One year ago today: April 5, 2019, nextwise.
Five years ago today: April 5, 2015, it’s not my instrument.
Nine years ago today: April 5, 2011, $81,000 a long time ago.
Random years ago today: April 5, 2014, 18 pairs of socks.
Below is this year’s census notice. It contains a letter saying that you are invited to participate. Then a notice that your response is required by law. Only the most beetle-brained of civil servants / bureaucrats don’t spot the hypocrisy in that. Of course, there are some that do, but they are the type that are not bothered by being hypocrites. Yes, that slime does exist in America. Everywhere. It’s a free country. On paper. Just don’t lose that paper.
This struck me, for while COBOL has been declared obsolete by the usual know-it-alls, it is still the language of many bank and government systems for one simple reason. It works. The code is segmented, meaning for example all the variables are declared in one section, and the code can be re-used and encapsulated, sorry if I’m getting technical. It is a compiled language, so the majority of errors are logic, not syntax. Makes it easy to pick out the dumb-asses that lied on their resumes. Compilation is good in the sense unless each statement is syntactically correct, it won’t even make it to the computer, much less to Mars.
If one good thing comes out of this virus scare, it would be the beginning of COBOL or at least a COBOL-like language emerging as a replacement for the tangled mess that C+ has degenerated into. There is even an object oriented version, though it needlessly complicates the code by abandoning the line numbers and elegant column structure that made COBOL both readable and maintainable. This was my original objection to OOPS programming—the students that liked it were the bottom of the class and “just loved” the anything-goes approach to coding. Put me in a room of strangers for two minutes and I can point to the ones that would like C+.
I’d say New Jersey has a problem. Except for people like me who got an early start (not to be confused with early opportunity), all real COBOL people necessarily have to be over 70. Unemployment claims are surging and while the original COBOL code is probably works fine, one can’t say that about the law that has come along since. Now there is nobody to maintain the code, but if the government thinks replacing COBOL is the solution, they have no friggin’ clue what C+ maintenance is going to cost them.
Hmmm, could be it is not COBOL that is obsolete.
How about that lawsuit against Google over in England? For those who don’t recall, around 15 years ago, there was a site called Foundem (www.foundem.co.uk, no link), which featured price comparisons. The problem was that many of Google’s advertisers ranked so low, they got Google to change the search algorithm to demote the site off page one. In Europe, that is anti-competitive, in America Google argues that it did nothing wrong. The bottom line here folks is that you cannot trust Google. I first pointed that out in 2004.
Judge’s signature, bankruptcy court.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
It seems I wasn’t clear enough on my last post about the “little laws”. For clarity, over the past decades, countless little laws were slipped into the system that did not affect most people. Tthe average citizen was not yoked because such laws are harmless enough in a society where the presumption of innocence was paramount. However, what happens at some point in the future when they flip on the ID requirement switch? When ID must be produced again and again, the presumption guilt.
This leaves the impression it makes a difference on the price, they’ll cover by saying they need to see if it is available in your area. But what do you care if the price is too high? There are similar [cabinet] designs at three times the price I scoped in the summer of 2018. Further investigation shows they changed only the width. The mirror depth and height are the same.
The tolerances in this bathroom were always inflexible, as it has been converted to a two-basin design. Shown here is the cardboard cutout from 2018 that was matched up and fitted at the lumber yard to totally insure the cutout was the correct dimensions. And of course, they waited until I got to the final step before springing this on me. I’m considering widening the opening with the oscillating saw, a laborious process.
I reviewed some of my early COBOL studies. It was not so much out of date as it was forced out of the picture by IBM who preferred code that looked more like mainframe gibberish. It was already an old course when I took it, which I passed with flying colors, but have never used in practice. I admired it for its readability. The school had just cancelled the advanced database course the semester previous. I regret not getting to it. They told me it was because COBOL was limited in what depth of computer operations it could perform. Nonsense, because it is the compiler that deals with the computer. It was all the staff at the school wanting new languages so they could get raises. It was a business college, so I also studied BASIC, Assembler, RPG, and several others I did not care for. Like LISP, which was designed to be confusing, the classic academic brain-fart.
For afternoon break, I looked into some of the COBOL training sites offered on-line. They’ve messed that up as well. They’ve messed the presentations up with filler and their concept of structured learning. I’m not old-school, I’m normal school. I’d rather have a video by a COBOL expert who can’t teach a thing than an expert teacher who doesn’t know COBOL.
ADDENDUM
Forex trading is up for the week. Logging on found several problems, the trading windows have disappeared from the dollar-yen and euro-yen charts. (So maybe it wasn’t me after all.) I have no trade notifications and there should at least be the ones carried over from last week. I can see the counters moving but my window says “Trading Not Allowed”. And my navigator pane does not respond to right-clicks to access the now familiar menus I need. A mentor is logged on up north somewhere and looking at it as I wait for a callback. Actually, I probably view this as less of a problem because it looks like code problems.
The program is cumbersome. C+ is self-limiting at the point where the volume of code becomes unmanageable by its own creators. I was on the line while they corrected the problems. It was an eye-opener concerning the difference in skill sets of the two people working on the fix. I’d need a lot more time on the system to know what they were talking. The trades have come back and I’m simply okaying them. Simple, I don’t yet know any reason to decline a trade. The hero of the day appears to be a lady they all know who was up 31% in a week. I’m still working with dummy dollars and lost about 26 of them since last week. That may not count, since I okayed a few after the interface shut down. I didn’t know they carried forward.
I would like also to trade in currencies I’m familiar with, like the Bolivare (Venezuela). I’ve been watching the displays and right now very little of it makes sense. While this goes on, I tried to find a COBOL IDE and a compiler. Nothing there downloadable, only on-line services. I suppose if people are stupid enough to post their pictures on Facebook, they’d upload their programming too.
