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Senate GOP Budget Bill Has Little-Noticed Provision That Could Hurt Your Wi-Fi
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Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI To Power Siri in Major Reversal
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VP.net Promises "Cryptographically Verifiable Privacy"
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WordPress CEO Regrets 'Belongs to Me' Comment Amid Ongoing WP Engine Legal Battle
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In China, Coins and Banknotes Have All But Disappeared
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Microsoft's New AI Tool Outperforms Doctors 4-to-1 in Diagnostic Accuracy
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Microsoft Authenticator Will Stop Supporting Passwords
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That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose
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Apple Plans First Sub-$999 MacBook Using iPhone Chip, Analyst Says
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Xbox Founding Team Member Says Xbox Hardware Is 'Dead'
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Nintendo Pulls Products From Amazon US Site
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UV-C Light Kills Nearly Everything - Except This Unusual Organism
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In Last-Minute Move, Canada Rescinds Digital Services Tax, Restarts Negotiations
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CodeSOD: A Highly Paid Field
In ancient times, Rob's employer didn't have its own computer; it rented time on a mid-range computer and ran all its jobs using batch processing in COBOL. And in those ancient times, these stone tools were just fine.
But computing got more and more important, and the costs for renting time kept going up and up, so they eventually bought their own AS/400. And that meant someone needed to migrate all of their COBOL to RPG. And management knew what you do for those kinds of conversions: higher a Highly Paid Consultant.
On one hand, the results weren't great. On the other, the code is still in use, though has been through many updates and modernizations and migrations in that time. Still, the HPC's effects can be felt, like this block, which hasn't been touched since she was last here:
// CHECK FOR VALID FIELD IF FIELD1 <> *BLANKS AND FIELD1 < '1' AND FIELD1 > '5'; BadField1 = *ON; LEAVESR; ENDIF;This is a validation check on a field (anonymized by Rob), but the key thing I want you to note is that what the field stores are numbers, but it stores those numbers as text- note the quotes. And the greater-than/less-than operators will do lexical comparisons on text, which means '21' < '5' is true.
The goal of this comparison was to require the values to be between 1 and 5. But that's not what it's enforcing. The only good(?) news is that this field also isn't used. There's one screen where users can set the value, but no one has- it's currently blank everywhere- and nothing else in the system references the value. Which raises the question of why it's there at all.
But those kinds of questions are par for the course for the HPC. When they migrated a bunch of reports and the users compared the results with the original versions, the results didn't balance. The HPC's explanation? "The users are changing the data to make me look bad."
[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!After 45 Years, 74-Year-Old Spreadsheet Legend/EFF Cofounder Mitch Kapor Gets His MIT Degree
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UK Scientists Plan to Construct Synthetic Human Genetic Material From Scratch
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Beware of Promoting AI in Products, Researchers Warn Marketers
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Earth is Trapping Much More Heat Than Climate Models Forecast
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For the Free Software Foundation's Summer Fundraiser, the 'GNU Press Shop' is Open
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New NSA/CISA Report Again Urges the Use of Memory-Safe Programming Language
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