I don’t know if this will work or even compile, but I feel like I’m pretty close.
long main () {
char output;
unsigned char shift;
long temp;
if (i < 152) {
shift = (i & 1) * 7;
temp = b[i >> 1] >> shift;
i++;
output = (char)(64 & temp);
output += (char)((n >> (temp & 63)) & main());
printf("%c", output);
}
return 63;
}
When I go to that URL on a stock, direct FF install, I still see that notice.
Re: the Acceptance stage.
Years ago I worked at a family-run business with a good working environment. The staff were once told a story of how, earlier in the company’s history, a manager made a mistake that caused the company a substantial monetary loss.
The manager immediately offered their resignation, but the owner said to them, “Why would I let you go now? I’ve just spent all this money so you could learn a valuable lesson!”
So yeah, generally, most managers’ reaction to accidentally deleting vital data from production is going to be to fire the developer as a knee-jerk “retaliation”, but if you think about it, the best response is to keep that developer; your data isn’t coming back either way, but this developer has just learned to be a lot more careful in the future. Why would you send them to a potential competitor?
Yes, I think that most of us realized from some of the self-aware wording that this is a parody. But like many parodies it’s a real trope taken to a silly extreme, so we’re talking about users who fit that trope (including ourselves, sometimes!).
Oh hell, you gave me a PTSD flashback!
It’s the late 90s. My mother suddenly discovers File Explorer on her refurbished commodity Wintel box and decides that all this messy clutter has to go. Never mind that the drive was 80% empty when delivered and I didn’t expect her to come close to filling it before it was replaced. Fortunately I had already backed up everything that looked important or interesting.
One day she calls from the office, “I don’t need this ‘Windows’ any more, do I?”
“What? Wait! Don’t do anything!” I walk in and she’s got C:/Windows highlighted and the cursor is hovering over “Delete”.
“I already have Windows installed on this computer, so I don’t need this any more, do I?” Spoken more as a statement than a question. It took several minutes of forced calm explanation to get her to accept that this “Windows” directory WAS the Windows that’s installed on the machine. She still wasn’t happy that she could see it in File Explorer, though. So untidy!
It’s a persistent dynamic memory allocation that’s accessed by multiple processes! :)
I tought myself programming as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and just got used to diagnostic print statements because it was the first thing that occurred to me and I had no (advanced) books, mentors, teachers, or Internet to tell me any different.
Then in university one of my lecturers insisted that diagnostic prints are completely unreliable and that we must always use a debugger. He may have overstated the case, but I saw that he had a point when I started working on the university’s time-sharing mainframe systems and found my work constantly being preempted and moved around in memory in the middle of critical sections. Diagnostic prints would disappear, or worse, appear where, in theory, they shouldn’t be able to, and they would come and go like a restless summer breeze. But for as much as that lecturer banged on about debuggers, he hardly taught us anything about how to use them, and they confused the hell out of me, so I made it through the rest of my degree without using debuggers except for one part of one subject (the “learn about debuggers” part).
Over 20 years later, after a little professional work and a lot of personal projects and making things for other non-coding jobs I’ve had, I still haven’t really used debuggers much. But lately I’ve been forcing myself to use them sometimes, partly to help me pick apart quirks in external libraries that I’m linking, and partly because I’d like to start using superscalar instructions and threading in my programs, and I remember how that sort of thing screwed up my diagnostic prints in university.
Of course! There’s already a proposal for a replacement Temporal object.
The definition of the Date object explicitly states that any attempt to set the internal timestamp to a value outside of the maximum range must result in it being set to “NaN”. If there’s an implementation out there that doesn’t do that, then the issue is with that implementation, not the standard.
My Hero isn’t actually Irish, but it does star Ardal O’Hanlon (Father Dougal) for almost its entire run, so it may scratch the itch.
Yep, it’s probably easier to get an Android device and install readers on it than to try for a prepackaged FOSS reader.
I use several apps on my Android phone, but mostly Kindle (for Kindle, duh), PDF Reader (for PDFs, duh again), and Lithium (mostly for EPUB but pretty much everything else, too). I get most of my e-books as DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs.
No argument from me; the management was chaos at that place. Those kinds of mistakes were beyond my control, but fortunately they were rare.
We were managing our own work with (usually generous) milestones/deadlines determined by other people. As long as we kept meeting goals, no-one looked any deeper. It gave me the freedom to literally put everything else on hold and switch 100% of my attention to this project.
I once had a manager hand me a project brief and ask me how quickly I thought I could complete it. I was managing my own workload (it was a bad situation), but it was a very small project and I felt that I had time to put everything else on hold and focus on it. So, I said that I might be able to get it done in four days, but I wouldn’t commit to less than a week just to be sure.
The manger started off on this half-threatening, half-disappointed rant about how the project had a deadline set in stone (in four days’ time), and how the head of the company had committed to it in public (which in hindsight was absolute rot). I was young and nervous, but fortunately for me every project brief had a timeline of who had seen it, and more importantly, when they had received it. I noticed that this brief had originated over three months prior, and had been sitting on this manager’s desk for almost a month. I was the first developer in the chain. That gave me the guts to say that my estimate was firm, and that if anyone actually came down the ladder looking for heads to set rolling (one of the manager’s threats), they could come to me and I would explain.
In the end nothing ever came of it because I managed to get the job done in three days. They tried to put the screws to me over that small of a project.
Does this also apply to Android?
I first learned about Java in the late 90s and it sounded fantastic. “Write once, run anywhere!” Great!
After I got past “Hello world!” and other simple text output tutorials, things took a turn for the worse. It seemed like if you wanted to do just about anything beyond producing text output with compile-time data (e.g. graphics, sound, file access), you needed to figure out what platform and which edition/version of Java your program was being run on, so you could import the right libraries and call the right functions with the right parameters. I guess that technically this was still “write once, run anywhere”.
After that, I learned just enough Java to squeak past a university project that required it, then promptly forgot all of it.
I feel like Sun was trying to hit multiple moving targets at the same time, and failing to land a solid hit on any of them. They were laser-focused on portable binaries, but without standardized storage or multimedia APIs at a time when even low-powered devices were starting to come with those capabilities. I presume that things are better now, but I’ve never been tempted to have another look. Even just trying to get my machines set up to run other people’s Java programs has been enough to keep me away.