• (nodebb)

    What? Am I Frist?!

    As for the Social Security database, the window for overnight maintenance is established, but rarely used. This way, if something big needs to be done, they have the time to do it already established and no users need to be unduly inconvenienced. It is the same time as it always is.

    The other reason could be they are backing up to a 45-year-old tape backup. On Sundays, they do an image backup to tape, so it may take a little longer, especially when they have to keep waking up the tape jockey to put in a new backup tape.

  • Andrew Miller (google)

    For that amount of scheduled downtime I suspect a senior executive got muddled and demanded nine-fives availability

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    The frist entry from Cloudera is only a WTF in the sense of "Those evil businesscritters have found a way to stymy the users' rights to manage their own personal cookie policy by borking their site unless the user lies down and allows Doubleclick, Google, et al, to have their way with them."

    Nice going bizcritters. NOT!

  • David (unregistered)

    So, wait, when is the website available on a Monday?

  • Darkwing Duck (unregistered)

    SSA being backed by an AS400 mainframe checks out. Lockout time for parallel processing tasks!

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    Peter G's package is easy to carry, but if it weighed just 10 picograms more at 4.2000000000000004E-2 kg, it would be much harder to carry.

  • (nodebb) in reply to David

    You can use it (supposedly) starting at 5 AM until 1 AM Tuesday, then it is down again for backups and other maintenance work.

  • Barry Margolin (github)

    "the software is already out of date"

    or was it millenia ahead of its time?

  • (nodebb)

    "Unless the "database" backing their site is a room full of filing cabinets with hundreds of clerks to transcribe records when a teletype prints out requests"

    Considering the state of the VA's backlog[1], this wouldn't surprise me.

    [1] last I knew, which admittedly was a few years ago, but I don't expect it's really improved since

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    If you search for that particular string, "4.2000000000000003E-2", you get an awful lot of hits from all over the web so it's possible there's some interaction between that as an FP value and something used to display it on web pages. Change the final '3' to something else and you get zero hits.

  • Zainab (unregistered)

    Oh, hey, I know that cookie situation. Matomo analytics--which I will forever think of as Piwik-- has a “don’t track my visits” option which is stored in a cookie. But if the site’s piwik/matomo files live on a different site, as mine do (“real” site vs. personal site), then you have to temporarily authorize a third-party cookie, or your preference won’t be saved. Which is why my Legal page winds up with “You just can’t win, can you”.

  • Neveranull (unregistered)

    Amazon has a Cle-Line C25177 T2000 T-2000 Positive Rake Tooth, 4/6T, Positive Rake, 1.25' Width, 1-1/4" x 0.042"' Length (Pack of 225) Brand: Cle-line Item Thickness 4.2000000000000003E-2 Feet

    Only $887, but they are currently out of stock.

  • floats (unregistered) in reply to zomgwtf

    Change the final '3' to something else and you get zero hits.

    That's because there is no 64-bit floating-point number with the final '3' replaced by something else (using standard IEEE encoding, anyway). Possible 64-bit floating point numbers around 0.042 are:

    0.04199999999999999567, 0.04200000000000000261, 0.04200000000000000955.

    Put 4.2E-2 into a thing that formats doubles and is either crappy or misconfigured, you might see 4.2000000000000003E-2 but never 4.2000000000000005E-2. Is there anything special about 0.042? Possibly - floats are complicated, but my gut feeling says no. Maybe it's close enough to a point where the formatter thinks it can get this many significant figures, but actually can't.

  • (nodebb) in reply to floats

    Is there anything special about 0.042?

    Pretty much guaranteed that there isn't, as such, anything special about it. It's close to what you get if you convert half an inch into feet (whence the bizarre example from Amazon), but that's not special in the context of expressing it as a double.

    But that 3 at the end is, as noted, right on the edge of there being enough precision to express it precisely, but unfortunately, on the wrong side of that edge. The formatter is using one too many maximum digits as a bounding limit.

    Addendum 2022-05-23 12:01: Just to be clear, half an inch, expressed in feet, is 0.04166666... (6 repeats forever).

    That rounds to 0.042 if you round to 3 decpl, or to 2 sigfigs.

  • RLB (unregistered)

    Interestingly enough, both those "long time ago" times are very nearly the same date.

  • (nodebb) in reply to RLB

    And, curiously, it's near to the zero point on a calendar whose epoch is 1-Jan in 1AD, proleptic Gregorian.

  • (nodebb)

    I have, in fact, had occasion to use a government site here (Australia) which only works during business hours on the Australian East Coast. The site itself remains up, but when you attempt to submit your request (in which they check that the document IDs you've given them match up to a proper identity), that only works during AEST business hours. I always assumed there was some vital server forming part of the chain of requests that was sitting in someone's office and dutifully being turned off at the end of the working day.

    Of course it never said anywhere that it would only work during AEST business hours; this fact was discovered by experimentation after many attempts to apply for the thing in question. Because naturally we were trying it after work and on the weekend and such, when we weren't otherwise busy.

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