The critters just don’t know where safety might be, and too many farm/ranch animals head for shelters that will probably collapse.

El Niño really screws up your weather.

OT: Cyclone Laurence appears to be a zombie storm – it just won’t die. I really feel for those poor people around Kimberly, because I’ve been there and it is miserable.

Yeah… I know some people up that way (near Port Headland), last I heard (early yesterday), it wasn’t good. They were moving inland, but resources are scarce and the wind and rain are pretty bad. It was upgraded to a Cat 5. My friends said they expect to loose most of their livestock and many animals in the area hit probably won’t survive.

I hope everyone does the smart thing, and is safe.

The biggest problem with the tools people use is the assumption that they are thoroughly debugged and will actually accomplish what is claimed. What good is OOP if the Objects have errors? I’ve used several of them and most don’t even think to type-check. If the object requires numeric input, there should be an error generated when it is passed alpha characters, not simply garbage results. They also seem to ignore cleaning up after themselves and releases resources when they are no longer needed. You watch the memory usage on some of these beasts, and it never declimes, it just goes up until you kill them. Hell, some of them require rebooting to free resources.

The standards are so lax these days, the open source seems to have much higher standards than anything you pay money for. It’s pathetic.

OT: Cyclone Laurence appears to be a zombie storm – it just won’t die. I really feel for those poor people around Kimberly, because I’ve been there and it is miserable.

The honest fact is that today, most s/w *designers* (I use that very loosely) really have no idea! There are so many *automation* tools now, that most are just plain lazy and let the tools try to do all the work for them. There is very little planning, very little real design, and almost zero actual coding.

GIGO!

I don’t disagree, but an upgrade should be bulletproof. If you need a new data structure, you copy from the old structure, you don’t destroy it. The first thing you should do is test to be sure the old structure isn’t corrupted before you do anything else, and if it is you abort, and tell the user about the problem.

The worse thing you can do is shut off the user from their data, and by checking first, you don’t get blamed for an earlier problem. No matter how large the warning is about backing up data, we both know that chances are good that they didn’t do it.

I’ll never forget walking into a client’s office during the early days when floppies were the order of the day, and seeing a floppy on a document stand, held in place by a bar magnet. I kind of knew why I had been called.

And the problem is, as the old engineering axiom goes “When you design something to make it idiot-proof, the World creates a better idiot!” 😆

Actually, coders are programmers, not users. Coders are supposed to be writing things that users can’t screw-up so bad that they lose data.

Machines can only do what the coders tell them to do, unless they die from old age, heat, or the “Pepsi syndrome” [a liquid spilled into the works].

After you loaded the new code, you were out of the loop. If something went wrong it is the fault of whoever wrote the new code. Normally it is a result of not telling the user about some essential step that they need to take.

Users are assumed to do weird things, so coders are supposed to prevent those things from becoming disastrous.

Go for it, Rook, but I haven’t lost anything yet, so, there’s always the first time.

Actually, I’m waiting for the update that screws up the minor tweaks that I have made to commenting, and makes me hack code again. That’s coming, because coders just can’t leave things alone.