Sorry, it was a Burroughs 7800 (I think they named their models after the year they came out).
These days I mainly program microcontrollers (Atmel, ARM, etc). Interestingly the Atmel AVR architecture follows the same Harvard model of rigorously separating code and data space. A nice architecture (though it does get a bit messy when writing boot loaders).
And fair enough too. I write a lot of firmware, and restrict myself to a compiler subset for all those reasons (eg being wary of using the heap). But that doesn't mean I want the language to force those inelegant restrictions.
This was before IBM PC days, so things may have changed a lot since then in the Cobol world. I don't recall the mainframes we ran it on (I think one was a Burroughs 78, not sure about the other). Never had the 'joy' of running Cobol on a PC...
Ever tried doing recursion in early Cobol? Maybe they've fixed this in later versions, but in the past the return pointer was stored in program space at the head of the function. This means that if you ever had any recursion, the return would loop back forever. How's that for a 3rd generation imperative language? You have to implement your own call stack!
My main complaint is the verbosity of the language, and the clunky set of program flow verbs. It almost forced you to use GOTO (and indeed, many people used GOTO as a way of implementing exception logic).
It had a couple of nice features for business applications: built in decimal arithmetic, and character-by-character print formatting (less messy than eg Fortran was at the time).
It is "evil" in the sense of being a poor language to teach programming. It is not general purpose enough, which means that students of the language are being constrained in their thinking about how to solve problems ("crippling" the mind).
I have no problem with using it as an application specific language, but surely now there are better choices even in that niche (for example the various database languages).
Isn't it illegal in most jurisdictions to provide third party access to wireless communications without a telco license? (not that I think it should be). It's just that many people are providing access by accident:-) Man, you used to have to study morse code just to even be allowed to say hello on CB radio.
I did some work for a big Australian telco (yes, you know who) for six months and noticed significant demarcation issues between the software department and the customer service divisions. It was so bad that the customer service divisions were writing their own programs on the side, because it was too difficult to deal with the software people. And the software people were caught up in their own infrastructure projects.
I suspect it is common in large businesses because each department becomes a little community, with an 'us and them' attitude to other departments.
Personally I don't think software/IT should be a separate department; it would be better if IT people were assigned to work on particular projects within the department that was running the project. Not only would that help software people to understand better the business implications of what they are doing, but it would help reduce the competing priorities which IT people are subjected to.
Obviously there are some IT roles that have to be centralized (especially if there are large server systems or the like). But I think we place too much emphasis on the efficiency of centralization at the expense of company morale.
Yeah, I find it embarrassing to make competent job applicants sit through these basic tests too. But we have been burnt before.
One applicant who came across well in an interview and had an impressive portfolio of past work, turned out to have no concept of object oriented programming, and used public Windows objects to pass data between his classes! His code worked (sort of), but it was unmaintainable and unscalable.
The tests are just a hurdle; does the applicant actually know the language, can they problem solve, do they understand basic concepts in the field. They aren't meant to be an insult, just a way of figuring out who might be able to do the job without the pain of a three month trial.
The problem with refreshing a pixel based e-ink display is that it has to be erased first (otherwise you get ghost images of the previous page). The erase setting has to be held long enough to achieve a stable and consistent state across the pixels. Some display modes of the ebook readers (eg, the mp3 player updating the play timer on the screen) don't do an erase first, and the update is quite fast (but you do get ghosting).
For a simple segment display, it doesn't matter if there is ghosting, especially if you are just blinking the display.
Anyone who thinks that 99.999% uptime can be guaranteed is not living in the real world. Failure causes in the real world are just as likely to follow a power law distributions as anything, so these "average" uptime figures are meaningless. Surely anyone who deals in the stock market should be aware of the perils of predicting success and failure.
It is difficult to know when prion diseases first developed. Take the case of kuru-kuru in the Fore area of Papua New Guinea, a prion disease that was transmitted because of burial practices (including eating the brains of the deceased). This area was only accessed by Europeans from the late 1930s, so it is not surprising that Kuru was not known to Western science until the 20th Century.
The researcher took some time to prove it was a disease agent, because of the long incubation time of the disease. However, some women from the adjacent Awa area who married Fore men were also contracting the disease, which helped rule out genetic causes.
So the disease existed before European contact. Moreover, the trade barriers (mountainous terrain and internecine warfare between villages) means that it is unlikely that contaminated foodstuffs were traded into the region before air travel.
You haven't been exposed to the source code of Windows have you? Are you one of these people who conceal their irrational belief in the Almighty Bill Gates by talking about intelligent design? Next you will be telling us that all of the flaws are deliberate!:-)
agreed, but how much does it cost in damage control if the old domain starts being used by a competitor, spammers, or criminals? I suspect more than $1000 a year.
So what you mean is that Microsoft don't know what the term "beta release" means. To the rest of the world, "beta" is a test version provided to willing customers to get feedback on bugs and cosmetic details. It doesn't differ substantially from a release version, except that it has undergone less scrutiny.
But in the spirit of Microsoft and Humpty Dumpty, let us redefine these words. A Microsoft release means what everyone else calls a beta release. A Microsoft beta release means what everyone else calls an alpha release. And a Microsoft alpha release is the announcement of an upcoming product yet to be written.
Can't we just cut out the middle man? The hardware people sell a simple computer, and the "extra feature" people pay us users to install their crap?:-)
I didn't start laughing, I was in shock! But the second part of your story was very funny. I guess that's why they called it the ultimate edition - it might be the last one that anyone takes seriously.
The customer misremembered his password as "Lloyds is pants". He rang up to make a transaction, but when he gave his (wrong) password, they said "no its not". He asked to change it to "Barclays is bank", but they weren't sure if it was really him, so they refused. Case solved! And no, I didn't read the article.
Slashdot Mirror
These days I mainly program microcontrollers (Atmel, ARM, etc). Interestingly the Atmel AVR architecture follows the same Harvard model of rigorously separating code and data space. A nice architecture (though it does get a bit messy when writing boot loaders).
And fair enough too. I write a lot of firmware, and restrict myself to a compiler subset for all those reasons (eg being wary of using the heap). But that doesn't mean I want the language to force those inelegant restrictions.
Yes. And the grasshopper escapement is not commonly used, so a contemporary clock that displays this ingenious mechanism is of technical interest.
Exactly right, and it cuts out the BIOS startup as well! The text editor is already open on the document you were just working on.
This was before IBM PC days, so things may have changed a lot since then in the Cobol world. I don't recall the mainframes we ran it on (I think one was a Burroughs 78, not sure about the other). Never had the 'joy' of running Cobol on a PC...
Ever tried doing recursion in early Cobol? Maybe they've fixed this in later versions, but in the past the return pointer was stored in program space at the head of the function. This means that if you ever had any recursion, the return would loop back forever. How's that for a 3rd generation imperative language? You have to implement your own call stack!
My main complaint is the verbosity of the language, and the clunky set of program flow verbs. It almost forced you to use GOTO (and indeed, many people used GOTO as a way of implementing exception logic).
It had a couple of nice features for business applications: built in decimal arithmetic, and character-by-character print formatting (less messy than eg Fortran was at the time).
It is "evil" in the sense of being a poor language to teach programming. It is not general purpose enough, which means that students of the language are being constrained in their thinking about how to solve problems ("crippling" the mind).
I have no problem with using it as an application specific language, but surely now there are better choices even in that niche (for example the various database languages).
Isn't it illegal in most jurisdictions to provide third party access to wireless communications without a telco license? (not that I think it should be). It's just that many people are providing access by accident :-) Man, you used to have to study morse code just to even be allowed to say hello on CB radio.
I did some work for a big Australian telco (yes, you know who) for six months and noticed significant demarcation issues between the software department and the customer service divisions. It was so bad that the customer service divisions were writing their own programs on the side, because it was too difficult to deal with the software people. And the software people were caught up in their own infrastructure projects.
I suspect it is common in large businesses because each department becomes a little community, with an 'us and them' attitude to other departments.
Personally I don't think software/IT should be a separate department; it would be better if IT people were assigned to work on particular projects within the department that was running the project. Not only would that help software people to understand better the business implications of what they are doing, but it would help reduce the competing priorities which IT people are subjected to.
Obviously there are some IT roles that have to be centralized (especially if there are large server systems or the like). But I think we place too much emphasis on the efficiency of centralization at the expense of company morale.
Yeah, I find it embarrassing to make competent job applicants sit through these basic tests too. But we have been burnt before.
One applicant who came across well in an interview and had an impressive portfolio of past work, turned out to have no concept of object oriented programming, and used public Windows objects to pass data between his classes! His code worked (sort of), but it was unmaintainable and unscalable.
The tests are just a hurdle; does the applicant actually know the language, can they problem solve, do they understand basic concepts in the field. They aren't meant to be an insult, just a way of figuring out who might be able to do the job without the pain of a three month trial.
IMHO they should have a white screen of death specially reserved for Apple products.
The problem with refreshing a pixel based e-ink display is that it has to be erased first (otherwise you get ghost images of the previous page). The erase setting has to be held long enough to achieve a stable and consistent state across the pixels. Some display modes of the ebook readers (eg, the mp3 player updating the play timer on the screen) don't do an erase first, and the update is quite fast (but you do get ghosting).
For a simple segment display, it doesn't matter if there is ghosting, especially if you are just blinking the display.
Anyone who thinks that 99.999% uptime can be guaranteed is not living in the real world. Failure causes in the real world are just as likely to follow a power law distributions as anything, so these "average" uptime figures are meaningless. Surely anyone who deals in the stock market should be aware of the perils of predicting success and failure.
The researcher took some time to prove it was a disease agent, because of the long incubation time of the disease. However, some women from the adjacent Awa area who married Fore men were also contracting the disease, which helped rule out genetic causes.
So the disease existed before European contact. Moreover, the trade barriers (mountainous terrain and internecine warfare between villages) means that it is unlikely that contaminated foodstuffs were traded into the region before air travel.
You haven't been exposed to the source code of Windows have you? Are you one of these people who conceal their irrational belief in the Almighty Bill Gates by talking about intelligent design? Next you will be telling us that all of the flaws are deliberate! :-)
Wasn't it the mice who engineered the genome change in us? Just a little experiment. The dolphins were furious.
..r tha cheerz ov millyinz ov spellin trollz
agreed, but how much does it cost in damage control if the old domain starts being used by a competitor, spammers, or criminals? I suspect more than $1000 a year.
So what you mean is that Microsoft don't know what the term "beta release" means. To the rest of the world, "beta" is a test version provided to willing customers to get feedback on bugs and cosmetic details. It doesn't differ substantially from a release version, except that it has undergone less scrutiny.
But in the spirit of Microsoft and Humpty Dumpty, let us redefine these words. A Microsoft release means what everyone else calls a beta release. A Microsoft beta release means what everyone else calls an alpha release. And a Microsoft alpha release is the announcement of an upcoming product yet to be written.
maybe they were just quoting the engineers who had built the satellite...
the data port software for my phone has such an arcane interface that I would be surprised if even the manufacturer can get data off it!
maybe you are just getting alzheimers, losing a gyrus or two.
Can't we just cut out the middle man? The hardware people sell a simple computer, and the "extra feature" people pay us users to install their crap? :-)
I didn't start laughing, I was in shock! But the second part of your story was very funny. I guess that's why they called it the ultimate edition - it might be the last one that anyone takes seriously.
The customer misremembered his password as "Lloyds is pants". He rang up to make a transaction, but when he gave his (wrong) password, they said "no its not". He asked to change it to "Barclays is bank", but they weren't sure if it was really him, so they refused. Case solved! And no, I didn't read the article.