While many IBM products are beautifully designed, IBM also has a long tradition of dreadful implementations. JES3 and COLT (Canadian On-line Teller) come to mind.
IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.
COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.
I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.
I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.
In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
Then Danielle moved the goalposts to make it easier for the Independence folks:
Signature collection period: January 3 to May 2, 2026
Number of signatures required for a successful petition: 177,732
(10% of the total number votes cast in the 2023 Provincial General Election).
I feel that neither justifies 2 generations of separatist blackmail, and the use of holocaust terms for constitution failures between two Quebecois men (Lesvesque and Trudeau) is inappropriate — but completely and utterly unsurprising for the overwrought self-pitying elite of the province. Moreover, it is no surprise that Quebec rejects the constitution but simultaneously uses the Not Withstanding clause to block language and religious rights. It is like the bully in Doraemon — what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.
That said I do grudgingly admire Lesvesque and felt he was much better than all of his successors. You could tell he had a philosophy of a Quebec that could be an actual nation, not merely a collection of childless people who spoke French and simply emulated France.
There is no Lesvesque in Alberta and that is why Alberta will never be a nation; only a gas station for the US. Still, if the only thing people value is income maybe that's the better outcome.
Quick research, but it appears that the population are descendents of the Emirate of Sicily from 1000 AD, which was colonised by people from Tunisia, who would be considered Arabs generally. So a splinter group cut off from the main body for a thousand years (if my reading is correct).
Are they still Arabs? That's subjective.
I'd consider America and England two capitals of the Anglo empire much like Roman and Constantinople, but there is lots of room for nuance. (Romans & Byzantines saw themselves as the same, whereas Americans and English see themselves as different... but I chalk that up to the tyranny of small differences, just look at how the elites jump back and forth across the pond and how their politics harmonise, Trump/Farage, Reagan/Thatcher, Clinton/Blair).
I live in the PNW of the US where many fires have been started by transformers exploding or whatnot.
Basically every community that has a fire as a result of transmission lines rebuilds them above ground/on poles. Just last month I was going through Detroit, Oregon and their 2-3 year old power lines were all down because of the wind storm. Detroit had a transformer explode a few years ago and it took out much of the community. They immediately rebuilt above ground.
So was rural electrification to start with, but it still more than paid for itself. It has also never been easier to bury lines with horizontal boring machines.
Once bacteria set up house deep inside a tooth, they are sheltered from the immune system while dispatching bacteria into the blood system. I've had infected tooth removed and found myself feeling a whole bunch better after.
Infection can spread to adjacent teeth or sneak in alongside a loose filling or underneath a crown.
A wobbly tooth is likely infected and you might want to get it out to protect adjacent teeth.
I had a root canal in my 20s that failed 10 years later and was replaced by a bridge that had to be replaced every decade or so until a tooth supporting the bridge failed; so I ended up with two implants.
Implant technology is really good today. You will ultimately save money and misery by going straight to an implant if a root canal or bridge is suggested. You will still need to floss to prevent gum loss.
The locked cockpit door has been implicated in a number of pilot suicides: German Wings, Egypt Air, MH370 and possibly others.
Then there's Helios that crashed near Athens. The pressurisation failed and the cockpit oxygen cylinder had been left closed. The preflight check of the crew oxygen mask flow had not been done. By the time a cabin crew member with portable oxygen figured out how to get through the door, the fuel was about to run out.
Maybe the crew member could had landed the Helios plane, but by that time everyone on board were already dead. Still, kudos to the guy for fighting tooth and nail till the very end in this impossible situation.
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
During Petzold’s preliminary hearing on Oct. 1, 2023, the Crown called RCMP [supposed] digital forensic expert Const. Wilson Yee to explain his analysis of the email on Marguerite’s laptop.
Petzold's defence lawyer Ian McKay then had a chance to cross-examine.
He asked Yee about the email “headers” — metadata contained in the digital file that is not typically seen by the end user unless they specifically go looking for it.
The email headers read, in part: "Received: From Emkei.CZ".
That website, based in the Czech Republic, describes itself as a "free online fake mailer” and allows users to send emails that can appear to come from any sender.
IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.
COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.
I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.
I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.
In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).