It's not so much that you found a customer who is "A little obsessive." It's that you found a customer who is not as stupid as the rest of your customers.
You were able to rip off idiots for years, but then suddenly someone comes along and says, "Hey, you're ripping off your customers. Stop it." Why is he obsessive? He is just the first person to point it out. If he had been around in the beginning, this never would have been an issue in the first place, but, unfortunately, he wasn't.
You're making the assumption that if you're allowed to rip people off for a long enough time, that suddenly ripping people off is normal and giving people a fair deal is strange.
I'm not sure what geographic rules determines the right to defend yourself in your own home, but I know that Oregon is the same way as you describe. Oregon is very much a liberal state and definitely not considered part of the south, but our gun laws have always been lenient. (Maybe because we're all uncivilized and we still run around shooting indians all day on our dirt roads while wearing our coonskin hats? Living in New York the last three years has provided some interesting insights into what people 'back east' think of us Oregonians.)
If someone has forcefully entered your house and they don't belong there, you're free to fire on them. On the advice of my sister, a practicing lawyer, any Oregonian would have nothing to fear by killing a burglar that entered their home. If you went to court at all, (which you wouldn't; but say the burglar's family is rich [oddly enough] and they sue) you would get off by saying something to the effect of, "I didn't know who they were, and I thought they might harm me and/or my family."
Certainly we can survive in other environments, but does that have anything to do with us being bipedal? I find it more likely that our brains are the cause of that.
You beat me to it. Humans are, as you said, a fluke. Humans simply do NOT follow the standard rules of evolution. Evolution, boiled down to layman's terms, goes like this: The strong survive and go make offspring, while the weak are killed and don't make offspring. Weak, of course, being relative to the environment. However, this isn't (100%) true with humans. There are plenty of undesirable traits that, rather than lowering your chance of survival, actually INCREASE it!
For example, take a person born with a DNA mutation; this person is blind. A blind person in society, however, is not likely to be killed. Rather, they'll live very well, with benefits from the government and a caretaker and what not. More than likely, they'll find a mate and go on to procreate.
This is the kind of thing we see all the time in human society; undesirable traits are actually nurtured, keeping them from being excised from the gene pool. This will continue as long as the societal norm of "Nurture the weak" persists. (Which I don't see changing any time soon.)
make the robots look like the Horde from WoW, and get the Dept. of Defense to release a WoW "expansion" in which the players unwittingly control the robot army, a la Ender's Game.
make the robots enact Wii tennis, with grenade-balls that explode on the second bounce.
why not just breed actual bears for combat? [...] Put some body armor and a control mechanism on them, and away you go.
You must have some seriously vivid dreams, brother.
Right. So... same question. How is that redundancy?
Redundancy would be having a copy of the operating system another partition/disk. Another copy which was mirror nightly (or on some routine basis) so that, in the event of a system crash, you can move to that mirrored copy, which is an exact replica of the original system.
Moving from Windows to OS X is in no way redundant, under any definition.
No doubt the GP missed a few obvious bipedal animals. (Some mentioned were birds, Kangaroos, and of course Humans. Another poster made an excellent comment regarding Human bipedalism, so I won't go into that.)
However, I agree with the core of his statement: animals with more legs are more common, and, geographically speaking, much more dominant than humans. There are 4+ legged animals in more nooks and crannies and extreme environments than humans will EVER be able to colonize, no matter how advanced our technology gets.
Insects alone, which all have 6+ legs, make up for approximately 80% of all the world's animal species. There are over 900,000 different species of insects! Without any doubt, if another meteor were to strike the earth, the insects would become the next dominant form of life.
Simply partition the hard drive three ways and use one for linux, one for windows, and the last for OS X.
What would be the point? So that the air traffic control operators can use whatever system they think is the prettiest? The point is picking the single most secure system, not playing with widgets.
If a virus trashes one system at least you'd still have redundancy.
How is this redundancy? There's nothing redundant about it. This is three completely different systems. You don't have redundancy at all, you just have your usable hard disk space reduced to a third of what it used to be.
Commenting is one of the most helpful types of documentation there is. (I would say UML diagrams can sometimes be even more useful, if made correctly)
I see a lot of comments in the code I play with. Unfortunately, most people don't understand the true purpose of commenting code. They put comments about what a code is doing, which is completely useless. Example:
//this increments tempVar by one
tempVar = tempVar + 1;
To anyone writing a program: For the love of everything you hold dear, please, do not comment on what code does; instead, comment on why you're doing it! I'm not an idiot. I can see what code is doing. I want to know what you were thinking when you wrote it.
I agree. As many times as I hear the motto, "do it right the first time," I never see it practiced enough in the industry. I try to hold myself to that standard and it looks like you do too.
However, which is more frequent: Your boss asking you to design a system from scratch, or your boss asking you to maintain/extend an existing piece of software? I'd say the latter accounts for a majority of programming work these days. To an executive making big decisions, the temptation to use a legacy system is just too powerful to resist in most cases. <sarcasm>Why waste money designing a new system if the current one works, right?</sarcasm> I find myself rarely ever having the chance to really sit down and build something that is both functional AND maintainable.
That said, I refer back to my original point. When you're forced to work with what's already there... well, you just do it. It's not ideal, but as the GP started, "It's ugly but solid." Maybe it's a pain in the ass to work with, but for now, it works, and that's all that Mr. Boss Man cares about. (And he's signing your pay checks.)
If you want to hit them where it really hurts, then stop buying their music and start looking out for independent artists;
Just what we need, another jackass spouting off at the mouth about independent artists every time the RIAA acronym comes into play. Every time someone tells me, "Oh, listen to the band ______, they're really good because they're independent!", I generally hate the band.
I support independent artists. I support them exactly as much as I support RIAA-labeled artists. You know why? Because the label means absolutely NOTHING to me. I do NOT care who a band's label is. I won't suddenly stop listening to a band if they get signed on with the RIAA, and I won't go out of my way to force myself to "like" a band who is independent.
I believe there is a fairly equal ratio of good bands to bad bands in both categories, independent or otherwise. I will keep an open mind to all music, without putting a black mark on their name because they couldn't afford to record their own music without help from the RIAA.
I hope that was supposed to be sarcastic, otherwise you are the worst developer I've ever heard of. Rewriting an entire legacy application just to use shared pointers is downright stupid. He might as well just redesign the entire software and build it from the ground up... but then you're not "maintaining" anymore. You've completely redefined your job description.
With that many flops, you could easily find the answer to the universe, life, and everything. It all makes sense now. Deep Thought wasn't telling us the answer is 42... he was telling us that the answer is Intel! Clever bastard.
I have a feeling Mario Party is going to be at the top of the sales charts.
I disagree. I think you're (probably) right that Mario Party will be at the top of the play charts. However, in this case, I don't think that the number of players equals the number of sales. Mario Party, specifically, is a game that you really only play with a handful of other people. Yes, I know, you CAN play single-player, but that just isn't fun.
Point standing; if John, Scott, and I are going to play Mario Party all the time, it's not likely that all three of us are going to buy it. More likely, only one of us will buy it, and we'll split the cost. Or John and Scott will never pay me back... pricks.
(arguments about an 18 year old with his 16 year old high school sweetheart getting tagged as a "registered sex offender" aside)
"Arguments about the three thousand dead people aside, September 11th 2001 was a really nice day!"
There are two ways to view that 18/16 kind of argument. One, that it's a dead horse, a topic that has been beaten to death. The other, that it's still a live topic of heated debate.
It doesn't matter either way. His point was that the argument over 18/16 year old "sex crimes" is a lengthy one, and beyond the scope of his post. It would have been off-topic, and would have detracted from the point he was trying to make.
"state attorney generals" => "state attorneys general"
General is an adjective, not the noun. You pluralize the noun not the adjective.
wouldn't that be "State Attorney's General"?
No, because that would completely change the meaning of the sentence. Adding the apostrophe and then an "s" makes the word 'attorney' be possessive. Therefore, you are turning 'general' back into a noun, and saying that the attorney possesses the general.
The GP is right; the correct format would be "State Attorneys General." As he stated, 'General' is an adjective that modifies 'State Attorneys.' It's a little-used style of notation, so that's why it may seem foreign to read it that way. It's almost the same as if you were to write it like, "State Attorneys (General)."
This score is a combination of (+1, Funny) and (-1, Environment-Destroying-Hummer-Owner). However, no one cares about the complaints of hippie mods, so the +1 Funny takes precedence.
So your point here is that FF6 looked better for its time than FF7, right? Okay, I will agree that FF6 looked great for a SNES game. However, FF7 looked great for a PS game too. Both games were creative in the use of their system's capabilities. FF6 had cheap sprite characters, but beautifully drawn battle scenes. FF7 had polygon characters, but incredible animations (any of the summons would make a prime example.) If your argument is that FF6 utilized its system's engine better than FF7, well, I have to say I disagree.
but still, I felt more for Tellah dying for his revenge, or General Leo's betrayal than the shock death of Aeris.
You did. I didn't.
Anyhow, the characters in FF6 were better developed and had more personality in my feeling. In FF7, we have a psycho amnesiac, an eco-terrorist stereotypical black guy, umm, a robot controlled by a pencil-pusher, some klepto ninja chick...
Wait, didn't you just describe all the reasons why Final Fantasy characters have LOTS of personality? Psycho amnesiac, eco-terrorist, klepto ninja... you find these things to be "unpersonable"? What exactly are you looking for?
Slashdot Mirror
"Insightful"?
Do you really find yourself correcting the grammatical usage of the word "hermetically" that often?
It's not so much that you found a customer who is "A little obsessive." It's that you found a customer who is not as stupid as the rest of your customers.
You were able to rip off idiots for years, but then suddenly someone comes along and says, "Hey, you're ripping off your customers. Stop it." Why is he obsessive? He is just the first person to point it out. If he had been around in the beginning, this never would have been an issue in the first place, but, unfortunately, he wasn't.
You're making the assumption that if you're allowed to rip people off for a long enough time, that suddenly ripping people off is normal and giving people a fair deal is strange.
and please don't say "get a mac" or "install linux" ...
Right, it's a monopoly, just as long as you tell people that they aren't allowed to use the competitor's products.
"As long as you include the rule that people aren't allowed to use AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile, then Verizon is totally a monopoly."
Ha..hahaha...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I'm not sure what geographic rules determines the right to defend yourself in your own home, but I know that Oregon is the same way as you describe. Oregon is very much a liberal state and definitely not considered part of the south, but our gun laws have always been lenient. (Maybe because we're all uncivilized and we still run around shooting indians all day on our dirt roads while wearing our coonskin hats? Living in New York the last three years has provided some interesting insights into what people 'back east' think of us Oregonians.)
If someone has forcefully entered your house and they don't belong there, you're free to fire on them. On the advice of my sister, a practicing lawyer, any Oregonian would have nothing to fear by killing a burglar that entered their home. If you went to court at all, (which you wouldn't; but say the burglar's family is rich [oddly enough] and they sue) you would get off by saying something to the effect of, "I didn't know who they were, and I thought they might harm me and/or my family."
That makes sense. You haven't heard of it, so clearly no one else has. Right?
For example, take a person born with a DNA mutation; this person is blind. A blind person in society, however, is not likely to be killed. Rather, they'll live very well, with benefits from the government and a caretaker and what not. More than likely, they'll find a mate and go on to procreate.
This is the kind of thing we see all the time in human society; undesirable traits are actually nurtured, keeping them from being excised from the gene pool. This will continue as long as the societal norm of "Nurture the weak" persists. (Which I don't see changing any time soon.)
You must have some seriously vivid dreams, brother.
Right. So... same question. How is that redundancy?
Redundancy would be having a copy of the operating system another partition/disk. Another copy which was mirror nightly (or on some routine basis) so that, in the event of a system crash, you can move to that mirrored copy, which is an exact replica of the original system.
Moving from Windows to OS X is in no way redundant, under any definition.
No doubt the GP missed a few obvious bipedal animals. (Some mentioned were birds, Kangaroos, and of course Humans. Another poster made an excellent comment regarding Human bipedalism, so I won't go into that.)
However, I agree with the core of his statement: animals with more legs are more common, and, geographically speaking, much more dominant than humans. There are 4+ legged animals in more nooks and crannies and extreme environments than humans will EVER be able to colonize, no matter how advanced our technology gets.
Insects alone, which all have 6+ legs, make up for approximately 80% of all the world's animal species. There are over 900,000 different species of insects! Without any doubt, if another meteor were to strike the earth, the insects would become the next dominant form of life.
Commenting is one of the most helpful types of documentation there is. (I would say UML diagrams can sometimes be even more useful, if made correctly)
//this increments tempVar by one
I see a lot of comments in the code I play with. Unfortunately, most people don't understand the true purpose of commenting code. They put comments about what a code is doing, which is completely useless. Example:
tempVar = tempVar + 1;
To anyone writing a program: For the love of everything you hold dear, please, do not comment on what code does; instead, comment on why you're doing it! I'm not an idiot. I can see what code is doing. I want to know what you were thinking when you wrote it.
I agree. As many times as I hear the motto, "do it right the first time," I never see it practiced enough in the industry. I try to hold myself to that standard and it looks like you do too.
However, which is more frequent: Your boss asking you to design a system from scratch, or your boss asking you to maintain/extend an existing piece of software? I'd say the latter accounts for a majority of programming work these days. To an executive making big decisions, the temptation to use a legacy system is just too powerful to resist in most cases. <sarcasm>Why waste money designing a new system if the current one works, right?</sarcasm> I find myself rarely ever having the chance to really sit down and build something that is both functional AND maintainable.
That said, I refer back to my original point. When you're forced to work with what's already there... well, you just do it. It's not ideal, but as the GP started, "It's ugly but solid." Maybe it's a pain in the ass to work with, but for now, it works, and that's all that Mr. Boss Man cares about. (And he's signing your pay checks.)
I support independent artists. I support them exactly as much as I support RIAA-labeled artists. You know why? Because the label means absolutely NOTHING to me. I do NOT care who a band's label is. I won't suddenly stop listening to a band if they get signed on with the RIAA, and I won't go out of my way to force myself to "like" a band who is independent.
I believe there is a fairly equal ratio of good bands to bad bands in both categories, independent or otherwise. I will keep an open mind to all music, without putting a black mark on their name because they couldn't afford to record their own music without help from the RIAA.
I hope that was supposed to be sarcastic, otherwise you are the worst developer I've ever heard of. Rewriting an entire legacy application just to use shared pointers is downright stupid. He might as well just redesign the entire software and build it from the ground up... but then you're not "maintaining" anymore. You've completely redefined your job description.
This?
Ah HA.
2^42 = 4398046511104x more teraflops.
With that many flops, you could easily find the answer to the universe, life, and everything. It all makes sense now. Deep Thought wasn't telling us the answer is 42... he was telling us that the answer is Intel! Clever bastard.
I disagree. I think you're (probably) right that Mario Party will be at the top of the play charts. However, in this case, I don't think that the number of players equals the number of sales. Mario Party, specifically, is a game that you really only play with a handful of other people. Yes, I know, you CAN play single-player, but that just isn't fun.
Point standing; if John, Scott, and I are going to play Mario Party all the time, it's not likely that all three of us are going to buy it. More likely, only one of us will buy it, and we'll split the cost. Or John and Scott will never pay me back... pricks.
There are two ways to view that 18/16 kind of argument. One, that it's a dead horse, a topic that has been beaten to death. The other, that it's still a live topic of heated debate.
It doesn't matter either way. His point was that the argument over 18/16 year old "sex crimes" is a lengthy one, and beyond the scope of his post. It would have been off-topic, and would have detracted from the point he was trying to make.
No, because that would completely change the meaning of the sentence. Adding the apostrophe and then an "s" makes the word 'attorney' be possessive. Therefore, you are turning 'general' back into a noun, and saying that the attorney possesses the general.
The GP is right; the correct format would be "State Attorneys General." As he stated, 'General' is an adjective that modifies 'State Attorneys.' It's a little-used style of notation, so that's why it may seem foreign to read it that way. It's almost the same as if you were to write it like, "State Attorneys (General)."
(Score:0, Funny)
This score is a combination of (+1, Funny) and (-1, Environment-Destroying-Hummer-Owner). However, no one cares about the complaints of hippie mods, so the +1 Funny takes precedence.