Interesting Links for 09-04-2020
Apr. 9th, 2020 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- The COBOL Problem
- (tags:programming history advice computers )
- Amazing Math Bridge Extended Beyond Fermat's Last Theorem
- My maths stops a very very long way before this, but I still find this kind of story fascinating
(tags:mathematics ) - You can't rely on fingerprint authentication if a nation state is after you
- (tags:security fingerprints )
- Scientists ponder how jugglers seem to defy limits to human reaction times
- (tags:juggling physics research )
- British Vets Association statement on cats and Covid-19
- (tags:cats virus pandemic )
- 51 recovered coronavirus patients test positive again in South Korea
- (tags:Korea virus Doom )
- What A Friend Is Upset, Validating Their Feelings Is The Best Way To Comfort Them
- (tags:psychology support friendship )
- Flour mills working 'round the clock' to meet demand
- (tags:UK food pandemic )
- Scientists create mutant enzyme that recycles plastic bottles in hours
- (tags:plastic GoodNews recycling )
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no subject
Date: 2020-04-09 12:20 pm (UTC)"Validating their feelings" is a good thing, but only if you process their feelings with your own brain first, and don't do what most people do when told to validate others' feelings, which is to mindlessly parrot their own words back at them. ("I'm really upset!" "Gee, you must be really upset.") This, I can testify from its having been done to me, is extremely irritating.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-09 01:46 pm (UTC)That was really cool! I didn't really know any of that despite having read accounts of Wiles' proof before.
"You can't rely on fingerprint authentication if a nation state is after you"
I feel like there's a whole class of articles which can be summed up as "Biometrics are less secure than a password you actually remember but a lot more convenient. For some reason, people believe they're more secure. This is not true, if you believe it, you will be wrong. Some specific types of biometrics are more secure but they need to be developed specifically and often involve very custom hardware or human oversight."
"Flour mills working 'round the clock' to meet demand"
Yeah, I'm confused why "Supermarkets start selling the big restaurant bags of flour" wasn't an easier solution. And if these flour mills working full time are producing flour where there isn't any, of if there's warehouses full that aren't getting distributed.
We really appreciate having a breadmaker when we're actually isolating because we can get fresh bread. If we can get flour. But we're presumably consuming roughly the same amount of flour from different parts of the supply chain...
no subject
Date: 2020-04-10 12:04 am (UTC)The COBOL Problem
Date: 2020-04-12 05:51 pm (UTC)1. Write a COBOL-to-X translator, where X is a more-modern programming language that -- very important -- provides good refactoring tools. (I would of course use Scala; given that Scala is actually pretty popular in the finance world, that might actually be right in some cases.)
2. Test the hell out of it, the way he describes.
3. Start refactoring the resulting monstrosity.
The heart of the current problem isn't just that COBOL is obsolete, it's that it predates the notion that refactoring *matters*; the result is that making incremental improvements is unreasonably hard. If you did a literal translation to a better language, the resulting code would still be horrible, but you would have a path forward.
(And yes, I would bet that writing an automatic translator isn't all that hard, in the grand scheme of things. Trying to *analyze* COBOL code properly is likely impossible, but simply translating it, warts and all, is simply a routine cross-compiler.)