Archaic means "belonging to the ancient past". English has not changed much in the last few hundred years, it has changed in the last thousand. A thousand years ago people in England spoken either Anglo-Saxon, or Norman (a relative of old French and Scandinavian languages). It wasn't until Norman rule was a couple of centuries old that English emerged as a common language.
Shakespeare did not use standard seventeenth century English. Much of the language used in his plays was archaic (or at least very esoteric) for the time. Partly because his plays dealt with historical matters, and partly to allow the use of Iambic pentameter.
For people who weren't raised by farmyard animals there should be very little difference between formal and informal English. Your vocabulary might differ but the basic grammatical rules should remain the same.
There is a belief that writing in a grammatically correct way is somehow more difficult than writing like a brain damaged twelve year-old. This is only true if you learnt everything you know about the English language from VCR manuals. For an educated person the use of proper English should be as natural as breathing.
I also attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
In the future I suggest you skip the Mathematics and pay more attention to English. For someone purporting to be clever your use of the language is utterly abysmal. I hope for your sake that you get someone else to proof read your resumé.
Re:Dude! Were's my job?
on
Offshoring IT
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· Score: 1
How in the world do you debug an Indian Programmer?
Errr... I'm not an expert on such matters but DDT should do the job.
Yes - but under Blunkett pretty much everything is verboten by some piece of draconian legislation. The laws are there to protect the Government and so are only enforced when it suits the Government to do so. Any law passed to combat 'illegal' behaviour on the internet has, invariably, eroded the freedom of all users. I'd rather have the current anarchy of spammers/anti-spammers than risk Herr Blunkett getting anymore control over UK internet traffic.
On an on topic note - I agree that using this screen saver is a bad idea. What's needed is a free (in all senses of the term), open, and low overhead method for authenticating mail. Like PGP signatures but invisible to non-technical users. That way users only have to authenticate a signature once - much like authenticating a buddy on IM systems - and then forget about it.
Then buy the game from EB/Game where you can return it for any reason within 14 days. If you buy it from Amazon you can return it for any reason for up to 30 days. In both cases it doesn't matter if the box has been opened, only that everything is in 'as new' condition (i.e. be careful with it).
Also, under the Sale & Supply Of Goods Act (1994 you are perfectly entitled to return a game anywhere if it is not:
Of a Satisfactory Quality. If the game is crap that doesn't count. However if it is buggy then it is of unsatisfactory quality.
Fit for the purpose for which they are generally sold.
As described. If a game is described on the box as multiplayer, and the publisher prevents you taking advantage of this then it is not 'as described'.
Note that these are statutory rights - they trump any EULA clause. If a sales person claims that you can't take advantage of these right they are willfully misleading you and thus leaving their employers open to legal action.
We still produce large amounts of C++ code at my place of work, as do many other banks and financial institutions. It's very fast, sufficently high level to be easy for experts to code in and cross platform. Plus it has an excellent standard library.
The main change is that we're replacing Java code with Python. Java was used for things like GUIs and report generation but it's much quicker to code these kind of things in Python. Most of the grunt work is done by the C++ back end so Python's lack of run time speed isn't an issue.
The public sector in the UK is nothing more than unemployment benefit for the middle classes.
Are you too stupid to be allowed near a productive company? But not pikey enough to go on the dole?
If so then we've got the job for you!
Work in an industry whose sole measure of productivity is how much of someone else's money you've spent! Get at least 30 days paid holiday year, plus all the paid sick leave you can lie about! Use state of the art technology (subject to availability/EDS profits)! Do absolutely nothing of value for forty years and get a pension that most CEOs would envy!
Join the British Public Sector! The largest, fastest growing employer in the Western world!
This is where I have a problem with piracy. If it's a choice between not seeing something because it hasn't been released in your territory, or downloading it from the internet; then I can see why people would download it. The publisher has left a gap in the market and the internet has filled it. But to pirate something that is available for sale in your territory, simply because you're too much of a cheapskate to pay for it; that's the moral equivalent of stealing.
For the record I paid the Amazon prices for my B5 collection (about 160GBP in total) and it was well worth it. If you like a series then you should at least pay the asking price to watch it.
Well, at least unsupervised computer usage hasn't destroyed your ability to write coherent sentences.
For the record; my formative years were spent using the family computer (a ZX Spectrum 48K+) in the dining room. Yet despite this, and the lack of a modem, I still managed to make good use of it and become a bloody good programmer.
Why is this mod'd as Troll? It's a fair point - you wouldn't pay full whack for a new sofa (couch) that had holes in; no matter how small or far apart they were. Why should this be any different for LCD monitors? If I buy a monitor that advertises a 1600x1200 resolution then I expect every one of the pixels to be working; otherwise the item is defective.
Don't bother with the 'why this site is missing' page - just drop it entirely from the index. For a large number of web users Google is the way to find sites. Dropping the plaintiff will essentially disappear them from the internet for a sizable proportion of their target market.
Google should not be getting involved in these kinds of arguments. If people have a problem with being include in the index - drop them and the matter is closed.
The grandparent comment was not sexist. It merely proffered an opinion on the state of the IT industry, and a fairly accurate one at that. Screaming 'discrimination' every time someone disagrees with you completely undermines your position.
Women are no more discriminated against in IT than men. There have been massive efforts to lure them in to the industry. Even positive discrimination in their favour has not redressed the balance. So maybe the majority of women just aren't interested in IT. Much like the majority of men (at least in the UK) aren't interested in becoming teachers.
A few points for anyone thinking of replying:
This is my opinion, based upon my experience in the industry and my observation of many IT workplaces. I don't claim it is a fact, merely my best guess. If you find what I've said offensive, then you should seek professional help.
Your experiences in the industry may vary. However personal anecdotes do not 'disprove' what my points.
I do not feel discriminated against in any way shape or form. Mainly because you could limit men to 10% of the total IT workforce and I'd still have a queue of people wanting to employ me (and the offices would smell less with fewer blokes).
"Why should I team up with you? I can do this on my own."
Which is, of course, nearly a succinct summarization of the underpinings of libertarian philosophy.
Pardon? Supporting freedom of the individual over that of other entities (primarily the state) does not prevent people from working together towards a common goal. All it does it prevent people from being coerced in to cooperating. Whilst I don't doubt that there are some libertarians who are also sociopaths, it's not mandatory. In fact the premise of a workable libertarian state is based on the presumption that people will freely chose to work together - just as they have done since the beginning of human history.
I think you're confusing the Slashdot ramblings of elitist programmers with the tenets of classical liberalism.
C++ tries, really tries hard, to cause buffer overflows.
No it doesn't. You have to be near brain dead to write buffer-overflow susceptible code in modern C++. All that's required to write safe code is to have a decent knowledge of what the statements you're writing actually do, and to think about what you're doing.
People who can't see that copying input of an arbitrary length in to a fixed size buffer is bad should stick to VB.NET and leave the complicated stuff to the experts.
It's unlikely that many of the people who voted for the UKIP in the Euro/local elections are going to vote for them in the general. The first step to getting the UK out of the EU (and back in the EEA/EFTA) is getting rid of New Labour, UKIP voters know this.
Oh, and the Liberal party is a completely different entity to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberals are actually liberal (the inheritors of the old Liberal party beliefs), the LibDems are European style Social Democrats.
True, and as a someone who enjoys collecting games consoles I find it annoying sometimes. Both when companies release slightly better versions of games on a different platform (I own both the PS2 and the XBox versions of GTAIII/VC) and when manufacturers release expensive hardware but completely fail to support it (good games are somewhat lacking for my Jaguar and Virtual Boy).
However in the greater scheme of things it's a fairly minor annoyance. I can't believe anyone buys consoles (and console games) expecting to make a vast resale profit. Even fairly rare machines/games don't appreciate very fast. Rather it's more of a case that people don't want to be seen as fallible. If you only have one console then you've made a decision to pick that one over the competition. If something occurs that weakens your choice's brand/market position/future then it suggests you made the wrong choice. Surprisingly few adults (and pretty much no children) are willing to admit that they backed the wrong horse (not that I'm suggesting the GC is/was the wrong horse). As such they take great personal offence at the perceived attack on the console or console maker and respond in typical zealot style.
If you are old enough to be in Gen X then I would hope that you're old enough to drop this childish 'console wars' bullshit.
Anyone who is vaguely in to console gaming has at least two, if not all three of the current crop of consoles. They cost next to nothing and having a range of machines allows you to play all the best games.
I can't understand why anyone would be loyal to a faceless multi-national that will screw its customers to the maximum extent that the law allows. Currently Microsoft and Sony are the big kids in the playground, and so do the most bullying. But let's not forget the crap that Nintendo got up to when they were at the top - trying to ban video game rentals, the use of spurious lawsuits to wipe out competition, misuse of patents to try and protect they're monopoly on NES cartridge manufacture.
SEGA are releasing Monkey Ball for the PS2 and XBox because they constitute the majority of the market; as such it will make SEGA more money. SEGA cannot 'sell out' because they are already a large company that exists to make its owners richer; they are not some unsigned indie band from Seattle.
Gamecube owners (of which I am one) are not members of some elite tribe fighting against Sony and Microsoft. They are customers, they people who exchange money for Nintendo's goods and services. Nothing more.
As a programmer, I find it far more useful to have the two monitors attached to different computers. That way, when the program I'm debugging kills one computer, it doesn't affect the computer with my development environment.
If I was developing for a desktop I'd probably go that route; though you have to be doing something pretty hardcore to take out the whole machine. But as a Unix developer I basically use my desktop machine as a dumb terminal with loads of SSH sessions (good old Putty) providing the interface to the development server. The head of systems was most amused to discover I was using a 3.2Ghz dual Xeon as a high resolution VT100.
Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ
on
A Dual Monitor Experiment
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· Score: 5, Informative
I have two 20" flat screens at work and couldn't live without them. As a code monkey I find the extra screen area invaluable for both coding and testing. I can have a number of terminals displaying the source I'm working on, a terminal to run tests and a web browser displaying documentation; all visible at once. This is huge productivity boost and avoids the need to constantly hunt for which window contains the information I'm after. It's also a lot cheaper and easier than having two computers with a monitor each.
Here in the world of investment banking there is still a huge demand for experienced C and C++ programmers with Unix (usually Solaris and/or Linux) experience. So much of a demand that where I'm based in London, we had serious problems filling even a junior role.
Neither myself, or any of my C++ coding co-workers have ever had a problem finding a job that pays more than the last one. Even during the job market crunch at the turn of century.
Then get a baby sitter that you can trust! If there's an emergency then the baby sitter can call 911/999/112 (delete as applicable) and summon professional help. This is how things used to work as recently as the mid-nineties, before mobile phones became ubiquitous. If you can't bear to be out of contact with your offspring for two hours then I suggest you seek professional parenting advice - before you smother the poor kids under a blanket of over attentive molly coddling.
The big difference is colour handling. PAL (at least in the implementations I've seen) has stable, life like colours; NTSC has terrible colour handling. I don't tend to watch much TV when I'm in the States, but that which I've seen reminds me of those old 'colorized' black and white films.
There's also the fact that digital PAL has had 16:9 widescreen and 5:1 surround sound for the last few years (in the UK at least). Widescreen sets are now the norm over here and with TVs tending to be smaller than those in the US the extra resolution provided by HDTV isn't considered that important.
It's no different from a Vodka Redbull - a hugely popular drink here in Blighty. You basically end up completely wasted - but utterly awake and hyperactive. Tragically dancing often ensues. Other than that it's cool, and beats drinking the watered down 'beer' that most clubs sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Archaic means "belonging to the ancient past". English has not changed much in the last few hundred years, it has changed in the last thousand. A thousand years ago people in England spoken either Anglo-Saxon, or Norman (a relative of old French and Scandinavian languages). It wasn't until Norman rule was a couple of centuries old that English emerged as a common language.
Shakespeare did not use standard seventeenth century English. Much of the language used in his plays was archaic (or at least very esoteric) for the time. Partly because his plays dealt with historical matters, and partly to allow the use of Iambic pentameter.
There is a belief that writing in a grammatically correct way is somehow more difficult than writing like a brain damaged twelve year-old. This is only true if you learnt everything you know about the English language from VCR manuals. For an educated person the use of proper English should be as natural as breathing.
In the future I suggest you skip the Mathematics and pay more attention to English. For someone purporting to be clever your use of the language is utterly abysmal. I hope for your sake that you get someone else to proof read your resumé.
On an on topic note - I agree that using this screen saver is a bad idea. What's needed is a free (in all senses of the term), open, and low overhead method for authenticating mail. Like PGP signatures but invisible to non-technical users. That way users only have to authenticate a signature once - much like authenticating a buddy on IM systems - and then forget about it.
Also, under the Sale & Supply Of Goods Act (1994 you are perfectly entitled to return a game anywhere if it is not:
- Of a Satisfactory Quality. If the game is crap that doesn't count. However if it is buggy then it is of unsatisfactory quality.
- Fit for the purpose for which they are generally sold.
- As described. If a game is described on the box as multiplayer, and the publisher prevents you taking advantage of this then it is not 'as described'.
Note that these are statutory rights - they trump any EULA clause. If a sales person claims that you can't take advantage of these right they are willfully misleading you and thus leaving their employers open to legal action.The main change is that we're replacing Java code with Python. Java was used for things like GUIs and report generation but it's much quicker to code these kind of things in Python. Most of the grunt work is done by the C++ back end so Python's lack of run time speed isn't an issue.
For the record I paid the Amazon prices for my B5 collection (about 160GBP in total) and it was well worth it. If you like a series then you should at least pay the asking price to watch it.
For the record; my formative years were spent using the family computer (a ZX Spectrum 48K+) in the dining room. Yet despite this, and the lack of a modem, I still managed to make good use of it and become a bloody good programmer.
Why is this mod'd as Troll? It's a fair point - you wouldn't pay full whack for a new sofa (couch) that had holes in; no matter how small or far apart they were. Why should this be any different for LCD monitors? If I buy a monitor that advertises a 1600x1200 resolution then I expect every one of the pixels to be working; otherwise the item is defective.
Google should not be getting involved in these kinds of arguments. If people have a problem with being include in the index - drop them and the matter is closed.
Women are no more discriminated against in IT than men. There have been massive efforts to lure them in to the industry. Even positive discrimination in their favour has not redressed the balance. So maybe the majority of women just aren't interested in IT. Much like the majority of men (at least in the UK) aren't interested in becoming teachers.
A few points for anyone thinking of replying:
Which is, of course, nearly a succinct summarization of the underpinings of libertarian philosophy.
Pardon? Supporting freedom of the individual over that of other entities (primarily the state) does not prevent people from working together towards a common goal. All it does it prevent people from being coerced in to cooperating. Whilst I don't doubt that there are some libertarians who are also sociopaths, it's not mandatory. In fact the premise of a workable libertarian state is based on the presumption that people will freely chose to work together - just as they have done since the beginning of human history.
I think you're confusing the Slashdot ramblings of elitist programmers with the tenets of classical liberalism.
No it doesn't. You have to be near brain dead to write buffer-overflow susceptible code in modern C++. All that's required to write safe code is to have a decent knowledge of what the statements you're writing actually do, and to think about what you're doing.
People who can't see that copying input of an arbitrary length in to a fixed size buffer is bad should stick to VB.NET and leave the complicated stuff to the experts.
Oh, and the Liberal party is a completely different entity to the Liberal Democrats. The Liberals are actually liberal (the inheritors of the old Liberal party beliefs), the LibDems are European style Social Democrats.
However in the greater scheme of things it's a fairly minor annoyance. I can't believe anyone buys consoles (and console games) expecting to make a vast resale profit. Even fairly rare machines/games don't appreciate very fast. Rather it's more of a case that people don't want to be seen as fallible. If you only have one console then you've made a decision to pick that one over the competition. If something occurs that weakens your choice's brand/market position/future then it suggests you made the wrong choice. Surprisingly few adults (and pretty much no children) are willing to admit that they backed the wrong horse (not that I'm suggesting the GC is/was the wrong horse). As such they take great personal offence at the perceived attack on the console or console maker and respond in typical zealot style.
Anyone who is vaguely in to console gaming has at least two, if not all three of the current crop of consoles. They cost next to nothing and having a range of machines allows you to play all the best games.
I can't understand why anyone would be loyal to a faceless multi-national that will screw its customers to the maximum extent that the law allows. Currently Microsoft and Sony are the big kids in the playground, and so do the most bullying. But let's not forget the crap that Nintendo got up to when they were at the top - trying to ban video game rentals, the use of spurious lawsuits to wipe out competition, misuse of patents to try and protect they're monopoly on NES cartridge manufacture.
SEGA are releasing Monkey Ball for the PS2 and XBox because they constitute the majority of the market; as such it will make SEGA more money. SEGA cannot 'sell out' because they are already a large company that exists to make its owners richer; they are not some unsigned indie band from Seattle.
Gamecube owners (of which I am one) are not members of some elite tribe fighting against Sony and Microsoft. They are customers, they people who exchange money for Nintendo's goods and services. Nothing more.
If I was developing for a desktop I'd probably go that route; though you have to be doing something pretty hardcore to take out the whole machine. But as a Unix developer I basically use my desktop machine as a dumb terminal with loads of SSH sessions (good old Putty) providing the interface to the development server. The head of systems was most amused to discover I was using a 3.2Ghz dual Xeon as a high resolution VT100.
I have two 20" flat screens at work and couldn't live without them. As a code monkey I find the extra screen area invaluable for both coding and testing. I can have a number of terminals displaying the source I'm working on, a terminal to run tests and a web browser displaying documentation; all visible at once. This is huge productivity boost and avoids the need to constantly hunt for which window contains the information I'm after. It's also a lot cheaper and easier than having two computers with a monitor each.
Neither myself, or any of my C++ coding co-workers have ever had a problem finding a job that pays more than the last one. Even during the job market crunch at the turn of century.
Then get a baby sitter that you can trust! If there's an emergency then the baby sitter can call 911/999/112 (delete as applicable) and summon professional help. This is how things used to work as recently as the mid-nineties, before mobile phones became ubiquitous. If you can't bear to be out of contact with your offspring for two hours then I suggest you seek professional parenting advice - before you smother the poor kids under a blanket of over attentive molly coddling.
There's also the fact that digital PAL has had 16:9 widescreen and 5:1 surround sound for the last few years (in the UK at least). Widescreen sets are now the norm over here and with TVs tending to be smaller than those in the US the extra resolution provided by HDTV isn't considered that important.
It's no different from a Vodka Redbull - a hugely popular drink here in Blighty. You basically end up completely wasted - but utterly awake and hyperactive. Tragically dancing often ensues. Other than that it's cool, and beats drinking the watered down 'beer' that most clubs sell.