wobbleblob

It was the Electron for me. Bought it new for the equivalent of less than #100 when Acorn discontinued it, the only computer I could afford from my allowance. Incidentally it also forced me to learn German and English as a kid, to be able to read the manuals and Acorn Magazine.

Second to learning to read, that machine probably had the largest influence on my career

I just heard energy analyst krutikhin explain on the news that Gazprom could have blown them up using so called "pigs", maintenance drones that move through the pipes.

Isn't that obvious? It's to strengthen Germany's resolve. The temptation to surrender and get the gas turned back on is going to be enormous this coming winter.

Germany and several other countries have made plans to shut down parts of heavy industry to save gas for heating. This is more than likely to put increasing pressure on governments to give in to Russia's demands. Now they can't, even if they want to, so that pressure is gone.

Start with source control, you can get that done in an afternoon and it could save you 20 million dollars a year.

I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM.

IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.

What else it is going to do is keep looping until the end of the input file is reached, which was the programming model at the time.

The problem with this article is the same as with every article about COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, Mainframes etc:

  The assumption that it is only 50+ year old legacy code running on dependable 
  but obsolete hardware, untouched by human hands in decades is wrong. 

In reality, much of it is new. COBOL shops still develop new software. IBM still makes brand new mainframes. The developers are not all old men in suits, they look pretty much like C++ or Java (or any other established tech) programmers: all ages. That may look old to you because you're biased to think of programmers as males aged 20 to 35.

By the way, I'm not saying it doesn't suck. It's not something I ever intend to do in my life again.

I guess the raw vegetables contain just enough protein to survive

Ages ago, I had a colleague who was deeply into hacking of his mTOR pathway. Among other things, this included a permanent calorie deficit and removal of all protein from his diet.

I don't know if he's still alive. Maybe it was working a bit too well, I recall he looked like an extremely tall 13 year old with anorexia.

Not only that, it would have been highly inappropriate for the US to intervene in another country's domestic affairs uninvited.

The assumption everything bad is always our fault is just the other side of the coin of the narcissistic belief that we're the greatest of all time at everything and therefor always right.

I think you have this upside down.

The oligarchs didn't swoop in and ruin everything. The Russian government did not want their resources and industry controlled by foreign share holders, so they were dead set on privatizing the economy by selling to Russians only.

With this constraint, the handful of Russians who were able to raise capital in such a short time, without foreign counter bids, got the privatized businesses far below market prices as a result. This is what made them billionaires, and turned them into the oligarchs.

Automatic transmission is very rare in Europe.

Github Copilot won't give students anything they couldn't already google.

It seems to be a natural part of aging, to start to complain about education and kids these days because it's not the same as when we were in school.

I try not to do that, because I never forgot how my parents generation said the exact same about us when we were in school, and I guarantee my grandparents generation complained when my parents were in school.

I thought people lose their caste when they cross the "black water".

I can relate to this, I am a dedicated fan of the Toyota Corolla