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Skinner.meme: “Should we build sensible, small cars that are cheap to buy and drive, dont support speeding, need little parking space and prevent horrific high speed crashes? - No, it would hurt the economy and my penis would fall of driving something with less than 400HP that dosn’t make vroom-vroom noises!”

Maybe is in the metadata as someone pointed out earlier, or it could be an otherwise unused ASCII char that looks different for each user who licensed it when printed out, sort of like a qr code as a single ASCII char.

Or it could be that they simply just check filename, file size and/or md5, all of which can be easily changed.

No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for “hello world” in other languages looks like this in Cobol:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'.
    STOP RUN.

This is already $6000 worth of code right there!

The Lead Dev/team Lead was quite arrogant and in his own mind the worlds best developer who had all the answers. If some technology or software was not written by him or already existed in the 90s it was “useless” and not fit for the company (without him having looked at it or the docs). If asked why we would not use X which was out for years, well maintained, had no critical bugs would solve problem Z we where having, he would reply “because i said so” and insist in writing out own variant - which ended up having 10% of the features, 10 times the bugs, terrible UI and would take months to develop.

When support repeatetly told him that users had issues with feature X because the only error message on a 10 fields forms page was “Error”, he would respond that this is a user problem, the end user is clearly stupid (despide used in a field where you need to study for years) and that support must hold training sessions so the users can “learn” how to use his product.

As such, the company would reject git and instead email each other files and changes.

Each meeting felt like living inside a Dilbert cartoon.

You only hurt yourself down the line. My last job had not improved their own product, processes, tools or frameworks, so everything was still stuck in the 90s. Their product was build on an discontinued an proprietary database and server system you never heard about, jQuery UI from 10 years ago and other BS.

However if you don’t upskill yourself in this situation you will be unemployable in the future, because all other employers demand modern technologies, git, docker, unit testing etc., which I was yelled at in meetings for suggesting it.

Nope, you need more than 1 subscription, because quite often services only offer a few of the seasons of your favorite show, while the others are on different services.

Example: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies

It could be a cost issue. A chip that collects data from connected sensors and sends it via Wifi is small and cheap. Adding a display and buttons ads size, complexitiy and costs. Therefore manufacturers offload the interface to an app and a device you already own, and they can update without expensive recalls.

If the task or device is more complicated and the device would also need it’s own storage, CPU, display, sound etc. the product costs could go up by hundreds of dollars, depending on functionality and how many units they plan to ship.

I also hate apps. Still have my 2010 smartphone in a drawer that still turns on, however it;s useless because google playstore, maps and email now used an more modern SSL standard that this phone does not support anymore, and it won’t receive any updates. I expect the same will happen to a lot of devices that are controlled by apps when the manufacturer decides he won’t support it anymore, or Google breaks the app because some new protocol must be supported now that didn’t exist 2 years ago when the app came out.

It’s a segmented display. Color display on consumer computers was to expensive at the time. because of the limited memory you could either have high resolution or few colors and low resolution, and high resolution was required if you need text.

My guess is that all displays have fixed segments and warning lights that can only be turned on or of.

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Paid speech!

In the 90s there where a lot more OS available to compete agains windows, who already had existing software (sometimes better and more capable) to compete with windows: MacOS (Popular in print, layout), BeOS, OS2/warp (tried to replace windows), Amiga OS (best for video editing work at the time), Atari, Novell Netware.

It’s not exactly like people where desperate for another OS at this point in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Windows as a software package would have never been affordable to individuals or local-level orgs in countries like India and Bangladesh (especially in the 2000’s) that are now powerhouses of IT. … Had the OS been too difficult to pirate, educators and local institutions in these countries would have certainly shifted to Linux and the like.

While i somewhat agree with your overall statement, this part is just wrong. Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s was very different from today, where you just plug in a CD/USB and select your region. Linux back then was very nerdy, you had to choose your hardware first to make sure there was a linux driver and the installation process was very difficult, especially before plug&play where you had to know which IRQs and slots you had to use for network, sound and videocard to avoid conflicts. I remember trying to install Linux from a CD, only to work my war from one error message to the next because it did not like my videocard, soundcard or both.

Also, what would you do with a linux pc at home or at work if it could not run word, excel, duke nukem 3D, TTD, programs you knew from work/school or software you could pirate from your friends?

They can use your wifi signal as a beacon by triangulating the signal strength from at least 3 different points. Then they can figure out in which departments you spend the most time, how long you spend in store, heatmaps, which aisles you skip and generic info like what time you visit, which locations you also shop at.

A quick google for “Retail Wifi tracking” brings up mirame.net , where you can see some of the features.

I would suggest to set your phone to flight mode if you see a “free wifi” sign in your shopping mall.

There are also a lot of e-commerce agencies who just don’t have their sh1t together. Was expected to work on 3 different clients a day who all had different platforms, different requirements etc. Yes, you can dump some new code into the project that looks like it’s working, but then you don’t have time for any unit tests, exception handling if the user won’t cooperate etc. and it’s basically just some dodgy, untested code that will come back a few days later with some issues related to something nobody told you about.

The other “senior” programmer in the company never set up any local environment but instead ftp’d all changes directly to the live server. I asked him if needs help to set up a local server and debugger, but instead he would just dump vars on the live server and stream the contents of error.log to his second screen to catch any issues…

I don’t think a battery, soldering joints or displays would last that long…