Yes, except that you'd have a period at the end, not a semicolon. (This is why statements in COBOL are referred to as "sentences.") However, if you did try something like that in a shop where the bean counters were auditing your code, they'd probably reject it for lack of clarity and insist that you gave that variable a more meaningful name. If you really want to, you can obfuscate code written in any language, but it's probably harder to get away with in COBOL than in most other languages.
I'm not disputing the fact that understanding the underlying structure of such a project is going to be a major project in itself. I'm only pointing out that the code itself is documented. Possibly, what needs to be done is to split the package up into separate programs (which it probably already is) and have teams go through the code program by program (Using multiple teams to get the advantage of doing the different jobs in parallel.) creating whatever design documents are needed to understand the various modules, then putting those together to create, eventually, an overall design document. Not easy, but probably easier than doing the same thing on packages that old written in languages that don't have COBOL's built-in documentation.
Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point,
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.
As far as spaghetti code goes, that can be a problem, especially in very old code, from before such things as structured programming were conceived. And, there's even a statement, "ALTER," which allows you to create self-modifying code, although even back in the '80s when I learned it in school, we were warned never to use it.
Except that 'Something to tinker with as the mood strikes them" is exactly what it is.
You left out the most important word: "just." Right now, Gnome is a DE for Linux that's used by millions of people around the world. However, a large and (I suspect) growing number of people are abandoning it because the Gnome devs are taking it in a direction many of us don't want, and they don't care what we think about it. If this trend continues, eventually the Gnome devs will be the only people still using it, and it will, in fact, be just something for them to tinker with when the mood strikes them because nobody else will care.
For you, maybe, but not for me. I've been using Linux as my only OS ever since Fedora 9, and was dual-booting for several years before that and the only time I've had any significant problems is when an upgrade went sour, and that can happen with any OS. And, my very non-tech older sister's been running Ubuntu for over five years with only minor assistance from me. Probably the biggest issue she had was with Unity, which isn't exactly designed for people with Parkinson's. After several months of fighting it, we installed Xfce, and since then, all's been fine. I don't know why it didn't work for you, but I know enough people, both tech-oriented and not, who use it on their desktops with no trouble to know that it's not the disaster you claim it is.
Gnome3's developers hate people who try to modify their holy UI.
Their attitude has always been "my way or the highway." They've never been open to suggestions from anybody who isn't actively working as a Gnome dev or understood that Gnome isn't just something for them to tinker with as the mood strikes them but something that other people should want to use. (That's why they're called "users," you know.) Personally, I was so horrified by what Gnome 3 was going to be that I migrated to Xfce before Gnome 3 was released and never looked back. It does what I want, the way I want and is very configurable, none of which is true about Gnome 3. The big problem, as I see it, is that, as you say, most of the mainstream distros are Gnome-centric and most of the newer users aren't even aware that they have a choice.
Personally, I run a Linux-only household. If I want, I can check every day for updates and install any that have been accepted since the last time I checked. If there's an important security update, I can get it as soon as it's ready. If I were running Windows, I'd have to wait until the next Patch Tuesday and hope that the black hats don't ream me out too badly before the patch is released. And, since the patch might be ready one day after a Patch Tuesday, that means that all Windows users might have to sit there for almost a full month waiting for an already-accepted patch. There are many reasons that I don't use Windows on my PC. This is one of them, and not the least important.
Before the NSA thing broke, there was plenty of warrantless wiretapping and such going on that we did hear about.
And where did I say otherwise? My point was the OP was claiming that the Patriot Act came after the 2006 scandal, when clearly it was passed roughly five years earlier. Reading for comprehension; what a concept.
The point is that phrasing it this way, as was done in the movie, makes it sound as though they're calling the character Doctor Shirley, making the reply fit better than if they'd said, "But surely, doctor..."
If you're going to do that line, you should at least get the setup right: "But doctor, surely you must be joking?"
"I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley."
The time to receive could be a second or two behind the real time for someone receiving on the far side of the earth.
No, it can't. The Earth's circumference is about 25,000 miles, which means that nothing can be more than 12,500 miles away by the shortest route. Considering that the speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles/second, the maximum propagation delay is about 67.2 ms.
That one may be an urban legend, but it does happen. I know, because when I was young, a local theater got a number that was the same as ours, with two digits transposed. We tried to get them to change it, but they refused so we decided to fight back: we'd tell children calling that the film was very adult, we'd check what times the movies started and give out the wrong names and times and various similar things. It took us a few years, but I'm glad to say that the theater finally went broke.
Instead, contracts should be dealt with at the individual level, allowing for the best for both the employer and the individual employee.
Even better would be a contract that allowed each employee a certain amount of choice, rather like the menu in a Chinese restaurant: you can have maternity leave or extra vacation days, but not both and so on. Best of all would be if you were allowed, under certain circumstances, to change your selection, such as if/when you get married.
It's so good to see Ugol's Law in action! Once I'd realized that I'd misread the title, I wondered if anybody else would be willing to admit that they'd done the same thing. I feel so much better!
Just because I'm not interested in buying an electric car (and don't live in one of the states affected by this) doesn't mean that I don't have a horse in this race. What's at stake here is the ability of ordinary people to buy whatever brand they want even if the only way they can do so is by going directly to the manufacturer. Being required to go through a dealership is a form of restraint of trade, and when the merchandise comes from another state, that makes it interstate commerce. Everybody who's concerned with the rate at which the current administration is eroding our rights has a horse in this race, not just those who want to buy a Tesla car.
The idea is that they may be able to make enough to sell as a cosmetic (at a highly-inflated price) long before they could ramp production up enough to use it as a fuel.
Saying that it has unique properties isn't a problem, because it's almost certain to be true. The trick is making the customer believe that those properties will all be beneficial, and that there won't be any harmful side effects.
No, that's not how heiroglyphs were translated, although that's an important tool in breaking substitution cyphers. Heiroglyphic (and Demotic) scripts were translated using the Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with a decree in heiroglyphs, demotic and greek, although none of the versions are complete.
I use an old-style "dumb phone" that charges off of a 3mm jack. I wonder if there's an adapter I could use for that. And, before anybody asks, I use a dumb phone because all I want is a phone, not a pocket computer.
Slashdot Mirror
COMPUTE t1(i1) = (t2(i2) ** 3) / (t3(i1) * 2 + 1);
Yes, except that you'd have a period at the end, not a semicolon. (This is why statements in COBOL are referred to as "sentences.") However, if you did try something like that in a shop where the bean counters were auditing your code, they'd probably reject it for lack of clarity and insist that you gave that variable a more meaningful name. If you really want to, you can obfuscate code written in any language, but it's probably harder to get away with in COBOL than in most other languages.
I'm not disputing the fact that understanding the underlying structure of such a project is going to be a major project in itself. I'm only pointing out that the code itself is documented. Possibly, what needs to be done is to split the package up into separate programs (which it probably already is) and have teams go through the code program by program (Using multiple teams to get the advantage of doing the different jobs in parallel.) creating whatever design documents are needed to understand the various modules, then putting those together to create, eventually, an overall design document. Not easy, but probably easier than doing the same thing on packages that old written in languages that don't have COBOL's built-in documentation.
Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point,
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.
As far as spaghetti code goes, that can be a problem, especially in very old code, from before such things as structured programming were conceived. And, there's even a statement, "ALTER," which allows you to create self-modifying code, although even back in the '80s when I learned it in school, we were warned never to use it.
Even better: a wildlife preserve to protect all of those metal-munching mice.
Except that 'Something to tinker with as the mood strikes them" is exactly what it is.
You left out the most important word: "just." Right now, Gnome is a DE for Linux that's used by millions of people around the world. However, a large and (I suspect) growing number of people are abandoning it because the Gnome devs are taking it in a direction many of us don't want, and they don't care what we think about it. If this trend continues, eventually the Gnome devs will be the only people still using it, and it will, in fact, be just something for them to tinker with when the mood strikes them because nobody else will care.
Well, Linux on the desktop is a disaster.
For you, maybe, but not for me. I've been using Linux as my only OS ever since Fedora 9, and was dual-booting for several years before that and the only time I've had any significant problems is when an upgrade went sour, and that can happen with any OS. And, my very non-tech older sister's been running Ubuntu for over five years with only minor assistance from me. Probably the biggest issue she had was with Unity, which isn't exactly designed for people with Parkinson's. After several months of fighting it, we installed Xfce, and since then, all's been fine. I don't know why it didn't work for you, but I know enough people, both tech-oriented and not, who use it on their desktops with no trouble to know that it's not the disaster you claim it is.
Gnome3's developers hate people who try to modify their holy UI.
Their attitude has always been "my way or the highway." They've never been open to suggestions from anybody who isn't actively working as a Gnome dev or understood that Gnome isn't just something for them to tinker with as the mood strikes them but something that other people should want to use. (That's why they're called "users," you know.) Personally, I was so horrified by what Gnome 3 was going to be that I migrated to Xfce before Gnome 3 was released and never looked back. It does what I want, the way I want and is very configurable, none of which is true about Gnome 3. The big problem, as I see it, is that, as you say, most of the mainstream distros are Gnome-centric and most of the newer users aren't even aware that they have a choice.
And yet, in the film's trailer at IMDB, it uses the line as I quoted it. And, my form makes it sound as though they're talking to Doctor Shirley.
Personally, I run a Linux-only household. If I want, I can check every day for updates and install any that have been accepted since the last time I checked. If there's an important security update, I can get it as soon as it's ready. If I were running Windows, I'd have to wait until the next Patch Tuesday and hope that the black hats don't ream me out too badly before the patch is released. And, since the patch might be ready one day after a Patch Tuesday, that means that all Windows users might have to sit there for almost a full month waiting for an already-accepted patch. There are many reasons that I don't use Windows on my PC. This is one of them, and not the least important.
Before the NSA thing broke, there was plenty of warrantless wiretapping and such going on that we did hear about.
And where did I say otherwise? My point was the OP was claiming that the Patriot Act came after the 2006 scandal, when clearly it was passed roughly five years earlier. Reading for comprehension; what a concept.
-1 Whoosh!
The point is that phrasing it this way, as was done in the movie, makes it sound as though they're calling the character Doctor Shirley, making the reply fit better than if they'd said, "But surely, doctor..."
Your timing is completely backward. The Patriot Act was passed in 2001, long before the NSA scandal broke. Maybe you need to repair your tinfoil hat?
If you're going to do that line, you should at least get the setup right: "But doctor, surely you must be joking?"
"I'm not joking, and don't call me Shirley."
The time to receive could be a second or two behind the real time for someone receiving on the far side of the earth.
No, it can't. The Earth's circumference is about 25,000 miles, which means that nothing can be more than 12,500 miles away by the shortest route. Considering that the speed of light is roughly 186,000 miles/second, the maximum propagation delay is about 67.2 ms.
That one may be an urban legend, but it does happen. I know, because when I was young, a local theater got a number that was the same as ours, with two digits transposed. We tried to get them to change it, but they refused so we decided to fight back: we'd tell children calling that the film was very adult, we'd check what times the movies started and give out the wrong names and times and various similar things. It took us a few years, but I'm glad to say that the theater finally went broke.
Instead, contracts should be dealt with at the individual level, allowing for the best for both the employer and the individual employee.
Even better would be a contract that allowed each employee a certain amount of choice, rather like the menu in a Chinese restaurant: you can have maternity leave or extra vacation days, but not both and so on. Best of all would be if you were allowed, under certain circumstances, to change your selection, such as if/when you get married.
Losers! (sorry for the correct spelling, stupid autocorrect didn't let me type Loosers!")
Of course, if you really wanted to be properly geeky about it, you'd have spelled it "lusers."
It's so good to see Ugol's Law in action! Once I'd realized that I'd misread the title, I wondered if anybody else would be willing to admit that they'd done the same thing. I feel so much better!
Are you sure your boyfriend will trust you that much?
Just because I'm not interested in buying an electric car (and don't live in one of the states affected by this) doesn't mean that I don't have a horse in this race. What's at stake here is the ability of ordinary people to buy whatever brand they want even if the only way they can do so is by going directly to the manufacturer. Being required to go through a dealership is a form of restraint of trade, and when the merchandise comes from another state, that makes it interstate commerce. Everybody who's concerned with the rate at which the current administration is eroding our rights has a horse in this race, not just those who want to buy a Tesla car.
Oils are lubricants. And, if this stuff isn't absorbed quickly by the skin, there's an obvious use for it.
The idea is that they may be able to make enough to sell as a cosmetic (at a highly-inflated price) long before they could ramp production up enough to use it as a fuel.
Saying that it has unique properties isn't a problem, because it's almost certain to be true. The trick is making the customer believe that those properties will all be beneficial, and that there won't be any harmful side effects.
That is how hieroglyphs were decrypted.
No, that's not how heiroglyphs were translated, although that's an important tool in breaking substitution cyphers. Heiroglyphic (and Demotic) scripts were translated using the Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with a decree in heiroglyphs, demotic and greek, although none of the versions are complete.
I use an old-style "dumb phone" that charges off of a 3mm jack. I wonder if there's an adapter I could use for that. And, before anybody asks, I use a dumb phone because all I want is a phone, not a pocket computer.