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Admin
Uh ... no. Go read your MS-DOS manual (Appendix C, Keyboard Layouts and Character Sets). For some strange reason, the DOS character set has a load of little icons in the control character range. For example, if you open a classical ".doc" file (i.e. plain text file) page breaks – ASCII 12 – are visible as female sex symbols. (The printer ejects the page on receipt of these.)
While playful, the symbols are useful and many, many DOS applications used control characters for their icon. Most control characters have no relevance on-screen (ASCII 12 doesn't eject the monitor, for example) so you can print them. ASCII 13 is a musical note, but also carriage return, so getting the note to appear could be interesting.
The Macintosh also puts important icons in this range – this is where you find all the glyphs for shortcut modifiers for example. (The symbols for command, option and shift) There are also glyphs in this range for the various keyboard key symbols (enter, up/down arrow etc).
The pound sterling symbol is, however, extended ASCII as you said.
The BBC Micro is one example, though, of a machine whose OS reserved the control character range explicitly for text and video display control and printer echo toggling. None of the characters had any visible forms whatsoever.
Admin
First of all, this isn't a WTF at all. So some department wouldn't pay for more RAM and instead sent someone from HQ with a replacement server. Big deal. Happens all the time. So they worked salaried people overtime instead of paying for the RAM. Big deal. Happens all the time.
Ok, maybe having a Vietnamese guy in IT who doesn't speak a work of English is a bit of a WTF, but why bother with the rest of the story? Just say, "So I worked at this company where the IT guy didnt' speak English." Har har.
Bad RAM causing "stripes" in a data file on a Netware server? Bullshit. If the memory was really that bad, the server would have been crashing left and right... or worse, the filesystem would have been hosed. Why would the corruption only come up in this one file?
I dunno, I'm beginning to suspect that a good number of the stories are heavily editted, if not completely fictitious. The LEAST they coudl do is make them more interesting while they're at it. Sacrebleu!
Admin
Ye gods, am I actually arguing with some clueless out-of-state dipstick who truly believes, in the face of the evidence, that every every software developer in California who is paid less than $100K pa is a non-exempt worker paid on hourly basis and eligible for overtime?
Throw in a classic bit of inane, smug "I was talking about developers, not 'techs'" bit of snobbery to underline how little you know whereof you speak.
California's "Professional Exemption" doesn't apply to software developers? Sure. Good. You continue to think that, I'll look elsewhere for my California HR needs. You pillock.
Admin
Admin
Someone must have thought that was really funny when they first designed it.
Admin
Admin
I think it was the "Nick" character.
Only joking!
This story is just another "I got one over on him aren't I clever" stories. OK so the target is a french guy, and I don't "amore" the french any more than anyone else.
But I don't go around getting one up on them just so I can submit it to some rapidly deteriorating blog.
The real WTF? Captcha is onomatopoeia. If they're in the dictionary, then long words are no more secure. I might write some SW to defeat the capchas just to save typing.
Admin
What you're referring to as "Overtime" is, in the real world, called "overtime." What you're referring to as "overtime" is, in the real world, called "comp time," as was already stated.
Admin
The real WTF is reinstalling NetWare on the new server. NetWare is only a PnP-aware OS and uses DOS to boot to the command line, from where the hardware detector can install any disk and network driver(s) necessary (the exact procedure depends on the OS version); if you're using a SCSI adapter and transfer that at the same time then you can even get away with editing the slot number in the startup file.
Admin
The OP here.
First, the major parts of this that are WTFs are:
Replacing an entire server instead of a stick of RAM.
An "IT director" who was looking for a way to uninstall an OS.
An "IT director" who was going to write down by hand all of the configuration info for multiple users and reenter it by hand on the new server.
And the corruption didn't happen in only one file (and nowhere in the story did it say it did). It was multiple .DBF files that happened to reside in the clusters in the stripe that was corrupted across the drive platter.
And bad RAM can easily cause file corruption on Netware or other OS's. If the bad portion of the RAM is high in address space and only gets used when there's a heavy load on the system, for example.
I was actually surprised at how little Alex edited the story I submitted.
Before you cry foul, make sure you know what you're talking about.
Admin
Actually, ben, the page you provided ( http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Glossary.asp?Button1=P#professional%20exemption ) says exactly the opposite of what you're saying. The exception does not apply to developers, unless you think that being a developer is generally assumed to require an advanced degree, or that developers are "artists" or licensed professionals.
It says a profession meets "[i]all[/a] of the following requirements" (but then inserts an "or" between #1 and #2, thus providing a grammatical and legislative WTF to ponder!). But apparently you must meet #1 or #2 to be an exception, in addition to being paid 2X the minimum wage, plus you also must exercise independent judgement (so junior developers (the kind paid <$99k in Cali?) are out?) in order to be exempt from overtime as a pro.
#1 is the classic professions: doctor, lawyer, teacher, architect, engineer (licensed, that is), dentist, optometrist (?) #2 is learned or artistic professions. Further down it explains that learned professions are those for which "an advanced academic degree (above the bachelor level) is a standard prerequisite," while artistic professions are: "music, writing, the theater, and the plastic and graphic arts."
I don't see software developers as learned nor artists. Well, some would say their code is art, but I don't think it's what's meant by "writing" in the statute. Sure, lots of devs have advanced degree, but such is not a "standard prerequisite."
Admin
Just curious, what does MDR stand for? (with translation to English)
Admin
MDR = Mort de rire means dead laughing
Admin
unrelated to the post at hand, after taking four years of highschool french, i was ecstatic after recognizing the language and being able to understand it "sans" the translation that followed it... je doit etudier plus encore!
Admin
He can think whatever he wants. However, I am a California software developer. I am also a FLSA non-exempt employee, because of the law I cited.
The law says what the law says. Read the law. Then lets talk.
Admin
Admin
If the company isn't willing to pay for more RAM, they're not willing. Happens all the time. Especially in the situation described. Now, the question is, was there another computer you could have taken RAM from? Like the new server? I was assuming the RAM in the new server was incompatable because nobody thought of it. But maybe I shouldn't assume... Of course, if that failed you could have moved the HD into the new server and simply modified the STARTUP.NCF with the appropriate NIC/SCSI drivers.
The real question is, why didn't YOU think of doing any of that? Are you implicating yourself in the WTF?
Ok, I do see that as a bit of a WTF.
Well, at 2:30 AM, one starts coming up with some desparate solutions. I could forgive this one. I'm more interested in the initial WTF of not thinking of swapping out the RAM or moving the HD.
Admin
Ignoring for the moment the OP who already pointed out that it was the disks that were corrupting data...
I've had a number of bad RAM experiences where exactly this sort of thing happens: A random collection of a few bits or maybe an entire row of 16 or 32 bytes goes bad, corrupting anything stored there, but the RAM is otherwise healthy.
Most of the time with a database server workload such RAM problems corrupt data, not metadata, simply because most of the contents of RAM are data (about 85% or so for healthy database servers) and most of the RAM is allocated to a single application at startup (the database server itself). If there is no hardware failure monitoring then a few bits can be flipped here and there for days or even months until something important enough gets hit for someone to notice. If you have enough RAM on a 32-bit server then any random address is going to be valid, so you won't notice page faults from following corrupted pointers as easily.
Machines with mixed workloads (like desktop PC's) will notice bad RAM much sooner, because their data/metadata ratios are much lower, and because their memory is reallocated to different workloads at different times. When the application's virtual memory is mapped onto different physical memory, the corruption appears at various points in the application's address space. Since most 32-bit desktop applications are full of pointers to data and don't use all 4GB of address space, crashes are frequent and obvious under these conditions.
Other bad RAM conditions (like overclocking or bad address pins) are much more obvious because they cause problems with large parts of the address space. If every 4096th bit in some RAM chip is corrupt, you'll know right away, whereas if bit #4096 in one RAM chip is corrupt, you may never know.
Admin
Admin
I had a smile reading the translations too!
"sacrebleu!" should be properly translated as something antiquated like "golly" or pretty much anything you would hear Butters (from South Park) say as an exclamation.
In other news, "get me a pad of paper" would be translated in french as "Trouvez-moi une tablette de papier"; garniture would mean "dressing" or "trim" in this context. (and it sounds wierd and makes me picture a paper salad)
Admin
Are you High?!
That is absolutely not true. WTF!!!?!!
Admin
No other machine with compatible RAM. The server was the only machine in the building with 16MB of RAM (remember, this was the mid-90's), in 4 4MB SIMMs.
I was told by my General Manager to keep my mouth shut and my hands off; the Canadian plant had made the decision and was to handle everything, and any problems that resulted would be their responsibility.
The only reason I even mentioned the reformatting by Netware was because I was afraid we'd be there all night while they searched for the NT uninstall option.
As I said, not allowed by my boss. I think he had sincerely been trying to get the money out of his bosses to fix the server and got frustrated, and therefore was trying to make a point.
My concern, which was normally shared by him, was that our main shipping day was starting at dawn. We'd have a couple of hundred trucks that wouldn't be able to move without their freight if the server couldn't generate packing slips for the warehouse crews and bills of lading for the truckers.
Admin
Then the real WTF is that you didn't keep your mouth shut and allow it all to go tits-up per your bosses intention thus giving positive reinforcement to those who turned down a perfectly valid and necessary purchase request.
I balk at actual sabotage but sometimes you just need to let nature take its course.
Rich
Admin
I have a couple of friends in France who speak very limited English, and I've been missing the ability to LOL. Merci beaucoup! MDR!
Admin
I worked at a place in Cali when the rule changed. We were told that we were hired as salaried employees, and when the rule changed, the only difference was that now we had to fill in and sign timesheets that stated that we worked 40 hours that week. I wrote a perl script to fill in the dates and vacation days, etc., since it had no relation to actual hours worked. If we worked more than 40 and complained, we would get blank stares.
Nice cafeteria there, though. I quit when they started charging for coffee.
Admin
I once worked at a company where the boss wanted me to make 3 50-80 foot UTC runs to avoid buying a (then) $50 Ethernet hub.