Starwatcher2001

Scrolls fine for me. Firefox 7.0, uBlock origin.

Yeah, that sounds fun. Did that have the evil "alter" statement, which caused even more spaghetti with gotos?

I wouldn't call it beautiful, but COBOL is a fairly capable language. I used Microsoft COBOL on the original IBM PC (twin floppy) in 1985 to produce a realtime multiuser data collection system in a factory. This interfaced to various machines and devices using a custom TSR* routine written in x86 assembler.

COBOL was chosen by the customer as they were running an IBM System 36, and the implementation was capable of calling the assembly code almost directly.

Each compile would take around 20 minutes, which teaches you to be careful with the syntax! When the source code got beyond 64k, we had to build the app in sections as that's all IBM Edit at the time could handle at one time. As the article shows, COBOL is quite verbose, so 64k isn't that large!

In later years we updated to Microfocus COBOL which was much better than the Microsoft version.

I can't imagine any modern programmer having any problems learning COBOL sufficiently well in a few days. It was my third language after BASIC and assembler.

[*] TSR = Terminate and Stay Resident program, which you loaded into MSDOS first, prior to running the main (COBOL) program. A very poor-man's "multi-tasking".

I met him in 2003 in the UK when he was doing a lecture tour. His colleague was translating into English for us, and every now and then they'd rattle away between themselves in Russian, causing my friend's wife to giggle.

After the talk they did a photo session, and she spoke to them. "You have an interesting accent, where you from?" Asked one of them in Russian. "Siberia..."

Apparently they'd been jesting all the way through: "You can't tell them that...", "You watch me..."

RIP Alexei, space hero and nice guy as well.

"But here's the kicker: an atheist beleives that there is no god"

Nope. A-theist simply means someone who lacks theism. I don't posit that there is no god, I simply don't believe there is any evidence or reason for me to believe in one. The burden of proof is yours my friend.

"What's your best atheist argument?"

I don't need one any more than I need a "best argument" against the existence of pixies. The default position is not to believe in something without a good reason. Why would we?

As soon as you can provide any solid scientific evidence that a god exists, then we can talk.

Am I misunderstanding something here? You want a car driver to pull into the outer lane so that you can undertake him between the cycle and car? I'm a biker and that sounds suicidal to me. The drivers next move would be to move back into the inner lane, right into you.

I've got no problem with your complaint about them half-changing and blocking both lanes, it's the concept of nipping between them, knowing full-well their next move will be back in.

If the spelling of the product name is uncommon, that might be a plus on search engines.

"Today was my first day on the job as a Junior Software Developer..."

And he has permissions to delete the production database? Heads much higher up the tree need to roll.

I quite agree with the problem of having to trade sleep for other necessities, but personally I didn't realise the actual cost of that trade, and the serious long term effects that 90+ hour weeks might have on me.

In my case it wasn't a second job, it was trying to be more productive to help a fledgling company fly. In retrospect I'd have been a lot more productive with a good 8 hours sleep in my tank every night.

Walker's book on sleep opened my eyes that much that I bought copies for all the family. I've never done that before.

Yes, especially when driving. Sometimes it feels like I should be reaching for gear stick at the same time as I previously did. It does feel bizarre.

I love mind maps and still use them regularly. I find them particularly good for marshalling my ideas at the start of a project when it's just important to get things written down somewhere and bash them into a sensble order and heirarchy. I also use them as quick single page summaries for revision of topics.

RIP Tony.

Synesthesia is definitely real, my wife has it. She sees numbers and letters as having colours. We'd been married a few years before either of us realised there was something different about her, she just thought everyone saw the world as she did. I didn't believe her at first, then asked her go through the entire alphabet and tell me the colours she saw for each letter. To this day they've never differed.

Words written in coloured ink are difficult for her to read, and trying to read "rainbow" coloured text is virtually impossible as it makes her feel sick.

You might enjoy this game written in a single line of BASIC on a TRS-80:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWyZO-yPnvM

For anyone not familiar with the TRS-80, who finds the code somewhat weird.. the BASIC implementation was written by Microsoft. Only the first two letters of variable names were significant. Although interpreted, the ROM tokenized typed lines, meaning it didn't care about spaces.

This led to such gems as:

FORK=10 TOMATOES STEP LADDER

You can find a transcript here: https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/quotations/quotes/stephen_fr...

If the universe was created, it wasn't created to be friendly to life. I'd guess that more than 99.99999 % of it is hostile to human existence.

On the subject of over reporting of church attendence, the discrimination against atheists in the USA may have a good part to play:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheist...

I agree with that. There were a number of anonymous remailers [0] where you could send emails to others, or make posts to Usenet[1]. The remainers would strip all the headers from your post and replace them with a specific number. Other users could then reply to you using that number without knowing your real email address or name. Likewise, you wouldn't know theirs. Coupled with PGP, anonymity was very high.

I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.

It was good not being tracked and traced.

[0] The most famous being anon.penet.fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

I concur. I used to work in a plastic factory in the 70's and at lunchtime there was a fair stream of machine operators who's make a beeline for the pub opposite. Pint or two of beer and a pie was the standard lunch.

I use a pink and green marker. If I put a pink splodge on something it needs attention, a green one next to it means "dealt with". Makes it very quick to skim through documents and see if there's anything I've not looked at yet.

You can find a copy here. Brings back memories.

http://www.thecomputerarchive.com/thearchive/Manuals/Epson%2...

Still have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me.

The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.

Think of the billions of years that passed by before you were born. Were they bad for you? Was there any pain? Do you worry about them, or even pay any attention to them?

Perhaps things will be identical to you after you've died, and therefore absolutely nothing to worry about.

As a non-believer, I believe that we have just this one life, so make the best of it and enjoy it without worrying.

Oh, and try to leave the place a bit better than when you arrived ;-)

You've got some great advice here, but I went the opposite way from paper to electronic notes. I had about five years of project notes on paper that became totally impossible to manage or search. I've been doing it electronic now (simple text files) for about a decade and find it much more valuable.

I still use ZtreeW64 almost every day. It's a clone of the old xtree and still very useful.

Please do educate us.

What an awful situation for you both. Would a change of career be possible/practical/helpful?

I built a memory dump system of my own for the TRS-80. The reset button on the machine launched an RST operation on the Z80 CPU, which was the only non-maskable interrupt (in other words, software writers couldn't disable or prevent it).

Unfortunately due to the memory mapping of the TRS-80, this set the CPU to an address in ROM, meaning I couldn't get at it to do anything useful. I put together a small veroboard circuit with a 2716 EPROM and a nand gate or two. This was hacked into the memory decoding circuit on the TRS-80 so that in normal operation the original ROM would be called, but if the address range was in the first 2k (the smallest block I could map), it would take instructions from the EPROM.

A friend then hand copied the entire first 2k of memory from the ROM (in hex) and cooked it into the EPROM (funnily enough using an Apple). However, we modified the code around the RST instruction to leap to RAM, where the memory dump program could reside and then be executed.

As the machine couldn't reboot properly until our dump software was loaded, we added a toggle switch to enable/disable the memory mapping hack and return the machine to normal.

Presumably like the "Wild Card" did it, we dumped the memory and register contents so they could reloaded later. Fun times.

This takes me back to the early 80s when "Personal Computer World" (UK) used to have a letters column called "Subset", where people would share short assembler routines for the 8 bit chips of the time. People would share optimisations, hidden opcodes, quirks about the chips etc. Often there'd be posts that shaved a byte or two or a few t-states off a previous months post. It's amazing how inventive people can be with limited resources.

It seems that as processors are so fast and memory so abundant now that squeezing the last drop of efficiency from a routine is a dying art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_World

Many of the Z80 and 6502 routines have been collected together into a couple of books, mentioned here:

http://mycodehere.blogspot.com/2011/10/my-work-in-print-1985...

Does the date when a student hands in a piece of work (which seems to be what they are measuring) corrolate with when they actually did the work?

It seems to me that a student who did the work early, but then sat on it for some reason (maybe to polish it), is very different to one who did the work at the last minute - even if they handed it in on the same day.

A few years ago I did a "hard hat" diving experience that gives a teeny, tiny view into what these divers experience, and wow did it increase my respect for them.

It also included being compressed in the "pot" down to 50m and getting narked to hell. Any UK bods fancy trying the experience lookup "York Diver Training".

Buying a "starter" dive computer makes a lot of sense as many divers quit after a year or two. As your skills and interests progress, you can aways upgrade to a better one.

It's been a while since I bought my last dive computer, but looking at the spec for the Leonardo, it looks okay. Personally I'd prefer one that includes a stop timer, but that's not a show stopper. The ability to download your dives to a PC is a good one to have. Have a chat with your instructors and see what they use and why. Enjoy your diving and keep blowing them bubbles!