The question here is this: did the sub-human wankers who created this ever consider this possibility? Now that it's happened, do you think they give a shit? Is there a chance that someone is saying, "Gee, maybe this wasn't such a good idea..." right about now?
Ha haaa, another four mod points wasted! (I can do this all day, but you only have one point left...)
That said, my post was perfectly on-topic to this post which I was replying to. Unless I prefix them with "OT:", they always are. I was, of course, assuming that the reader had the wit to extrapolate out the point I was trying to make: perhaps the presence of these tags helps to improve the overall quality of submissions.
. I see zero value in learning to parrot quicksort, especially since the information is easily obtained and the implementation you use is almost certainly as fast as is possible (assuming you aren't Abrash).
I agree, but I think being able to memorize/parrot the implementation isn't the point. Instead, it's about understanding it, knowing how it works, and knowing why it's faster by comparison to other types of sorts.
Any monkey can memorize; but if you don't have the ability to understand these algorithms at a fundamental level, then your mind is not well-suited for programming.
Why not use that tag for something useful that can aid in searching articles and what not. Pedantic bastards.
I think having such technical tags such as "typoinsummary" can be handy for analysis. It's kind of hard to think of an example right now, but it seems to me that being able to search through thousands of summaries and instantly identifying which of them contains (or contained) an error could indeed be useful in some cases.
Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems that the number of duplicate posts has gone way down since we gained the ability to tag posts as "dupe".
Troll? Seriously? Here, let me help -/. definition of troll:
"A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections."
Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time."
What part of this description fit my post above - which is both factually correct, and relevant to the article being discussed?
The US gov't IS out of business... We're bankrupt. No one has the balls to say it on camera, but every person with common sense knows what it means when (money in) - (money out) is consistently 0.
Every person indeed does: if we had a government that had "(money in) - (money out) = 0", "efficient" and "well run" would be the words you're looking for.
Here in the real world "(money in) - (money out) = -11,000,000,000,000" and counting.
*everybody: the disturbingly large subset of programmers who are unaware that COBOL and FORTRAN still power the vast majority of the financial and healthcare infrastructures of the world.
**dead: working quietly in the background without need of constant updates and maintenance
You do know that you need to check the oil in your car and lawnmower? Your lawnmower blade may need sharpening?
You should have a basic understanding of your tool at hand. Some tools are dangerous.
A basic understanding means knowing how to a) do what you need to accomplish and b) keep it running. Why should this mean understanding the file system's structure?
The same reason I have to drive my car, rather than picking a destination, waiting, and magically ending up there.
Most people driving their car have no idea how it does what it does. They know that it drinks gas and farts exhaust, and sometimes they have to bring it to the mechanic for this thing called a "tune up". As with most car analogies, your attempt to carry it to the "next logical step" is seriously flawed. By your example, the user would expect the computer to write their reports for them.
Opening a folder is not that difficult. I do tutoring sometimes, and I've found more people are confused by the Autoplay menu than just opening the drive in Explorer. Those Autoplay menus can get very cluttered!
We're talking about autorun, and not autoplay - autoplay is a stupid idea; users hate choices, especially when they don't know what all of them mean. Autorun is poor for security, but great for usability.
Yeah but when your lawnmower turns on every time you get near it or your car slams the gas when you sit in the driver seat it's time to learn how they work, mainly so that you can stop the the annoying and dangerous "features".
I'm not quite sure how this analogy makes sense... but most folks never learn how these things work. They learn how to use them - which is a rather important distinction.
Oh and BTW, I think I know how toilet paper works, and I would be extremely worried if the were any users who didn't.
So the only legimate disagreement you (and a few others) have is my sense of humor?
hat a concept, actually knowing what's on your media. All this "ease of use" and accessibility crap is just making users dumber and dumber.
Why should those people who are using computers as tools (in the same way they would use a car, lawnmower, or vibrator) have to know anything at all about how it works, where content is stored, etc?
The best system is one that just does what you want it to do, without distracting you from your task by making you think about it. That holds equally true for computers, windshield wipers, and toilet paper.
These are things that have frustrated me for years, especialyl as more and more applications are presuming to do it. It's like people have never heard of the concept of windows scheduler/cron, or even spawning off an update thread in the background on startup. Processors and hard drives are so fast these days that even bloated and beefy software (I'm looking at YOU openoffice.org and netbeans) provides acceptable startup times without a "launcher" application.
As far as Adobe - the only thing I ever do with my PDF files is read them. Every year I watch Reader's footprint get bigger and bigger, and yet there is/no/ difference in my experience with it (except that it's slower) than there was several years ago.
Why micosoft don't provide an updater program for windows, requiring companies to provide their own repos, i don't get
That would also be quite nice. A simple Updater API would go a long way and might clean up some of this crap.
That's what memory is for, though. I have 4 GiB of it, and I don't see the gain from having it go unused over having it occupied by a sloppily made app. In return, I get something I enjoy using more.
I'm not usually a subscriber to the "evil big company" theory, but I'm not too fond of trusting Adobe to install and run whatever they want, regardless of whether or not I have asked for it. Actually, I guess I am a subscriber to that theory - since I don't tend to let anyone run their crap on my PC unless I know exactly what it does or can at least be reasonably sure that it's not doing something stupid*. That's a large part of how I've stayed virus free for a couple of decades, in spite of not running anti-virus.
Aside from that - I'm not sure that I agree that's what memory is for. When I'm working in game development and my development tools are consuming 3GB of memory, you're damn right I"m picky about someone taking up an unnecessary 60MB plus. I view my computer's memory as/my/ resource, to be used by my computer as I want it to.
* like allowing anybody at all to run flawed javascript when I open a PDF file -- which should be a read only format for viewing and printing documents
Well, let's see. Given 2,500 pixels/image (assume 4 bytes a pixel since there would be no time to compress data at that rate), and 6,000,000 images a second.. 196 PB/hr, for one day is 4704 PB...
This is true mostly for day traders, who are indeed gamblers; and the naive folks who think that the stock market is a great way to get rich quick. However, long-term investments are investments, and not gambles. This irregularities that you mention are typically not even blips on the radar over a 10 or 20 year timespan. Over that time the value/may/ decline - but if you do your research and pick stable companies with long-term plans for the future, it's very unlikely.
All in all, I think Foxit Reader is nice, but slightly overrated. Adobe deserves their fair share of criticism, but they still deliver a more polished product.
And without additional cost to you, that delivery includes a 60MB runtime footprint and two or three always-running updater applications!
Japanese and European companies are trying to strike deals to tap the resource, but a nationalist sentiment about the lithium is building in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who already has nationalized Bolivia's oil and natural-gas industries.
The way this reads, the criticism of the US stems from the fact that the US has nationalized Bolivia's hydrocarbons. The correct interpretation of the sentence (simplified) is : "Morales has nationalized Bolivia's oil and natural gas industries. Morales is an ardent crtiic of the United States." These two thoughts don't even belong in the same paragraph, nevermind the same sentence.
Just because you're posting articles online doesn't excuse you from editing them.
It seems to me that if you're putting potentially damaging PRIVATE information out there in a PUBLIC forum, and that information might make you less appealing to an employer, you have no right to complain when it comes back to bite you in the ass. No matter what kind of information it is. There's a reason "private life" is considered "private" and separate from the job.
Whether it's your religious affiliation or your drunken frat pictures, use your brain before making private information about yourself public.
Legally, I know this wouldn't leave me with a leg to stand on. But in Mr Dicken's words, sometimes "the law is a ass" - especially when it comes to things that really should be common sense.
You check up on someone's page and find out that they do something you don't like, and that you can discriminate on. However also on that page it lets you know they are Mormon. You don't hire them, they sue you for religious discrimination because your organization has a bunch of Catholics at the top.
The one rather major flaw in this theory: The accuser would first have to prove that the company even looked at their social networking profile in the first place - before they can even raise the issue of the things that were located on that site.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me guess, you think gun manufacturers should be getting sued for how their products get mis-used as well?
The question here is this: did the sub-human wankers who created this ever consider this possibility? Now that it's happened, do you think they give a shit? Is there a chance that someone is saying, "Gee, maybe this wasn't such a good idea..." right about now?
Aei! The pain, you got me again! Like little pins and needles under my skin. Damn you!
That said, my post was perfectly on-topic to this post which I was replying to. Unless I prefix them with "OT:", they always are. I was, of course, assuming that the reader had the wit to extrapolate out the point I was trying to make: perhaps the presence of these tags helps to improve the overall quality of submissions.
. I see zero value in learning to parrot quicksort, especially since the information is easily obtained and the implementation you use is almost certainly as fast as is possible (assuming you aren't Abrash).
I agree, but I think being able to memorize/parrot the implementation isn't the point. Instead, it's about understanding it, knowing how it works, and knowing why it's faster by comparison to other types of sorts.
Any monkey can memorize; but if you don't have the ability to understand these algorithms at a fundamental level, then your mind is not well-suited for programming.
Why not use that tag for something useful that can aid in searching articles and what not. Pedantic bastards.
I think having such technical tags such as "typoinsummary" can be handy for analysis. It's kind of hard to think of an example right now, but it seems to me that being able to search through thousands of summaries and instantly identifying which of them contains (or contained) an error could indeed be useful in some cases.
Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems that the number of duplicate posts has gone way down since we gained the ability to tag posts as "dupe".
Wait... one left. Oh, shit...
"A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time."
What part of this description fit my post above - which is both factually correct, and relevant to the article being discussed?
The US gov't IS out of business... We're bankrupt. No one has the balls to say it on camera, but every person with common sense knows what it means when (money in) - (money out) is consistently 0.
Every person indeed does: if we had a government that had "(money in) - (money out) = 0", "efficient" and "well run" would be the words you're looking for.
Here in the real world "(money in) - (money out) = -11,000,000,000,000" and counting.
Everybody* else knew the language was dead.**
*everybody: the disturbingly large subset of programmers who are unaware that COBOL and FORTRAN still power the vast majority of the financial and healthcare infrastructures of the world.
**dead: working quietly in the background without need of constant updates and maintenance
You do know that you need to check the oil in your car and lawnmower? Your lawnmower blade may need sharpening?
You should have a basic understanding of your tool at hand. Some tools are dangerous.
A basic understanding means knowing how to a) do what you need to accomplish and b) keep it running. Why should this mean understanding the file system's structure?
The same reason I have to drive my car, rather than picking a destination, waiting, and magically ending up there.
Most people driving their car have no idea how it does what it does. They know that it drinks gas and farts exhaust, and sometimes they have to bring it to the mechanic for this thing called a "tune up". As with most car analogies, your attempt to carry it to the "next logical step" is seriously flawed. By your example, the user would expect the computer to write their reports for them.
Opening a folder is not that difficult. I do tutoring sometimes, and I've found more people are confused by the Autoplay menu than just opening the drive in Explorer. Those Autoplay menus can get very cluttered!
We're talking about autorun, and not autoplay - autoplay is a stupid idea; users hate choices, especially when they don't know what all of them mean. Autorun is poor for security, but great for usability.
Yeah but when your lawnmower turns on every time you get near it or your car slams the gas when you sit in the driver seat it's time to learn how they work, mainly so that you can stop the the annoying and dangerous "features".
I'm not quite sure how this analogy makes sense... but most folks never learn how these things work. They learn how to use them - which is a rather important distinction.
Oh and BTW, I think I know how toilet paper works, and I would be extremely worried if the were any users who didn't.
So the only legimate disagreement you (and a few others) have is my sense of humor?
hat a concept, actually knowing what's on your media. All this "ease of use" and accessibility crap is just making users dumber and dumber.
Why should those people who are using computers as tools (in the same way they would use a car, lawnmower, or vibrator) have to know anything at all about how it works, where content is stored, etc?
The best system is one that just does what you want it to do, without distracting you from your task by making you think about it. That holds equally true for computers, windshield wipers, and toilet paper.
These are things that have frustrated me for years, especialyl as more and more applications are presuming to do it. It's like people have never heard of the concept of windows scheduler/cron, or even spawning off an update thread in the background on startup. Processors and hard drives are so fast these days that even bloated and beefy software (I'm looking at YOU openoffice.org and netbeans) provides acceptable startup times without a "launcher" application.
As far as Adobe - the only thing I ever do with my PDF files is read them. Every year I watch Reader's footprint get bigger and bigger, and yet there is /no/ difference in my experience with it (except that it's slower) than there was several years ago.
Why micosoft don't provide an updater program for windows, requiring companies to provide their own repos, i don't get
That would also be quite nice. A simple Updater API would go a long way and might clean up some of this crap.
That's what memory is for, though. I have 4 GiB of it, and I don't see the gain from having it go unused over having it occupied by a sloppily made app. In return, I get something I enjoy using more.
I'm not usually a subscriber to the "evil big company" theory, but I'm not too fond of trusting Adobe to install and run whatever they want, regardless of whether or not I have asked for it. Actually, I guess I am a subscriber to that theory - since I don't tend to let anyone run their crap on my PC unless I know exactly what it does or can at least be reasonably sure that it's not doing something stupid*. That's a large part of how I've stayed virus free for a couple of decades, in spite of not running anti-virus.
Aside from that - I'm not sure that I agree that's what memory is for. When I'm working in game development and my development tools are consuming 3GB of memory, you're damn right I"m picky about someone taking up an unnecessary 60MB plus. I view my computer's memory as /my/ resource, to be used by my computer as I want it to.
* like allowing anybody at all to run flawed javascript when I open a PDF file -- which should be a read only format for viewing and printing documents
Damn. GE better get moving on that holographic storage.
Perhaps I missed something here.
You mean, like, "the summary"?
This is true mostly for day traders, who are indeed gamblers; and the naive folks who think that the stock market is a great way to get rich quick. However, long-term investments are investments, and not gambles. This irregularities that you mention are typically not even blips on the radar over a 10 or 20 year timespan. Over that time the value /may/ decline - but if you do your research and pick stable companies with long-term plans for the future, it's very unlikely.
Reverse psychology is a funny thing
Yeah man.
A "do not touch" sign makes exposed high-voltage wiring seem like an adorably cuddly kitten begging to be petted.
Totally
The allure of defecating in one's pants is irresistible when the goal is precisely the contrary
I completely ag- erm. Wait. What? Damn man, how do you get through the day?
All in all, I think Foxit Reader is nice, but slightly overrated. Adobe deserves their fair share of criticism, but they still deliver a more polished product.
And without additional cost to you, that delivery includes a 60MB runtime footprint and two or three always-running updater applications!
Japanese and European companies are trying to strike deals to tap the resource, but a nationalist sentiment about the lithium is building in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who already has nationalized Bolivia's oil and natural-gas industries.
The way this reads, the criticism of the US stems from the fact that the US has nationalized Bolivia's hydrocarbons. The correct interpretation of the sentence (simplified) is : "Morales has nationalized Bolivia's oil and natural gas industries. Morales is an ardent crtiic of the United States." These two thoughts don't even belong in the same paragraph, nevermind the same sentence.
Just because you're posting articles online doesn't excuse you from editing them.
"suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" and "thankgod"?
It seems to me that if you're putting potentially damaging PRIVATE information out there in a PUBLIC forum, and that information might make you less appealing to an employer, you have no right to complain when it comes back to bite you in the ass. No matter what kind of information it is. There's a reason "private life" is considered "private" and separate from the job.
Whether it's your religious affiliation or your drunken frat pictures, use your brain before making private information about yourself public.
Legally, I know this wouldn't leave me with a leg to stand on. But in Mr Dicken's words, sometimes "the law is a ass" - especially when it comes to things that really should be common sense.
You check up on someone's page and find out that they do something you don't like, and that you can discriminate on. However also on that page it lets you know they are Mormon. You don't hire them, they sue you for religious discrimination because your organization has a bunch of Catholics at the top.
The one rather major flaw in this theory: The accuser would first have to prove that the company even looked at their social networking profile in the first place - before they can even raise the issue of the things that were located on that site.
Why would you assume that we aren't already?