I had a similar experience years ago. Did a report showing project costs based on hours and rates, shown for each individual on the project, then totaled up to the project, then all projects for each manager, all managers for each director, then a grand total. Since the directors, managers, etc. wanted to see the "real money", everything shown to the (U.S.) cent - no "extra" places shown. Report was pretty nice - controls so each manager or director could only see "their" projects information, could switch between various summary-levels or go all the way into the details, etc. Everyone happy until a new director comes in from HQ Sales to take place of a retiree. He insists that rather than just using the online reports that everyone else loves, it is "required" that PRINTED versions be prepared for all 5 directors every month (remember, he came from HQ so seemingly had to throw his weight around). Each monthly set ran to three 3-inch binders. It would take two admin assistants 2 weeks to get everything printed, copied, collated, and delivered. The other four directors would just sigh and throw the printed copies on a shelf. This guy, however, would go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, as evidenced by him coming to me one month and starting to ream me out because his totals shown in the report summary were off from what he got by adding up every single line-item of every project under him - by $0.02 (of his multi-million dollar monthly budget - this was a pharmaceutical company in the 1980s). Thankfully, the director I was actually working under, who also happened to be the "managing director" and a VP, plus the auditor heard the commotion and came over. Mr. "2-cents" was given a lesson on rounding in reports and asked to explain why he was wasting so much of his time, plus taking a person-month of admin assistant time and 4 feet worth of dead trees looking for these kinds of "problems" rather than actually directing his projects. The reports stopped being printed and copied, and the fine-toothed-comb director was seen out the door shortly afterward.

Being introduced [^], but WAY to lenient and limits not configurable - at least yet. I guess might be a little bit useful in a huge enterprise at this point, but looking forward to something more generally useful. How about keyboards that give a shock anytime reply-all is used - do you think it might help people learn to only use it when they REALLY need to? (Unfortunately, I'm guessing probably not).

I believe the convention goes back typewriters, which may have picked it up from typesetting. Approximately 80 characters per typewritten line on a standard sheet of paper. If you break that into 10 columns (so you can make tables), you start a new column every 8 characters. So when typing a table, you would enter something, hit the tab key which would take you over the "remaining" amount of the 8 characters, then type your next column. If you just hit the tab key, you went over 8 characters to leave that entry in the column blank. Come on people - I'm not the only "old fart" around here. Surely I'm not the only one that learned to type on a typewriter rather than a teletype or PC keyboard!

Same here. Additional benefit is that I can walk up to someone else's machine and not be thrown off by the mouse (mentoring/support/etc.). Think it started with my initial exposure to PCs being machines that were shared and mouse was always to the right-hand side of the keyboard. Reinforced when started getting "egronomic" mice that couldn't have buttons swapped and be physically comfortable for left-handed use. Plus I believe "lefties" are generally more ambidextrous than "righties" - but couldn't say if this is due more to genetics or conditioning from necessity. Thankfully, was never forced to write with my right hand - THAT would have been a disaster!

Zombie code - eats your brains :)

Seen it; rewrote it. In (pre-Visual) BASIC code (ON ERROR GOTOs that would branch to different line labels depending on the ERRNO thrown) for nuclear weapons effects. Guess it's fitting, in retrospect, that "bomb code" worked by "blowing up" :)

Yup, been there. Just after starting my first "real" job in the early PC days (company upgraded the network file server to a bleeding-edge IBM AT just after I started), I had to debug a DOS BASIC program that implemented the equivalent of function/subroutine calls by saving the return line in a variable (all global, single letter optionally followed by a single digit), setting an ON ERROR GOTO for the desired function, then forcing an exception, and using the same mechanism with the saved return line value to return. Written by a nuclear physicist, no REMarks in the code - just the physicist's hand-scrawled notes. I might be mistaken, but I seem to recall that there was a way to set the ON ERROR GOTO for different target lines depending on the exception code generated, and this was used to pick which "function" to "call" at various locations in the code. Today, he probably would have coded the entire thing as a single Excel macro with just Row-Column cell references and of course, no labels, headings, etc. :laugh:

I completely agree with this. I really, really miss having authoritative documentation - i.e. complete and accurate.

:doh:

patbob wrote:

As for what hardware, let's just say I've written code to run on systems with actual ferrite core memory and leave it at that :)

CDC-6500 and ferrite cores - another Michigan State University grad???