Old English had stopped being spoken about 200 years before Chaucer.
Make that 300 years. Old English is generally defined as 600-1100 AD. Chaucer's writings are circa 1380-1400.
You're right about the "harder to read", but only to a certain extent. Northern texts of the same era as Chaucer, such as the works of the Pearl poet (no, not that Perl!), are also pretty hard to read.
Chaucer's English is fairly familiar to us because it's the London dialect that went on to form the basis of modern English. It also helps that most editions of Chaucer modernise his spelling to a considerable extent...
As others have pointed out, there was no standardisation of English spelling in the fourteenth century. On top of that, I don't think you realise that these books were copied out by hand. On very expensive parchment. By people who didn't have any concept of "correct" spelling anyway.
On your computer, if you make a typo you can delete it and try again, and when you've finished writing it you can run a spellcheck. Even if you're writing a sci-fi novel with We'ird'naMes in it, you can do a search/replace to make sure you've got those consistent.
On parchment, if you spell something wrong, you leave it spelt wrong. If you accidentally write the wrong word, chances are you leave that, too. You literally cannot afford to make a "perfect" copy.
Plus, in this case, you're a hack writing something for his nephew in his spare time. You aren't going to waste time proofreading if that's not a part of your culture.
Any moron can administer a Windows box. Why? Because Windows doesn't give you control over anything.
That, on the other hand, is entirely BS. Windows gives fine-grained control over most behaviour. Any moron can administer Windows, sure, but in my experience it's very easy to tell whether a given Windows network is administered by a moron or not.
Please restrict your comments to subjects you actually have knowledge of.
The coding standards say that initial letters are capitalized for all words except the first. If you know that rule, there is nothing to remember for each function name. Unless of course, you're not following the coding standard, but I imagine that you are since your gripe is with that standard.
Great.
So tell me - should the word for the name of a file be capitalised as Filename or FileName?
Answer - it depends on the function!
Both forms appear in the Java standard library (java.io.FilenameFilter, java.net.FileNameMap). I guess coding standards don't make things quite as simple as you like to believe.
How about a heater, guess we should leave that out, it's not a necessity to the car.
Was that meant to be sarcasm? Whoops, you lose. I can only conclude that you've never seen a Caterham 7 - for which the heater is indeed an optional extra.
Ah, but back when I was a lad we didn't have machines to do it for us - we had to catch viruses ourselves by coming into physical contact with infected tissue.
There was a guy that applied for a programming job. He wrote on his resume that he knew C++ and C since he heard about those classes in college. So naturally he figured that there must also be C+ language and wrote it into his resume. The HR looked at his resume and lo and behold.. he was hired.
I've seen recruitment ads that demanded experience with "C+". It's worse than the ones that want 10 years experience with Windows XP...
I think inflexable is the postfixed form of inflex (ie inflexion)... to conjugate for cases, plurality, etc. inflexable means: able to inflex so it might be a correctly spelled word.
Except that there is no verb "to inflex": you're thinking of "inflect". Now, "inflexable" might well be an accepted variant of the standard "inflectable", in the same way that "connexion" is an accepted variant of "connection". But it's not one I've ever seen. (Come to that, I don't think I've ever seen "inflectable" in the wild, and I studied linguistics.)
I do not like variant types, the ByVal/ByRef seems too subtle for my liking...
Don't like Variant types? I hope you don't use perl or any other dynamically typed language, then, because that's the same thing.
The ByVal/ByRef distinction is too subtle? I sure hope you don't use C++, then, because you'd never cope with the difference between int foo (int bar) and int foo (int& bar).
So you obviously don't use perl (or Python, Ruby, or Java) or C++ (or C - pointers are too like ByRef arguments), and you can't stand VB... what language do you program in?
Canadians, Brazillians, Mexicans, and even Jamaicans and Cubans are American without being citizens of the USA, while Hawaiians are citizens of the USA without being American. Therefore we need a word other than "American" to describe citizens of the USA. And we don't feel very comfortably using "Yank" in case you're from the Southern states.
When scanning code in a case insensitive language, you will have to keep an eye out for multiple possible representations of the word. With case sensitivity there will be a uniform representation I can more easily spot when scanning code.
Not in a language like Java, which permits Unicode identifiers. In Java, it's possible to have two identifiers Area and Area - did you notice that the second one begins with a Greek alpha character?
(Well, okay, it doesn't because this is Slashdot, but it would in Java.)
The info pages are about as much use as a handbrake on a canoe.
Now you're trolling. Some info pages - bash springs to mind - are very bad, but others - like those for GCC and GNU make - are very useful.
I'm very surprised that the info page writers ignored the 'those who seek to re-invent the wheel are doomed to do so badly' adage.
Which wheel do you have in mind?
Man? Nope, even the worst info page is superior to its man equivalent, on account of, eg, having little features like cross-referencing and splitting it up into multiple pages so you don't have to press PageDown 500 times to get to the bit you're interested in.
HTML? Nope, texinfo was invented before HTML.
Do enlighten us - what is this perfect documentation format you have in mind (that existed before texinfo)?
No, GNU info doesn't, and pinfo thought gdb was short for gdbm.
WFM (pinfo 0.6.7).
I've noticed in the past that GNU info and pinfo handle $INFOPATH and directory files slightly differently, so maybe your problem is connected with that.
Take for instance the Unicode standard. It's an open standard, and quite important for internationalisation in our digital age, but you'll pay $74 to get it.
Or just download the free PDFs from the Unicode Consortium's website. You aren't permitted to print them, but I for one can cope with missing out on the dead tree format.
The whole notion of putting a message in a man page to the effect that it's just a placeholder and the user really ought to be using info if they want to find what they are looking for is basically akin to telling users to go fuck themselves. At least it sure feels that way when you're trying to get help from the machine...
To you, maybe. To me it seems perfectly reasonable. I use "foo --help" if I want a list of command-line options, "man foo" if I want a summary of what foo does and basic descriptions of those options, and "info foo" if I want the full manual.
Add in a few whiny, clueless geek justifications for this user-hostile behavior and Linux folks certainly send many a user scampering back to Microsoft, with good reason.
Was that whiny and clueless? I hope not. Because I went scampering back to Microsoft a long time ago, and I *still* use man and info all the time...
Nintendo is the company that claims that emulation is illegal.
Not that pirating ROMs is illegal - not even that copying ROMs that you own is illegal - they claim that emulation is illegal, in and of itself. Even emulating a SNES to play a public domain SNES game you wrote yourself is illegal, according to Nintendo.
Do you seriously think this company is going to look favorably on people hacking their flagship system? I admire your optimism.
Our EULA specifically forbids using our software for the purposes of identifying users for legal action. Also, specific companies and known agents of RIAA/MPAA are explicitly barred from usage of our software.
(IANAL.)
So, like, what you're saying in that license is "This software has been designed to aid copyright violations, and we are perfectly aware that most of its users are doing that." The RIAA doesn't need to use it - if they want to shut you down, they will show that license to the Feds, who will interpret it as you confessing to a crime.
It's like a sign saying "Beware of the dog". All that means is that if your dog bites someone, their lawyers will say that you are 100% liable because you knew the dog was dangerous.
Or maybe you're one of those people who are actually impressed by those click-through screens on warez sites that claim that law enforcement agents aren't allowed to visit the site to determine whether a crime is being committed? All those screens are doing is admitting that a crime IS being committed, and that's all an officer needs to get a warrant.
What I really appreciate (thanks, KoTOR) are games that let you change the difficulty level at any time.
Somebody mod this guy up - this is the first comment I've seen here that I agree with 100%.
Let me play on "medium", but give me the option of switching temporarily to "easy" if I run into trouble.
Note that - give me the option. I don't want the game to dumb itself down; sometimes I actually want to try and get through a tough bit by myself. Other times I want a walk through the park. But I should be the one choosing, not the game.
Slashdot Mirror
You think you're joking...
I quote:
And beyond the poor editing, how is this news? The treatise is included in all of the most widely used compilations of his complete works.
Quite.
Now, if someone had managed to prove beyond doubt that the Equatorie of the Planetis was Chaucer's, that would be news. But not for nerds, I guess...
Old English had stopped being spoken about 200 years before Chaucer.
Make that 300 years. Old English is generally defined as 600-1100 AD. Chaucer's writings are circa 1380-1400.
You're right about the "harder to read", but only to a certain extent. Northern texts of the same era as Chaucer, such as the works of the Pearl poet (no, not that Perl!), are also pretty hard to read.
Chaucer's English is fairly familiar to us because it's the London dialect that went on to form the basis of modern English. It also helps that most editions of Chaucer modernise his spelling to a considerable extent...
As others have pointed out, there was no standardisation of English spelling in the fourteenth century. On top of that, I don't think you realise that these books were copied out by hand. On very expensive parchment. By people who didn't have any concept of "correct" spelling anyway.
On your computer, if you make a typo you can delete it and try again, and when you've finished writing it you can run a spellcheck. Even if you're writing a sci-fi novel with We'ird'naMes in it, you can do a search/replace to make sure you've got those consistent.
On parchment, if you spell something wrong, you leave it spelt wrong. If you accidentally write the wrong word, chances are you leave that, too. You literally cannot afford to make a "perfect" copy.
Plus, in this case, you're a hack writing something for his nephew in his spare time. You aren't going to waste time proofreading if that's not a part of your culture.
Any moron can administer a Windows box. Why? Because Windows doesn't give you control over anything.
That, on the other hand, is entirely BS. Windows gives fine-grained control over most behaviour. Any moron can administer Windows, sure, but in my experience it's very easy to tell whether a given Windows network is administered by a moron or not.
Please restrict your comments to subjects you actually have knowledge of.
WFM. Are you sure you're using the latest Adblock extension in Firebird?
The coding standards say that initial letters are capitalized for all words except the first. If you know that rule, there is nothing to remember for each function name. Unless of course, you're not following the coding standard, but I imagine that you are since your gripe is with that standard.
Great.
So tell me - should the word for the name of a file be capitalised as Filename or FileName?
Answer - it depends on the function!
Both forms appear in the Java standard library (java.io.FilenameFilter, java.net.FileNameMap). I guess coding standards don't make things quite as simple as you like to believe.
How about a heater, guess we should leave that out, it's not a necessity to the car.
Was that meant to be sarcasm? Whoops, you lose. I can only conclude that you've never seen a Caterham 7 - for which the heater is indeed an optional extra.
Or rather don't, because you'll slow your own system to a crawl too. Not to mention it being a naughty thing to do.
Ah, but back when I was a lad we didn't have machines to do it for us - we had to catch viruses ourselves by coming into physical contact with infected tissue.
There was a guy that applied for a programming job. He wrote on his resume that he knew C++ and C since he heard about those classes in college. So naturally he figured that there must also be C+ language and wrote it into his resume. The HR looked at his resume and lo and behold .. he was hired.
I've seen recruitment ads that demanded experience with "C+". It's worse than the ones that want 10 years experience with Windows XP...
I think inflexable is the postfixed form of inflex (ie inflexion) ... to conjugate for cases, plurality, etc. inflexable means: able to inflex so it might be a correctly spelled word.
Except that there is no verb "to inflex": you're thinking of "inflect". Now, "inflexable" might well be an accepted variant of the standard "inflectable", in the same way that "connexion" is an accepted variant of "connection". But it's not one I've ever seen. (Come to that, I don't think I've ever seen "inflectable" in the wild, and I studied linguistics.)
I do not like variant types, the ByVal/ByRef seems too subtle for my liking...
Don't like Variant types? I hope you don't use perl or any other dynamically typed language, then, because that's the same thing.
The ByVal/ByRef distinction is too subtle? I sure hope you don't use C++, then, because you'd never cope with the difference between int foo (int bar) and int foo (int& bar).
So you obviously don't use perl (or Python, Ruby, or Java) or C++ (or C - pointers are too like ByRef arguments), and you can't stand VB... what language do you program in?
Canadians, Brazillians, Mexicans, and even Jamaicans and Cubans are American without being citizens of the USA, while Hawaiians are citizens of the USA without being American. Therefore we need a word other than "American" to describe citizens of the USA. And we don't feel very comfortably using "Yank" in case you're from the Southern states.
When scanning code in a case insensitive language, you will have to keep an eye out for multiple possible representations of the word. With case sensitivity there will be a uniform representation I can more easily spot when scanning code.
Not in a language like Java, which permits Unicode identifiers. In Java, it's possible to have two identifiers Area and Area - did you notice that the second one begins with a Greek alpha character?
(Well, okay, it doesn't because this is Slashdot, but it would in Java.)
.tar.bz2.asc ...uses less disk space/bandwidth than RAR files.
Um, no. For all the files I've ever archived, RAR ends up about 5-8% smaller than tar + bzip2.
Bzip2's advantage that it's free and open (and compresses better than the archaic zip and gzip). It does not compress better than RAR.
If you want to champion a free compression tool, I suggest 7-zip, which does often do better than RAR, but has a rather pathetically small user base.
All the bugs of windows, and the Linux User Interface.
Or you could look at it the other way - all the power of the Linux command-line, and Windows games without rebooting.
(Yeah, Cygwin gives you a lot of that. But this is still cool.)
Note also that they're porting this to OSes other than Windows...
At least you guys don't get never-ending rehashes of BSOD jokes.
No - they get never-ending rehashes of BSD jokes instead.
The info pages are about as much use as a handbrake on a canoe.
Now you're trolling. Some info pages - bash springs to mind - are very bad, but others - like those for GCC and GNU make - are very useful.
I'm very surprised that the info page writers ignored the 'those who seek to re-invent the wheel are doomed to do so badly' adage.
Which wheel do you have in mind?
Man? Nope, even the worst info page is superior to its man equivalent, on account of, eg, having little features like cross-referencing and splitting it up into multiple pages so you don't have to press PageDown 500 times to get to the bit you're interested in.
HTML? Nope, texinfo was invented before HTML.
Do enlighten us - what is this perfect documentation format you have in mind (that existed before texinfo)?
No, GNU info doesn't, and pinfo thought gdb was short for gdbm.
WFM (pinfo 0.6.7).
I've noticed in the past that GNU info and pinfo handle $INFOPATH and directory files slightly differently, so maybe your problem is connected with that.
Take for instance the Unicode standard. It's an open standard, and quite important for internationalisation in our digital age, but you'll pay $74 to get it.
Or just download the free PDFs from the Unicode Consortium's website. You aren't permitted to print them, but I for one can cope with missing out on the dead tree format.
The whole notion of putting a message in a man page to the effect that it's just a placeholder and the user really ought to be using info if they want to find what they are looking for is basically akin to telling users to go fuck themselves. At least it sure feels that way when you're trying to get help from the machine...
To you, maybe. To me it seems perfectly reasonable. I use "foo --help" if I want a list of command-line options, "man foo" if I want a summary of what foo does and basic descriptions of those options, and "info foo" if I want the full manual.
Add in a few whiny, clueless geek justifications for this user-hostile behavior and Linux folks certainly send many a user scampering back to Microsoft, with good reason.
Was that whiny and clueless? I hope not. Because I went scampering back to Microsoft a long time ago, and I *still* use man and info all the time...
Nintendo is the company that claims that emulation is illegal.
Not that pirating ROMs is illegal - not even that copying ROMs that you own is illegal - they claim that emulation is illegal, in and of itself. Even emulating a SNES to play a public domain SNES game you wrote yourself is illegal, according to Nintendo.
Do you seriously think this company is going to look favorably on people hacking their flagship system? I admire your optimism.
Our EULA specifically forbids using our software for the purposes of identifying users for legal action. Also, specific companies and known agents of RIAA/MPAA are explicitly barred from usage of our software.
(IANAL.)
So, like, what you're saying in that license is "This software has been designed to aid copyright violations, and we are perfectly aware that most of its users are doing that." The RIAA doesn't need to use it - if they want to shut you down, they will show that license to the Feds, who will interpret it as you confessing to a crime.
It's like a sign saying "Beware of the dog". All that means is that if your dog bites someone, their lawyers will say that you are 100% liable because you knew the dog was dangerous.
Or maybe you're one of those people who are actually impressed by those click-through screens on warez sites that claim that law enforcement agents aren't allowed to visit the site to determine whether a crime is being committed? All those screens are doing is admitting that a crime IS being committed, and that's all an officer needs to get a warrant.
What I really appreciate (thanks, KoTOR) are games that let you change the difficulty level at any time.
Somebody mod this guy up - this is the first comment I've seen here that I agree with 100%.
Let me play on "medium", but give me the option of switching temporarily to "easy" if I run into trouble.
Note that - give me the option. I don't want the game to dumb itself down; sometimes I actually want to try and get through a tough bit by myself. Other times I want a walk through the park. But I should be the one choosing, not the game.