This is a mistake many programmers (like Mr. Henderson) make. Human languages are not like programming languages, where there's a compiler that either accepts it or doesn't. There are no rulebooks for English, and many (if not most) of the supposed "rules" you may have been taught actually have more exceptions than exemplars. The only real rule is that your target audience understands you without being distracted by your weird way of saying it.
So I'm sorry, but pretty much any change that requires reference to some supposed authorities, comes as a surprise to most long-term practitioners, and requires scripts to keep track of all the hundreds of occurrences of it happening daily, is in fact in clearly in common usage, and is by definition, correct English.
Many writers use this phrase to aggrandize a sentence -- to intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated. In these, a simple "of", "is", or "have" often produces an easier to read sentence. (Example: "a team comprised of scientists" versus "a team of scientists").
He's dead on there. If you are just using the phrase (or any other rhetorical flourish) to pad out a sentence, please stop.
They are only mostly in circulation. Pretty much all retailers have some place at checkout to stick your unwanted pennies, and most people won't even bother to bend over to pick one up off the ground any more. Some people have been known to throw them in the nearest trash can. I tend to solve the problem by using my bank card for all purchases.
I think the basic problem is that getting rid of them would require an act of Congress. That's a place filled with old guys who fondly remember using pennies to pay for bottled cokes back in the '50's.
I can somewhat vouch for this. I went to Holland on a spur of the moment business trip last summer. While pretty much everyone there takes credit cards, they all have to be chipped. Of course with 1 day notice for the trip, I didn't have time to acquire such a card. My only salvation was that some of the currency-exchanging bank ATMs (particularly in the train stations) would take my magstripe Visa bank debit card.
As an aside, I was also pretty startled by the amount of English knowledge there. I think I was hampered by knowing only English in exactly 2 places the whole month. I even had a train station panhandler switch right to English when I tried to fob him off because I didn't understand his pitch. I was tempted to say "No Habla Englez", but he probably knew Spanish too.:-(
You def have no idea at all. Look at Finland, and THEN say cutting expenses is not the way to go.
Interesting. I took you up on that challenge, and even a simple Googling of Finland Recession tells me Austerity has been a nightmare for them.
Hit 1 title: "Finland: Double-Dip Recession or Depression?"
Hit 2 title: "Finland's Economy is headed for a 'perfect storm'"
Hit 3 title: "Finland Economy falls back into recession", digest: "Finland entered its third recession in six years, preliminary data showed, as government efforts to halt debt growth collided with the longest..."
My personal favorite, the title of hit 7: "Pro-austerity Finland falls into triple-dip recession"
...and its not like it was a secret this was going on at the time, and only coming out now. Everyone knew these countries were lying, and still let them in with a wink and a nod (unless of course that country happened to be majority Muslim, in which case the rules were applied stringently, but that's another rant for another day). So countries like Germany do not really have a right to act "Shocked, Shocked!" about it now when its convenient for them to do so.
The only thing particularly special about Greece is that they happen to be the weakest member, so all the crap gets dumped on them first.
And about the USA, you see, they are one country. The EU isn't. As such, germany can give money to greeks, but it can't tell them how to spend it.
Exactly. That's why I said their current middle ground isn't working. The United States started out in that same wishy-washy decentralized manner with the Articles of Confederation. After about 12 years it was clear to everyone that it wasn't working, and the Constitution was written which created a stronger central authority. The EU is most likely eventually going to have to either go that direction, or disband.
Because its interesting? The Prime Minister is Atheist as well, and refused to take a ceremonial diety-based oath. This is apparently a first in Greece since the war ended (if not ever).
I'm Christian myself, but I'm strongly for religious freedom, and I find it interesting. In an ideal world this wouldn't be big news, but it is to Greeks, so it is. That's what progress looks like.
That's why a large part of his job is going to be negotiating with the EU.
He's absolutely right too. When all those little countries gave up their own currencies, they also gave up control of their own monetary policy. That means it has to be run from the EU, or its not being run at all. Its like everyone jumping on a big ship with nobody at the rudder, trusting in its own sheer size to keep everyone safe. That might not be a problem while everything's going great, but if there are reefs or an iceberg ahead, and nobody is trying to steer things, all kinds of nasty disasters become likely.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.
Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.
It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi.
One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.
If it means you have a bunch of options and settings that are only accessible from this hidden menu which you have no indication on the screen whether or not it exists, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.
Oh! Is that what they are calling the "charms bar"? Dayum, I seriously dislike that thing. I typically want to reboot my machine only when something I'm having trouble killing is making it sluggish. In that scenario, it would seriously take some impressive creativity to come up with an interface for doing that which is worse than how Windows 8 does it. If the little magic window doesn't come up, is it because my system is sluggish, or because I don't have the mouse in the right place? If I do manage to get it up, where exactly is that reboot control that I hardly ever need to use? Surfing through 3 touchy magic sidebar menus on a system that gives you only a few cycles a second is ridiculously frustrating. Particularly with the computer's reset button just sitting there on the case taunting you the whole time...
If that is going goodbye, I hope they remember to burn the corpse so that it can't rise from the grave.
OTOH, most of the rest of these complaints about Windows 8, I can't get behind. The "start menu" scheme of previous versions had gotten so unwieldy as to be useless. Everyone just used start-menu search tools anyway, so it makes perfect sense to redesign program starting around that interface. Just hitting the window key and typing a program name is the way it should be. I really appreciate the bigger icons on the Windows 8 "start screen" that autoupdates as I type in the search menu. I kinda hope they ignore the whiners and keep that (or at least give me something as good).
lol. Of all the "yeah but" comments I got, this is my favorite.
I still have 2 issues here though. 1: That's gonna be a pretty small minority of Slashdot readers (barring disaster). and more importantly 2: You left off the "that we know of". There are far more such objects out there that we don't know about than ones that we do. Admittedly, that's an unimportant distinction if you need a lot of advanced notice to see it. However, we discover more all the time (perhaps every day), and 12 years is a pretty large amount of days. This one, as the name implies, was only discovered 10 years ago. So if you'd tried to make such a statement 12 years ago in 2003 about the next chance to see one, you would have predicted wrong.
Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.
Pascal, the base language created by Niklaus Wirth, was a nice little strongly-typed toy language. I say "toy" for a very good reason: it had no standard way to modularize. In theory, you'd have to write every program all in one source file! There was also no way around the type system, which is good for purity, but makes low-level systems programming impossible (try doing a CRC on record including floats when you can't convert it to bytes!)
They released a new standard in 1990, which I understand did not correct these flaws. There was a further standard released in the same year called "Extended Pascal" which did. However, there are only a few compilers that just use that standard with no extensions.
That's the important thing here. When you see someone saying how great "Pascal" is, they are invariably not talking about Pascal. They are talking about Delphi or they are talking about Object Pascal. While those are both great languages, they are also both different languages. A typical Delphi program cannot be built with an Object Pascal compiler, nor with a standard Pascal compiler. Calling them "Pascal" is about as accurate as throwing Ada on the list, and calling them all "Algol".
So the real answer here is, No. Pascal is not underrated. Those languages Delphi and Object Pascal might be, but Pascal is not.
For an experienced programmer, C wins. Words like 'begin' and 'end' look too similar to
35 years of experience here (about half of it programming professionally in curly-bracket languages), and I'm sorry, but C-ish languages are much harder to read.
I actually came here to comment against Pascal, but this is decidedly not one of its (many) failings.
Enjoy using a mouse with a bunch of cables attached to it. Not so ergonomic, you see...
The Slashdot is strong with this one. Its amazing how stupid you can make this out to be, when you don't bother RTFA.
"You see", there's actually only one cable (the video cable), and there's an option to make that wireless too and have a totally wireless mouse/computer. It gets its power either through a flywheel in the mouse (using it keeps it charged), or though inductive charging from its mouse pad.
Now I don't know how practical or useful it will end up being. But as an exercise in hacking, its pretty darn neat.
The Gal Civ series is part of a long-existing genre of space-based 4x games. We even had them back in the day when we used ASCII characters for the graphics (stars of course represented by asterisks), and the games were typed in by hand from BASIC source code in books.
The same goes for Civilization of course. At its heart, that series is just a re-imaging of classic Empire. The trick is what new things can be done with the genre, and can it be made more fun. Sid's got a good track record with that, so it will be interesting to see what he does here.
Tulsa, Oklahoma. Admittedly, we live in the richest zip code in the state. We got a great deal on the house, and the suburban school district is supposedly awesome. But that of course means there aren't a lot of kids around the neighborhood, and helicopter parenting is expected.
If I had it to do over again, I think it would have been a lot smarter to find a poorer neighborhood (perhaps in the local district of the city's best magnet school) where people are used to mundane things like children playing outside.
I had my daughter brought home in a police cruiser no less than 3 times when she was between the ages of 6 and 8, simply for playing outside unsupervised in broad daylight. (Admittedly, she was small for her age). After the third time we got a visit from child protective services, which basically ended with us being instructed to buy a key operated deadbolt to lock her in the house so she couldn't escape.
...advice that was promptly ignored. That's a serious safety issue in a fire, which is frankly far more likely of a disaster. When I was a kid we were told we should have household fire escape drills, and now I'm being told to lock em in so they can't "escape" to play outside? What a f'ed up time we live in.
I'm really impressed that even the frigging Pope is taking grief for simply trying to point out the uncomfortable facts here.
Nobody should be murdering cartoonists, no matter how racist or disgusting their cartoons are.
The cartoons in question were absolutely racist and disgusting.
There's no reason these two facts can't be simultaneously true. And just as the first act should not be perpetrated, neither should the second. Not by a caring moral human being. We even have laws against hate speech in the USA.
When I was a kid I remember seeing a "soapbox preacher" downtown, who was basically berating passerby whilst holding a Bible. Calling passing women whores, etc. It would be totally wrong for someone to beat the crap out of him. But would I be surprised if someone flew into a rage and did that when their daughter/wife/mom just got called a whore? Not in the slightest.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a mistake many programmers (like Mr. Henderson) make. Human languages are not like programming languages, where there's a compiler that either accepts it or doesn't. There are no rulebooks for English, and many (if not most) of the supposed "rules" you may have been taught actually have more exceptions than exemplars. The only real rule is that your target audience understands you without being distracted by your weird way of saying it.
So I'm sorry, but pretty much any change that requires reference to some supposed authorities, comes as a surprise to most long-term practitioners, and requires scripts to keep track of all the hundreds of occurrences of it happening daily, is in fact in clearly in common usage, and is by definition, correct English.
In the interest of fairness, here's Giraffedata's argument against "comprised of". He also makes one point I wholeheartedly agree with:
Many writers use this phrase to aggrandize a sentence -- to intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated. In these, a simple "of", "is", or "have" often produces an easier to read sentence. (Example: "a team comprised of scientists" versus "a team of scientists").
He's dead on there. If you are just using the phrase (or any other rhetorical flourish) to pad out a sentence, please stop.
Blacks are allowed to own guns too.
Are they really? It sure doesn't look like it.
They are only mostly in circulation. Pretty much all retailers have some place at checkout to stick your unwanted pennies, and most people won't even bother to bend over to pick one up off the ground any more. Some people have been known to throw them in the nearest trash can. I tend to solve the problem by using my bank card for all purchases.
I think the basic problem is that getting rid of them would require an act of Congress. That's a place filled with old guys who fondly remember using pennies to pay for bottled cokes back in the '50's.
I can somewhat vouch for this. I went to Holland on a spur of the moment business trip last summer. While pretty much everyone there takes credit cards, they all have to be chipped. Of course with 1 day notice for the trip, I didn't have time to acquire such a card. My only salvation was that some of the currency-exchanging bank ATMs (particularly in the train stations) would take my magstripe Visa bank debit card.
As an aside, I was also pretty startled by the amount of English knowledge there. I think I was hampered by knowing only English in exactly 2 places the whole month. I even had a train station panhandler switch right to English when I tried to fob him off because I didn't understand his pitch. I was tempted to say "No Habla Englez", but he probably knew Spanish too. :-(
The good news is, on X11 platforms, anyone can write their own lock screen program.
The bad news is, on X11 platforms, anyone can write their own lock screen program.
You def have no idea at all. Look at Finland, and THEN say cutting expenses is not the way to go.
Interesting. I took you up on that challenge, and even a simple Googling of Finland Recession tells me Austerity has been a nightmare for them.
Hit 1 title: "Finland: Double-Dip Recession or Depression?"
Hit 2 title: "Finland's Economy is headed for a 'perfect storm'"
Hit 3 title: "Finland Economy falls back into recession", digest: "Finland entered its third recession in six years, preliminary data showed, as government efforts to halt debt growth collided with the longest ..."
My personal favorite, the title of hit 7: "Pro-austerity Finland falls into triple-dip recession"
Yeah. Gotta get me some of that in my country!
...and its not like it was a secret this was going on at the time, and only coming out now. Everyone knew these countries were lying, and still let them in with a wink and a nod (unless of course that country happened to be majority Muslim, in which case the rules were applied stringently, but that's another rant for another day). So countries like Germany do not really have a right to act "Shocked, Shocked!" about it now when its convenient for them to do so.
The only thing particularly special about Greece is that they happen to be the weakest member, so all the crap gets dumped on them first.
And about the USA, you see, they are one country. The EU isn't. As such, germany can give money to greeks, but it can't tell them how to spend it.
Exactly. That's why I said their current middle ground isn't working. The United States started out in that same wishy-washy decentralized manner with the Articles of Confederation. After about 12 years it was clear to everyone that it wasn't working, and the Constitution was written which created a stronger central authority. The EU is most likely eventually going to have to either go that direction, or disband.
Because its interesting? The Prime Minister is Atheist as well, and refused to take a ceremonial diety-based oath. This is apparently a first in Greece since the war ended (if not ever).
I'm Christian myself, but I'm strongly for religious freedom, and I find it interesting. In an ideal world this wouldn't be big news, but it is to Greeks, so it is. That's what progress looks like.
That's why a large part of his job is going to be negotiating with the EU.
He's absolutely right too. When all those little countries gave up their own currencies, they also gave up control of their own monetary policy. That means it has to be run from the EU, or its not being run at all. Its like everyone jumping on a big ship with nobody at the rudder, trusting in its own sheer size to keep everyone safe. That might not be a problem while everything's going great, but if there are reefs or an iceberg ahead, and nobody is trying to steer things, all kinds of nasty disasters become likely.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited
Austerity for an entire government simply sucks. Cutting expenses is a great idea for an individual, but for a government that's more like trying to balance your checkbook by taking a lower-paying job close to home (Hey! Gasoline expenses are way down!). Or more accurately, a company trying to balance its ledger by selling less products. Adherence to this idea is why Europe is still deep in recession while China and the USA have been back to economic growth (and in the USA's case, falling real dollar deficits) for over a year now. If it needs to do so, a government should cut expenses during a recovery, not during a recession.
Greece has some systemic problems that helped get them into this mess (eg: tax cheating is practically a national sport). But when faced with a recession they have 2 basic problems. The first is that they aren't AAA borrowers like the USA, so their government can't just borrow money at will. If they want to borrow large sums, they have to cajole it out of someone (like the EU). The second is that they are shackled to the Euro, which means all the monetary policy options that the US relied on to pull itself out are not available to Greece. That means leaving the EU, or borrowing more money from it, are really their only 2 options.
It would really behoove the EU to develop some analog to the US's Fed to run their monetary policy. The problem is everything there seems to run on consensus, and I simply don't see how that's possible when you have such divergent members. They'd have to get themselves a semi-independent policy board, like the US has, or unify all their national budgets and expect to have to regularly pour EU tax dollars into poorer members, like the US does every year with Mississippi.
One thing is pretty clear though. The current middle ground the EU is trying to run just isn't working.
If it means you have a bunch of options and settings that are only accessible from this hidden menu which you have no indication on the screen whether or not it exists, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.
Oh! Is that what they are calling the "charms bar"? Dayum, I seriously dislike that thing. I typically want to reboot my machine only when something I'm having trouble killing is making it sluggish. In that scenario, it would seriously take some impressive creativity to come up with an interface for doing that which is worse than how Windows 8 does it. If the little magic window doesn't come up, is it because my system is sluggish, or because I don't have the mouse in the right place? If I do manage to get it up, where exactly is that reboot control that I hardly ever need to use? Surfing through 3 touchy magic sidebar menus on a system that gives you only a few cycles a second is ridiculously frustrating. Particularly with the computer's reset button just sitting there on the case taunting you the whole time...
If that is going goodbye, I hope they remember to burn the corpse so that it can't rise from the grave.
OTOH, most of the rest of these complaints about Windows 8, I can't get behind. The "start menu" scheme of previous versions had gotten so unwieldy as to be useless. Everyone just used start-menu search tools anyway, so it makes perfect sense to redesign program starting around that interface. Just hitting the window key and typing a program name is the way it should be. I really appreciate the bigger icons on the Windows 8 "start screen" that autoupdates as I type in the search menu. I kinda hope they ignore the whiners and keep that (or at least give me something as good).
lol. Of all the "yeah but" comments I got, this is my favorite.
I still have 2 issues here though. 1: That's gonna be a pretty small minority of Slashdot readers (barring disaster). and more importantly 2: You left off the "that we know of". There are far more such objects out there that we don't know about than ones that we do. Admittedly, that's an unimportant distinction if you need a lot of advanced notice to see it. However, we discover more all the time (perhaps every day), and 12 years is a pretty large amount of days. This one, as the name implies, was only discovered 10 years ago. So if you'd tried to make such a statement 12 years ago in 2003 about the next chance to see one, you would have predicted wrong.
Sort of. Haley's comet only comes around every 75 years, so for most of us that's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
However, there are oodles of asteroids and comets out there, so in general you will have plenty of opportunities in your lifetime to see some. So feel free to get some sleep tonight if you need to.
Pascal, the base language created by Niklaus Wirth, was a nice little strongly-typed toy language. I say "toy" for a very good reason: it had no standard way to modularize. In theory, you'd have to write every program all in one source file! There was also no way around the type system, which is good for purity, but makes low-level systems programming impossible (try doing a CRC on record including floats when you can't convert it to bytes!)
They released a new standard in 1990, which I understand did not correct these flaws. There was a further standard released in the same year called "Extended Pascal" which did. However, there are only a few compilers that just use that standard with no extensions.
That's the important thing here. When you see someone saying how great "Pascal" is, they are invariably not talking about Pascal. They are talking about Delphi or they are talking about Object Pascal. While those are both great languages, they are also both different languages. A typical Delphi program cannot be built with an Object Pascal compiler, nor with a standard Pascal compiler. Calling them "Pascal" is about as accurate as throwing Ada on the list, and calling them all "Algol".
So the real answer here is, No. Pascal is not underrated. Those languages Delphi and Object Pascal might be, but Pascal is not.
On an instruction cycle basis, there are orders of magnitude more C code executing
This comment was very difficult to read, as you kept leaving off the "OBOL".
But that's not Pascal, that's Delphi. That would be like someone saying the same about C++, and me countering with C#.
For an experienced programmer, C wins. Words like 'begin' and 'end' look too similar to
35 years of experience here (about half of it programming professionally in curly-bracket languages), and I'm sorry, but C-ish languages are much harder to read.
I actually came here to comment against Pascal, but this is decidedly not one of its (many) failings.
...the Slashdot is clearly very strong with me too, as I didn't bother reading what you were replying to. :-)
Enjoy using a mouse with a bunch of cables attached to it. Not so ergonomic, you see...
The Slashdot is strong with this one. Its amazing how stupid you can make this out to be, when you don't bother RTFA.
"You see", there's actually only one cable (the video cable), and there's an option to make that wireless too and have a totally wireless mouse/computer. It gets its power either through a flywheel in the mouse (using it keeps it charged), or though inductive charging from its mouse pad.
Now I don't know how practical or useful it will end up being. But as an exercise in hacking, its pretty darn neat.
Hopefully he skips the rootkit "copyright protection" scheme too.
The Gal Civ series is part of a long-existing genre of space-based 4x games. We even had them back in the day when we used ASCII characters for the graphics (stars of course represented by asterisks), and the games were typed in by hand from BASIC source code in books.
The same goes for Civilization of course. At its heart, that series is just a re-imaging of classic Empire. The trick is what new things can be done with the genre, and can it be made more fun. Sid's got a good track record with that, so it will be interesting to see what he does here.
Tulsa, Oklahoma. Admittedly, we live in the richest zip code in the state. We got a great deal on the house, and the suburban school district is supposedly awesome. But that of course means there aren't a lot of kids around the neighborhood, and helicopter parenting is expected.
If I had it to do over again, I think it would have been a lot smarter to find a poorer neighborhood (perhaps in the local district of the city's best magnet school) where people are used to mundane things like children playing outside.
I had my daughter brought home in a police cruiser no less than 3 times when she was between the ages of 6 and 8, simply for playing outside unsupervised in broad daylight. (Admittedly, she was small for her age). After the third time we got a visit from child protective services, which basically ended with us being instructed to buy a key operated deadbolt to lock her in the house so she couldn't escape.
...advice that was promptly ignored. That's a serious safety issue in a fire, which is frankly far more likely of a disaster. When I was a kid we were told we should have household fire escape drills, and now I'm being told to lock em in so they can't "escape" to play outside? What a f'ed up time we live in.
I'm really impressed that even the frigging Pope is taking grief for simply trying to point out the uncomfortable facts here.
There's no reason these two facts can't be simultaneously true. And just as the first act should not be perpetrated, neither should the second. Not by a caring moral human being. We even have laws against hate speech in the USA.
When I was a kid I remember seeing a "soapbox preacher" downtown, who was basically berating passerby whilst holding a Bible. Calling passing women whores, etc. It would be totally wrong for someone to beat the crap out of him. But would I be surprised if someone flew into a rage and did that when their daughter/wife/mom just got called a whore? Not in the slightest.