It's not about us...

[DnATL]

Computational Fluid Dynamics.

skeet skeet skeet

[CCTAU]

Yep.  Every year, Oracle tells us they are going to phase out COBOL for processing of PeopleSoft Financial Aid and Student Financials, and every year, they provide tax updates to the existing programs, because that's easier than recreating it in a different language.

Its cheaper. I am hoping the old mainframe COBOL solution lasts another 20 years. Then I don't give a crap.

There are probably more high tech ways to do things, but for big volume and ease of maintenance, you can't beat it.

[DnATL]

Nope, I took C++ in college as a tech elective and that was the last time I've used it.  We have a lot of legacy software that was written in Fortran, the most common analysis tool Nastran was written in a Fortran derivative, and when it comes to manipulating large matrices of data Fortran seems to be just more straightforward to me.

Lots of guys use Matlab too.  But that's pretty similar to Fortran from what I remember.  A large piece of structure on the Ares I (RIP) was given to me and another guy to design.  I wrote all the stress equations and he programmed them into a genetic algorithm he wrote in Matlab.  NASA wanted us to write a paper as that was kind of a novel way of doing a first cut design and we ended way ahead of the scheduling curve, he was all into it because he's a PhD.  I'm just a filthy contractor so I asked how much money was in it, when I heard it was only for the greater good of the engineering world I passed.

I took an AE-dept FEM class taught by Foster one summer in grad school - focused on MSC Nastran

Computation time is fast and cheap now, so iterative solvers are efficient in lieu of direct inversion

[Snaggletiger]

Oh look, Daddy.  Nerds

[bottomfeeder]

NASA wanted us to write a paper as that was kind of a novel way of doing a first cut design and we ended way ahead of the scheduling curve, he was all into it because he's a PhD.  I'm just a filthy contractor so I asked how much money was in it, when I heard it was only for the greater good of the engineering world I passed.

Ahhh...contractors. 

[Godfather]

[dallaswareagle]

Oh look, Daddy. Nerds  Employees.

FTFY

[bottomfeeder]

lambda, wave vector, wave number, who needs 'em?

[AUTiger1]

I should have done CFD work.  Write some code and let it run for about a week, check your answers and repeat.

Yup.  Tons of it is written in Fortran. 

That was the sweet part of being an SA on SuperClusters.  We couldn't touch shit while their code was running so it lead for a lot of days on the X and playing Sauerbraten in the office.  Then again, there was a lot of times that the I/O operations were so huge that it would totally hose the file system and crash all the NFS servers.  We would have to reboot and that caused us to lose hardware or nodes would just be like "Fuck it, I ain't doing this shit anymore." and we would have to start taking a look at why stuff was corrupted.   

It also sucked when he started tinkering with his source code.  He would forget to compile stuff with drivers for the interconnect and his shit wouldn't run.  When we told him it was something to do with the way he complied and was his source code he would get livid and blame it on the hardware.

"Why is the system broke and my jobs not running?"
"Did you change your code?"
"No!"
"Nothing should be wrong then as we haven't introduced any config or hardware changes. Let me investigate and sift through some logs and what not, hang on just one second."

(cd /Volumes/Users/home/customer's dir/source code dir/current source code running dir/)
(ls -lat)

"Are you sure you didn't change your code sir"
"Yes!  I am positive!"
"Well someone logged into your account and changed it b/c it was changed at 6:45 AM this morning."
"Oh, yeah I forgot about that, I did change some things this morning.  Let me call you back."

He would hang up, make changes and recompile and I wouldn't hear from him for a while.

He had plenty of money to spend at one time and we got to test a lot of cool HW before it was released to the public.  Rack, stack, cable, and test HW to get him the most cost effective solution was awesome.  He ran out of money. 

This Information Assurance thingy sucks pretty bad compared to it.

[AUJarhead]

Oh look, Daddy.  Nerds Employees. Employers

FTFY

Fixed your fix.

[Snaggletiger]

Oh, jeepers creepers.. I was trying to help those morons on the 3rd floor. They're trying to run RealPlayer behind a firewall without the proxy set. Can you believe that?

[WiregrassTiger]

My computer is electricity based. I took typing in HS, which comes in handy with the operational features. It has this thingy that I can move this pointer and I click the thingy to navigate. It's cool beans guys. And Ive got a new pocket protector with a shit pile of pens.

[AU_Tiger_2000]

My computer is electricity based. I took typing in HS, which comes in handy with the operational features. It has this thingy that I can move this pointer and I click the thingy to navigate. It's cool beans guys. And Ive got a new pocket protector with a shoot pile of pens.

Did you know it can show you picture of nekkid wimmenz?

[AUTiger1]

Did you know it can show you picture of nekkid wimmenz?

[bottomfeeder]

http://animoto.com/play/djFoHQkySi1mX1KGYUyDew