Posts made by nuclear_eclipse
-
RE: Randal Munroe of xkcd.com must be familiar with TheDailyWTF.com
@bouk said:
On a zen note, humans error is human error, although human error is not human error.
My brain just broke...
-
RE: The joys of PHP
@Cap'n Steve said:
How do you explain the blank string then? I also think null would make more sense than false in this case. I thought I remembered some case where it will return a negative number, but I can't find an example right now.
It's simply saying that objects such as 0 or "" evaluate as false in a normal conditional, but only the identity operator (===) will determine if it's really the FALSE value, and not just evaluated as false. It's actually quite useful once you get used to how it all works. It's much better, and much more elegant than having functions return a special value like -1, which can get in the way when you want a return value that's outside all other possible values, like for a math function, where -1 could be a perfectly reasonable answer...
-
RE: Co-worker's third attempt at formatting a date...
That looks almost exactly like the way my co-workers like to use Perl to extract date/timestamps into arrays and then use sprintf to put them back together....
-
RE: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Pricing WTF
@TheJasper said:
Fair? I tried to read it. I tried to keep an open mind. He begins by saying he is going to concentrate on comparison with vista's main competitor, namely XP. Fair enough, probably true. But the fact of the matter is that the further I read, the clearer it became that the guy was 110% pro Windows. He wouldn't have made a bad review if Vista came packaged on punch cards. You can't convince me that any (non trivial) software product that comes out is perfect. Maybe he gets to the downsides further on in the article, but I as far as I read it was all pro-windows and pro-vista.
I am not inherently anti-windows (I am anti-microsoft, but mainly because of their business practices). I figure, maybe windows fails on certain technical grounds, but it succeeds in making the machine accessible for my 77 year old aunt, who once swore she wouldn't ever have a computer in the house...and I haven't touched her machine for any maintenance ever, it was set up by my non-tech relations. But when I read a review which is only positive...well I hope he got paid for it, otherwise he is just delusional.Maybe somebody who actually read the whole review could give a...review. However, I think this 'fair review' reads like either a commercial or fan-fiction.
Perhaps you are correct. Thurrott is historically biased towards Windows, but if you take the time to read the last few sections of the article, especially the piece on the downsides of Vista, you do see that he is not just spouting the company line for Vista. He's simply making the argument that all of the problems that everyone is blaming Vista with, are mostly blown out of proportion. I have tried to find as many reviews of Vista as I could, and Thurrott's is really the one that seems most in touch with reality, and I'm no Windows fan - I have six computers, 4 with Linux, 1 with FreeBSD, and only 1 with Windows XP. But the majority of Vista reviews that I have found are of only two types: either written by a paid writer for a magazine who tailors the review to be favorable to the audience (100% pro-windows or 100% anti-windows), or written by a writer who for open source software, and the review of Vista is even more biased, or correspondingly slammed either over the price, the number of different versions, the "DRM-ed to hell" OS, or the new security dialogs.
But I digress. If you truly want unbiased information on Vista, you must read articles from every viewpoint, both good and bad, and then draw your own conclusions from what you've read. I personally found Thurrott to be quite open and he refreshingly wrote about Vista in such depth that it required about twenty separate articles to cover everything. I would be hard pressed to find such a detailed review of Vista anywhere else on the net.
-
RE: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Pricing WTF
@Tweenk said:
Vista in itself is a WTF. Looks to me like the most awaited uber-bloat of all time. May anyone convince me I am wrong?
This is one of the most fair reviews I've seen dealing with Vista, especially is such detail that he goes into:
Paul Thurrott: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista.asp
-
RE: Ajax4Jsf White Paper
@asuffield said:
[quote user="nuclear_eclipse"][quote user="asuffield"]
Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
When you start to get into doing drivers, interrupts, functions/procedures, stacks, and memory allocations, I don't exactly see assembler as being simple.[/quote]
Missed the point. Assembler is simple. Programs that need to be written in assembler frequently are not. And writing programs in assembler is certainly not simple. But by analogy - just because it's difficult to take over the world by hitting people with a rock, doesn't mean that it's difficult to hit somebody with a rock. Overly simple tools are not normally the best choice for excessively complicated tasks.
[/quote]I'll accept that; good analogy. Much better than HTML -> JSP -> JSF =\
-
RE: Ajax4Jsf White Paper
@asuffield said:
[quote user="nuclear_eclipse"]while assembler is a highly complex, powerful, and wild beast of a language.
Assembler is a highly simple, powerful beast of a language. That's kinda the point.
[/quote]
When you start to get into doing drivers, interrupts, functions/procedures, stacks, and memory allocations, I don't exactly see assembler as being simple. It's a very complex process of managing and planning your code to take all those points into account. If assembler was simple, we'd all just be coding in machine languages...
-
RE: Ajax4Jsf White Paper
I think the WTF here is their equating of HTML to assembler, considering HTML is a very easy, static, and un-assembler-like "language", while assembler is a highly complex, powerful, and wild beast of a language.
-
RE: IE could not open site
@db2 said:
@nuclear_eclipse said:
I believe it's a sarcastic use of JavaScript to pop up an alert dialog for IE users,
Eg. <script> alert('Internet Explorer cannot blah blah ....'); <script>
As far as I know, you can't throw up a Red X Of Doom message box via Javascript. Unless there's some clever way of exploiting exceptions or something.
I somehow missed the red X, I guess it was my eyes glazing over already from the code I have to work on....
-
RE: IE could not open site
I believe it's a sarcastic use of JavaScript to pop up an alert dialog for IE users,
Eg. <script> alert('Internet Explorer cannot blah blah ....'); <script>
-
RE: Flickr Javascript Gems
@seventoes said:
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mozilla/5.0") != -1 && navigator.userAgent.indexOf("KHTML")==-1) { // fix for stupid moz bug w/scrollbars and maxHeight
//EXT.notes_text_area.style.overflow = '-moz-scrollbars-vertical';
} else {
}Ok, i understand why you would comment a line out, but whats with the empty else?
Scarily, the empty else statement is probably the result of the Javascript being generated on the fly with PHP, Perl, Ruby or somesuch. In my current job, just working on a poorly done web 1.0 application, I've come across 5 or 6 instances of PHP-generated Javascript that's different for each rendition of the page. Probably something of the sort:
<xmp>
echo "<script>if (condition) {";<br /> // do stuff<br /> echo "} else {";<br /> if (condition) {<br /> echo "do this;";<br /> }<br /> echo "}";</p> <p dir="auto"></xmp></p></p> </script>
-
RE: Yet another Microsoft vs Apple
@Iago said:
Yeah, so, wake me up when Apple releases a tablet product, or when you can run OS X on embedded devices. Apple have a better desktop OS, but that's basically all they have (ignoring the iPod, which is just a media player), while Microsoft's product line is really quite diverse.
Funny how the Apple fanatics seem to gloss over that. Seems some people just aren't interested in evaluating the competition fairly.
Not to mention that Apple only has to design their products to work against a very small subset of hardware that Windows has to support. It's easy to churn out new operating systems when the product support requirements are a fraction of the competitors. Wake me up when Apple releases Mac OS X that will work on any computer out of the box, not just what they want it to work on...
-
RE: Now you can store your data on paper!
@merreborn said:
Actually, good paper with good ink stored in the right environment will last longer than any other medium, short of chiseled stone.
I don't know about this guy's format specifically -- it sounds like it'd be really error prone. But point is, there are tons of books from a hundred years ago, and many that are far far older that are still perfectly readable today. And printing's cheap. There's not a single digital medium available today that you can guarantee will be readable in 2106; but a book certainly will be.
How does this take into account for the fact that most old books, although "readable" even today, are not in a condition that they could be used as a normal book for fear of falling apart or disintegrating? Most old books must be kept in hyper-sterile environments under incredibly well-trained attention in order to preserve them. Compare this to modern storage techniques, such as hard drives and optical disks, which can technically last incredibly long without any special maintenance, or even to magnetic tape drives, which at the most require the skills of a monkey to duplicate to a new tape or refresh every 8 or 10 years...
-
RE: Now you can store your data on paper!
Brilliant!!! Now when Enron needs to dump some evidence, they run everything through the shredder!!!
Seriously though, I would think a SIM-sized piece of data paper would be easily bent/torn/crumpled/burnt/etc, and that storing everything on paper would just lead to more data loss. Forget long-term storage of backups, the paper would rot, yellow, etc, and all of a sudden you have nothing....
-
RE: We'll go with option A
At my job (working on a bunch of internal web applications), our definition of consistency is to have all of the webpages use the same dumb "blue ice" background image....
-
RE: Don't touch the null, it may explode
Just make sure you dont try to reference the null value inside the catch block, that will not only explode on you, but it will also send viruses to everyone in your mailing list, tape your dog to the ceiling, and overfeed your pet fish until they swell up and burst.
-
RE: Java "loop unrolling"
The real WTF is the manually centered help text... and the case statements... and the use of Java, oh wait...
The real WTF is this: "After the chat program is added to the java game, we can't see the chat GUI" and then later on in the replies "I haven't done anything. I just want someone to tell me how to put the chat code into the game code" and then one minute later "I've tried a number of things I just need suggestions on other options i can do."
If you're going to pawn your learning experience off onto random forum-goers, at least get your damn story straight!!
-
RE: This is odd!
@Laertes said:
The real WTF is that you're using Internet Explorer.
And Norton (IIRC), and Quicktime, and Outlook..... ;)
-
RE: College WTF
@RevEng said:
(register_globals FTW)
My current job (working on an internal web-based bug-tracking tool) is loaded with tons of WTFs and spending a good portion of my time tracking backwards through 6 or so PHP pages just looking for where the variables get created. Just because register_globals was set on by default in old PHP versions doesn't mean the programmer needs to use them. I wish I could just press a button and zap the creaters of this monolith every time I had to deal with a register_globals issue....
-
RE: Dreamweaver Update Pains
I'm just used to places where any IT-supported software is only installed/updated by IT, but that's also on Unix machines where the admins push updates to the machines every week, and the users can install anything else they want/need, assuming they have the proper privileges to compile and put in place.
-
RE: Dreamweaver Update Pains
Why is the ordinary cow-orker/user installing the updates to Dreamweaver? Isn't that the job of IT? ( and/or the helpdesk? ) I would think that in most jobs, it shouldn't even be possible for normal users to have access to installation media due to piracy issues (copying, installing elsewhere, etc).
-
RE: Sometimes it's the little things
The real WTF is the resulting page when you've done something wrong in the form:
"You have made an error somewhere in this form..."