Add a 
to that.
Of course they are. Just ask one.
New development: While God’s Chosen has hand picked me to blame for this, I now have an excuse – “I talked to the IT guy about this, he said that that particular model is no longer made, and there is no such thing as a replacement part for it, and that we should get a new machine. He told you as much three months ago.”
And if he goes all SDMB on me and says “Cite?!?”, I have one. 
I saw put the final nail in the coffin, get him a mac.
That’s nothing new. I can write the finest C++ code you ever saw. but I can’t manage “Hello, world!” in Ada after 6 months of trying.
Ada?
Ada is a rather old programming language developed after a DOD analysis in 1973 or 1974 which determined how much money they were spending on software annually, which came about after a few projects (Woodenman, Tinman, Red, Green, Ironman and Steelman) was eventually named Ada in 1979 after Ada Byron Lovelace. Ada wrote the first book on programming theory around the middle of the 19th century due to her work with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine.
It’s original name was DoD-1, but was changed to Ada in honor of her contribution to the field of programming, nearly 100 years before the emergence of ENIAC. The Ada Joint Program Office closed in 1998, the same day that the ISO/IEC standard for C++ program language was published. This Ada language came from the Green programming team, after Green and Red were declared the finalists by the DoD.
I have not seen many instances of Ada programming currently, but I think it still exists out there somewhere because it is an internationally recognized object oriented programming language.
As for the heart surgeon who can’t tell that the box is not the CPU and has a tendency to kick things and slap around the monitor, it could be far, far worse (not that this isn’t bad) the guy could be your Network Administrator. shudder
Being that it’s an NT server, nocando.
Thanks Catsix, this is why I love this place, you get your question answered in full, glorious detail.
You left out Ada’s favorite color, but I forgive you. 
I smack the monitor on the side and say ‘BAD COMPUTER!!!’
I can understand this guy’s frustration (although the violence is over the top). He’s a surgeon, for pete’s sake, yet he can’t figure out how to work the damn computer.
For someone in such a highly respected profession, that must be quite a blow to the ego.
Your welcome for the answer (after all, what is a computer geek’s worthless trivia knowledge for), and I’m afraid I don’t know her favorite color.
I imagine, though, that her favorite poet would have to be her father, Lord Byron, who abandoned her before she was a year old, and that it was her mother who encouraged her study of mathematics. And she was 36 years old when she died of cancer in 1852, so who knows what she might’ve done with a few more years of life.
-catsix,
repository of useless trivia.
I actually learned Ada in college in the late 80’s. Still have the textbook in my garage.
The professor told us that it was a regulation that all DoD projects had to written in Ada, but it was so freaking slow that the end-product would actually be running C or assembly. But it was first written in Ada, to satisfy the regulations.
That sound pretty ULish to me, in retrospect.
Internet porn?
All of the other posts about Ada have been correct so far, so I won’t add any more.
It does sound ULish, but it smacks more loudly of Big Govermentism and DoD arrogance. And it’s all true. Ada is a language designed by committee (mistake #1) to be the One Language for all DoD applications (mistake #2), whether it’s embedded code for an arms management system or goverment payroll.
I’m convinced that my inability to adapt to Ada is a big factor in my being laid off last year. My employer was carving out a niche in the defense market doing maintenance and rework, so most of the software jobs coming in were legacy Ada, and not C/C++. I actually cheered the day the requirement to code in Ada died, being the oddball that I was.
You know, my Boss has problems with computers, too.
So I got into his screen saver, set it for “Scrolling Marquee” & periodically, I leave “messages from beyond the grave” on it.
He hasn’t said anything to anybody…yet.
Give this a try with the old sawbones in the OP.
Your boss is Henry Chinaski.
But the part about the equipment in the field actually running C or assembly, and not the Ada wastefully written and discarded because of the regulation, is there any truth to that? That’s the part that sounded ULish, not the regulation itself.