Where I live taking all your days is mandatory, by law. The company gets punished if you don’t, so the HR guys actually remind you to do it. There is a small flexibility (you can take part of your days in next year Q1) but you cannot swap your days for money, nor ‘give them’ to another employee.

Did I mention we have 25 workdays of paid vacation, by the way? ;)

Feds??? WTF!

You can run an (emulated) IBM mainframe on it!

Also null and void in Spain. Judicial recourse is an non-waiveable right.

It didn’t clear the return code. In mainframe jobs, successful executions are expected to return zero (in the machine R15 register).

So in this case fixing the bug required to add an instruction instead of removing one.

Just to boast my old timer credentials.

There is an utility program in IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS, that has been there since the 60s.

It has just one assembly code instruction: a BR 14, which means basically ‘return’.

The first version was bugged and IBM had to issue a PTF (patch) to fix it.

The budgie is a so sweet bird he has gained my little murderbird heart

I block people liberally. I agree 100% with the comic. And blocking idiots is good for my health.

The underlining linear algebra routines are written in… FORTRAN.

Pl/1 did it right:

Dcl 1 mybools, 3 bool1 bit(1) unaligned, 3 bool2 bit(1) unaligned, … 3 bool8 bit(1) unaligned;

All eight bools are in the same byte.

To give some context, originally a ‘nazareno’ is somebody paying penitence for sins committed since last years Easter. Part of their ‘penitence’ is to march in procession covered with those robes. The ‘capirote’ (the hood) is intended to keep those sinners (that could be important or well known people) anonymous.

I’m not sure if this is still valid today or if it’s now just a performance. Someone from the south of Spain will more about that than myself.

Uh, no. The ‘devil horn’ sign, aka heavy metal salute DOES mean that. Thumbs up is just ‘thumbs up’ (it’s an imported/borrowed sign, as far as ai know)

Banking IT engineer here.

In our case, everything ‘core’: checking and savings accounts, loans and credits, credit and debit cards… anything requiring a sub-second response time while being bombarded with tens of thousands of transactions per second AND requiring strict ACID transactions end to end AND 24x7 availability with quick recovery in case of disaster.

Secondary stuff is being moved to other architectures. And new core stuff is being written in Java… and ran on the mainframe.