neverartful

"SQL had (and maybe still has) its own C compiler"

Oh? Are you referring to something different from a database's precompiler?

I'm genuinely surprised that California hasn't figured out fire risk management decades ago. The Santa Ana winds are nothing new and have been in the southern part of the state forever. I remember seeing news reports about catastrophic fires in southern California as far back as the 1970s (when I was a kid). Doesn't everyone know that strong winds (which are guaranteed to come) can make wild fires exponentially worse? No one can control the wind though.

The 3 necessary components for fire are: oxygen, fuel, and ignition source. No stopping the presence of oxygen. Ignition sources are present with lightning strikes (among other things). That leaves fuel as the thing that can be controlled. If you can't reduce the fuel load around your dwelling, it doesn't make any sense to live there. I live in a forest that has experienced a tragic wildfire in the past, so I'm in a similar boat (but without the Santa Ana winds). Keeping fuel away from my home is something that I think about a lot -- and ACT ON a lot.

I have a neighbor who does practically nothing to reduce his fuel load. It's his legal right, but I think it's foolish. He's told me he likes to keep his property "undisturbed". It sounds like there's much of the same thinking that drives policy in California.

The combined practice of: (1) put out any fire immediately, and (2) do nothing to reduce fuel load, makes for a bad combination in the long run. It would seem to me that Californians should have figured these things out decades ago and be the experts on fire risk management. What am I missing?

Intel also had the 80860 (aka i860) that was hyped up as a "Cray on a chip".

I have an Apple Mac Pro Late 2013 (aka trashcan) with an Intel Xeon 8 core cpu.

"sometimes as a queue"

Oh? I'd be interested in hearing more about that. Is this common?

In my experience they are not nearly as fast.

To be fair, you have to pay the Apple tax to use Apple Numbers. It's not monthly (or even a subscription), but it's not a one-time payment if you want the ability to use it over a long period of time.

Qt is competition (perhaps not direct in many cases) and it's not the only one. Also wxWidgets, Lazarus, Delphi, C++ Builder, WinForms, WPF, Xojo, etc.

Have a look at their github repos. They have a fair bit of sample code sprinkled about.

They do have a free tier. It's nice having more dev tool options than fewer options.

"incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now"

Agreed! Also, typically far lower memory usage.

Yes, Remobjects makes some nice tools. I absolutely adore their Oxygene language.

This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.

The funny thing is that even for devs who don't want to declare their types will still have think about them to some extent. Even if it's correcting run-time errors indicating that some function or property doesn't exist for type 'X'. Plus, they get to guess at the types that are expected for various function calls in their own projects. Oh sure, you can add comments that document it right above/below the function, but do you remember to keep those up to date while you're in the middle of refactoring?

I interviewed with Canonical in 2023. It was an enormous waste of time. I would never suggest anyone interview with them while they still have the same interview process.

When you say 'this line of work' are you referring to my handyman business or work to develop a new software product? (I'm happy to discuss either)

I'm in my upper 50s and I resigned from the corporate employee world in spring of 2024. I've been working my handyman business since then. I don't have enough business to keep my schedule full (and not enough income), so I decided to get back into tech on my own terms. I've started developing a software product that I hope to launch soon. No idea how any of this will turn out, but it's the best plan I've got at the moment.

Interbase is still around and it can store the entire database in a single file or across multiple files. There are also 3 versions of it available: IBLite (in process DB engine), IB-To-Go (in process DB engine), and Interbase (server based).

Notice I said as a systems programmer. A systems programmer is the one who would configure system settings (possibly for the whole lpar). Is IBM letting people change settings on the LPAR as part of the course?

Reading about z/OS systems programming is one thing. Being able to practice with it on a real system is what would likely be missing. You have to have a safe environment to learn on and it's hard to get access to those.

IBM has many decades of innovations (and patents) on making their mainframe hardware super resilient.

Years ago I developed for iOS as an employee. In my case, it was the product managers that wanted the data. I saw it as a pattern and I hated it. I made my plans to leave that space.

I can imagine where it would be really nice to have an expiration date on a filesystem. The behavior I would want to see for expired files would be: to show up on a report and maybe display in different color in directory listing. It could be a useful reminder to update an expiring certificate, expiring customer contract, etc.

If there are any, you can be sure that they're not using z/OS. More likely would be one of those rack-mounted models that only run z/Linux (and possibly z/VM).

For being a user of the mainframe that may be true. For being a systems programmer for the mainframe not true.

I believe that from Microsoft's perspective, it most certainly had a purpose. The purpose was marketing/advertising the OpenGL/3D capabilities of NT.

This post is coming to me at an odd time regarding friends. On the one hand, I've rekindled some friendships with friends from high school and I'm so happy to be reconnected with them. I wish I could see them more often and spend time with them. On the other hand, I also just recently blocked the calls and emails from a long time friend. It wasn't a decision that I made lightly. Without getting into too much detail, our fairly frequent phone calls had become toxic with us arguing about politics and him lecturing me about various things (and perhaps me lecturing him too about various things).

I was recently thinking how much I would like to be closer (geographically) with my high school friends (despite the changes that we've had over the years). But in the case of my friend whose phone number I recently blocked, I'm so happy that I don't live so close that he could drop by.

Can you elaborate on 'useful shell that accelerated some special purpose tasks'? I'm curious about the types of things that people have done with their own shells.

Because Python doesn't place any restrictions on the data types of function parameters.

One of the resources to be aware of is 'From Nand to Tetris'. It's online and it's free. It's of very high quality and very eye opening.