It’s OK, they were saved in the end … by a war that killed 100 million people.

do a proofread before adding the D

Always think twice before bringing the D.

Lol “credentials”. This was done directly on the server, which was kept always logged in with the admin account so anybody in the server room could access it. It was OK though, this was just a small company … just Reliance Electric, now part of Rockwell Automation.

And you thought “security through obscurity” was bad - this was “security through apathy”.

I remember my first day of my first professional programming job back in 1996. I had just learned SQL that morning (which I’d never even heard of before) and that afternoon I forgot to add a WHERE clause to a DELETE command. Good times …

Fortunately this was in production and not in any important environment like development or test.

Where is Visual Basic in this diagram? Does nobody enhance blurry license plate pics any more?

I ran into a similar situation many years ago, when I was trying to write a software synthesizer using Visual Basic (version 4 at the time). The big problem is that if you’re doing sample-by-sample processing of audio data in a loop (like doing pixel-by-pixel processing of images) and your chosen language’s compiler can’t compile to a native EXE or inline calls, then you end up suffering the performance hit of function calls that have to be made for each sample (or pixel). In many applications you’re not making a lot of function calls and the overall performance hit is negligible, but when you’re doing something where you’re making hundreds of thousands or even millions of calls per second, you’re screwed by the overhead of the function calls themselves - without there being any other sort of inefficiency going on.

In my case, I eventually offloaded the heavy sample processing to a compiled DLL I wrote in C, and I was able to keep using Visual Basic for what it did really well, which was quickly building a reliable Windows GUI.

Even fucking billions don’t count for much any more.

I wrote a web app for a client back in the late '90s that is still in (heavy) use at the company. It was actually a “Classic ASP” app and they kept one old PC around to act as the server for it for a couple of decades (they eventually replaced that with a virtual machine and the app is still going). The output is straight HTML + CSS so they’ve never had any problems using it with progressively more modern browsers. Ironically, this app is a front end sitting atop an unbelievably clunky mainframe application that dates to the 1970s, so my app’s continued existence means that mainframe application is still running as well.

My first coding experience was as a kid on punch cards (and I’m not even 60 yet). This was in the late 70s and I had an older neighbor friend who was in high school but taking some classes at the local university. The intro programming class that he took still used punch cards on mainframes (though this was being phased out even then) and my friend sort of Tom-Sawyered me into helping him with his homework. It was actually kind of fun to sit there punching the holes in the cards, and then we’d take the stack of cards over to the CS building and leave it in his mail slot, and then a few days later you’d get a giant stack of that old green- and white-striped computer printout paper deposited there with the program’s results.

It’s interesting, it really taught me to check and recheck my own code extremely thoroughly and carefully before “running” it, rather than pumping out some slop quickly and relying on the compiler and/or the output to identify any problems. Because with multiple days between submitting the code and seeing the results, you really had to make sure stuff was working from the get-go. In my career as a programmer, I subsequently ran into many similar situations that required basically just your own eyeballs to make sure the code was right. When I was writing Blackberry applications circa 2010 (!) for example, RIM’s utterly fucked-up developer environment meant that the delay between starting to compile an application and having it running on a test device could be 30-45 minutes or more (if it finished compiling at all) even if I’d only made a single one-line code change. So I had to get back in the habit of very carefully writing a lot of code before attempting to compile, and making sure it was going to work correctly just by inspection.

I don’t even know if I want to rent to someone, that’s a whole other set of headaches.

I live with my elderly parents, taking care of them until they move into a nursing home or worse (although I’m not sure death is actually worse than a nursing home). In the meantime, I bought myself a small house nearby that I’m renovating and I plan to move there after I close out my parents’ house. I’m genuinely terrified of renting it out after having put so much time and effort into it. A lot of people rent in this neighborhood and I’ve seen firsthand what some tenants do to places.

But if I do rent it out, I’m a shitty scumlord? I’m a better person if I don’t rent it?

If I was a hacker, I would just get a job as a night cleaning person at corporate office buildings. And then just help myself to the fucking post-it notes with usernames and passwords on them.

No, I’m saying that if you didn’t have union-negotiated healthcare, the $700 you would have instead to spend on health insurance would only get you an extremely shitty private plan. I know this because I currently have great union-negotiated healthcare but prior to that I had the extremely shitty private plan.

$700 in health insurance

Ah yes, the plan with the $10,000 annual deductible and they drop you if you ever file a claim of any sort.

They want to kill (public) unions altogether

I’m a school bus driver and we’re unionized (although that’s actually somewhat rare). My co-workers are mostly trumpers but also rabidly pro-union, at least pro-our union. They’re in a strange mental state where they think trump and the republicans are supporters of unions and it’s the democrats who are trying to break them. I’m sure even George Orwell is in his grave thinking “wait, I didn’t think people would really be like this.”

The GOP for decades has targeted a fifth-grade level of discourse and been very successful with that. Trump’s big political innovation was targeting a third-grade level.

My school bus driver union (Teamsters) are not in anybody’s pocket but they still don’t do much for us. They did go to bat for our shop steward who was pulled over for DUI and blew a .32 and then was at work driving a bus full of kids three hours later. She was eventually fired but it took more than two weeks for the situation to be resolved. I’m very pro-union but the shit is not a panacea by any means.

Upvoted butt this is sum hard two reed shit write hear.

All those wheels made without any unit tests. What was humanity thinking?

The original Moog synthesizers used patch cords (in fact that’s why a synthesizer instrument sound is still called a “patch”) and I’m sure somebody somewhere is still fucking around with one of those.

Is disliking something that (allegedly) is more popular with women than the average thing of its category anti-woman, even if no part of the complaint involves the user or their gender?

According to my sister-in-law, yes. I don’t like Taylor Swift’s music and apparently that makes me a misogynist.