It isn’t a disk driver since the OS is not loaded yet. It is the hardware identifying each disk in the SCSI chain. Not sure what else it was doing walking the bus much I know finding all the disk was the longest part.
Shoot, it did occur to me that might not technically be the right word.
Still, even if you’re an engineer in the late 80’s, it seems like it would be obvious you need a way for disks to announce themselves in O(1) time. Was it just a limitation of interoperability between vendors or something?
I think it was just a limit of how quick everything ran back then. Also, this was an IBM system that was checked, double-checked, and triple-checked because it was a mission-critical system. IBM used to be known for quality hardware. Hard to imagine because they are such a crap company now but that was the equivalent of a google back then.
I like how posting got fairly fast. Then we started putting absurd amounts of ram into servers so now they’re back to slow.
Like we have a high clock speed dual 32 core AMD server with 1TB of ram that takes at least 5 minutes to do it’s RAM check. So every time you need to reboot you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting anxiously.
Using a tape drive is crazy when you think about it. It was slow…. This wasn’t the big tape cartridges. It was a standard Audio tape. Not sure why they could store but it was all sequential
Not now, not most of the time anyway. I did say mostly fixed
That was not the case back with Java 6 ish. Even massive breakage between minor releases was common. you had to tell everybody exactly which jre to use and possibly ship it with your software
I write Java for a paycheck, but I really hate it.
It feels like everything is layers and layers of overengineered cruft, each added to the precarious tower for something extremely minor. But every subsequent card in the house of cards makes it more precarious. “But look, I don’t have to write accessors.” “But look, I eliminated the need for the web.xml file.” “But look, I don’t have to understand SQL now.” But look, the codebase depends on a shit-ton of completely opaque Automagic™ that you have no hope of understanding the moment something goes wrong – which it will if you even think of changing your Java version. And since it’s practically impossible to understand what’s going on under-the-hood of whichever dependency is fubar’d this week, you have to resort to a mixture of trial-and-error and copy-pasting shit (that you also don’t understand) from StackOverflow and praying to Cthulhu something works – which is also trial-and-error because Java questions in particular have tons of just straight up wrong answers.
To be fair, I’m the guy on my team who people come to when they run into those sorts of “I bumped up one subminor version of Mockito to fix a bug that was preventing my unit test from working but now literally half of our unit tests won’t build” or “I added the war plugin to the build.gradle and now SwaggerUI is broken.” So maybe I see more than my fair share of “well shit, I guess I’ll just spend the next three hours hunting down which magical combination of Jar version numbers will fix things” kind of problems. But damn. This shit didn’t ever happen back when I was doing Python for a paycheck.
I don’t use Java if I don’t have to. If I have to use Java, I prefer to just use Servlets (mostly I do web development) and absolutely as few dependencies as I can possibly get away with. Fewer moving parts mean less that can break.
You’re talking about Java(Jakarta) EE, my comment is primarily targeted at Java SE. I find that the Java standard library on its own and core language is pretty nice if you use modern versions like Java 21. If I had to complain it’d be about checked exceptions, they annoy me but otherwise the language is fine. I’ve never worked with the full enterprise web stack, I use servelts for web and do a large amount of Java SE desktop development, not with swing, fuck swing. Primarily LWJGL and JavaFX. I love that language, more than most. At work I use a lot of C# and I hate it, I miss Java when I have to write C#. I just don’t love it, mostly due to all the little annoyances and missing things(no labeled breaks, no diamond operator for generics, etc). I try to use Java for projects where I can but it’s not always an option.
Have a proper radio ham license. Buy a 40-meter transceiver and a software defined radio dongle. Convert your code into esoteric programming languages such as Whitespace and Brainf, then spell it. “Plus, plus, next, plus, dot, open bracket, next, …”. Transmit your spelling over 40-meter band, while a receiver across the continent is tuned to the frequency. Ask it to repeat and record the QSO. Set the SDR recorder to I/Q packets instead of demodulating AM. Publish it as an audiobook.
Or go full CW, and just transmit source code in binary as dits and dahs. (So long as you document what you’re doing it should be legal, though I’m not sure if you should use the CE portion of he band since it’s nonstandard…)
If your love letter isn’t given in the form of highly obfuscated C, is it really a love letter? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I love you! <3
Whoops! When I looked at the second time that the shift value is calculated, I wondered if it would be inverted from the first time, but for some reason I decided that it wouldn’t be. But looking at it again it’s clear now that (1 - i) = (-i + 1) = ((~i + 1) + 1), making bit 0 the inverse. Then I wondered why there wasn’t more corruption and realized that the author’s compiler must perform postfix increments and decrements immediately after the variable is used, so the initial shift is also inverted. That’s why the character pairs are flipped, but they still decode correctly otherwise. I hope this version works better:
Playground zone signs where I live often read “slow children playing”. It’s supposed to be “slow (children playing)” but I always get a kick out of reading it as “(slow children) playing”.
You’ve turned this into a catch 22. If there were no female characters, you could argue that’s sexist. If the idiotic boss was female, you could argue all of the dumb characters are female so that’s sexist. If Jarod were the only female, that would be sexist.
How does this sketch get rewritten in such a way that it is not casually sexist?
Good point. I guess you’re right, there are no flattering roles. But each of those options you list would have been less on top of existing prejudices.
Making her the (non-technical) project manager whose only contribution is “how many story points is that?”, who’s then silenced because “this is important!”, confirms the typical prejudices about women in tech:
no technical expertise
is not in charge
does not have anything to say that is worth listening to in times of crisis
Especially being talked over. This matches many women’s experiences in men-dominated environments to a T.
I’d much rather the technically competent, important but socially weird engineer (Jared) be the woman, or the incompetent boss, who’s in charge and calls the shots. Even having no women in the skit would be better than this Cindy role.
Or, weird idea I know, multiple people with different roles being women. 🙄
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.
It doesn’t help that they keep deprecating and changing standard stuff every other version. It’s like they can’t make up their mind and everything may be subject to change. Updating to the most recent release can suddenly cause 10s or 100s of compiler warnings/errors and things may no longer behave the same. Then you look up the new documentation and realize that you have to refactor a large part of the codebase because the “new way” is for whatever reason vastly different.
Can you give some examples? I’m my experience Java has been pretty easy to upgrade to new versions. 9 was a bit wacky but that was it. It’s definitely been less of a headache than worrying about using Python 2 versus 3, for example.
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