" They may tell you they don't believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do."
No surprise there. That is, after all, why cons and scams work.
" They may tell you they don't believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do."
No surprise there. That is, after all, why cons and scams work.
@Sutherlands said:
@bgodot said:
@Sutherlands said:Yes, I've heard of it. Have you heard of UTF-8, UTF-16, or ISO 8859? Are you saying that the only modern useful character encoding is UTF-32? Oh, you are? Pity...@bgodot said:
there is little modern useful data that fits in 8 bits anyway, [. . .] 32 bits for a full unicode charWha... there is just so much wrong with this statement I don't know where to begin.Never heard of UTF-32?
Have you heard of reading comprehension?
Bgodot said that little modern useful data fits in 8 bits. They did not say that the only modern useful character encoding is UTF-32.
Personally, I agree with the former statement. For character encodings, certainly, 8 bits isn't enough. Or perhaps I should be saying that ISO/IEC 8859-1 isn't enough, because it doesn't contain characters I need in my country. Possibly I could fit all the characters I need in 8 bits but that wuld exclude characters that other countries need.
That sounds like my bank saying
"For your convenience the bank will open half an hour later on Thursdays."
B
@Gordonjcp said:
who the hell eats baked beans on toast?
I do. It's a standard meal here and has been for, umm, fifty years, sixty years, more? It is one of those "can't be bothered cooking, what the heck, tin baked beans, toast, grated cheese, profit!" meals. When I was growing up it was a common Sunday evening meal. Much, much healthier than 2-minute noodles.
One thing my country does share with the US seems to be inflexible airport security. Once upon a time, if you took a knife through screening they would make you walk back to checkin and check your carryon bag. Now they just confiscate it. You are not allowed to walk back out - once you have entered the screening area with the xray machines and metal detectors you are theirs, with no escape! As a trainer, I used to travel with a laser pointer. Not any more. It was explained to me that it was a danger because i might shine it in the cockpit. The locked door between passengers and cockpit didn't seem to make an difference.
On the other hand, the airport security staff have never been anything other than friendly, polite and respectful. Completely inflexible on the rules, yes, but respectful.
@blakeyrat said:
…Stop giving help.…
I may be feeding a troll but here goes anyway.
@eViLegion said:
So long as I'm not hurting anyone else, what right of it is yours to tell me that I may not do something?
Because you are part of a community you selfish prick.
In a community you do stuff that costs you in order to make a stronger community. You pay part of your income to the city/state/country/whatever. In return, fire engines come to your house, and to the houses of other members of the community. The roads are paved and level. The water and electricity get to your house. The police arrest criminals before they break into your house and steal your stuff. The country's military and intelligence agencies stop many threats to the country before those threats are realised. There is a pretty good chance that when you wake up tomorrow morning the government will be the same as it was when you went to bed.
If you have more money than your neighbours then yes, you help them! You provide for their housing and feeding (either directly through charity or indirectly through taxes and/or tithes). If you own a business then yes, you pay the money to install a wheelchair ramp. Why? First, it means that when life shits on you then someone else provides for you. Second, when those people get out of the bad situation they contribute to the society themselves, making the whole society stronger. Third, because it is the decent human thing to do!
EvilLegion, you sound like one of those rich, healthy, materialistic "libertarians" for whom libertarianism simply means "I get to do what I want and the poor can go fuck themselves". I call you on the strength of your convictions and challenge you to go an live in a place where that attitude really applies. I suggest northern Afghanistan or Somalia or many other places in the world where law and order has broken down and the social contract no longer applies.
Short answer: Can I provide one shred of reason why it is your responsibility? Yes. It is because acting that way is the sign of a responsible member of a community. If you are not willing to act that way and contribute to the community then you shouldn't be accepting the benefits of being part of the community.
I'm not normally a fan of pithy sayings but sometimes they are appropriate. Freedom of speech does not give you the right to yell 'fire" in a crowded theatre.
@morbiuswilters said:
Why would it have to return an integer? Most languages easily convert strings to integers..
If you are starting with an integer and you want an integer at the end then why the heck would you use a string at all?
What the university should be teaching (I'm assuming we are talking an IT programming degree†) is the mechanics of programming in lots of different enviroments, with the aim of producing well-rounded programmers. The degree should be exposing them to lots of different platforms and situations and paradigms to give them a wide experience, as well as (and here's what I think is most important) the critical thinking to take things learned in one environment and apply them to other environments.
I expect a university graduate with a three- or four-year programming degree to have a well-rounded collection of skills and practices and a well-rounded set of experiences to do with modern programming. Breadth and depth.
For example, embedded programming is usually very memory- and cpu-limited, and usually has no user interface. It teaches a programmer to respect resources like memory and CPU. It teaches how to write optimal code (and also how much work it is to write optimal code and how that work usually isn't worth it when resources aren't limited).
For example, Web programming is a completely different user interface paradigm to desktop software. If a programmer has dealt with nothing but the keyboard-and-mouse desktop software paradigm for four years then how are they going to react when faced with something different (either web-based or something else)? Web programming teaches asynchronous communication concepts (you can't just what an alert box on a screen and wait for the user in web server code).
Programming a web site requires different skills and approaches than programming a desktop application or programming a service or programming a database abstraction layer library or programming a smartphone app. I expect a programming graduate to have more than just an introductory level of skill in all of these.
@blakeyrat said:
Something everybody listing bullshit so far has missed: usability. Also the thing programmers are weakest at. And something with UNIVERSAL applicability. (Unlike the embedded bullshit or the web programming bullshit.)
Oh man, I am so with you on that one. Every engineer should be able recognise when they are creating ugly and/or unusable shit and should be able to either not produce the turd in the first place or correctly defend why they are producing it, as appropriate.
__________
† If we are talking a Computer Science degree, then that is completely different. Computer Science is the study of programming in exactly the same way Astronomy is the study of telescopes.
@mikeTheLiar said:
@El_Heffe said:A spam massage?
Is that where you massage spam, or you rub spam on yourself?
@xaade said:
You didn't build the building, therefore, you didn't do creative work. The robot did the creative work.
I think that using that sort of pedantic dickweedery to get around your god's law is just as much of a sin as breaking the law. Or to put it another way, what sort of respect is a person showing their religion by obeying the letter of the law *instead of* the spirit of the law?
My limited reading of the relevant laws does, however, make me feel like the laws were not written by a god but by a bunch of men whose goal was controlling a population. Perhaps that is why the rules are insane? Not allowed to water plants on one day out of seven? Good luck in a drought. Not allowed to put your burning house out? Good luck finding somewhere to live tonight.
A mad idea - perhaps the pedantic dickweedery of devices like the kosher light switch are a response by people who know their laws are insane but who still want to follow the religion behind them?
@eViLegion said:
When I restart my machine I'm usually in the middle of trying to do something, and I'm only restarting because of some error, expecting it to take a minute or two and actually being delayed by an hour.
Hint: At an admin cmd prompt, enter "shutdown /r /t 5" (restart) or "shutdown /s /t 5" (shutdown). This does not install updates (unless WIndows 8 has waited its 48 hours or whatever and has decided that it knows more that you do about what to do, the bastard).
Also, I think that if you log off from Windows XP/Vista/7 then you can shut down the machine from the login prompt without applying updates.
As for IT departments that install updates without giving me the opportunity to postpone the shutdown, while I can see their point of view, I still want them to undergo paper cuts and lemon juice for every time my machine reboots when I am in the middle of work, even if it is at 3:00am. Arrgghh!
@DaveK said:
@Cassidy said:
When I was in school back in the mid-80's, the careers advice guy specifically warned me not to go for a CS degree at university if I actually wanted to work in computers, for just that reason. Plus ça change, apparently...@morbiuswilters said:
I've seen good programmers with degrees in English, Music, Art or with no degree at all.I knew of one place where having a CS degree informally disqualified you for developer interviews. The teams (and interview panel) experienced many prima donna CS grads that presumed their degree bestowed complete knowledge upon them and stubbornly refused to budge from their outdated ways.
@PJH said:
@joe.edwards said:@GMMan said:I'm fairly certain that the horse you've tried to take to the birdbath won't actually drink from it.I still haven't figured out how to turn it off.
Google Verbatim
This horse, however, will gladly slake its thirst.
Thank you for the link.
@PJH said:
…not so good when you have more than one… Better is this.
Better still is a text message to my mobile phone. It is one authenticator I can use for any number of sites.
Now if only my bank would get with the times…