@joelkatz said:
My generic response to this kind of argument is this simple:
OMFG, I'm actually not the only person on the planet who understands patents. We should, like, go out for a beer or something.
@joelkatz said:
My generic response to this kind of argument is this simple:
OMFG, I'm actually not the only person on the planet who understands patents. We should, like, go out for a beer or something.
@belgariontheking said:
Why do I get the feeling that everyone's arguing against what morb said just because morb said it?
Morb's brought up a religious issue (should one fear periods of unemployment), which is very much like the question of using 1TBS or BSD style. Which amounts to whether you write code like
this() {
}
or
this()
{
}
Regardless of which way you feel, anyone who doesn't feel the way you do is clearly stupid and needs to get a clue. I mean, it's obvious how you should do things, isn't it?
@NSCoder said:
Sometimes I get several spam emails with the same dishonest subject on the same day.
Well, on that front... I'm particularly fond of this guy, who sends me ALMOST the same email three times a day, and has done it for years.
And here's the crappy part: it's not spam. He's a client.
@vt_mruhlin said:
Last year's deal only included three Hs. This year you get 40% off AND another H at no additional charge.
No, this year's deal has three H's.
Which I suppose means that not only do I get 40% off the products, but I even get 20% off "Shhhh".
@DaveK said:
What's so "mature" about hanging around, pointlessly beating your head against a brick wall?
Mature is whatever morbs would do. Everything else is immature, stupid, or both.
Here's the current and last year's message sitting in my GMail inbox.
Oh, but they did have one more H in the subject last year.
I got email from a company advertising 40% off and that they "don't normally do this."
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
Looks normal to me.
@bob171123 said:
I bet...
TRWTF is almost always that whenever a WTF involving management is posted, people turn around and try to excuse the behaviour and conduct of the authority figures who created or accepted it - I mean, they're in charge, it can't be their fault.
@scgtrp said:
These "couple dozen retards on an internet forum" are, in the end, the people you work for. Listen to them.
On the other hand, the "couple dozen retards" in THIS particular internet forum are not exactly your average user... and doing things the way it makes sense to US may not help that average user very much.
I mean, honestly: don't you wish you had PCRE support in Google's search box?
No normal person wants that! You're not the average user! STFU!
@OzPeter said:
Given the difference in the breeding rates between English speaking Caucasians and Spanish speaking Hispanics in the US, Caucasians are destined to become a minority at some point in the future. Where upon the majority Hispanics will be able to exercise their democratic right and vote out US-english as the national language.
We don't have a national language. There's nothing to vote out, and there would be tremendous resistance to voting anything in.
You're also assuming that Spanish-speaking Hispanics will necessarily have Spanish-speaking children. I find it more plausible that they will have bilingual children, which I suggest would be an advance.
@morbiuswilters said:
Neo-Nazism is not a protected status under the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
Which prohibits "employment decisions based on stereotypes or assumptions about the abilities, traits, or performance of individuals of a certain sex, race, age, religion, or ethnic group, or individuals with disabilities" (emphasis mine).
We can pretty easily say that neo-Nazism is not sex, race, age, or a disability. We can also argue rather convincingly that it is not a religion. But what is an ethnic group?
Title 18, USC: "A set of individuals whose identity as such is distinctive in terms of common cultural traditions or heritage."
Do neo-Nazis have common cultural traditions or heritage?
I think they might. And if you think to yourself "a neo-Nazi will create a hostile work environment", that's based on a stereotype or assumption. So if neo-Nazis constitute an ethnic group, you're in violation of the law.
Can you answer that question? Well, no, I don't think you can. I think the answer to that question fundamentally depends on the judge, and you don't have one yet, and by the time you do it will be too late. I choose to assume the neo-Nazi is part of an ethnic group, against whom I cannot discriminate, because I honestly don't see any value in discriminating.
@morbiuswilters said:
If you hire a neo-Nazi and another employee feels the environment is hostile they can sue your ass.
You can say that about anyone. What if everyone in your company is a Democrat, and you hire a Republican? That could create a hostile environment. Republicans aren't a protected class. Should I fire the Republican because the Democrats don't like him? Could they sue me for hiring him?
How is a neo-Nazi different from a Republican?
@morbiuswilters said:
Remember, it is not the intent of the offender that matters in hostile work environment cases, it is the fact that someone was offended.
And it's the same thing that matters in employment discrimination. It's not that you intended to discriminate, it's that the candidate felt you were discriminatory.
@morbiuswilters said:
I don't know what the laws are like where you live, but in most of the US you certainly can refuse to hire someone who is homophobic, a neo-Nazi or even a homosexual.
Not for that reason, you can't. You have to base your decision exclusively on the candidate's qualifications for the job. If you refuse to hire a neo-Nazi, the burden is on you to demonstrate that a neo-Nazi couldn't be expected to do the job.
Personally, I can't demonstrate anything of the sort, so if he's the best qualified candidate - I'll hire him. Am I asking for trouble? Well, yes. But the trouble I'll get is minimal compared to the trouble I might face in court. By hiring him in spite of his views and giving him a fair shot, I completely destroy any chance that he or anyone else might ever have to claim that I'm somehow prejudicial or discriminatory in my hiring practices. If another neo-Nazi comes in and isn't qualified, I can say "no hire" immediately without fear. If he tries to say I was biased against his neo-Nazi ideals - I'm a Jew, after all - I just point to my neo-Nazi employee and say "honestly?"
Most importantly, this policy scales well into the millions of employees, where a policy of avoiding a hostile work environment does not.
@morbiuswilters said:
I did stop by the early 90s to pick up enough Crystal Pepsi for everyone.
OMG OMG OMG I LOVE CRYSTAL PEPSI!!!!!!
No, seriously, I love Crystal Pepsi. I miss it.
But does anyone remember Jooky? That shit was a party in a can.
@morbiuswilters said:
As I said, we're talking about employees who never meet customers face-to-face.
No, YOU are. All my employees are likely to meet customers face-to-face. How you interview and how I interview will therefore be different. Even if your job duties don't normally require you to see customers in person, I may at any time have someone come to the office for a meeting, and emergency conditions may even force you into an on-site service call. Even if the chance is small, operational readiness is paramount. There are certainly employers like you out there, but there are a lot more employers like me.
@morbiuswilters said:
Who said anything about blatantly offensive stuff like that?
How do you know what is blatantly offensive? I'm offended by the Hindu idols some Indian employees display on their desks. The point is that no matter what your tattoo is or where your piercing is, someone may find it blatantly offensive. Most people wouldn't be offended by a barbed wire tattoo, but the few people that are could be anywhere. Just because your client's peculiarities are peculiar doesn't mean you get to ignore them.
There are people out there who have Chinese ideographs tattooed on their arms; some of them are supposed to say "love" or "peace" but actually say something offensive, because someone who can read Chinese thought it would be funny. What happens when I send one of those people to a Chinese client's site? Am I supposed to learn Chinese, just so I know what these tattoos say? Cover the damn thing. Yes, I'm sure it really does say "serenity". All tattoos must be covered.
@morbiuswilters said:
You're saying you'd knowingly hire a rabid homophobe or a neo-Nazi just as long as they don't act out?
Yes, because it is illegal and unethical to consider that in your hiring decision. It is every bit as illegal as refusing to hire someone because he is a homosexual or a Jew. I can refuse to hire anyone for failure to cover a tattoo or remove a piercing, no matter how innocuous it is, but I cannot refuse to hire them because they have one. The double-interview tactic distinguishes between the two cases: if you come in with your offensive tattoo visible, I will treat it like any other tattoo. I want it covered. I'll express that nonverbally, because I want you to pick up on it. You'll need to do that with clients all the time. When you come back in, I don't care whether you have a tattoo or what it is. I only care that you picked up on the nonverbal signal and took the appropriate action. If you can't do that, it's relevant to the job, and I can legally and ethically refuse to hire you.
@morbiuswilters said:
Just to be clear, I'm talking about lady job candidates, not man ones.
Again, it is illegal and unethical to distinguish between the two.
It strikes me that when we argue, you seem to spend a lot of time insisting that my policies and procedures are stupid, and recommending that I do something illegal or unethical instead.
@morbiuswilters said:
Yes, and they are demanding equal recognition before the law, economic opportunities and an end to hate speech like yours.
But they're retarded, and they smell funny.
@morbiuswilters said:
I always go to job interviews dressed professionally and I'm not a fan of tattoos and piercings myself, but any place that was this anal about tech people looking "professional" would suck the life out of me.
If you go to a client site looking like a biker, and that client loses three hours of productivity throughout the office because nobody will shut up about that creepy scary person working on the web server, we have a problem. We may even have lost a contract, or even the entire client.
So if I tell you not to go in there looking like a biker, you had damn sure better do it, or you will not be working for me much longer. You represent my company at those sites, and I am not going to have you wearing swastika earrings and showing off your "AIDS KILLS FAGS DEAD" tattoo. You can HAVE those things - just take them off or cover them up when you go out to a client site.
Yes, I am rather anal about whether I keep my clients. That's because if I don't have clients, you don't get paid. Maybe you should be anal about it, too.
@morbiuswilters said:
You seem to miss the point.
No, you do. The appearance, availability, and sexual proclivities of a job candidate are IRRELEVANT. They are not part of the interview. Indeed, they cannot be part of the interview. Professionalism is at issue; if you can't get through a sentence without double-entendre and suggestive language, no damn way do you work for me - no matter how much I like it. What are the Jehovah's Witnesses going to think when they point at their server and say "we need a bigger one"... and you reply "that's what SHE said"? No fucking way. I don't care how you look, or what implied promises you make, or whether I want to bone you. It simply doesn't matter. The job interview is about your ability to do the job, and if you can't represent my company appropriately on a client site, you don't have that ability. Full-stop.
@morbiuswilters said:
Christ you people are a bunch of whiners. I thought it was a fine WTF.
Seconded.
Oh, shit, I just agreed with morbiuswilters. Are there plagues of darkness outside?
@wesley said:
yeah, we all know its expensive, probably for a reason.
I find it rather disturbing that I have yet to meet anyone who knows what that reason really is.
@wesley said:
But can someone provide a reasonable technical argument
For the customer? Not really.
But from my end? As a project manager?
- Client pays cost + 10% and I get to take that 10% home. SQL Server makes me $200. Oracle makes me ten large.
- Oracle install needs an Oracle DBA. Full-stop. That's one person who will never be cut from the project budget and, owing to the nature of DBA work, is largely idle.
- Customer demands I cut the bid? I can downscale the Oracle system.
Oracle is a big money sink that drags in a highly capable professional of my choice. It gives me room to do all sorts of things without having to cut real features.
(I don't do this sort of thing anymore. My company abandoned most of its principles and ethics for a while, and collapsed under its own weight when I tried to reinstate them. I could make a lot more money if I went back to the Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe school of business, but I'd really rather not. I'm of the opinion that a slower build with the ethics and principles in-place throughout is preferable.)
@tster said:
wait..... You people are asked these kinds of questions at work?
Yep. And you can't always look at them like some sort of moron and say "you want to pay my consulting rates for THAT?"
@TehFreek said:
Except that a leading 0 without the x means octal instead, of course.
I was just going to say that this would come out as "8", whereas 012 would come out as "a". Six AM to midnight is a reasonable set of hours.
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]Can't they?[/quote]
I rather expected this.
@Lingerance said:
Why is there a leading zero?
Clearly the item count is being specified in octal.
You know, for convenience, and clarity.
@CPound said:
Imagine if a female candidate walked in, with a nose piercing and a visible barbed wire tattoo on her arm.
This is a JOB INTERVIEW. You should not have your nose piercing in. Your attire should cover your tattoo if possible. You are expected to be a professional at my company, and your piercings and tattoos may offend or upset our clients and customers. Hell, they might offend ME. You don't know me. You don't know how unreasonable I might be about this.
I will give pointed looks to your tattoo and piercing. I will then interview you as though you were any other candidate, and if you are worth further consideration I will send you home and call you back for a second interview a day or two later.
If you show up with a piercing and tattoo again, you don't get the job. If you can't take the hint that I disapprove of your tattoo and piercing, you can't be on a client site for me. Your diplomatic skills are lacking. When my company's big enough to have a dark basement with a corner where you can work, maybe I'll call you.
@CPound said:
As a male interviewer, all you would be thinking about during the interview would be that she is wild in bed.
The piercing and tattoo are irrelevant to this. If you are female, and I am interviewing you, my mind is already preoccupied with your sexual prowess and proclivities - no less than if I pass you in the hallway or on the street. If you're at all attractive to me, and I've seen you anywhere, I've imagined having sex with you. I will continue to do so every single time I see you. And yet, I will still conduct myself professionally and courteously; any job I am doing will still get done, and my brains will not slide out my arse because the sex button got pushed. The sex button always gets pushed. That will never change.
@tster said:
This thread is really very illuminating. You people are the same people that when a user can't use your program you simply call them stupid and say, "well it's easy for me." I would hate to have to use the shit you people make.
People are lazy. They optimise. I've adopted a policy of saying "I don't know" and continuing what I was already doing, because once they perceive "it is easy to ask Caliban" that will become their strategy and they will teach it to others.
So I interpret this thread differently.
1. People I honestly like ask me questions, and I honestly want to help.
2. It is more efficient to get the answer than to try and teach them how, so I do that. They like the result, so they ask me more questions.
3. Gradually, by the death of a thousand cuts, my development work stops getting done because now I am the freakin' help desk AGAIN. Now I resent these people and their stupid questions and the way they have made my job suck, in addition to taking up all my time I should be using for development, so my management is looking at me with disapproval because my productivity is decreasing.
You need to learn how to say "I don't know". If you do know, and it's easy to communicate, tell people what you know. If you don't, or it's hard to explain, just say you don't know. It's okay not to know.
Only a cursory examination, but it appears you may have the test wrong in the nested loop. When you drop the ball, and it is moving down, you test "<FONT color=#008000>(cht + bht) > curdrop</FONT>". When the ball bounces and is moving up, you continue to use the same test. Since (cht + bht) are now going down instead of up, the loop will never terminate.
@Kermos said:
apparently he can only navigate to a file if he uses Word's file->open.
He should right-click on the file and choose "Open" from the context menu. This will invoke the Explorer shell handler for the specific file type and open it in Acrobat. It will even helpfully remind him what application actually opens it.
Now your boss can be clueless and still get his job done, simply by knowing one little trick that makes him feel smart. He feels smart, the job gets done, and most importantly he leaves you alone.
@ratboy667 said:
Of course, Java has no direct way of expressing.
Because it implicitly discourages the use of Java, I will support the ludicrous assertions of this post exclusively on that principle.
What? Java developers do the opposite all the time. Fight fire with fire, right?
I've always preferred to pronounce it "skwill" but nobody ever knows what I mean.
@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
this was intentional ;-)
You're weird. I like you.
I continue to own a Mac SE and an IBM PS/2 XT. Both of them still boot. Not that I use them for anything... but once, for no real reason, I tried installing MS-DOS 2.10 on the XT's hard drive. It doesn't actually know what a hard drive is. It will cheerfully install from the floppy onto the hard disk, but when you try to boot off the C drive, it panics and misbehaves in amusing ways.
@amischiefr said:
There is nothing wrong with using Java or Tomcat if done properly
The problem is, like Ruby on Rails, developers capable of using Java or Tomcat properly are thin on the ground. There are a boatload of developers who claim it on their resume, but comparatively few of them are even competent.
PHP and C#, on the other hand, are as easy to use well as they are to use badly. The problem isn't that it's easy to use Java or Ruby badly; it's easy to use anything badly. That's what you do by default with any tool. The real problem is that using Java or Ruby well is extremely hard... so the people who do it are the kind of people who love complexity and proving their intellect. These are Bad Things to have in your framework developer, because it will result in an overly complex framework to prove how much smarter he is than his users. What you want is someone who is going to find the best tool for the job, not because it provides job security and proof of skill, but because he can develop what you want quickly and easily with it.
I would go so far as to say that while a great Java developer is usually a great developer in any language, turning a great C# or PHP developer into a great Java developer is near-impossible.
I completely agree: C# on ASP.NET is the way to go. On a Linux foundation, or a platform likely to move into a Linux foundation, I would say PHP. If you don't know whether you'll ever move to Linux, I would be tempted to go PHP just in case. Both languages have roughly equivalent strengths and weaknesses, in my experience.
@Xanthus179 said:
That teacher should be fired for marking it wrong. Knowing when to use me or I has always made me happy.
But if you correct it to "The dog barked at me and my friend", most such teachers would figure it out and never do that to anyone else again.
If you can't do it right, do it wrong in a way that reveals the problem.
Kind of like if your program leaks heap, but you don't know what it's leaking or where. Start your program, and leave it running for days. Then go in and grab any random object from the heap. Chances are it's what you're leaking.
@menta said:
Ha this is why I am the writer of a successful product and you are not sir.
Plus, if you ever need your search to run faster, you can just open up the source code and JAM IT.
@campkev said:
I don't get the Bell End one. Is that some kind of british slang I don't know about?
Yes. The end of something looks like a bell. Since you know it's something naughty, that should narrow it down enough for you.
TRWTF is that I read this post first, so it wasn't the second time.
I think they should change the error message for code 0 to "Your retarded".
Then people will come here and complain about the punctuation.
And we can tell them it's short for "Your retarded behavior produced this worthless error message because you're too stupid to program".
Then we all get to have a good laugh at they're expense.
@gremlin said:
But if you use (rand()/(RAND_MAX+1) )*N, you get 0,0,1,1,2,3,3,4 as possible values, which, although slightly better, still has problems. If RAND_MAX is not divisible by N, you have to do smething more complex (e.g. throw away some values, and regenerate another number).
Actually, the problem is in which bits you are using. With a % operation, you are always using only the lowest-order bits. With (rand()/(RAND_MAX+1) )*N, you're using all of them. So the overall entropy of the PRNG is in your calculation, no matter to which bits that entropy may have been localised. Many PRNGs have localised entropy at certain points in the cycle, and when you're only using the lower order bits, you may get no entropy at all for a while.
Imagine a PRNG which textually reorders digits. If it doesn't happen to reorder the final digit in a given call, any N <= 10 will generate the same number as the previous call.
@BillC said:
No reason that couldn't be done in a custom += method
I can think of a few reasons it shouldn't. Among other things, file operations may throw exceptions, and using the operator overload conceals this reality. So the += doesn't get wrapped in try/catch, and the application crashes sporadically when the file is on a network drive or something.
Operator overloads are sometimes a great idea, but in general, if an operation might fail for any reason at all... an operator overload usually makes it more difficult to handle the failure.
@campkev said:
I never said they should be outlawed, just that running one makes you a scumbag.
I rather appreciate payday loan places, because it dramatically reduces the number of people who ask me to loan them $50 for some plausible reason that isn't bullshit.
Instead, I get people asking for $50 with stupid reasons, and I say "no". Or I get people asking for $50 with bullshit reasons, and I suggest they get a payday loan.
See? Everyone's happy.
@DaveK said:
The filepos itself, OTOH, is opaque, and not for the reasons that you mention, but more subtle problems. Think about a file open in text mode: a CR or an LF counts as "one" in these units, but so does a "CR-LF" pair. It gets even more complicated when you involve unicode, locale, and variable-length multi-byte representations.
As opposed to what Andy said, which was...
@AndyCanfield said:
Adding offset to the current file position should advance the file position by ten. Ten what?
Um... that looks like EXACTLY the reason he mentioned.
@Mole said:
Morons usually get promoted to remove them from the productive flow. They normally become leaders or management.
However, what should happen is they should be fired. Which also removes them from the productive flow, but has the further benefit of guaranteeing they stay out of it.
@campkev said:
If your developers need this in a coding policy, you need to fire them and hire better developers.
All programming jobs can be divided into two categories.
1. Jobs that require a highly skilled and therefore highly paid expert in software engineering.
2. Jobs that could be done by a sufficiently large finite number of monkeys.
The developers who do type-2 jobs need coding policies like this.
@jimheem said:
Shelly's got a point there.
If I don't have a mainstream sense of humour, googling "joke" is unlikely to turn up anything I think is funny, let alone my favourite joke.
Being a twisted weirdo, I would say "Well, I'm pretty sure we have the same favourite joke, so you know perfectly well why I can't tell it in an interview."
And if they said "yes you could" or something like that, I'd say "isn't it the one about the rabbi and the hippopotamus?" or something, and they'd almost certainly say "no". And I'd say "well, I still can't tell it in an interview."
I'd keep this going until I got tired of it and then say "actually, there's no such joke, but I think this conversation is hilarious."
But in all seriousness... http://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20060818
Gets me every time.
@Aaron said:
If you still can't work it out, may I suggest a less challenging profession, say, marketing?
Hey, I said I was bad at this stuff. But when you come down to it, who cares how many possible passwords there are, anyway? If it's cryptographically significant, someone like me - who is more concerned with translating business rules into software systems - would defer to the judgment of a cryptographic expert.
Who is probably really bad at translating business rules into software systems. But that's okay, because he can worry about the cryptographic stuff, and I can worry about the rule translation... and we end up with good software. Neither of us could have done it alone, but that's irrelevant, because we didn't have to.
@dtech said:
Here I present the worlds smallest bug-free and self-replicating code (it outputs itself to stdout).
I hereby assert that this is not code. Per Wikipedia:
"...any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language."
You can parse this two different ways:
1. "...any collection (of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language)."
2. "...any collection (of statements or declarations) written (in some human-readable computer programming language)."
I assert that the latter is more sensible, and that your collection is not code because it has not been written - since there is nothing to write.
It is entirely possible to argue that this is both code and not-code, from which I would be forced to infer that you have been to the maze and retrieved the black particle, and therefore that further discussion with you is pointless.
@DaveK said:
Dreamcast FTW!
Ever since I saw that "it's thinking" commercial campaign, I've had vague concerns that the Dreamcast might someday evolve into SkyNet... so I'm kind of glad the console failed to take hold in the market.
I don't see the compelling value in a PS3, myself. I suppose "not Microsoft" has weight with some people, but I'm rather the opposite.
@PJH said:
@CDarklock said:
Those policies strike me as reasonably useful."I'll do this stuff if I know about it, but if I don't know about it, I'll barf, crap, and barf again." is reasonable?
No. Recommending a catch-all "else" on an if-else ladder is reasonable. Recommending a "default" case in a switch is reasonable.
If you do something stupid in your catch-all else or your default case, that isn't the policy's fault. It's yours, for doing something stupid. The policy doesn't say "your default case MUST puke all over the screen, take a dump on a mass storage peripheral, and puke again before terminating gracelessly". It just says you are encouraged to have a default case, but if you have a good reason not to have one, don't have one.
@curtmack said:
There are three pairs of repetitions, so you have to divide by 8.
I still don't believe this is accurate, but I can't explain why, and I'm bad at this stuff. So I'll take your word for it.