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Admin
Appetizers. Are you new?
Admin
Even taking into account the environment, this entire train of argument is both pedantic and assinine.
eros: I love you too.
Admin
I see what you are saying. People should continue to use terminology that is 50 years out of date, because that is what you fondly imagine is "correct".
Smatta, damn kids on your lawn again?
Admin
She didn't seem concerned about the bumps on your head?
Admin
I mostly agree with you, except that to me a kilobyte will ALWAYS be 1024 bytes. Retroactively defining it to be 1000 just to keep the metriphiles(new word!) happy was idiotic and pointless.
Kibibytes sounds like pet food.
Admin
I think the word you are looking for is "salespeople".
The ones who want to sell 931 GB for the price of a "Terabyte".
Admin
That may be where it started, but there are some weirdos out there as well. I've argued with people who insisted that kilobytes were always 1000 bytes and people were just 'using it wrong'. I suspect these kinds of people never saw a computer before the 1990's.
Just to clarify for future generations: Kilobyte = 1024 bytes Megabyte = 1048576 bytes Kibibyte = Pet food Mebibyte = What your dog might do if he doesn't get his Kibibytes
Admin
Yes, the attempt at a general solution was the right way to go about it, but it should have been done while having the documentation for the COBOL system handy. And, ideally, at least using previous revisions of the COBOL source code as test cases. You know, to make sure that all the "idiosyncracies" were all handled.
Writing a lexer and a parser is quite often the right thing to do, instead of some manual or half-baked process that's usually the replacement. Admittedly, lex and yacc are horrible tools to work with, the various modern C++-using equivalents are much nicer to work with.
Who the heck calls themselves a software engineer without having a multitude of tools in their toolbox -- lexer and parser generators being among those. Yeah, I know that the reality is such that people either never learn it, or they leave that knowledge among dusty college memories, best forgotten about. Lexing and parsing: it's not hard, just requires not having an irrational fear of it. This statement applies to most things in life, BTW.
Addendum (2012-06-21 16:37): I also presume that some normalization and key selection was needed instead of just dumping the records straight into an SQL database. Both could be done entirely automatically, after the data got imported temporarily into a flat table that had 1:1 mapping to input from the COBOL system.
I presume it'd be done in steps:
Admin
The interesting thing about this is that you're both right in such an argument. a "Kb" has always been 1024 bytes, but based on what "kilo" means, it was also being used wrong. You know, just so the water is good and muddy.
Admin
Admin
While COBOL is certainly not the worst platform to develop software on (MUMPS will most certainly hold that title through at least our grandchildren’s lifetimes)
Actual MUMPS (as opposed to Strawman MUMPS, a language that exists only on this site) isn't bad at all. It's no more difficult to develop in than C, and in fact for the domains it normally handles (database and string operations) it's probably easier than C.
Admin
It sounds like the problem is that the customer has not been forced into signing a contract that means it's more expensive for them if someone has spend lots of time doing manual fiddles.
Customers are generally driven by money and if they can see that there's a way to save mutual time and money then they will always go for it.
Otherwise you can't blame the customer for "getting away" with sending data of random format if they know that someone will sort it out for free.
Admin
I strongly disagree.
KB means kilobyte which means 1024 bytes. They are all the same thing.
"Based on what 'kilo' means" - it means 1024 when used in the context of bytes. It always has. What it means in other contexts, historical or not, is irrelevant. It was deliberately chosen to represent 1024 in this context and has enjoyed popular usage ever since. That is the only true measure of correctness any language has, despite what grammar nazis might have you believe. So no, it has never been used wrong, unless you count the revisionist attempts to redefine it to mean 1000.
Admin
To clear things up a bit.
There is KB, kB, Kb and kb.
They all have different meanings and are used by different peoples for different reasons
KB = 1024 bytes (this is what ordinary people will use) Kb = 128 bytes kB = 1000 bytes (used by hard drive manufaturer to make you think the drive is bigger than it actually is) kb = 125 bytes (used by ISP to screw you on your download speed, that 30mbps connection only goes at about 3MB/s)
Admin
Basic are the most similar languague to fortran that exists now. There is no benefit in converting to java. First, upgrade to old basic, then no classic visual basic (6), then to new vb.net. Perhaps convert to csharp, csharp is almost 98% like vb.net, i dont see benefit in using csharp, only because some programmers think that comma terminated languages are better, this is bullshit.
Admin
This is the reason they contracted you, that is what people does, if you dont like this stupid work, then you can quit.
Admin
Yeah, Ada's got some surprisingly good design behind it; it's shame that more people aren't looking into [using] it.
Admin
Always use KB, MB, GB etc. Ignore those pretenders.
Admin
One time, when working as an intern for a suburban city, I was given several days to work on organizing a database. I did it with a SQL command in 15 minutes. (and if I were better at SQL, it would have been faster)