The fact that they have to read the whole thing through before proceeding. Most people want to just jump in and get it done as quickly and painlessly as possible...and then they get to the second to last step and realize they need a special pan or to marinate for a day and a half.
Well, you don't want to do that with your code, either, because it works just about as well. Not that I haven't been bit by doing exactly this both when coding *and* when cooking, mind you...
Nah, it just means that what we really want is to get women pregnant and carry on our genetic material. All this sex stuff is just the way to make that happen. A messy, inefficient, random way. You wonder why we even bother.
Well, I don't get this nonsense about recipes being made for women and their "funny way of looking at the world". It sounds a lot like a comment from somebody who doesn't know much about recipes or women. I've been reading, and successfully following, recipes for much of my adult life. As long as you read all the instructions *before* starting to do anything else, most any well-written recipe is perfectly clear, as long as you have a little bit of domain knowledge (understanding of the basic symbols and terminology, mostly) and the requisite equipment. Pretty much like any other geek task.
I will say that the table layout is a pretty neat idea. I don't personally care for it as much as the traditional format, but that's mainly because I'm used to the "normal" way. The table makes it really clear what steps depend on what other steps. However, there's something to be said for having a linear set of steps - mainly, that you don't get as easily lost in the subtasks and lose track of where you are in the process. I think that might just be me, though.
So what is it about traditional recipes that confuses people?
OT: The "IE-specific tables" look fine in Opera, by the way.
Winroll does most of what you're asking for there. The transparency, send to back, etc. are secondary features, but easy enough to use. Look at the help to see how it's done.
Hey, thanks for the link - I've been thinking about finding something like this recently. Although not enough to actually go look for one. Winroll is pretty neat, although my personal feeling is that the translucency feature is not going to be all that useful. Maybe if my poor 1 Ghz box had a little more horsepower.
Honestly, I can't *stand* maximized windows. This isn't DOS, you know - I have all this screen real estate and a lot of things to do.
My desktop is Win2k and I always have a bazillion overlapping windows. At the moment, that evaluates to 32, about 30 or 40% of which I can see at any given time (okay, so I can't see more than a bit of some of them, but that's enough - I know more or less where they are). True, almost all of them are a) terminal windows, b) directory listings, c) editor or Notepad windows and d) browser windows, so it's pretty easy to size them reasonably small. Okay, the dual-monitor setup helps a lot, but I tend to spread out to fill all available space (and then some), so the principle is the same.
Maximzed windows are the biggest canard foisted on us Windows users since 286/real modes. Every damn app I install seems to think I want it coming up fullscreen the first time. And of what use are full-screen installers except to show off the company's logo a little better? To make it harder to switch back to the desktop to open an Explorer window to find the directory I want to install to?
This is another thing OSX gets right - the business of 'full sized' meaning that the widows contents are fully displayed. It took be a bit to "get" that, but, like so many things Apple does, I've come to think it's a Good Thing.
The home/end/cursor keys, well, that's just Wrong.
Oh, get fucking over it. If you don't like the jokes, go and do something else for the day, like read a book, or watch TV, or play a game, or whatever. Is your life so shallow that you think "news" on Slashdot is the high point of the day?
Do *anything* else, just don't come here and bitch about it.
Do tell - what's he really like? Because I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about, unlike, for instance, you.
Re:Medical students syndrome
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Too true there. When I was in college, I knew a number of psych majors. Every single one of them was - not nuts, but they had - issues. They would read about how the brain and psychological development processes work and apply that to themselves -- "Hey, *this* explains a lot. *That's* what goes on inside my head!" Then they get into the more advanced abnormal psych courses, and they really start to go off the end. All of a sudden they've figured out why they're so screwed up or why they can't keep a normal relationship. See, it's right in this book here.
Mind you, this doesn't address the issue of whether they went into the field precisely because they wanted to figure out the mess, or if they were messed up before they started. But it seemed to be universal, and it brings up a lot of questions about the stability and effectiveness of a lot of the working shrinks out there.
I guess the real problem is that if you apply theory to yourself, you have to be really careful to maintain some perspective, and not assume it all applies perfectly to you. And that's not easy, I can tell you.
I'm pretty sure that publishers' contracts all now give rights to publish in any electronic medium whatsoever, and have for a while now. I remember the New York Times doing this a few years ago.
Since the publisher is generally in the stronger position ("you want to publish, sign this contract or there's the door"), the creators are pretty much screwed unless they have a big enough name.
I worked for the company that did the development (Mindscape) at the time this was published. The entire product is, as someone else pointed out, a collection of JPEG scans of the orignal magazine pages. We did it this was for exactly that reason - so it wouldn't become a litigational nightmare by being considered a "new work". I guess it worked.
Remember that the majority of the photos (and articles, for that matter) came from the days before anyone had imagined electronic republication. National Geographic did not want to go through the hell of getting releases (not to mention paying cash to) *every* photographer who ever had a picture published in the magazine.
My personal feeling is that NG may have tried to do it on the cheap, but they really didn't have any alternative. The margins on a product like that are so thin that if they had to pay everybody again, there would have been nothing left.
The Bible is not really retranslated. When people set out to translate something, they usually go back to the original source and translate that. The same holds true for the Bible.... You've also got to realise that the Bible was only compiled as a whole fairly recently. Parts of it were written at different times, and in different ways. It's fairly obvious that, for instance, most of the New Testament is not an oral history. Most of it was written by people who claimed to be eye-witnesses of the event (except for Luke, who researched things after the fact). The first five books of the Old Testament, too, are unlikely to be oral history. They were written by Moses, who was involved in a lot of what he wrote... As to the veracity of the Bible, there have been cases were truths denounced as fiction in the Bible have later been archeologically verified...
Your point is well taken. "Nothing more than an oral history" was a little harsh and simplistic. I was trying to say that the Bible is not a scholarly work of non-fiction in the modern sense, but a document that was put together, as you say, over a number of years and from a number of sources. As such, it is subject to people's recollections, personal prejudices, and the political realities of the day. I realize that there is a lot of truth there, not to mention good common sense. I take issue, however, with those who claim that it represents Absolute Truth - especially the ones who claim that every worse is literally true.
But who who took the matter, who set the physical laws, who defined the constants? No matter how far back scientists delve, they never find a "first cause", because science, which deals in chains of cause and effect, is inequipped to deal with first causes. If the universe ever began, then it had to be begun by an external force. Hawking says this in A Brief History of Time. What he also says is that the alternative is that the universe never began, that it always was, and it is this alternative he prefers. Neither can be proven. Personally I prefer believing the former.
I agree completely. I've thought about this a lot, and I like to believe that there is a set of all-powerful intelligences who created existence as an experiment (being all-powerful and eternal, they wanted something to keep from being bored). Think of it as the "God's train set" theory. He/she/it/they created matter, set up the laws and constants, and watched it to see what would happen. Every now and then, they might move a switch or bump a train onto a siding, but essentially they watch. Hopefully, they want to see us lifeforms improve ourselves. Sometimes, they say "Okay, that was a good run; now let's tweak the gravitational constant a bit and see what that does."
I have absolutely NO belief that this is, in fact, anything close to reality, but the alternative (We're all alone and stuff just exists) is awfully cold, and provides no incentive for us to act morally or to improve ourselves. After all, isn't that the reason for religion in the first place - to make us feel less alone and meaningless?
I hope that, when I die, I'll find out how it all works. For now, I try not to think about it too much any more. Eventually, it makes my brain spin around in circles.
I don't claim to know the Truth, and I submit that neither you nor the Bible have the Truth either. If you can show me any evidence to prove that the Bible is anything more than an oral history, passed down, retranslated, and expurgated for political purposes over the generations, or that there was any involvement from extrahuman sources whatsoever, I will be more than happy to reconsider this statement.
I see the stars and yes, I wonder where everything came from. I wonder why it exists at all. I think, "Okay, some extraordinary force put it here - but where did *that* come from?" I'm right back to the beginning again - ex nihilo arguments are not very satisfying to think about. I prefer to be in awe of the fact that the universe exists and that it works as perfectly as it does at all.
The "there must be an intelligent designer because this is all so complex" argument is really kind of silly. Complex things evolve from simple ones all the time. Take a bunch of matter, some fundamental forces, a set of physical laws, and define some basic constants. Compress matter tightly, explode it in all directions such that it forms into different elements, fairly evenly distributed. Subject it to lots of energy from different sources. Let it run for several billion years. Amino acids and simple proteins evolve, combine into bigger and more complex forms. Hey presto - we have life. After a couple billion more years, collapse it all down, start over again.
Now, imagine you had to explain all this to a PHB in the front office. Wouldn't "And God created the heavens and earth and all the creatures that swim and creep and fly" be a pretty good executive summary for someone who has absolutely no comprehension of the principles involved?
Disclaimer: I am by no means an astrophysicist, an evolutionary bioligist, or a Biblical scholar. Someone please tell me where this analysis goes wrong.
...I have a largish project which I'm right now preparing for release and I need to decide whether to build now or to run the update and go through another testing cycle. My intuition tells me to build now and update later, but I don't know if they've fixed any massive compiler bugs.
No no no NO! You *never* upgrade in the middle of a project, *especially* if you're in the final phases. Unless there is a known bug or limitation that is causing a drop-dead problem, you leave everything exactly as it is, so you have a known, stable build. You don't get new libraies, you don't add that cool new feature, you don't install the latest service pack on the (internal) build machine. You certainly don't upgrade the compiler or IDE.
The alternative is, in the best case, to have to start the testing cycle over from the beginning. In the worst case, the upgrade will break something badly, and in a situation where you cannot roll back to the original state (as I assume an OSX update is, but I may be mistaken), you'll be screwed.
I don't know if this is a personal project or a work-related thing, but if it's for work, first your boss will kick your ass, then QA will hand it back to you, in pieces.
Follow your intuition here. If there were any big compiler bugs, testing would have already found them, right?
It was ASCII 127, which would show up as a little Monopoly-house (or home-plate shape) in any of the standard shells of the day - Norton Commander, XTree, PC-Tools, etc. DOS wouldn't see it or the rest of the name. This was really handy for hiding stuff on the computers in the school lab, among other places.
You could enter them (or any character) by holding down the Alt key and typing the 3-character decimal code on the keypad. This trick worked for everything that used the standard INT 21h/10h interface. Very neat way to type the extended ASCII codes.
My favorite sub-version, which involves no balloons:
A shepherd is tending his flock when a black 5 series BMW pulls up in his field. A dude jumps out of the car wearing $2000 loafers, an Armani suit, Gucci tie, Blancpain watch.
"Hey Shepherd" says the Dude, "if I can guess exactly how many sheep you have in this field, can I have one of them?".
The Shepherd looks at the field and says "I'm a punting man; give it your best shot".
The Dude whips out his WAP and calls a satellite flyover service and gives them a telephone number. 10 minutes later, an overhead view is faxed to the Dude and he counts up the animals.
"Shepherd, you have exactly 1218 sheep".
The Shepherd confirms this is correct and the Dude opens the trunk of the Beemer and puts an animal in the trunk.
"Tell me sir" says the Shepherd, "if I can guess what you do for a living, can I have my animal back?"
"Sure", says the Dude, grinning.
"You are a IT Consultant and you work for either Accenture or KPMG"
"Fuck!! Right on" exclaims the Dude "How didja guess?"
"Well" says the Shepherd "Firstly you turned up unannounced, unwanted and with no prior warning. Then you told me what I already knew. And then you proved you knew absolutely nothing about my business. So give me back my fuckin' dog".
Yay for Absolute Zero Gravity - it's one of my favorite joke books. It has a permanent position in my bathroom. Sadly, it seems to be out of print, but that's what used book stores are for, right? (well, that and killing hours at a time)
(Jesus, I just noticed from that link that it's selling *used* for a hundred bucks - I suppose I shouldn't have left it on top of the toilet after all)
Wouldn't the Apple joke be more like:
How many Apple employees does it take to screw in a light bulb? Ten - one to screw it in, two to design the icon, four to design the T-shirts, and three to come up with the code name for the project.
Warning: mists of time have been applied to this recollection.
It was back in the late 80s, when I was in college. I had a job with this little shop that sold mailorder sports handicapping software - for horse racing, football, basketball, baseball, etc. We ran on the PC, Mac, C64 and whatever the contemporaneous Atari was. Everything was written in BASIC (but no, it was *not* cross-platform).
Working on the C64 was definitely the most fun (fun being iterpreted rather arbitrarily) - I was used to working in C on a PS/2 model 50, and I really enjoyed the challenges in making everything fit on one side of a floppy. As I recall:
* no comments (obviously) * no variables longer than 2 characters * lots of code like
IF I<10 THEN R1=R1+1:X4=0:GS=GS+R1:GOSUB 9910:GOTO 445
because every line number cost a couple of bytes. * the sprite code was *cool* * other things I've blissfully blocked out
I got to play a little with programming the floppy drive (although most of that code had already been written). I seem to remember hosing a number of disks with bugs I'd introduced.
The Atari, for some reason, was not that interesting to work on. The Mac version was all written in RealBasic (???), which was actually a pretty capable platform. I especially enjoyed writing the copy protection routines in BASIC. The PC had the nicest working environment, especially after we got the bigass huge *20MB* hard drive and the edit-compile-link cycle went down to 5 minutes or so.
Although I was a serf, it was a pretty cool gig. Part of my job was testing the horse racing systems by running the algorithm against reams of old Racing Forms - at the time, I was really good at reading those damn charts and scores. The two guys who ran the place were old-time gambler/horse racing/handicapping types who had lots of great old war stories. One interesting thing I learned: the trotters (horses that pull the carts and are not allowed to go over a fixed pace) are considered to be pretty much completely corrupt, due to the ease with which a race can be thrown (a horse will be disqualified for breaking pace, it's really easy to get yourself blocked in).
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that they have to read the whole thing through before proceeding. Most people want to just jump in and get it done as quickly and painlessly as possible...and then they get to the second to last step and realize they need a special pan or to marinate for a day and a half.
Well, you don't want to do that with your code, either, because it works just about as well. Not that I haven't been bit by doing exactly this both when coding *and* when cooking, mind you...
You know, you can replace references to 'cooking' and 'programming' with 'sex' in the second paragraph, and it still holds true.
Not that you're not absolutely right about cooking, though.
Nah, it just means that what we really want is to get women pregnant and carry on our genetic material. All this sex stuff is just the way to make that happen. A messy, inefficient, random way. You wonder why we even bother.
Well, I don't get this nonsense about recipes being made for women and their "funny way of looking at the world". It sounds a lot like a comment from somebody who doesn't know much about recipes or women. I've been reading, and successfully following, recipes for much of my adult life. As long as you read all the instructions *before* starting to do anything else, most any well-written recipe is perfectly clear, as long as you have a little bit of domain knowledge (understanding of the basic symbols and terminology, mostly) and the requisite equipment. Pretty much like any other geek task.
I will say that the table layout is a pretty neat idea. I don't personally care for it as much as the traditional format, but that's mainly because I'm used to the "normal" way. The table makes it really clear what steps depend on what other steps. However, there's something to be said for having a linear set of steps - mainly, that you don't get as easily lost in the subtasks and lose track of where you are in the process. I think that might just be me, though.
So what is it about traditional recipes that confuses people?
OT: The "IE-specific tables" look fine in Opera, by the way.
Winroll does most of what you're asking for there. The transparency, send to back, etc. are secondary features, but easy enough to use. Look at the help to see how it's done.
Hey, thanks for the link - I've been thinking about finding something like this recently. Although not enough to actually go look for one. Winroll is pretty neat, although my personal feeling is that the translucency feature is not going to be all that useful. Maybe if my poor 1 Ghz box had a little more horsepower.
Honestly, I can't *stand* maximized windows. This isn't DOS, you know - I have all this screen real estate and a lot of things to do.
My desktop is Win2k and I always have a bazillion overlapping windows. At the moment, that evaluates to 32, about 30 or 40% of which I can see at any given time (okay, so I can't see more than a bit of some of them, but that's enough - I know more or less where they are). True, almost all of them are a) terminal windows, b) directory listings, c) editor or Notepad windows and d) browser windows, so it's pretty easy to size them reasonably small. Okay, the dual-monitor setup helps a lot, but I tend to spread out to fill all available space (and then some), so the principle is the same.
Maximzed windows are the biggest canard foisted on us Windows users since 286/real modes. Every damn app I install seems to think I want it coming up fullscreen the first time. And of what use are full-screen installers except to show off the company's logo a little better? To make it harder to switch back to the desktop to open an Explorer window to find the directory I want to install to?
This is another thing OSX gets right - the business of 'full sized' meaning that the widows contents are fully displayed. It took be a bit to "get" that, but, like so many things Apple does, I've come to think it's a Good Thing.
The home/end/cursor keys, well, that's just Wrong.
Oh, get fucking over it. If you don't like the jokes, go and do something else for the day, like read a book, or watch TV, or play a game, or whatever. Is your life so shallow that you think "news" on Slashdot is the high point of the day?
Do *anything* else, just don't come here and bitch about it.
Geez, man. I didn't know you knew the guy.
Do tell - what's he really like? Because I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about, unlike, for instance, you.
Too true there. When I was in college, I knew a number of psych majors. Every single one of them was - not nuts, but they had - issues. They would read about how the brain and psychological development processes work and apply that to themselves -- "Hey, *this* explains a lot. *That's* what goes on inside my head!" Then they get into the more advanced abnormal psych courses, and they really start to go off the end. All of a sudden they've figured out why they're so screwed up or why they can't keep a normal relationship. See, it's right in this book here.
Mind you, this doesn't address the issue of whether they went into the field precisely because they wanted to figure out the mess, or if they were messed up before they started. But it seemed to be universal, and it brings up a lot of questions about the stability and effectiveness of a lot of the working shrinks out there.
I guess the real problem is that if you apply theory to yourself, you have to be really careful to maintain some perspective, and not assume it all applies perfectly to you. And that's not easy, I can tell you.
I'm pretty sure that publishers' contracts all now give rights to publish in any electronic medium whatsoever, and have for a while now. I remember the New York Times doing this a few years ago.
Since the publisher is generally in the stronger position ("you want to publish, sign this contract or there's the door"), the creators are pretty much screwed unless they have a big enough name.
I worked for the company that did the development (Mindscape) at the time this was published. The entire product is, as someone else pointed out, a collection of JPEG scans of the orignal magazine pages. We did it this was for exactly that reason - so it wouldn't become a litigational nightmare by being considered a "new work". I guess it worked.
Remember that the majority of the photos (and articles, for that matter) came from the days before anyone had imagined electronic republication. National Geographic did not want to go through the hell of getting releases (not to mention paying cash to) *every* photographer who ever had a picture published in the magazine.
My personal feeling is that NG may have tried to do it on the cheap, but they really didn't have any alternative. The margins on a product like that are so thin that if they had to pay everybody again, there would have been nothing left.
Well, in Windows 95, those were pretty much the same thing.
The Bible is not really retranslated. When people set out to translate something, they usually go back to the original source and translate that. The same holds true for the Bible.
Your point is well taken. "Nothing more than an oral history" was a little harsh and simplistic. I was trying to say that the Bible is not a scholarly work of non-fiction in the modern sense, but a document that was put together, as you say, over a number of years and from a number of sources. As such, it is subject to people's recollections, personal prejudices, and the political realities of the day. I realize that there is a lot of truth there, not to mention good common sense. I take issue, however, with those who claim that it represents Absolute Truth - especially the ones who claim that every worse is literally true.
But who who took the matter, who set the physical laws, who defined the constants? No matter how far back scientists delve, they never find a "first cause", because science, which deals in chains of cause and effect, is inequipped to deal with first causes. If the universe ever began, then it had to be begun by an external force. Hawking says this in A Brief History of Time. What he also says is that the alternative is that the universe never began, that it always was, and it is this alternative he prefers. Neither can be proven. Personally I prefer believing the former.
I agree completely. I've thought about this a lot, and I like to believe that there is a set of all-powerful intelligences who created existence as an experiment (being all-powerful and eternal, they wanted something to keep from being bored). Think of it as the "God's train set" theory. He/she/it/they created matter, set up the laws and constants, and watched it to see what would happen. Every now and then, they might move a switch or bump a train onto a siding, but essentially they watch. Hopefully, they want to see us lifeforms improve ourselves. Sometimes, they say "Okay, that was a good run; now let's tweak the gravitational constant a bit and see what that does."
I have absolutely NO belief that this is, in fact, anything close to reality, but the alternative (We're all alone and stuff just exists) is awfully cold, and provides no incentive for us to act morally or to improve ourselves. After all, isn't that the reason for religion in the first place - to make us feel less alone and meaningless?
I hope that, when I die, I'll find out how it all works. For now, I try not to think about it too much any more. Eventually, it makes my brain spin around in circles.
By the way, to CmdrTostado:
I'm sorry they moderated you as 'Troll'. Some people can't seem to understand how someone can have views different than their own (or the mainstream).
I don't claim to know the Truth, and I submit that neither you nor the Bible have the Truth either. If you can show me any evidence to prove that the Bible is anything more than an oral history, passed down, retranslated, and expurgated for political purposes over the generations, or that there was any involvement from extrahuman sources whatsoever, I will be more than happy to reconsider this statement.
I see the stars and yes, I wonder where everything came from. I wonder why it exists at all. I think, "Okay, some extraordinary force put it here - but where did *that* come from?" I'm right back to the beginning again - ex nihilo arguments are not very satisfying to think about. I prefer to be in awe of the fact that the universe exists and that it works as perfectly as it does at all.
The "there must be an intelligent designer because this is all so complex" argument is really kind of silly. Complex things evolve from simple ones all the time. Take a bunch of matter, some fundamental forces, a set of physical laws, and define some basic constants. Compress matter tightly, explode it in all directions such that it forms into different elements, fairly evenly distributed. Subject it to lots of energy from different sources. Let it run for several billion years. Amino acids and simple proteins evolve, combine into bigger and more complex forms. Hey presto - we have life. After a couple billion more years, collapse it all down, start over again.
Now, imagine you had to explain all this to a PHB in the front office. Wouldn't "And God created the heavens and earth and all the creatures that swim and creep and fly" be a pretty good executive summary for someone who has absolutely no comprehension of the principles involved?
Disclaimer: I am by no means an astrophysicist, an evolutionary bioligist, or a Biblical scholar. Someone please tell me where this analysis goes wrong.
No no no NO! You *never* upgrade in the middle of a project, *especially* if you're in the final phases. Unless there is a known bug or limitation that is causing a drop-dead problem, you leave everything exactly as it is, so you have a known, stable build. You don't get new libraies, you don't add that cool new feature, you don't install the latest service pack on the (internal) build machine. You certainly don't upgrade the compiler or IDE.
The alternative is, in the best case, to have to start the testing cycle over from the beginning. In the worst case, the upgrade will break something badly, and in a situation where you cannot roll back to the original state (as I assume an OSX update is, but I may be mistaken), you'll be screwed.
I don't know if this is a personal project or a work-related thing, but if it's for work, first your boss will kick your ass, then QA will hand it back to you, in pieces.
Follow your intuition here. If there were any big compiler bugs, testing would have already found them, right?
It was ASCII 127, which would show up as a little Monopoly-house (or home-plate shape) in any of the standard shells of the day - Norton Commander, XTree, PC-Tools, etc. DOS wouldn't see it or the rest of the name. This was really handy for hiding stuff on the computers in the school lab, among other places.
You could enter them (or any character) by holding down the Alt key and typing the 3-character decimal code on the keypad. This trick worked for everything that used the standard INT 21h/10h interface. Very neat way to type the extended ASCII codes.
I thought it was:
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.
But I like yours, too.
And, at my old school,
The limit as GPA approaches 0 of an business major = education major.
My favorite sub-version, which involves no balloons:
A shepherd is tending his flock when a black 5 series BMW pulls up in his field. A dude jumps out of the car wearing $2000 loafers, an Armani suit, Gucci tie, Blancpain watch.
"Hey Shepherd" says the Dude, "if I can guess exactly how many sheep you have in this field, can I have one of them?".
The Shepherd looks at the field and says "I'm a punting man; give it your best shot".
The Dude whips out his WAP and calls a satellite flyover service and gives them a telephone number. 10 minutes later, an overhead view is faxed to the Dude and he counts up the animals.
"Shepherd, you have exactly 1218 sheep".
The Shepherd confirms this is correct and the Dude opens the trunk of the Beemer and puts an animal in the trunk.
"Tell me sir" says the Shepherd, "if I can guess what you do for a living, can I have my animal back?"
"Sure", says the Dude, grinning.
"You are a IT Consultant and you work for either Accenture or KPMG"
"Fuck!! Right on" exclaims the Dude "How didja guess?"
"Well" says the Shepherd "Firstly you turned up unannounced, unwanted and with no prior warning. Then you told me what I already knew. And then you proved you knew absolutely nothing about my business. So give me back my fuckin' dog".
Yay for Absolute Zero Gravity - it's one of my favorite joke books. It has a permanent position in my bathroom. Sadly, it seems to be out of print, but that's what used book stores are for, right? (well, that and killing hours at a time)
(Jesus, I just noticed from that link that it's selling *used* for a hundred bucks - I suppose I shouldn't have left it on top of the toilet after all)
Wouldn't the Apple joke be more like:
How many Apple employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Ten - one to screw it in, two to design the icon, four to design the T-shirts, and three to come up with the code name for the project.
Wow. Your job was *way* cooler than mine...
It was back in the late 80s, when I was in college. I had a job with this little shop that sold mailorder sports handicapping software - for horse racing, football, basketball, baseball, etc. We ran on the PC, Mac, C64 and whatever the contemporaneous Atari was. Everything was written in BASIC (but no, it was *not* cross-platform).
Working on the C64 was definitely the most fun (fun being iterpreted rather arbitrarily) - I was used to working in C on a PS/2 model 50, and I really enjoyed the challenges in making everything fit on one side of a floppy. As I recall:
* no comments (obviously)
* no variables longer than 2 characters
* lots of code likebecause every line number cost a couple of bytes.
* the sprite code was *cool*
* other things I've blissfully blocked out
I got to play a little with programming the floppy drive (although most of that code had already been written). I seem to remember hosing a number of disks with bugs I'd introduced.
The Atari, for some reason, was not that interesting to work on. The Mac version was all written in RealBasic (???), which was actually a pretty capable platform. I especially enjoyed writing the copy protection routines in BASIC. The PC had the nicest working environment, especially after we got the bigass huge *20MB* hard drive and the edit-compile-link cycle went down to 5 minutes or so.
Although I was a serf, it was a pretty cool gig. Part of my job was testing the horse racing systems by running the algorithm against reams of old Racing Forms - at the time, I was really good at reading those damn charts and scores. The two guys who ran the place were old-time gambler/horse racing/handicapping types who had lots of great old war stories. One interesting thing I learned: the trotters (horses that pull the carts and are not allowed to go over a fixed pace) are considered to be pretty much completely corrupt, due to the ease with which a race can be thrown (a horse will be disqualified for breaking pace, it's really easy to get yourself blocked in).
Hey you signature has BUG in it.
if(read(this)) you==programmer;
Original version has slight mistake. It has assigment operation that is incorrect.
Actually, assuming POSIX semantics, this should be:
if (read(this) > 0) you==programmer;
since read() returns -1 on error...
Right then. Back to the previous topic:
So, what I want to know is if it's cheaper than my current apartment, and if utilities are included
Yep, the utilities are included, but the plumbing tends to leak a lot for the first couple years.
Yeah, and the neighbors are really loud, and always poking their heads in.
It should be configurable, preferably with an XML file and an arcane UI. If I want my Axim to crash after 12 minutes, I should be able to.
It's all about choice, dammit!