Viewing profile — pacaro

The largest test case was 4kloc. There are hundreds of billions of lines of cobol in production. The IRS alone has approx 160 cobol programs, averaging 230kloc each.

Can't help thinking of the classic series of userfriendly comics about Vigor, which at one point was implemented as a plugin for nvi

I have a ch57x based keyboard/macropad, and hate (unsurprisingly) the (windows only) programming tool that it comes with. Given that I can use a web based tool for my wooting keybo…

The EU's "E-Evidence framework" allows authorities in any member state to compel entities doing business in any part of the EU to produce and/or preserve communications data, compl…

I'm getting a mixed reading, the most egregious flags aren't present, but there are a couple. As you identified there is a lot of parallel sentence structure. They also have a bunc…

Reading this, it feels like an application on Conway's law.

Dithering as a mechanism to reduce/remove banding can be very impressive. The color Next machines only had 12 bit displays, 4 bits per channel, but with careful use of dithering it…

There are so many ways to produce sierpinski gaskets. It you specify n points and the pick a new point at random, then iteratively randomly select (uniformly) one of the original n…

FWIW, the Next color machines had 12bit (4096) color and in practice it didn't make much of a difference. I was using one fairly extensively in the late 90s (by which time 24bit wa…

Yes! that one!. I have a paper copy, so it didn't occur to me that there would be an online version

There's even a book "Adventure in Prolog" by Dennis Merritt (ISBN 1520918917) It's a lot of fun to work through, other prolog resources can be a little dry

I've also worked with engineers who have raced LMP. It's largely pay-to-play and this is one of those professions where if you're the right person, in the right place, at the right…

For the title holder, in this case the Earl of Lovelace, they are often referred to ("styled") simply by the place name. So after William King-Noel was created Earl.of Lovelace he …

From the mid 60s

Hence why it is so easy to get lost in there

The sidebar about pirate radio, while factually correct, seems to heavily imply that pirate radio started in the jungle era, but Radio Caroline was broadcasting in the 60s

Just that thinking about the "floppy drive in 1998" question. I can think of a couple of things at play The system was likely designed a long time before 1998, because of how this …

As @GistNoesis is being somewhat gnomic, I believe that they are referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Electricity_and_... Written in 1873 by James Clerk Maxwell …

I believe that they started writing it in 2003. It's hard to precisely age code unless you cut it down and count the number of rings

I've always thought of this as being equivalent to "work hardening" My concern with it is more about legitimately old code (android is 20ish years old, so reasonably falls into thi…

They are popular cars to steal because they are easy to steal. Stolen cars are used "differently" than other cars

The tech trivia related to this that springs to mind is that the DEC Alpha processor was known internally by the code name EV, which stood for "Electric Vlasic" — although the suit…

I guess that I was taught basic mental arithmetic differently. Multiply by 8 and divide by 5, or (it's inverse) is two single instruction cycle opcodes (or whatever my brains equiv…