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Comment Odd assumption in first question (Score 1) 62

Describing a dog-walking company, we have:

"Returns the number of dogs, always greater than 0, that are available for a walk during the time specified by hour"

"always greater than 0"? As this means that every compliant dog-walking company must never run out of dogs to walk, how could one start a dog-walking company? To even exist, it must already have registered dogs — available to be walked at any hour of day or night — or it cannot be instantiated in a valid manner.

Is there an unspecified requirement that one must never investigate the number of dogs to walk without already knowing that there are dogs available to walk, and that it causes undefined behavior or an unstated exception? If so, why is there no such test (e.g. isDogAvailable(int hour)) available in the API?

Perhaps the right answer is to reject this broken API, or to correct its contracts to say "no less than 0". Or perhaps to muddle through and pretend that the commented contracts are irrelevant? Regardless, I'm puzzled as to how a test question would come to exist.

Comment Or D32k, for another obscure one (Score 1) 114

I remember an incident when my father's stock-related company suddenly broke down starting on 1989-09-19, and I coined D32k to describe it. They recorded close-of-business stock data in days-since-turn-of-century, and that was the 32768th day of the century. All it took was any place in the code that used signed 16-bit values instead of unsigned 16-bit values, and suddenly the day after 1989-09-18 becomes 1810-04-15 due to the sign flip (32767 rolls over to -32768). It effectively halted a big portion of that company's operations until they found and patched that one ... after it struck.

Comment What's Fandango's market coverage? (Score 1) 48

Has something dramatic shifted in the market, such that a significant fraction of ticket sales are done through Fandango now? I haven't seen them mentioned for years.

Are they just relying on the Fandango population being a fair representation of the general paying movie-going public? Because it's not likely to be, given Fandango's surcharges; price-sensitive viewers will naturally tend to avoid them.

Comment Quite a bit longer than Morocco's (Score 3, Informative) 108

Morocco's conveyor belt is "only" about 100 km, transporting about 3 million tonnes of phosphate each year.

But if this one in Japan is underground it probably won't be visible from space like Morocco's. The lack of dust being blown off of the parcels would also cut down on that.

Comment No, Linux does not require Snap or Flatpak. (Score 1) 94

I've been on Linux since the '90s and haven't so much as encountered Snap or Flatpak.

You must have chosen a distro that was wrong for you. I've been on Fedora since RedHat spun it off, but that's mainly an inertial choice and may not be right for others. But Linux is certainly not restrictive in that way.

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