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Citation Station: Bewilderment: April 29

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    I am somewhat confused as to how a computer would calculate her age as 4 years old... It seems there may be a clue missing in this story...

    16-year-old Johanna Jensen of St. Ignace, MI was not given her drivers license due to a glitch in the computer system of Michigan's Secretary of State office. Because her birthday was 2/29, the computerized record keeping system calculated her age as four years old.

    re: http://www.gullible.info/archive.php?m=2007-04#post762

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      CommentAuthorHaoest
    • CommentTimeAug 27th 2007
     

    All in all, it's because of noob programmers.

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    It was Professor Plum, lead pipe, in the office. (How do you do that so fast, they ask. It's my foolproof system, I say.)

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      CommentAuthorPaulustrious
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007 edited
     

    Both my niece and my cousin were born on the 29 Feb.

    And when is the USA going to join the rest of the world and put the day before the month?

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      CommentAuthorTaed
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     

    The computer just calculated how many February 29ths there had been since she had been born, which had only been 4. Since she had only 4 birthdays in the last 16 years, she is thus only 4 years old and cannot have a license.

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    I'm trying to imagine how anyone could write a program to calculate an age by counting birthdays.

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      CommentAuthorFact totum
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     
    Posted By: Paulustrious

    Both my niece and my cousin were born on the 29 Feb.

    I didn't know you had family in West Virginia.

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      CommentAuthorFact totum
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     
    Posted By: auto gullible

    I am somewhat confused

    "Leap Day" is a pretty tough concept to grasp.

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      CommentAuthorTrance
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     
    Posted By: Paulustrious

    I'm trying to imagine how anyone could write a program to calculate an age by counting birthdays.

    It's easy. You just clap your heels together three times and say 'there's no computer program like the one that counts your birthdays.'

    ...
    ... Than wait a few minutes, and consult your 'program making guide for dummies' It's all in there.

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      CommentAuthorFact totum
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     
    Posted By: Paulustrious

    I'm trying to imagine how anyone could write a program to calculate an age by counting birthdays.

    As Einsenstein said, "Stupidity knows no bounds"

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      CommentAuthorRot Bottom
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     

    It's called BUREAUCRACY.

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      CommentAuthorcmseagle
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007
     
    Posted By: Paulustrious

    I'm trying to imagine how anyone could write a program to calculate an age by counting birthdays.

    Actually, it does not count birthdays, it counts how many times the date 2/29 has appeared.

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      CommentAuthorUdoboy
    • CommentTimeAug 28th 2007 edited
     
    Posted By: auto gullible

    I am somewhat confused as to how a computer would calculate her age as 4 years old... It seems there may be a clue missing in this story...

    We here at GULLIBLE.INFO don't have a clue. We only report the facts as they come to us.

    • CommentAuthor5010
    • CommentTimeAug 29th 2007
     

    I don't know the actual reason the application used that formula, but I can tell you this. Programmers especially fresh out of college have the wackiest ways of solving problems. In a software shop where I used to work, we asked every new programmer to write a function that, given a date, returns the date of the next saturday. There were two best solutions that involved 1 line of mathematical code each, but the worst one included creation and searching of databases and required over 50 lines of code.

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      CommentAuthorFact totum
    • CommentTimeAug 29th 2007 edited
     

    What language?

    In a FORTRAN shop I worked in, we had a woman who was fresh out of college who was too lazy to reformat a series of numbers into a data statement -- she cut and pasted a series of character strings instead and each time the subroutine was read performed an internal-file read. She thought she was pretty clever since internal-file reads aren't commonly used and she figured she had done something cool AND she had saved herself 5 minutes of typing.

    Internal-file reads are perhaps the slowest operation one can do and this subroutine she had modified was called literally millions of times a day. The new build was rolled into production and immediately the system came almost to a halt.

    I thought it would have been obvious to anyone with the slightest familiarity with computers and programming that one would know that an internal-file read is an incredibly expensive operation. I might have even given her the benefit of the doubt but when her mistake was pointed out she became obstinate and blathered on about how stupid it is for that operation to take so long and how SHE wasn't going to take up HER precious time by re-writing the 20-or-so 4 or 5 digit numbers into a data statement when she could so easily cut-and-paste.

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    I remember having one of those wonderful moments when I re-wrote a Powerbuilder routine at Swiss Re and reduced its run time from 20 minutes to 8 seconds.

    Hey 5010, would you like to take in a movie next AddDay(Today() , (7 - DayOfWeek() )

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      CommentAuthorHaoest
    • CommentTimeAug 30th 2007
     

    Excuse me Athene and Margarete, but women can't program. I must reiterate, women's emotion overcomes their logic. Hilary is an excellent example.

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      CommentAuthorTrance
    • CommentTimeAug 30th 2007
     
    Posted By: Haoest

    Margarete,

    And men can't spelle?

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      CommentAuthorAthene
    • CommentTimeAug 30th 2007
     
    Posted By: Haoest

    Excuse me Athene and Margarete, but women can't program. I must reiterate, women's emotion overcomes their logic. Hilary is an excellent example.

    Sorry - I beg to differ. Not only was I double-majoring in Computer Information Systems while in college, I use my programming skills all the time to make the old, sludgy Excel worksheets at work do what they're supposed to. I think I maxed out the number of If...Then statements you can have once.

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      CommentAuthormargaret
    • CommentTimeAug 30th 2007
     
    Posted By: Haoest

    Excuse me Athene and Margarete, but women can't program. I must reiterate, women's emotion overcomes their logic. Hilary is an excellent example.

    Big Rig? Is that you?!? :shocked::surprised:

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      CommentAuthornyarfdude
    • CommentTimeAug 31st 2007
     
    Posted By: Haoest

    Excuse me Athene and Margarete, but women can't program. I must reiterate, women's emotion overcomes their logic. Hilary is an excellent example.

    I'm not even a woman, and I find it offensive. There is no reason that a woman couldn't program. Just because women show more emotion outwards, men get just as emotional, and perhaps in a worse way, because we've been taught not to let people see our emotions, or else we're deemed wimps. So I see no reason that women couldn't program just as well as us. Maybe even better, because we men use less of our brain than women. It's been proven actually. (And I'm sorry to all my fellow males, but it's true.)

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      CommentAuthorTrance
    • CommentTimeAug 31st 2007 edited
     

    It's not how much you use or how big it is, it's how you use it that's important.

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      CommentAuthornyarfdude
    • CommentTimeAug 31st 2007 edited
     

    That's from Austin Powers: Goldmember!!! (Only they weren't talking about brains)

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      CommentAuthorTrance
    • CommentTimeAug 31st 2007 edited
     

    I've not seen the film...But I think I know what they were talking about.

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      CommentAuthornyarfdude
    • CommentTimeAug 31st 2007 edited
     

    Yep. "Cars".

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    The best programmers I have met have been men. The best programming managers have been women.

    This is not a personal prejudice, merely a personal observation.

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