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All the leds on my washing machine are blinking. According to the official dealer and an independent mechanic, the main board is faulty and needs replacing. Their prices were similar, but I'll come back to that in a bit.
Having replaced many parts in many different computers, one would expect a similar proces. Open the hood, unscrew motherboard, put in new one that you ordered from the site, and boot it. Since the washing machine lacks a display, we can safely assume that this new board does not come with a graphics adapter, soundadapter, integrated networks-adapter nor with large amounts of DDR3 RAM.
To my surprise, the price of the logic board was 60% of the total price of the new machine (current price, the exact type is still for sale today, so it is not like ordering hardware that's not available), and it is built in a way that a regular consumer cannot replace it easily. The logic board inside the washing machine sells for roughly 150 euro's - but you'd have to add an hourly rate and travel costs, and then it adds up to 60% of the new-price.
All the other hardware still works, it's just a faulty logic board. Still, the independent mechanic gave me the advice to "buy a new machine", since it makes more economic sense. Must have been working too much with computers as it makes no sense to me at all. It reeks of planned obsolecence; making it hard to repair and easy to break down, to limit the lifespan. Seek out their owners website, and you get marketing-texts like "environmental sustainability" and "fair trade" 
The rest of the old machines hardware would be "recycled", meaning it probably[^] gets dumped somewhere in Africa. Very environmentally and fair. Having a kid burn the plastic of a copper wire is a form of recycling, and that's good for the environment.
Remember how some printers have an internal counter[^] after which they stop working? Same thing 
So, why don't we do that with software? After, say, a 4000 executions, simply stop the software and demand that the customer buys a complete new license. Let's add to that OriginalGriffs' headphone-economics - and sell new licenses only in packs of 20. And to top all that, include the words "fair trade" on your website.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I didn't know Apple made washing machines.
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Sure. The iBleach.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Me thinks that was his point. 
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Still is?
Was I argueing?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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yes it is
and
not that i can tell
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Darn, that IS inconvenient! 
I recently read about Airpods: AirPods Are a Tragedy - VICE[^]
The way I see it, they (and similar products) should be banned by law.
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Agreed 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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If they made vacuum cleaners, they wouldn't suck.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: After, say, a 4000 executions, simply stop the software and demand that the customer buys a complete new license
You obviously don't have that kind of customers who expect eternal premium service, just because they grabbed your software from a bargain bin at Walmart.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: You obviously don't have that kind of customers who expect eternal premium service, just because they grabbed your software from a bargain bin at Walmart.
One of the things you can get out of this story is that the company doesn't care about the customers expectations; only about it's perception.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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They will quickly change their perception as soon as they have some of the customers with torches and pitchforks at their door and/or a decent shitstorm in the internet.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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That's the idea of a free market, where those kind of companies are replaced by new "innovative" competitors. So where are they?
There's so many shitstorms on the internet, it would get snowed under. Nothing the marketing-department can't handle with a few well-placed ads.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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That has been the problem with shitstorms, even long before the internet. Nobody cares when it is just a shitbreeze.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Well a category 3 sh*t hurricane is a doozey until you experience a category 4 sh*t hurricane.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: So, why don't we do that with software? After, say, a 4000 executions, simply stop the software and demand that the customer buys a complete new license.
One of the first systems I worked on used ints for customer IDs. This was VB6 so ints were 16 bit. It lasted more than 4000 executions, but not more than 32767 users.
(edit: true story BTW, the guy who made the decision to use "int" was a SQL DBA who thought a VB6 int was the same as a SQL int)
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A simple application could have proven that they're not the same. So you opted to give the DBA what he wants, knowing the error.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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It was an existing application, he was the MD and I was straight out of uni. Neither of us had the experience to be doing what we were doing 
Thank God for "find and replace all".
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: Neither of us had the experience to be doing what we were doing
Sorry for the accusation, currently not in the best of moods.
F-ES Sitecore wrote: Thank God for "find and replace all".
So the app is now using strings instead?
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: So the app is now using strings instead?
Don't be silly, it's VB6.
Variant.
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Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Hmm, well back in the mid-90s I was handed a problem one of our clients had with our system.
A part I had never heard of, but I was the de facto primary support person for the client.
It turned out to be the ability to extract a list of customers (from Oracle on an AlphaServer) and import it into Excel (on Win 95?). And no one had realized that Excel (95?) limited the number of rows in a worksheet to... fourteen bits !? WTE!
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: It turned out to be the ability to extract a list of customers (from Oracle on an AlphaServer) and import it into Excel (on Win 95?). And no one had realized that Excel (95?) limited the number of rows in a worksheet to... fourteen bits !? WTE!
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the original design optimized ram usage by using the high 2 bits in the row ID to pack a pair of flags into an int16. MaxRows and MaxColumns were picked to limit how badly you could overwhelm system ram and bring the system to an utter and total crawl via swapping; and ~4m cells would be enough to crush a mid 90s system. Dynamic max rows/columns limits based around a cell cap would be too confusing for non-technical users.
Limits went up to 64k x 256 in Excel 97 and and 1M x 16k in Excel 07. Libre Office and Google Sheets have lower limits; the Dump Everything Into a Single Denormalized Sheet report in my current project exceeds both of the non-MS spreadsheets. (I think the customer just uses it as input for a stats tool.)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I once ran out of auto increment IDs on a SQL int (after a bug with an infinite loop, I think).
I figured it out after a lot of weird bugs and lots of debugging
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