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Comment Comparison (Score 1) 602

The yanks can be brutal, eh :-)

Here in Denmark, "the Danish Bernie Madoff", Stein Bagger, just got 7 years. Of course he only swindled about 150 million dollars, so proportionately he got off worse.

Comment And another one (Score 1) 731

Back in the day ... I did my PhD work on a university-wide mainframe which cam equipped with a seriously dubious scheduling algorithm and a whole lot of quota restrictions on job queues, job output queues, cpu usage etc. The critical parameter was the five-minutes-cpu per job limit. The only way to get around this was the self-resubmitting job which, when it got to 4:30 minutes cpu, would write its state to disc and resubmit itself using the written state as input. The fun, of course, was avoiding creating a rabbit job which would reproduce itself uncontrollably bringing the entire university's theoretical research program to a grinding halt. Oh happy days.

Comment Re:Dirty old Fortran (Score 3, Interesting) 731

Hollerith constants Equivalences Computed Gotos Arithmetic Ifs Common blocks

There were worse things, horrible things... dirty tricks you could play to get the most out of limited memory, or to bypass Fortran's historical lack of pointers and data structures.

Long live Fortran! ('cause you know it's never going to go away)

Didn't most of the tricks just boil down to "Define one big integer array in a common block and then pack all your data, whatever its type, into that"? All my PhD research was done with code like that. It was mostly written by my supervisor years and years before even that and I never actually learned how it worked.

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