redbluff

How about mainframe systems using PL/I instead of Cobol?

As someone who has worked on nonstops for 35 years (and still counting!) it's nice to see them get a mention on here. I even have two at home, one a K2000 (MIPS) machine from the 90's and an Itanium server from a the mid 10's. I am pretty sure the suburbs lights dim when I fire them up :).

It's an interesting machine architecture to work on, especially the "Guardian 90" personality, and quite amazing that you can run late 70's based programs without a recompilation written for a CPU using TTL logic on a MIPS, Itanium or X86 CPU; not all of them mind you, and not if they were natively compiled. The note on Stratus was quite interesting for a long time the only real direct competitor Nonstop had in a real sense was Stratus. The other thing that makes these systems interesting is they have a unix like personality called "OSS" that allows you to run quite a bit of POSIX style unix programs.

My favourite nonstop story was in the big LA earthquake (89?) a friend of mine was working at a POS processor. When they returned to the building the Tandem machine was lying on its side, unplugged and still operating (these machines had their own battery backup). The righted it, plugged everything back in and the machine continued operating as though nothing happened. The fact that pretty much all the network comms were down kind of made this a moot point, but it was fascinating none the less. Pulling a CPU board, network board or disc controller or disc - all doable with no impact to transaction flow. The discs themselves were both mirrored and shadowed, which back in the day made these systems very expensive.

For relative values of OK - right collarbone/shoulder/4 ribs, right knee ACL (fortunately micro tears, not snapped) and a traumatic brain injury (big bleed). I had lowsided the previous round after losing the front and that was fine, you slide along the track, controlling the fall and slide. In the last one was pitched head first into the track, knocked out and got severely rag dolled.

Highsides are unrelated to tankslappers - it is a totally different concept, as discussed in another post. As stated in the article the highside is caused by rear breaking traction and then regaining it while the bike is crossed up, sending you either over the bars or skyward. My own recent highside (6 weeks ago) was caused by an engine seizure after a downchange from fifth in a third gear corner in qualifying. I had the bike leaned over, let out the clutch lever and because of the lean angle the bike rear kicked to the left, grabbed, kicked right and threw me over the bars. Well, so I was told - I do not remember the crash, waking up in the medical centre.

Highsides are particularly nasty, especially if you are knocked out so that you cannot control your crash and get rag dolled.

53, been doing software and hardware since I was 10 and professionally since I was 22. Tried a team lead role a few years ago, pulled the pin after 2 weeks. Don't see any reason why I can't go on for another 10 or 20 years.

In most places I have worked I have been a younger dev, it was only when I started at my new place a couple of years ago that I became one of the 'old boys'. Interestingly most places I have worked seem to have an inverted bell curve for ages, with quite a few grads and then over 40's being the most populous. A lot of the middle ages seem to be in management or lead roles.

Err - what? The whole reason the election has been delayed is because of community transmission in Auckland. Additionally all parties have agreed to the suspension. In fact it was the opposition who called for the intitial suspension.

Some of the answers are close, but no cigar. The main reason for the time delay is the offline authentication of the chip, combined with generation of the ARQC cryptogram. Additionally the EMV protocol is very chatty if there are multiple applications on the chip card, although the latency involved in the customer interaction far outweighs the protocol timings.

As mentioned in many comments online transactions will be an order of magnitude slower, as they need to be sent to the issuer, have their cryptogram verified and the challenge response returned if the card does host authentication - which most do these days.

The entry mode generally does not determine how a transaction is authorised - chip, PayPass (NFC) and stripe can either be off or online. In fact stripe transactions are invariably online unless you want your business to be overrun with fraudsters. One of the prime reasons in the early days of EMV was to have it so safe that offline transactions were fraud proof - or close to. Naturally this noble goal was shot full of holes the moment real fraudsters got to it. However, the card is personalised with various limits and counters and with the possibility of using an offline PIN, which combined with the static authentication does give reasonable protection for low value offline transactions. Fun fact - in the initial spec this offline PIN was communicated between the terminal and the card in the clear. What could possibly go wrong :-). These days it is encrypted.

Anyhow enough blather - hopefully this has given a bit of insight.

Not true - the entry mode is irrelevant to whether it is batched or online. In fact it is more likely in modern systems to be the other way around. Chip may use offline, including offline PIN, whereas stripe is nearly always online. Source: 30 years EFT Banking experience, specialising in EMV.

When I was doing my 10 year work through Europe thing with my young family I think our favourite time was the 2 lots of 3 months I worked at Bank of Valletta. We lived in an apartment opposite the beach in Sliema.

The island was quiet, the people fantastic and the lifestyle amazing. Even the massive storms smashing the water over the road and ground floor apartments were incredible. We were also there when Etna went up, and had mounds of ash banked against our balcony door.

Although looking at that photo, it looks like there has been more than a little bit of development since were were there in the early 2000s. We left just as they agreed to join the Euro zone, so I suspect the lovely old buses and quaint roads may be gone.

Still, A+++, would live there again.

Your Bank is lying, or more correctly has either poorly trained front end staff or a rubbish interface to their EFT system.

Source: 25 years of EFT development on Bank transaction systems.

That can be true, but then the transaction is considered "fallback" and most issuer Banks that have any brains will be examining these very closely with their real time fraud systems. Some deny fallback outright, but I am not sure if this is within scheme rules, it may depend on the region.

Thanks for this - I was wondering how they got the PIN considering plain text offline PIN has been deprecated for years. My understanding is that the liability shift is in effect for plaintext PINs, but maybe not in the NA/Canada region.

You've obviously not tested them on a motorcycle in WA...

Grrr...I'm just waiting for the day I get picked off by some overzealous Judge Dredd cop because I ran a red arrow because I got tired of waiting for it to detect me.

My first impulse is like a lot of people to be fairly skeptical. Then I cast my memories back to when I started, and this is how a lot of big companies got their developers.

You took the IBM Data Processing aptitude test and if you did OK, the company inducted you into a trainee programmer role and you were sent on a course and got your PL/I book. You then spent 6 months working with the senior programmer gaining experience and making small patches and then eventually moved into a journeyman status. Basically it was an apprenticeship for coders.

Some stayed at that level, some quit, others would then do a combined CS with Computer Systems Engineering degree and get honours :-). The point is that it gave people a look in at the ground floor - people who gained value for their company who never would have had the chance in a world where the only way to open the door is a degree.

So despite my initial skepticism, I think there can be a place for things like this. In the end it depends how it is used. If it is to get people to pay money for a worthless course, then that is not great. However, if people can get placements as part of the gig, and they are treated effectively as apprentices, then it opens doors to a little more diverse crew than we are getting at the moment, and that's a good thing.

Actually as an old hand (been in the game since the late 80's) the proportion of women I saw has decreased from when I first started and has only turned around in the last five or so years.

Admittedly this is mainly in a corporate environment, but most of the women I started with tended not to come back when they started their family. I think with more family friendly hours and policies such as remote and flex working this may also change.

To say that "they are only doing it for the cash" is unlikely, as from what I have seen that drive tends to run in men more so than women. cf: all the "web developers" in the first tech boom who did not know shit from clay and vanished as quickly as they came in the bust.