Although I would hazard to guess that even that phrase is less then true. Truth in meda what a concept!
Come to think of it, maybe it's more of a reflection on the average intelligence of a reporter, than a reflection on the intelligence of the public.
As you are finding out from messages such
as "what we did", "wiring is important", etc.
Geek houses are not found, spontaneously evolve.
It starts with you finding a geek for a roomate
and renting the house. Then other friends join.
The only way you "find" a geek house is if a
mutual aquaintance knows about it.
It appears that Mr. Moody has become
aware of his faux pas. The original article
has been updated to use the proper numbers,
and a little tidbit has been
end of the paragraph:
"[Please note: Upon further research, I realized
that my original numbers were a bit off. The
numbers above are new and revised.
Fred Moody, 8/4/00.]"
I thought C-Pound, and then I thought that several copies would be equivalent to the proverbial several hundred(C) pound gorilla.
ps2pdf and ghostscript and html pages
on
From Paper To PDF?
·
· Score: 1
I have not had a great deal of success with this. It has only worked for simple documents. For the rest, ghostscript generates what appears to be a pdf file, but ghostscript itself does not seem to be able to display it, and the adobe reader gives an error message "expression to complex" The source ps was postscript generated by printing an html page to a file from netscape. It happens consistently for anything other than the simplest text page. Anyone have any ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it is to fend of PHBs and consultants. Back when
I was with a service company, several of my contacts told me of some of the letters they got from OO consultants which warned them that if they were not using the latest OO techniques, that they could be sued by thier share holders (and of course offered thier services to help with the transition). Of course much of the code is some of the most reliable code that exists in the world is beside the point.
So using COBOL for MVS means that when the CEO calls the CIO and says "are we using an object oriented language?" the CIO can say yes with a straight face.
In other words the standard abreviated structure reference
that Cobol and PL/I have had since the 60s. Cobol
and PL/I do not reqire you to specify the intermediate
names when the name is unambiguous. When they are
ambiguous then you have to specify some (but not all)
of the intermediate names to disambiguate the case.
There is nothing new under the sun - Aurther Conan Doyle.
Not really. A balloon of this type can take a few holes. All that happens is that the balloon starts to loose presure and comes down. Last summer there was an interesting case here in Canada where a scientific package was sent up by weather balloon. It had an eject to release the instruments which would parachute down. The eject failed. So they sent some military jets up to shoot the balloon down. Put many 50 cal. holes in the balloon. The balloon was in Northern Europe before it finally came down (even with the holes).
In this case, all a hole means is that they don't set the altitude record.
Tom.
Not exactly complete. My research
area is reverse engineering. The book only
talks about low level reverse engineering
(i.e. executable code). Most of the research
in the area is at the source level.
This is not a criticism targeted at theauthors,
but at the submitter.
It would be nice if the companies that write the virus scanners put in a bit of useful information in the detection notices, so that the users would know that sending email to the forged return address is most likely pointless.
Unfortunately competition doesn't work when most
of the industry moves together. Take banking
for example. I've watched the general decrease in
banking service and the general increase in
service charges over the past 25 years. Since
all of the banks (with a few small exceptions) have
moved together on this, there is little consumer
choice.
Given that Bruce Sterling is not his real name, and
he suggests that google would be a simple way to
find out his real name, I wonder what the stats
are for searches on google for Bruce Sterlling
right now?
Unless I'm mistaken it's only slander if it's not true
Unfortunately, this is not the case. While IANAL, I do remember from the one law class that I did take is that libel can happen even if the facts are true, just as a company can be held accountable for a promise made by its agent even if the agent did not have the authority to make the promise.
The libelouse even if true has been held up in court on numerous occasions, including this one. The case depends, in part, on how the information is presented.
You mean like Windows 95, which could not stay up for more than 49 days continuously (MS technote Q216641)?
The technique is specifically documented in the O'Reilly book on module programming for apache, and used in
various reverse proxy type engines.
As with most job markets it depends on what you want to work in and what you expect. If you are looking to work in the latest web/ecomerce/insertyourownbuzzwordhere at $120K then the tech downturn is as bad up here as down there. Networks in particular are badly hurting.
But there is certainly is solid work at reasonable wages. One of my graduate students got two offers in less than two weeks last summer and tells me that they are currently hiring several more.
The AS400 is based around persistent object store and doesn't require special language features to support it. On an AS/400 there are only objects in memory, and adding disks only adds more backing store for the VM. Files, programs, everything are just objects in VM. Shutdown just flushes all of the ram to the disk. The machine has a built in UPS to handle shutdown if the power is lost.
The system operator has the ability to tune the VM and ram
by reserving pools of ram and vm for specific categories of objects or users of objects.
Back in the early 90s Nasa flew the Macintosh Portable (a bulky 13lb pre powerbook brute) on the shuttle. I remember that one of the more humourous issues dealt with the macs power eject of floppy disks. In Earth's gravity, the floppy catches on the edge of drive, so that it stops partway out. In space, when the floppy was unmounted, it flew accross the compartment.
Also marking the finals for the fall classes that the students took in December. Takes them 3 hrs to write, me days to mark properly. 71 students x 1 hr per exam. (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Many students don't appreciate the work that goes into making and marking an exam.
A slightly less cynical view. Although the CG celebrity may not be demanding a salary increase, the use of the CG will demand better and better hardware. Since the popularity of the CG celebrity will depend on the quality of the rendering and the AI, this will require the "owner" of the CG celebrity to continue to invest in better and better hardware to back the celebrity up.
I rember a particular compiler for Windows that had a clause in the EULA that prohibited the compiler from being used to build a compiler, a database, or any of several other applications. That is: you could not use the compiler to build anything that would compete with products from the company that sold you the compiler.
Old News. It was reported in Jan 2000.
I was involved in Y2K remediation at the time and I remember it being reported in mainstream news media, although it was ususally (but not always) reported as "DoD Satellite Intelligence".
Living in Kingston, I was a bit put off at first by the comment of SNO being near Kingston. Probably someone saw Queen's associated with it and assumed it was close to Queen's. :-).
But then I got to thinking... From the point of view of a neutrino, travelling millions (billions) of kilometers, only to run smack into a heavy water molecule, Kingston would be considered close to Sudbury
How would they know? Companies with serious problems are not going to call press conferences. The PUC (local distribution) billing system was not Y2K compliant, and the new system was 4 months late. They had to make special arrangements for people to pay the wopping big bills they got in May over the rest of the year.
- The infrastrcture was never really at risk. Of the approximately 400 Billion spent on Y2K, less than 1% was spent on infrastructure. Our local Hydro utility spent a litte more than a few 100M$, mostly in the billing department.
- The biggest problem was in IT departments. It is important to note that other than embarassment, reporting incorrect dates on screens and on statements is not critical, and was never considered critical. The only critical points are where dates are used as keys (sorts, etc), compared, or used in arithmetic (subtracted, incremented, etc). This is typically less than 4% of the code, in less than 40% of the files in a typical COBOL application. But there's the rub. Which 40% of the files and which 4% of the code? If I give you a declaration of ACCTPSTD with a picture of 9(6) [a 6 digit number], would you recognize it as a account posting date?
- I know I have personally seen code that would not function correctly after Y2K. It would not have crashed, it would not have printed reports with wierd dates, it would just produce subtly incorrect results. This is the worst kind of error.
- Sandbox testing (simulated Y2K testing on an isolated machine) turned up many problems.
- One of the state goverments left an uncorrected system running, anticipating the very real posibility that they might have to account for the Y2K money. The uncorrected system failed rather spectacularly.
- Our company never pushed the fear aspect of it (we never needed to with our clientelle). We did see some of the outrageous letters written by other firms. When contacted by media, we gave a middle of the road response(I.E. there may be some problems, but in all everthing will be fine). We never seemed to get any of our quotes in anything other than the local media for some reason. I wonder why? (sarcasm intended)
- How would the media or anyone else know if a company had Y2K problems. As long as the problem is small enough that it can be solved behind the scene, (probably because enough had been done ahead of time), how would you or anyone else know? Do you expect them to call a press conference and announce to the world that they had a problem? Good-bye stock options! (Yeesh!!) For that matter, would you recognize if your paycheck was correct, what if an extra $1 was deducted on one of the line items (tax, employment insurance, etc.)? On your pension statements (for those with pensions) would you recognize a reporting error? Think about it.
All in all, I've grown rather tolerant of the idiots claiming that it was all a hoax. All of our clients were satisified with our work, and have told us so as we kept in touch with them after the big day. They knew the problem that they had, and knew what service that we gave them. In the end, that's all that really matters.Is anyone else bothered by the phrase "world's top scientists"? It conjurs up some phony sci-fi image of a bunch of people in white lab coats around a blackboard, or Brosnan's character on Mars Attacks. My pick of the worlds top scientists probably don't even know that the pyramids are aligned, and couldn't care less how it was accomplished.
Another pet peeve: the continual use of the generic term 'scientist'. Why can't they use the proper titles. Is it such a stretch to assume that the public would understand the term vulcanologists when refering to volcanos? To come back to topic, the story would be much better in my opinion if the story used the phrase: "the world't top archeologists". Although I would hazard to guess that even that phrase is less then true. Truth in meda what a concept!
Come to think of it, maybe it's more of a reflection on the average intelligence of a reporter, than a reflection on the intelligence of the public.
As you are finding out from messages such as "what we did", "wiring is important", etc. Geek houses are not found, spontaneously evolve. It starts with you finding a geek for a roomate and renting the house. Then other friends join. The only way you "find" a geek house is if a mutual aquaintance knows about it.
Further research?
Oh well...
I thought C-Pound, and then I thought
that several copies would be equivalent
to the proverbial several hundred(C) pound
gorilla.
I have not had a great deal of success with this. It has only worked for simple documents. For the rest, ghostscript generates what appears to be a pdf file, but ghostscript itself does not seem to be able to display it, and the adobe reader gives an error message "expression to complex" The source ps was postscript generated by printing an html page to a file from netscape. It happens consistently for anything other than the simplest text page. Anyone have any ideas?