Forgive me if I gave you the impression that I think it's a terrible malady, fate worse than death, etc. That's not what I was trying to get at. Let me explain.
Here's a handicap, although not a severe one, which some people suffer from. And some of their symptoms aren't all that uncommon; some of them, like being withdrawn or standoffish (?) might be relatively common among NON-asperger's people. OK so far?
So, the media gets ahold of it. All of a sudden, all of these armchair shrinks are saying THIS guy must be autistic, or THAT guy must be autistic, when clearly they're not. And all of a sudden, claiming one is asperger's (or claiming that someone ELSE is, more commonly) becomes STYLISH. Look how many people here on Slashdot throw the term around!
First, I think it cheapens the malady. If it's a real thing, and there are people really suffering from it, it's screwed up that all these poseurs are trying to claim it for themselves or throw it around at others.
Second, I think that ultimately it becomes a way to cheapen and "cut down to size" intelligent people that Joe Average finds intimidating. Joe's annoyed that Einstein is smarter than Joe could ever be -- so Joe plays "sour grapes" and claims that Einstein had some handicap, like autism or asperger's (it used to be calling him a womanizer, portraying him as absent-minded, etc).
I'm not trying to slam people with Asperger's -- just the silly schmucks who throw the term around for their own purposes.
I've never met anyone who suffered from either aspergers OR autism. I don't know why; we just didn't seem to have anyone like this in my neighborhood (or in any school I've ever attended, or at any company I've ever worked in).
Now, I hear many reports in the media that there ARE people with aspergers and autism, and I assume these people are dealing with their problems as best they can. But I've never encountered any, and in my opinion, I think the diagnosis is being thrown around willy-nilly, ESPECIALLY on Slashdot, as if it has become stylish. STYLISH, to have a handicap! It's just crazy.
So that's what I'm trying to get at. The media started this whole asperger's thing, and now people are starting to use it to explain away every intelligent person they hear about. And ultimately, I think it's a way of dismissing intelligent people, of de-fanging them. If someone's smart, and Joe Average feels intimidated, he'll say "yeah, but he's got that asperger's thing". Annoying.
Now, now. I never said I was psychologically NORMAL. I just said I was neither autistic nor aspergers. And I pointed out that I find it remarkably irritating that people in our society seem to feel the need to explain away the brilliance of one segment of it via things like Aspergers.
Psychologically, since you went there, I think this sort of thing implies a sort of inferiority complex on the part of the majority of society, which they try to cope with by saying things like "yes, Einstein was a brilliant physicist and one of the most influential scientists of this past century, but I bet he had some form of autism!" (thus making the speaker feel less inferior).
It's the sour grapes thing writ large.
By the way, I have no ill-will towards anyone suffering from autism or aspeger's syndrome. I'm sure it's very difficult for them. However, it is completely inappropriate to assume such a handicap whenever one encounters a particularly wily geek.
Having said all that, yes, perhaps I shouldn't have said "FUCK ALL YOU PEOPLE!" But it's so satisfying! How can I resist?
Try it. Just once. Seriously. You'll smile, I promise.
I'm a geek. I have a 142 I.Q, I program computers for a living, I program OTHER computers as a hobby at home, and I live for video games and anime. I enjoy science fiction and I find most people boring and unimaginative. This makes me an eccentric pain in the ass, and it's true I'm somewhat antisocial, but I am DEFINITELY not autistic.
I am further not afflicted with "ASPERGER'S SYNDROME", which apparently is the hip thing to say your kid has out in Cali these days.
What in the FUCK is wrong with our society these days? Do we really have to tear down everyone with above-normal ability by painting them with the autism brush??? Is it really that hard for all you 100 I.Q's to accept the fact that there are people out there who are much smarter than you and DON'T HAVE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THEM???
Seriously! FUCK ALL YOU PEOPLE! I wish all my intelligent brothers and sisters would figure out how to build a starship so we could get OFF this rock and leave all you dim bulbs to jock-breed yourselves back to the stone age. You want sports? FINE. We'll take physics et al and leave you to your devices.
I swear. I accept the fact that you pricks felt the need to torment people like me all through school, but enough is enough already. Go back to the sports bar, I think there's a game on.
Yes, that's true, but doing it with a debugger, you can just step through the code without pasting in all sorts of debug code. It's quicker, cleaner, and a whole lot less work. One of the nice things about ASP.Net is the way the debugger actually *works*.
ASP (old-school) unfortunately doesn't work very well in terms of debuggers, so you're stuck doing it the "old" way. What I do is, I put in response.redirects and pass a "whereami" string and some debug info to an error page. But I don't like it. It's a pain in the butt to do it that way, you know?
Debuggers are nice.
As far as the way your developers are distributed, well... That's pretty extreme as cases go. I'm lucky, I guess -- we're all in the same building.:)
Well... Yeah, OK, debugging in ASP pre-.Net really sucks. You don't really have as many options in terms of stepping through the code. The only place where I can step through code in that environment is in my middleware. I wrote a unit-testing tool in VB6 that accesses a local COM+ copy of my middleware and lets me step through it, trying individual function calls and so forth. But the ASP pages themselves... Feh.
I'm generally reduced to using Response.Redirect to an error page, passing a "whereami" string and any error data and variable data I've got at that point. Here's something: whether you use "On Error Resume Next" or not, if you try to access a null recordset using, say, "while not myRecordset.EOF..." you'll get a nice hang. I think the dopey-ass system gets itself stuck in an infinite loop and just spins its wheels. I had to debug something like that recently... I tore out half my hair trying to figure out why it wasn't erroring out for me, and hanging instead. MY expectation was that it would puke and give me a nice error message. But NOOOOOO...:)
Anyway, using a good debugger is SO much more efficient! And, don't most good languages come with one? I can't believe Python doesn't offer something... With all the Linux guys who love it, I'd bet every Linux IDE offers SOME kind of debugging for Python.
And, it's not that you *need* to use one (even I don't, and I'm a big fan of debuggers). It's that they're really useful, so why wouldn't you want to?
Re:Now there's no point in subscribing
on
Morpheus is Dead
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· Score: 1
Maybe he's hoping to improve his acting? Or maybe he just recently played Silent Hill... Those bird things really freaked me out.
Re:Now there's no point in subscribing
on
Morpheus is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the company in any way, I have no insider information, and since I'm a Slackware guy, I can't even play the game. Therefore, this is ONLY a wild-ass guess.
I've looked over their website, I've read the news they put up about the assassination, and I have a theory (which seems kind of obvious to me).
They say the assassin can tinker with the matrix like Neo used to (although they didn't make that comparison, which I found telling).
The machines have not released Neo's body.
Morpheus was trying to pressure them to release Neo's body by blowing stuff up, or otherwise causing all kinds of problems.
An assassin with a porcelain mask pops out of a small vent and kills Morpheus. This directly benefits the machines (and by extension everybody else).
Conclusion:
The assassin is either Neo himself brought back to life, or a clone of Neo with updates.
If it's Neo, maybe he's missing some of his memories and believes he's acting in the greater good.
If it's a clone, maybe it's the first in a new line of unstoppable agents based on Neo.
OR, it could be Neo brought back to life but still infected with some part of Smith, thus completely bonkers and a new enemy in the game?
As a Slackware user who doesn't think a single video game is worth plonking down a grand on a PC, then having to run Windows XP on it, I am absolutely brokenhearted that they didn't make this for consoles. But, really... What the fuck were they thinking?
The console market is HUGE. There's going to be a console in every home sooner or later. Both major consoles available right now have ethernet ports, so networking is no problem.
If they had released this game for XBox and Playstation II (or even just one of them) their market would have been GIGANTIC. Absolutely enormous. With an automatic, almost guaranteed purchase of a follow-on title when the new consoles come out (doubling the revenue).
Ok, I'm sorry, I've gotta call bullshit here. Debuggers are WONDERFUL. I just think you don't know how to use them effectively. No flame here, just something I want you to consider.
When you're running in an IDE, you can set breakpoints around your code and step through it one line at a time until it blows up. Then you know the EXACT LINE where it blew up. Or, better: you can set "watches" on some of the variables and objects you're working with, and WHILE you step through your code, you can keep one eye on the value of your watches and see WHY it blows up. EVEN BETTER, you can use the "immediate" window to quickly try out something you're feeling suspicious of, and maybe get some clues about what's going on.
Response.Writes are of very limited usefulness. If the app crashes, you ain't gonna see 'em. The page might not even be rendered.
You're way, way wrong here and you should at least give our way a try before you give up on it. Give it a couple of days, you'll thank us.
Except you can't even directly integrate VB6 code with VB.Net (unless you just keep running the VB6 code, which will only work until you get a Windows version that refuses to run it).
If you want to port a VB app, you have to completely rewrite it (and don't try to talk me out of this one, I've confronted this in a few projects already and it's horrible, almost as horrible as trying to explain to a VB6 guy why VB6 is NOT OOP).
So, if they can't even give you this with VB, their flagship app development language, how do you expect them to give you this with other languages which are even LESS compatible with.Net?
They didn't say "infoterrorists", they didn't say "communists", they didn't say "mafia" or "organized crime"...
They said "Anti-American" and "Anti-Globalization". Note how the two are assumed to be in the same general "evil" sphere. This is probably low-key propaganda designed to make people associate "Anti-Globalization" with "Anti-American", at least subconsciously, the way "communist" was back in the fifties. Otherwise, why would they even tell anyone about it?
I think this says quite a bit about the priorities of the U.S. government right about now... Don't you?
When I was living in Phoenix, Az, there was an old man who was like, 70 years old, who became famous among the cops in my neighborhood. He was completely nuts, and had somehow gotten the idea that "chaff" would foil police radar. He wound tinfoil all through his car's grill, through the hubcaps, taped pieces of it to his car, and threw it out the window as he sped past speed traps doing 70 or 80 miles an hour.
The cops would dutifully pull him over, then endure a long conversation about whether they could prove anything or not. Then of course the judge would have to go through the whole thing all over again. He racked up ticket after ticket, and the cops ended up getting really fond of him. He became sort of their semi-mascot.
After a while, he lost his license, and that was that. This one cop I heard the story from said they missed him, though.
Of course, this was the same cop who admitted to the following:
1. Taking radar readings from pidgeons, then pulling over corvettes and camaros to tell them that driving three miles an hour is "obstructing traffic".
2. Taking readings from landing 747's, then pulling over the worst junkers they could find to ask why the person was going 325 miles an hour.
Isn't it awful? Such a nice, fun, sporty little car, so easy to break. I nearly cried when we figured out we'd have to dump the thing. It was gorgeous: tan leather interior, charcoal grey exterior, tan convertible top... And the interior design of it was really nice. What a gorgeous car. I felt like I was driving a budget ferrari.
Sometimes, I think about getting another one on Ebay Motors. I know they're pretty old by now, but...
I'll have you know that Fiats are fun, cute little cars. They may not be particularly RELIABLE, but they're cute.
Pfft... What a meanie.
P.S. Funny Fiat story number 1: My father's cousin had an amazing little fiat, a great little sporty job with removable roof panels. I was hoping I'd get it, but he killed it. After refilling his oil at a gas station, he forgot the oil cap. THEN, when he realized this, he stuffed a cotton/polyester rag in the hole and tried to drive home. The oil broke down the polyester and the engine sucked the cotton fibers in, tangling them all around everything -- KILLING the car.
Funny Fiat story #2: The same guy gave me and my Dad a Fiat Spyder 2000, and we took it for a drive. We banged the oil pan on a bit of bad road, which caused the mainshaft to bang into it, giving our driving a tinny drum solo. We tried to take off the oil pan and bang the dent out with a hammer, only to find out that to take off the oil pan you had to PULL THE WHOLE FREAKING ENGINE OUT WITH A HOIST! We gave up and sold it; I started driving a motorcycle instead.
Who cares? I bought my Panasonic Toughbook 28 on Ebay, and it ROCKS! It's water-resistant, shockproof, and armored (even the LCD).
It was made by the ever-cool Japanese, who are the source of most anime, all sushi, and many fun-to-practice martial arts. They're also the people who forced the U.S. auto industry to make an effort to produce good cars again. And (this is the trump card) they gave us the Playstation II.
Yay, Japan! Keep up the good work, guys, we love ya.
An A/C replied "It would be best not to talk about something you haven't worked with in 7 years. C++ != Java. If you don't write a copy constructor, your object still gets copied."
It seems you're right; I just looked it up. Sorry about that; fair enough. I'm getting used to this crow; tastes like chicken.
Anyway, it's Slashdot. If we didn't screw up from time to time, people would get confused and wander, lost in the wilderness, all sense of meaning lost. It's a public service.:)
I've tried, believe me, but I really get on my nerves. I tried for a divorce, but I just didn't have the heart to follow through with it... My friends say I should set my bed on fire and claim I was abusing myself, but I'm afraid they'll make a really bad movie about me...
Man,that's so sad; the field's falling apart. I'm telling you, you should make a computer science degree from an institution you actually have heard of a prerequisite, and ask them to bring transcripts with them. That'd be pretty hard to fake...:)
Fuck. I just dug out my old C++ book. Yeah, ya got me. There's a "reference variable" that becomes an alias to another variable, something I'd completely forgotten about because I haven't used anything like it in years.
Color MY face red.
You weren't talking about classes, or objects, you were actually talking about an actual reference variable, LITERALLY. Like &something.
Consider what it's like to be a programmer (especially an American programmer) in private industry:
1. Management doesn't like you. They consider you a big sunk cost, a drain on their precious profits. It won't matter whether the product YOUR team developed is the only thing the company has to sell, it won't matter if your skill in setting up their network made them leaner and meaner than the competition, nothing you do or say will change anything. They consider you an anchor around their neck and they resent you for it.
2. You are painfully aware that management (the guys from #1 who don't like you) keeps investigating various outsourcing options. From time to time, you see the CEO having warm conversations with guys in suits, who you know from a conversation in the elevator are with a large outsourcing firm.
3. Although all the guys in Sales are out the door by 5:01PM, and in the bar pickled by 6:00PM, YOU're stuck at work until 9PM every night trying to get a product release out the door. You're working your guts out because your idiot project manager doesn't care (he's drinking with the guys from Sales). And no matter how hard you work, your only thanks is going to be "Damnit, Bill, you're a week late on this! This is going to go in your performance review!"
4. Because you live at work, and therefore are a pasty, nearsighted, vaguely unhealthy dweeb, you haven't been laid in a year. But you have to listen to the sales guys bragging about all the pussy they're getting when they're drunk in the bar you never make it to. Once in a while, one of them catches a venereal disease and you get to enjoy a minute of Shadenfreude. Then you go back to your compiler. What the fuck! It was compiling fine a minute ago... How the fuck did that... Oh. Right. Never mind. (Type, type, type).
5. The ONE NIGHT you go home early (at 6PM) because you're dead exhausted, you run into one of the suits and he quips "Half day, Bob?" The rest of the elevator ride is you fighting the overwhelming urge to stab him in the neck with the pen your father gave you for Christmas. The reason you DON'T is, you're afraid the police won't return it after the forensics guys are done with it. It really IS a nice pen.
6. Every day, on your way in to work, you walk past Smith, who is some vague middle manager or something (you don't know what his actual function is, but he seems to be always present). If you're even a minute late, he makes clucking noises as you pass. If you forgot to shave, he rubs his chin and shakes his head, smiling. The one time you spoke, he got snotty with you, implying that you were a hippie freak.
7. You can't work for more than ten minutes without somebody ruthlessly interrupting you to ask you a question they could have answered with Google in two minutes flat. You briefly consider buying a spray can and filling it with cold water (it worked on your ex-girlfriend's cat). Then you think, nah, better use battery acid. THEN you worry about why you thought of that, and THEN, you worry that you're a big pussy because you worried.
One day, you realize: THIS IS MY LIFE. I picked this on PURPOSE! And just like that, you become a burnout.
DISCLAIMER: When I figured out I was a burnout, I left the private sector and found much happier environs. I feel a whole lot better now.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Forgive me if I gave you the impression that I think it's a terrible malady, fate worse than death, etc. That's not what I was trying to get at. Let me explain.
Here's a handicap, although not a severe one, which some people suffer from. And some of their symptoms aren't all that uncommon; some of them, like being withdrawn or standoffish (?) might be relatively common among NON-asperger's people. OK so far?
So, the media gets ahold of it. All of a sudden, all of these armchair shrinks are saying THIS guy must be autistic, or THAT guy must be autistic, when clearly they're not. And all of a sudden, claiming one is asperger's (or claiming that someone ELSE is, more commonly) becomes STYLISH. Look how many people here on Slashdot throw the term around!
First, I think it cheapens the malady. If it's a real thing, and there are people really suffering from it, it's screwed up that all these poseurs are trying to claim it for themselves or throw it around at others.
Second, I think that ultimately it becomes a way to cheapen and "cut down to size" intelligent people that Joe Average finds intimidating. Joe's annoyed that Einstein is smarter than Joe could ever be -- so Joe plays "sour grapes" and claims that Einstein had some handicap, like autism or asperger's (it used to be calling him a womanizer, portraying him as absent-minded, etc).
I'm not trying to slam people with Asperger's -- just the silly schmucks who throw the term around for their own purposes.
I've never met anyone who suffered from either aspergers OR autism. I don't know why; we just didn't seem to have anyone like this in my neighborhood (or in any school I've ever attended, or at any company I've ever worked in).
;)
Now, I hear many reports in the media that there ARE people with aspergers and autism, and I assume these people are dealing with their problems as best they can. But I've never encountered any, and in my opinion, I think the diagnosis is being thrown around willy-nilly, ESPECIALLY on Slashdot, as if it has become stylish. STYLISH, to have a handicap! It's just crazy.
So that's what I'm trying to get at. The media started this whole asperger's thing, and now people are starting to use it to explain away every intelligent person they hear about. And ultimately, I think it's a way of dismissing intelligent people, of de-fanging them. If someone's smart, and Joe Average feels intimidated, he'll say "yeah, but he's got that asperger's thing". Annoying.
Anyway, that's what I was riled up about.
Now, now. I never said I was psychologically NORMAL. I just said I was neither autistic nor aspergers. And I pointed out that I find it remarkably irritating that people in our society seem to feel the need to explain away the brilliance of one segment of it via things like Aspergers.
Psychologically, since you went there, I think this sort of thing implies a sort of inferiority complex on the part of the majority of society, which they try to cope with by saying things like "yes, Einstein was a brilliant physicist and one of the most influential scientists of this past century, but I bet he had some form of autism!" (thus making the speaker feel less inferior).
It's the sour grapes thing writ large.
By the way, I have no ill-will towards anyone suffering from autism or aspeger's syndrome. I'm sure it's very difficult for them. However, it is completely inappropriate to assume such a handicap whenever one encounters a particularly wily geek.
Having said all that, yes, perhaps I shouldn't have said "FUCK ALL YOU PEOPLE!" But it's so satisfying! How can I resist?
Try it. Just once. Seriously. You'll smile, I promise.
You say that like it's an either-or choice.
For fuck's sake, people!
I'm a geek. I have a 142 I.Q, I program computers for a living, I program OTHER computers as a hobby at home, and I live for video games and anime. I enjoy science fiction and I find most people boring and unimaginative. This makes me an eccentric pain in the ass, and it's true I'm somewhat antisocial, but I am DEFINITELY not autistic.
I am further not afflicted with "ASPERGER'S SYNDROME", which apparently is the hip thing to say your kid has out in Cali these days.
What in the FUCK is wrong with our society these days? Do we really have to tear down everyone with above-normal ability by painting them with the autism brush??? Is it really that hard for all you 100 I.Q's to accept the fact that there are people out there who are much smarter than you and DON'T HAVE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THEM???
Seriously! FUCK ALL YOU PEOPLE! I wish all my intelligent brothers and sisters would figure out how to build a starship so we could get OFF this rock and leave all you dim bulbs to jock-breed yourselves back to the stone age. You want sports? FINE. We'll take physics et al and leave you to your devices.
I swear. I accept the fact that you pricks felt the need to torment people like me all through school, but enough is enough already. Go back to the sports bar, I think there's a game on.
Yes, that's true, but doing it with a debugger, you can just step through the code without pasting in all sorts of debug code. It's quicker, cleaner, and a whole lot less work. One of the nice things about ASP.Net is the way the debugger actually *works*.
:)
ASP (old-school) unfortunately doesn't work very well in terms of debuggers, so you're stuck doing it the "old" way. What I do is, I put in response.redirects and pass a "whereami" string and some debug info to an error page. But I don't like it. It's a pain in the butt to do it that way, you know?
Debuggers are nice.
As far as the way your developers are distributed, well... That's pretty extreme as cases go. I'm lucky, I guess -- we're all in the same building.
Well... Yeah, OK, debugging in ASP pre-.Net really sucks. You don't really have as many options in terms of stepping through the code. The only place where I can step through code in that environment is in my middleware. I wrote a unit-testing tool in VB6 that accesses a local COM+ copy of my middleware and lets me step through it, trying individual function calls and so forth. But the ASP pages themselves... Feh.
:)
I'm generally reduced to using Response.Redirect to an error page, passing a "whereami" string and any error data and variable data I've got at that point. Here's something: whether you use "On Error Resume Next" or not, if you try to access a null recordset using, say, "while not myRecordset.EOF..." you'll get a nice hang. I think the dopey-ass system gets itself stuck in an infinite loop and just spins its wheels. I had to debug something like that recently... I tore out half my hair trying to figure out why it wasn't erroring out for me, and hanging instead. MY expectation was that it would puke and give me a nice error message. But NOOOOOO...
Anyway, using a good debugger is SO much more efficient! And, don't most good languages come with one? I can't believe Python doesn't offer something... With all the Linux guys who love it, I'd bet every Linux IDE offers SOME kind of debugging for Python.
And, it's not that you *need* to use one (even I don't, and I'm a big fan of debuggers). It's that they're really useful, so why wouldn't you want to?
Maybe he's hoping to improve his acting? Or maybe he just recently played Silent Hill... Those bird things really freaked me out.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the company in any way, I have no insider information, and since I'm a Slackware guy, I can't even play the game. Therefore, this is ONLY a wild-ass guess.
I've looked over their website, I've read the news they put up about the assassination, and I have a theory (which seems kind of obvious to me).
They say the assassin can tinker with the matrix like Neo used to (although they didn't make that comparison, which I found telling).
The machines have not released Neo's body.
Morpheus was trying to pressure them to release Neo's body by blowing stuff up, or otherwise causing all kinds of problems.
An assassin with a porcelain mask pops out of a small vent and kills Morpheus. This directly benefits the machines (and by extension everybody else).
Conclusion:
The assassin is either Neo himself brought back to life, or a clone of Neo with updates.
If it's Neo, maybe he's missing some of his memories and believes he's acting in the greater good.
If it's a clone, maybe it's the first in a new line of unstoppable agents based on Neo.
OR, it could be Neo brought back to life but still infected with some part of Smith, thus completely bonkers and a new enemy in the game?
Just a theory...
As a Slackware user who doesn't think a single video game is worth plonking down a grand on a PC, then having to run Windows XP on it, I am absolutely brokenhearted that they didn't make this for consoles. But, really... What the fuck were they thinking?
The console market is HUGE. There's going to be a console in every home sooner or later. Both major consoles available right now have ethernet ports, so networking is no problem.
If they had released this game for XBox and Playstation II (or even just one of them) their market would have been GIGANTIC. Absolutely enormous. With an automatic, almost guaranteed purchase of a follow-on title when the new consoles come out (doubling the revenue).
But they put it out for PCs. WINDOWS PC's. ONLY!
Way to go, guys. Sigh...
Read his post, man... He didn't say it was "profound". He said it was "profoun". Isn't that slang for "lotsa fisticuffs"?
Ok, I'm sorry, I've gotta call bullshit here. Debuggers are WONDERFUL. I just think you don't know how to use them effectively. No flame here, just something I want you to consider.
When you're running in an IDE, you can set breakpoints around your code and step through it one line at a time until it blows up. Then you know the EXACT LINE where it blew up. Or, better: you can set "watches" on some of the variables and objects you're working with, and WHILE you step through your code, you can keep one eye on the value of your watches and see WHY it blows up. EVEN BETTER, you can use the "immediate" window to quickly try out something you're feeling suspicious of, and maybe get some clues about what's going on.
Response.Writes are of very limited usefulness. If the app crashes, you ain't gonna see 'em. The page might not even be rendered.
You're way, way wrong here and you should at least give our way a try before you give up on it. Give it a couple of days, you'll thank us.
Seriously.
Except you can't even directly integrate VB6 code with VB.Net (unless you just keep running the VB6 code, which will only work until you get a Windows version that refuses to run it).
.Net?
If you want to port a VB app, you have to completely rewrite it (and don't try to talk me out of this one, I've confronted this in a few projects already and it's horrible, almost as horrible as trying to explain to a VB6 guy why VB6 is NOT OOP).
So, if they can't even give you this with VB, their flagship app development language, how do you expect them to give you this with other languages which are even LESS compatible with
Honest question.
They didn't say "infoterrorists", they didn't say "communists", they didn't say "mafia" or "organized crime"...
They said "Anti-American" and "Anti-Globalization". Note how the two are assumed to be in the same general "evil" sphere. This is probably low-key propaganda designed to make people associate "Anti-Globalization" with "Anti-American", at least subconsciously, the way "communist" was back in the fifties. Otherwise, why would they even tell anyone about it?
I think this says quite a bit about the priorities of the U.S. government right about now... Don't you?
Who would notice? We're all running Slackware, Debian, or Gentoo.
When I was living in Phoenix, Az, there was an old man who was like, 70 years old, who became famous among the cops in my neighborhood. He was completely nuts, and had somehow gotten the idea that "chaff" would foil police radar. He wound tinfoil all through his car's grill, through the hubcaps, taped pieces of it to his car, and threw it out the window as he sped past speed traps doing 70 or 80 miles an hour.
:)
The cops would dutifully pull him over, then endure a long conversation about whether they could prove anything or not. Then of course the judge would have to go through the whole thing all over again. He racked up ticket after ticket, and the cops ended up getting really fond of him. He became sort of their semi-mascot.
After a while, he lost his license, and that was that. This one cop I heard the story from said they missed him, though.
Of course, this was the same cop who admitted to the following:
1. Taking radar readings from pidgeons, then pulling over corvettes and camaros to tell them that driving three miles an hour is "obstructing traffic".
2. Taking readings from landing 747's, then pulling over the worst junkers they could find to ask why the person was going 325 miles an hour.
I guess they get bored out there...
Isn't it awful? Such a nice, fun, sporty little car, so easy to break. I nearly cried when we figured out we'd have to dump the thing. It was gorgeous: tan leather interior, charcoal grey exterior, tan convertible top... And the interior design of it was really nice. What a gorgeous car. I felt like I was driving a budget ferrari.
Sometimes, I think about getting another one on Ebay Motors. I know they're pretty old by now, but...
How DARE you??? OOOOOHHHHH! You awful man!
You compare Fiats to Chryslers???
I'll have you know that Fiats are fun, cute little cars. They may not be particularly RELIABLE, but they're cute.
Pfft... What a meanie.
P.S. Funny Fiat story number 1: My father's cousin had an amazing little fiat, a great little sporty job with removable roof panels. I was hoping I'd get it, but he killed it. After refilling his oil at a gas station, he forgot the oil cap. THEN, when he realized this, he stuffed a cotton/polyester rag in the hole and tried to drive home. The oil broke down the polyester and the engine sucked the cotton fibers in, tangling them all around everything -- KILLING the car.
Funny Fiat story #2: The same guy gave me and my Dad a Fiat Spyder 2000, and we took it for a drive. We banged the oil pan on a bit of bad road, which caused the mainshaft to bang into it, giving our driving a tinny drum solo. We tried to take off the oil pan and bang the dent out with a hammer, only to find out that to take off the oil pan you had to PULL THE WHOLE FREAKING ENGINE OUT WITH A HOIST! We gave up and sold it; I started driving a motorcycle instead.
Who cares? I bought my Panasonic Toughbook 28 on Ebay, and it ROCKS! It's water-resistant, shockproof, and armored (even the LCD).
It was made by the ever-cool Japanese, who are the source of most anime, all sushi, and many fun-to-practice martial arts. They're also the people who forced the U.S. auto industry to make an effort to produce good cars again. And (this is the trump card) they gave us the Playstation II.
Yay, Japan! Keep up the good work, guys, we love ya.
An A/C replied "It would be best not to talk about something you haven't worked with in 7 years. C++ != Java. If you don't write a copy constructor, your object still gets copied."
:)
It seems you're right; I just looked it up. Sorry about that; fair enough. I'm getting used to this crow; tastes like chicken.
Anyway, it's Slashdot. If we didn't screw up from time to time, people would get confused and wander, lost in the wilderness, all sense of meaning lost. It's a public service.
I've tried, believe me, but I really get on my nerves. I tried for a divorce, but I just didn't have the heart to follow through with it... My friends say I should set my bed on fire and claim I was abusing myself, but I'm afraid they'll make a really bad movie about me...
Man,that's so sad; the field's falling apart. I'm telling you, you should make a computer science degree from an institution you actually have heard of a prerequisite, and ask them to bring transcripts with them. That'd be pretty hard to fake... :)
BUT,
:)
What I said about objects and copy constructors was still correct. So I'm not ALL wet.
ADDENDUM:
Fuck. I just dug out my old C++ book. Yeah, ya got me. There's a "reference variable" that becomes an alias to another variable, something I'd completely forgotten about because I haven't used anything like it in years.
Color MY face red.
You weren't talking about classes, or objects, you were actually talking about an actual reference variable, LITERALLY. Like &something.
This here is my dish of crow. Munch, munch.
Consider what it's like to be a programmer (especially an American programmer) in private industry:
:)
1. Management doesn't like you. They consider you a big sunk cost, a drain on their precious profits. It won't matter whether the product YOUR team developed is the only thing the company has to sell, it won't matter if your skill in setting up their network made them leaner and meaner than the competition, nothing you do or say will change anything. They consider you an anchor around their neck and they resent you for it.
2. You are painfully aware that management (the guys from #1 who don't like you) keeps investigating various outsourcing options. From time to time, you see the CEO having warm conversations with guys in suits, who you know from a conversation in the elevator are with a large outsourcing firm.
3. Although all the guys in Sales are out the door by 5:01PM, and in the bar pickled by 6:00PM, YOU're stuck at work until 9PM every night trying to get a product release out the door. You're working your guts out because your idiot project manager doesn't care (he's drinking with the guys from Sales). And no matter how hard you work, your only thanks is going to be "Damnit, Bill, you're a week late on this! This is going to go in your performance review!"
4. Because you live at work, and therefore are a pasty, nearsighted, vaguely unhealthy dweeb, you haven't been laid in a year. But you have to listen to the sales guys bragging about all the pussy they're getting when they're drunk in the bar you never make it to. Once in a while, one of them catches a venereal disease and you get to enjoy a minute of Shadenfreude. Then you go back to your compiler. What the fuck! It was compiling fine a minute ago... How the fuck did that... Oh. Right. Never mind. (Type, type, type).
5. The ONE NIGHT you go home early (at 6PM) because you're dead exhausted, you run into one of the suits and he quips "Half day, Bob?" The rest of the elevator ride is you fighting the overwhelming urge to stab him in the neck with the pen your father gave you for Christmas. The reason you DON'T is, you're afraid the police won't return it after the forensics guys are done with it. It really IS a nice pen.
6. Every day, on your way in to work, you walk past Smith, who is some vague middle manager or something (you don't know what his actual function is, but he seems to be always present). If you're even a minute late, he makes clucking noises as you pass. If you forgot to shave, he rubs his chin and shakes his head, smiling. The one time you spoke, he got snotty with you, implying that you were a hippie freak.
7. You can't work for more than ten minutes without somebody ruthlessly interrupting you to ask you a question they could have answered with Google in two minutes flat. You briefly consider buying a spray can and filling it with cold water (it worked on your ex-girlfriend's cat). Then you think, nah, better use battery acid. THEN you worry about why you thought of that, and THEN, you worry that you're a big pussy because you worried.
One day, you realize: THIS IS MY LIFE. I picked this on PURPOSE! And just like that, you become a burnout.
DISCLAIMER: When I figured out I was a burnout, I left the private sector and found much happier environs. I feel a whole lot better now.