Good thing they won't be needing any of that LNG from the Gulf.

COBOL used to drive some government and business web sites. You could tell because the HTML was output in 100 column fixed width format.

> they wouldn’t have to worry about competing CPU designs, at least not for a very long time.

US Government sales require two vendors, which I think is why AMD had x86 licenses in the first place.

IBM*. They approached Intel for the 8088 for the 5150, but said "We want a second source". So Intel reeled in AMD. Second sourcing at the time was pretty common.

The uniform scale of the symbols is deceptive since the source drawings have substantially different sizes. The hand outline is hand sized, for instance.

H-1B is for difficult-to-find specialists and O-1 is for people with extraordinary ability in their field.

H-2B is for ordinary workers.

The opposite of extraordinary is, well, ordinary - why would they be difficult to find? H-2B seems to be a non-immigrant visa for temporary workers.

It's not "the opposite", it's a spectrum of rarity.

The conditions look like the only requirement is being a professional with college degree.

I am an immigrant (not to US though), so looking from this standpoint. If I wanted to move to the US, H1B would be a pretty straightforward way for me to do so - as it is for many professionals now. With this path cut off - what is left to people who are just good professionals in their field, but maybe not exactly Nobel laureates? There is Green card lottery, but being a lottery, it's not ideal for life planning, and it doesn't account for one's professional achievements.

Become exceptional.

Having a degree and expertise isn't sufficient. There needs to be a reason a US company should hire you over a domestic applicant.

Do you think US companies decide whom to hire for no reason? Not being available for interviews locally, not speaking English natively and needing a visa sponsorship already puts you at disadvantage compared to the local talent. If they still decide to go for you, there sure is a reason.

The reason is often money. Even with visa sponsorship. Perhaps $100k is too much, but ~$5k is too little.

The $100k fee basically makes it not about money. It's going to be more expensive to hire a foreign worker - meaning that if they're chosen over a domestic applicant, it's for a real reason, not just because they'll take a lower salary.

Hardware attestation. They say vendors are pushing this like crazy at security and government conferences.

Just like during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Getting ready for doomsday? You need a solar powered, wifi-enabled, offline wikipedia server.

https://piwithvic.com/offline-wikipedia-with-kiwix/

People aren't getting that it was two characters that need to be added, not two bytes to make a short into an int. COBOL uses a fixed width character format for all data (yes even for COMP). If you want a four digit number, then you have to use 4 character positions. Ten digits? Then ten characters.

These field sizes have to hard coded into all parts of the COBOL program including data access, UI screens, batch jobs, intermediate files, and data transfer files.

"COBOL uses a fixed width character format for all data (yes even for COMP). If you want a four digit number, then you have to use 4 character positions."

That is incorrect. USAGE COMP will use binary, with the number number of bytes depending on the number of digits in the PIC. COMP-1 specifically takes 4 bytes. COMP-3 uses packed decimal (4 bits per digits).

That's what the specs say, but I found out it actually didn't work that way when I was working on a transpiler, at least for that installation.

yeah, I shouldn't have said "bytes" either, especially as I had AS/400's in mind when I wrote it.

Gen. Ripper is getting some validation now that fluoride is being banned in some places.