I find the fact that people will go to court over such matters incredibly depressing. Why do people have to resort to this manner of conflict-resolution?
Whilst in this case, yes, they used the term 'cup', it was not intentionally deceptive, rather it was actually being used in the same way in which almost all other coffee maker maufacturers use. I have a plunger here which claims "3 cups", of course, it only just fills up my mug. This method of capacity definition is a 'defacto'. Of course, I realise that just because everyone does it doesn't make it 'right'.
It should be noted that 'cup' is not a 'standard' measure of anything, it is not an ISO unit. Rather, almost everyone presumes it's 8oz... does that make it 'right' ?
Filing a law suit against the said company could probably have been avoided if you simply wrote a letter to them, or other more amicable approaches. Simply advising them that they should perhaps have a fluid-capacity rating on their products would have done the trick most likely.
Every day we hear more and more reports of people being sued or taken to court over matters which could have been resolved quite simply through basic communication skills. Instead, the trend is now to hide behind a 20ft brick wall and send the lawers in. Is it any wonder that entities like the RIAA, BSA and other such which we are all fearing because "They are taking away our 'freedom' rights" are growing so fast...it's because it all starts with things like this.
( Note - in the case of the HP ink issue, yes, HP is misleading the public because there's nothing 'economic' for the/customer/ about a 1/2 full ink cartridge ).
and so on... ugly as hell in LaTeX, but in something Lisplike, it could be a lot nicer-
Looks like you found yourself a new project;)
I agree with what you mentioned in your reply. I should have qualified my area of intention down to things like "Report/Letter/manual production for the purpose of being read-only" (as apposed to ssheets, db's etc).
It's an unfortunate thing though that people have "forgotten" about the high-quality output tools which already exist within their distributions. Even worse still that in general people are losing the skills to use them. Speaking of which, I believe that LyX 1.2.x is now out, so there's a good compromise.
Now, if only they'd make a thought-to-file converter:P
I understand the need to create professional documents, but I would fathom a guess that 99% of what word-like apps are used for are the wrong things. An email "memo" doesn't need to be an attached word doc.
As far as professionalism goes, "Office" apps are terrible. For truly crisp results, I can recomment non other than the [supposedly] archaic vi + LaTeX + dvipdf. PDF is so widely supported and accepted that everyone [unless you've been living under a rock] knows how to read them. In addition, the use of LaTeX ensures that your formatting is of high-readability, as apposed to 'fasionable'.
I for one will not be moving to such Office packages.
"I learned to comment the end of if structures and function blocks to make the code easier to follow... just add " }//end if" or something"
I agree, often that's a really good way of saving a few moments flicking up/down trying to determine which 'terminator' belongs to which block, things like }//end of "while (foobar...)" enhance it more.
If we're in the mood to split hairs... then declaring variables as
type* var1;
is rather misleading in itself, ie: char* foo, bar;
Whilst most people can instantly tell that it's meant to be a pointer to char and a char, it might not always be obvious if the programmer wanted two pointers, or a pointer and a char.
Better to place the * with the variable name [imho;)]... char *foo, *bar;
"I find a different part of the brain kicking in - and at that stage, I find it easier, even pleasurable, to add meaningful comments, to change indenting, variable names etc, as if I'm narrating the code to someone else. I guess it's a matter of balance, and using the right mental faculties at the right time."
Hail! Yes indeed, in chasing a bug I often fix it without noticing simply by doing as you have mentioned, going through, cleaning up, as though doing a multipass on source code makes it clearer like an interlaced JPEG:-)
I like to see comments where the function of the next code block is well described in a continuous comment block. Additionally, any further specific comments can be placed at the end, or on top of the lines in question. It's simple enough, and permits comment/documenting-scrapers to produce some potentially useful documentation.
ie, // Foo():infinite loop // We attempt to complete an infinite loop // here as quickly as possible, in order to // remain true to Linus's statements of // being able to do them faster with linux.
while (1) { ...// Oooh, this is a fancy line, watch out for it doing nothing.
}
I am envisigaging a new problem that's going to arise if GPG/PGP take off... how do we filter the content of the emails! Hence, I'm all for S/MIME, which allows encrypted messages between client/server/server, but the content of the email remains in its original form.
If GPG/PGP takes off as a method of transferring, then we'll be back to square one with trying to prevent viruses getting to the end users *sigh*
Additionally, S/MIME is easier to setup and far simpler to deploy on a large scale.
Now, if South African immigrations (HomeAffairs) would stop throwing out all the professionals in the name of "Affirmative Action" (Read Aparthaid, but the other way around) perhaps the country could defeat the current trend of the Southern Sahara African countries.
It's a lovely country (South Africa), but they have to stop pointing the finger of blame for everything that goes wrong back to the pre '90's and start understanding that skin colour -really- doesn't make a difference.
Sending attachments via Email will ensure that AOL sucks up another 33% of internet capacity. The current [default] binary encoding scheme of BASE64 has a 33% overhead. I'd rather see people send URL's in their emails. (Hey! a new XP feature, send an email, and allow people to come right in and pick it up from your PC...oh wait, they've already got that)
What really gets my goat is the fact that the "young-ones" immediately think that the "oldies" have no experience in computers. Lord knows then who created all the systems that predated their Quad Xeon for their Quake nights...
Im running a Digital HiNote ULTRA CT475. At less than 1" thick and smaller than a sheet of A4, not to mention being able to buy them at ~$100 USD, it's an ideal solution. Runs X nicely too. A classic case of more grunt etc being utterly pointless. Admittingly, I use it primarily to hook into other systems and as my oversized PDA.
I have read "The Code Book" and think it's a great peice of work. It stands proudly (hard cover) on my shelf. The actual "practicals" make it even more enticing to read. The section of quantum-computing for "breaking" codes was recently proven more than probable by the IBM 3-qubit computer.
Slashdot Mirror
In South Africa, this is the norm. If your house is being invaded or what ever and the robber injures themselves on your property, you get sued.
I think this is great... out here in 'outback' Australia we're still trying to convince the budgies to comply with the Avarian packet methods.
Whilst in this case, yes, they used the term 'cup', it was not intentionally deceptive, rather it was actually being used in the same way in which almost all other coffee maker maufacturers use. I have a plunger here which claims "3 cups", of course, it only just fills up my mug. This method of capacity definition is a 'defacto'. Of course, I realise that just because everyone does it doesn't make it 'right'.
It should be noted that 'cup' is not a 'standard' measure of anything, it is not an ISO unit. Rather, almost everyone presumes it's 8oz... does that make it 'right' ?
Filing a law suit against the said company could probably have been avoided if you simply wrote a letter to them, or other more amicable approaches.
Simply advising them that they should perhaps have a fluid-capacity rating on their products would have done the trick most likely.
Every day we hear more and more reports of people being sued or taken to court over matters which could have been resolved quite simply through basic communication skills. Instead, the trend is now to hide behind a 20ft brick wall and send the lawers in. Is it any wonder that entities like the RIAA, BSA and other such which we are all fearing because "They are taking away our 'freedom' rights" are growing so fast...it's because it all starts with things like this.
( Note - in the case of the HP ink issue, yes, HP is misleading the public because there's nothing 'economic' for the
Looks like you found yourself a new project
I agree with what you mentioned in your reply. I should have qualified my area of intention down to things like "Report/Letter/manual production for the purpose of being read-only" (as apposed to ssheets, db's etc).
It's an unfortunate thing though that people have "forgotten" about the high-quality output tools which already exist within their distributions. Even worse still that in general people are losing the skills to use them. Speaking of which, I believe that LyX 1.2.x is now out, so there's a good compromise.
Now, if only they'd make a thought-to-file converter
As far as professionalism goes, "Office" apps are terrible. For truly crisp results, I can recomment non other than the [supposedly] archaic vi + LaTeX + dvipdf. PDF is so widely supported and accepted that everyone [unless you've been living under a rock] knows how to read them. In addition, the use of LaTeX ensures that your formatting is of high-readability, as apposed to 'fasionable'.
I for one will not be moving to such Office packages.
That's a bit hard on my ZX80 sinclair with BASIC.
"I learned to comment the end of if structures and function blocks to make the code easier to follow... just add " } //end if" or something"
//end of "while (foobar...)" enhance it more.
I agree, often that's a really good way of saving a few moments flicking up/down trying to determine which 'terminator' belongs to which block, things like }
Sheesh, so much for examples... the code was not intended of course to be specific... rather it was to act as glue to the comments.
Now, where's my dictionary.
If we're in the mood to split hairs... then declaring variables as
;)] ... char *foo, *bar;
type* var1;
is rather misleading in itself, ie: char* foo, bar;
Whilst most people can instantly tell that it's meant to be a pointer to char and a char, it might not always be obvious if the programmer wanted two pointers, or a pointer and a char.
Better to place the * with the variable name [imho
I guess it's a matter of balance, and using the right mental faculties at the right time."
Hail! Yes indeed, in chasing a bug I often fix it without noticing simply by doing as you have mentioned, going through, cleaning up, as though doing a multipass on source code makes it clearer like an interlaced JPEG
"I've never had to deal with 'obfuscated' code so I don't know about onscure variables, etc"
I thought Perl was the most efficient self-obfusicating code ever.
ie,
while (1) {
}
My point though is that it didn't kill Linux. Yes it was an inconveniance and it does/did turn away a few people (perhaps a thousand or more).
Regards.
About as much as bringing WinMODEM's spelt the end of Linux dialup. As far as I could tell it didn't make any impact, ditto.
Someone please keep quiet, I'm trying to format my LaTeX... eh? What do you mean these "new" office apps dont typeset? Waste of space!
If GPG/PGP takes off as a method of transferring, then we'll be back to square one with trying to prevent viruses getting to the end users *sigh*
Additionally, S/MIME is easier to setup and far simpler to deploy on a large scale.
It's a lovely country (South Africa), but they have to stop pointing the finger of blame for everything that goes wrong back to the pre '90's and start understanding that skin colour -really- doesn't make a difference.
Sending attachments via Email will ensure that AOL sucks up another 33% of internet capacity. The current [default] binary encoding scheme of BASE64 has a 33% overhead. I'd rather see people send URL's in their emails. (Hey! a new XP feature, send an email, and allow people to come right in and pick it up from your PC...oh wait, they've already got that)
What really gets my goat is the fact that the "young-ones" immediately think that the "oldies" have no experience in computers. Lord knows then who created all the systems that predated their Quad Xeon for their Quake nights...
Ghar, the local ISP here had Xamime installed.. not a single client copped anything from Sircam... oh wait, this is about RedCode? :)
Btw, anyone got a battery for this thing?
I think you summed up my feelings precisely.
Been there, done that, now 27. Now this is my view...
...) but the -doesn't- mean you have "experience" in the true sence.
You can be as smart as Richard Feynman (if you dont know who he is, then
There are many things which simply cannot be aquired as experience without age.
I started when I was 9yrs old (the ZX80 had -just- come out).
In short, keep working, dont bitch 'n moan, just work harder. Let your "reputation" become your PR front.
The old addage "You cant put an old head on a new body" rings very true.
I have read "The Code Book" and think it's a great peice of work. It stands proudly (hard cover) on my shelf. The actual "practicals" make it even more enticing to read. The section of quantum-computing for "breaking" codes was recently proven more than probable by the IBM 3-qubit computer.