@Lorne-Kates I was going to say that you need a relational DB for that and make a snippy joke but I think that's already been done to death (and I've been ed as well...).
Posts made by remi
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
@Arantor @dkf so once again, using trendy new techs means we can't have useful features that boring old techs could deliver. I love modern tech...
Can we go back to CS, please? It might not have had many features, but at least it didn't pretend to...
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
@masonwheeler I can understand some people not liking seeing 642 instead of 638, if nothing else because it gives a wrong picture of accuracy (and if you know this number is wrong, you start doubting all other numbers...). If really there is no way to get the exact number (which would be surprising, honestly!) then we could at least have an approximate one, like for the posting times. What you want to know from the number of unread is indeed 1 or 1000, not really 642 or 638.
-
RE: Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!
@xaade said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
@remi said in Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!:
so why not the same thing with taxes?
Because murder is obvious. There's a dead body.
And did the person who killed the other intend to? That makes a huge difference in the sentencing (and in the qualification but in a sense that's just legal technicalities). Someone who stabs another in anger and happens to kill him will not get the same as someone who deliberately wanted to kill. The only difference may be the intent.
And I was foreseeing this, so that's why I'm also mentionning scams and other financial abuses ( did you skip that bit on purpose? ). Again, apologies if it's not the right technical word, but let me clarify.
Say someone pays some money to someone else, in exchange for a service that is never given. There is of course the contractual liability (i.e. the second person has to repay the money or other contractual arrangements) but there is also a criminal aspect: if the second person repeatedly does that, we are in clear scam territory. What matters here is the intent: someone may be clearly willing to render the service but fails (for any reason, including incompetence, but that's not a crime), or he may want to trick the other. The intent makes the difference between legal or not.
The intent of tax law is not so obvious, and it's purposefully made to be that way, because there are incentives for politicians to introduce loopholes.
I agree on that, and I think the intent of each law should be made clearer. There are laws where part of the text is not strictly legal dispositions (i.e. "doing so and so is punished by so and so"), but introductory text expressing the intent of the law (e.g. "we want to encourage people to save for their retirement"). It's part of the law, so judges can use that to help them interpret it, and I think it should be always present.
So, you can blame someone for a dead body, but not ALWAYS for misinterpreting the intent of the tax law.
That's why we have judges and tribunal and everything else. Even for a dead body, it's not obvious whether the person who killed wanted to kill or not. Yes, that's difficult. Yes, there are cases where not everyone agrees on the final conclusion. But on the other hand, there are many cases where there is no doubt.
-
RE: Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!
@xaade I disagree. Sure, if there is a clearly identified loophole, it's easier to make that explicitly illegal rather than rely on some "catch all" clause. But there are many laws that rely on the intent of the person committing the offense (starting with the murder/manslaughter (GBH?) ones -- not sure on the english exact words here, but you get my idea -- and also some laws about scams/fraud/..., again I am not sure of the technical names in english, sorry), so why not the same thing with taxes?
(scams are interesting for what we're talking about in that they deal with something similar -- money and not physical harm -- and there are cases where the intent makes the difference between something being an offense or being perfectly fine)
That's what the laws about this that I have heard about do, mentioning something like "knowingly working around the tax code". Judging that is exactly the same as judging murder etc., it's up to the prosecution to prove that there was an intent to fraud.
It's not easy, I agree, and there will be many edge cases. But again, nothing is perfect and I believe it's worth trying to improve the current situation. I know you and some other are going to disagree, and I think that at the core is (partly) the question of whether an imperfect law is worse than no law. But we won't resolve that one so easily...
-
RE: Line up, line up, pay your taxes here!
@Jaloopa I agree with you. On the tax loophole thing, I think there is a relatively (morally, if not in the law) clear distinction between "taking advantage of a tax break that the governement has explicitly set up to encourage something" (e.g. pensions, or -- at least in France -- large energy-saving building work such as changing your boiler etc.), and "finding how to combine various laws to slip something around the taxman".
That's why, on principle, I am not opposed to laws that penalize any tax avoidance, even if it's supposedly legal, unless it's a tax break specifically designed as such. Obviously, the devil is in the details and how that law is written may change everything (someone mentionned one such law in Poland that seems to be badly written), but the idea doesn't strike me as bad.
And in any case there will always be grey areas in complex matters, but nothing is perfect...
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
@Arantor said in Display unread count for each topic on /unread:
It is worth having only if it is accurate.
Fair point, having a wrong number is worse than no number. But, as @Luhmann says, if I click the topic I get sent to a specific post: even if it's not really the last one I was reading, this could be used to give a number? At least I would know how many posts are between where takes me when clicking the topic and the end.
(plus, may I respectfully suggest that if read tracking is flaky, that should be one more incentive to fix it...)
(and I don't want to rehash that theme too much, but the phpBB forums I'm using don't seem to have any issue with read tracking, so that's probably not that difficult to do...)
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
@Onyx Makes sense, yes. But if it's useless information, there is no point showing it even if it can be computed (and even if it might be of interest to the admins).
Back to the original topic, I understand that computing the number of unread is slightly more work than just the global stats. But since knows where I was in each topic, it must have the relevant information somewhere...
-
RE: Display unread count for each topic on /unread
btw, is the number of view an interesting information for many of you? I can see how on some forum with topics with real information but a low post count, that might be an interesting stat, but here?
I mean, in relation to this topic, I would see more value in having the number of unread rather than the number of views on the summary page (to keep only 2 numbers displayed to avoid crowding things... you know how white space is precious, you wouldn't want to put too much stuff in it!).
-
Display unread count for each topic on /unread
It would be nice if the /unread page was showing, for each topic, how many unread messages there are.
At the moment, it shows the total number of messages plus some info about the last one, but that's all. I would appreciate before going to a topic knowing whether it's for one message (and if it's a one-liner, the preview on /unread is enough and avoids letting do its magic dance when loading a topic) or a more significant discussion.
-
Clicking notification in same topic reloads page
If you have a notification about a post in a topic, and you are already currently viewing this topic, then clicking the notification reloads the page.
This is particularly annoying when you are already looking at the post that triggered the notification or if it's very close to where you are, and in a long thread with a lot of pictures, because of the "smart loading" (I don't know what the name of that feature is, but it certainly should have "smart" in its name, given how dumb it is).
-
RE: The Official Status Thread
@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
STATUS Very annoyed. This is the second time I've threatened to cancel my paper subscription and this is the second time that they have discounted it. Fuck disloyalty rewards.
I had almost the same with my ISP a few years back. They changed my contract to something more expensive so when I called to complain they offered me a discount for a few months (3 or 6, I don't remember) to bring it back to the old price. When I pointed out that in a few months I would still be paying more, they said to call again at that time. I thought that was just the guy wanting to get rid of me, but lo and behold! when I called again, they indeed renewed the discount! And again the next time, and so on. All I had to do was call and say that I had a discount until now, and they renewed it (until I moved home and changed ISP for other reasons).
-
RE: The most important part of selling a product: having a product
@TimeBandit said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
At my previous job, my boss was often sending me emails written in all caps.
One previous boss wrote emails with subjects such as "!!!!IMPORTANT!!! $$$stuff and things$$$" (with the "stuff and things" part being the real subject of the email, albeit formulated in vague terms such as "new release" or "that code you sent me").
Weirdly, he never understood why many of his emails ended up in our spam folders and he had to resend them (yes, we could have configured the spam filter to accept his emails... but where's the fun in that?).
Although there may or may not have been times when we pretended to not have received an email from him thanks to that excuse...
-
RE: Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++
@Onyx ah, yes. If QtCreator gets the #define right, I think that Find correctly uses it, but there are some cases where that fails, yes. I haven't had issues with namespaces, but I don't do complicated things with them (and still that's enough to totally mess up VS... but I already said that this is not about bashing VS ;-) ).
I agree that it's not foolproof, but it works reasonably well for a reasonably straightforward project. Which is, in my experience, a fair assessment of QtCreator in its entirety.
-
RE: Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++
@Onyx said in Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++:
it has some usability holes ("Find usages", for example, is just a glorified search and can sometimes fuck it up)
I have the complete opposite experience on that. For me Find usages in QtCreator works (almost) perfectly and in a fraction of a second. Compare to VS2015, where the same function churns for at least 10-20 s (same code base, same computer) and returns tons of false positives (comments, same function but in a different class etc.), to the point of making it useless.
(but this is not a thread about the failings of VS... otherwise I would have a few more to add!)
-
RE: Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++
@Adynathos said in Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++:
CMake can also build QT projects.
Do you mean that you can compile Qt code with CMake (in which case it's no different to Makefiles or command line, Qt is just one more lib to link with...), or that CMake can use Qt .pro files directly (which would be more interesting!)?
-
RE: Dumb things being crowdfunded.
@ChrisH said in Dumb things being crowdfunded.:
Full-LED high beams work really well to wake those up. But yes, fuck them.
That reminds me of the latest fucktard that high-beamed me (2 days ago): 2 lanes highway, fully congested, he decided that he was above that shit and started going between the 2 lanes (like a motorbike). Of course, people that didn't move out fast enough to let him through got high beams and honks. For some reason, I was quite happy to be one of those.
(the really hilarious part being that the rightmost lane I was in turned out to be slightly faster than the other one, so I overtook him and he did the same trick again a couple of minutes later, showing how much time he was gaining by being a total dick!)
-
RE: Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++
@dkf said in Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++:
It takes skill to use the performance analysers anyway.
True. But using one with a flat listing without the ability to navigate properly between calls and to break down costs requires more than just skill...
-
RE: [NSFW] Anyone want a Brangelina Memorial Waxwork Scuplture?
@HardwareGeek said in [NSFW] Anyone want a Brangelina Memorial Waxwork Scuplture?:
@Arantor said in [NSFW] Anyone want a Brangelina Memorial Waxwork Scuplture?:
Punch
line:duderelisted the item, and it soldfor £5100 with 40 bids.So much for faith in humanity.
Better?
-
RE: Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++
@Quwertzuiopp said in Let's talk build systems and tooling for C++:
Which is, in your opinion, the least worst build system for use with C++?
Our C++ code here is heavily based on Qt, so we use their build system (qmake). It's... definitely not the best system, but probably not the worst either... It's actually only a wrapper for Makefiles, or generating VS files, so sometimes things leak a bit between the two layers (but in my experience, it's quite rare unless doing really weird things). For a standard use, it works reasonably well.
As far as I can tell, using it does not mean that your code has to use Qt in any way, which is probably good for what you want.
Which cross platform IDE's do not suck?(My experience and cursory reading tells me the answer is probably "none")
Same as above, we use QtCreator. Again, it's... not the best IDE, but not the worst either! On Linux, it integrates quite well with gdb, and it also tries to integrate with valgrind, with less success (the memory checker part is tolerable, the performance one is unusable -- I only know of kcachegrind on Linux that does a reasonable job of showing valgrind results). It has a vim-like editor if you want, which kind-of-works as long as you don't want to do more than using a few regexps and cut-and-pasting code (assuming you like vim, of course...).
It's probably not the tool you want to use in the end, but someone had to mention it!
-
RE: Hi
There are good wines from the Mosel area, but they tend to be expensive…
Yeah, that's because you have to ship them from elsewhere first.
(sorry, I have no idea about Mosel wines, that's just one standard joke about any non-wine-producing region in France... same as "to drink good wine with an honest man in [fill in whatever region you want to make fun of], you have to bring the wine, and the man")
-
RE: Telstra: The Immutable Hurricane of Utter Stupidity
I read the topic as "Tesla" and then read all of the initial post waiting for the car to happen.
Too bad, that could have been a nice story (I don't know, maybe the neighbour charges his Tesla just when you come home and that borks the power/phone lines?).
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue I'm hoping things will improve before the next reorg or we buy another company. These things tend to throw back any effort with an alarming speed!
Although to be fair, these days and given the state of the industry I'm working in, it's more likely that we will be bought than the opposite... when a company has reached the stage where what's protecting it from being bought is that its debt is too large and all potential buyers are in the same situation, it's not good...
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@remi I have no doubt you're in a shitty IT situation.
TBH, it could be worse. Not much more, but it could be. At least the non-IT aspects are pretty good (team, management, actual business is pretty interesting...). Plus I'm not a software engineer by training, so I probably don't mind that much letting some ugliness creep in (I keep my perfectionnism for the science that the code is supposed to do!).
OK, I thought it was pretty clear from my messages that I was trying to find an applicable balance between theory and reality, but it seems we've had a misunderstanding on that from the start. If we're talking ideals, then I agree with you, full stop.
I am too (check out Yamirant in the lounge ;) ). But I firmly believe there's a better way and slowly, reluctantly, kicking and screaming, the industry is moving in the right direction.
(I'm not in the Lounge, joined too recently and never bothered about that) I think that on the whole things are indeed getting better.
Hey, you want a slice of my own s to illustrate that? It's only since about 1 year that we have a common source code repository for all people working together, rather than... at least 2 CVS and 1 SVN repo? Unfortunately we couldn't push some guys hard enough and we ended up with SVN rather than git/Hg/... But still better than before, no?
Also, someone recently managed to add a field in the SVN commit box to enter the issue # so that now we can start to link (most) commits to an issue! And we have an automated build system which is not one guy running "make" from a crontab! It's definitely getting better...
(but you get an idea of where I'm coming from...)
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
The time spent learning the code and why it is the way it is is just as valuable as time spent writing code you're going to keep
Again, on the principle, I can't argue with that. But I would love to be able to really do that all and every time and tell that to my manager (and other people involved). It just doesn't always work that way.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@remi said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
only to have another dev explaining immediately that there was a good reason for that edge case
If the dev has to explain, you've done it wrong. Write a test that explains, comment the code, and leave the explanation in the commit message. You can't be chasing down everyone who comes after you!
Yeah, right. If you think that's how all code is always written, I've got a bridge to sell...
Again, that's the ideal world. Sometimes people do it that way. Sometimes what seems obvious to one dev when writing the commit message does not look obvious at all to the next one (I mean, look at how this thread started!). Sometimes one dev writes in a kind of borked English that he thought made sense but didn't. Sometimes someone is just lazy, just once, just this time but that's enough...
I don't know, I may be working in the wrong place (well, if I'm honest... anyway, that's a lot of other stories!), but it does happen regularly that someone doesn't fully understand some code and goes to ask the original dev if he remembers what that was about. And on the whole, I'd rather have that than everyone thinking they can change anything by themselves.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@PleegWat said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@remi said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
But when you rewrite the function (code, whatever) from scratch, you are still going to spend time fixing the code so that all those tests pass again.
If you've got the tests, then you'll run into those cases again immediately, rather than when someone complains, reducing impact. Also you'll run into it before you merge, so you can back out if it doesn't work out.
Sure, but in both cases you have spent more time than just adding one more wart to the code.
Not saying this is not worth it in some cases, but I've seen too many cocky and over-confident devs (including me, let's be honest!) who think that rewriting will be quicker, only to end up spending much more time and effort than the quick-and-dirty...
It's a balance, and personnally I'd rather shift it towards conservativeness.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@remi I think having cleaner code to maintain is valuable in and of itself.
Yes, that's a good point. My fear is that while you think you are cleaning, it's very easy to overlook good reasons that lead to the warts that you want to remove.
figur[ing] out what assumptions were originally made that were poor
... can easily be wrong! I see that often in code that has been modified by several devs. Someone comes along, sees something that looks wrong, or weird, or purely ugly, and changes it, only to have another dev explaining immediately that there was a good reason for that edge case (doesn't matter whether this is seen in tests, code review, discussion between coders or anything, the result is a loss of time -- if not new bugs!).
Sure, this is usually a code smell that the design is wrong (or at least no longer adapted to the needs), and that code usually needs to be refactored. But it's all too easy to sweep in and erase carefully thought out (if badly executed) code, all because you think that you understood everything...
Again, my point is definitely not to never refactor or rewrite, but rather that refactoring/rewriting should not be your first port of call, but only one possible choice that you pick after careful consideration.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
I'm sorry, you're saying the previous programmer (you or whoever) was perfect enough to hit all the edge cases, had the time to write tests, and was stupid enough not to encapsulate the edge cases they solved for in the tests?
No, of course ideally all these edge cases are in tests (again, ideally, because we all know that in reality if some code comes from old stuff and various places, things are never perfect). But when you rewrite the function (code, whatever) from scratch, you are still going to spend time fixing the code so that all those tests pass again. So OK, my quip at "perfect" tests was not really warranted here as hopefully the tests are good enough to cover all the cases that caused the warts in the initial code.
Still, having tests doesn't mean for me that rewriting is necessarily a better idea than adapting.
I'm not saying you should always throw out the code, but the idea that you can't ever change the sacred lines laid down before you is bunk.
Me neither. I'm just saying that, by default, my position is rather on the "incremental and minimal changes" rather than "rewrite everything in a way that looks nicer". But that's just a "default setting", there are many cases where rewriting is warranted.
-
RE: 📧 The Official Spam Emails Thread™
@Boner Is that really a spam? I mean, what would be the point of the spammer to send that? Is the "case details" link a phising one?
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@Yamikuronue said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
Why is it better to modify than to throw out and redo?
Because, as Joel Spolsky (I think?) said, what you call an ugly old code full of warts is likely to actually be a code that was tweaked and adjusted to handle all the weird edge-cases and bugs that you didn't think of initially. So by throwing it out you're condamning yourself to falling into these bugs again and adding the edge cases again. Sure, tests will help you do that more quickly and without breaking the rest (assuming you have perfects tests, which is very unlikely!), but you're still going to spend time on that, which you won't have to do if you just modify the code.
There are cases where the piling-on of edge cases actually shows that you took the wrong route from the start, and in that case a change in requirements might be a good opportunity to start from scratch, yes. And cases where the new requirement is so far from the initial one that rewriting the code is the only realistic option. But I would not put that as a rule.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@LaoC said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@flabdablet said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
The compiler has worked out that the only time it needs to write back to
head
is if the while loop never runs even once, so the conditional in question gets hoisted to the start of the proc amongst the jumps that set up the loop. The "optimized" version actually ends up costing an extra jump in order to force updating the header to use the same code as updating a walked-to link.Whow. Nifty indeed! I'd like to retract everything and argue for the opposite now (I hear that's en vogue here now) :)
Which kind of shows what a lot of people (including myself) have been saying here: don't bother trying to write smart code, you'll end up falling on your face more often than not. Write code that works and that you can understand.
-
RE: These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious
@pydsigner said in These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious:
@remi said in These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious:
if you don't mind your picture being widely published
ERR_PATH_NOT_FOUND
@remi said in These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious:
undefined (or NULL, or FILE_NOT_FOUND, or...)
Or an exception (which won't be caught, of course).
-
RE: These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious
@Onyx It's reasonably OK if you're not trying to be funny, and undefined (or NULL, or FILE_NOT_FOUND, or...) if you don't mind your picture being widely published.
Guys, I'm just reading the chart!
-
RE: These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious
@Jaloopa Good point.
But you cannot dress as an alien (*) from a movie that got mixed reviews (and thus is "controversial" -- OK, that one is a bit far-fetched).
(*) not-from-Earth... we've already done this one before, I think.
-
RE: These Chinese knockoffs are hillarious
@Jaloopa I think you're not allowed to wear that if you're not white...
https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/1021179
The real funny thing is that, since that's the first test on the chart, as soon as you're white, then this is entirely OK.
-
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
@cartman82 said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
@Maciejasjmj said in Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article):
But in application code that's not on a critical performance path, it just says "hey, look at me, I'm clever!". And the 5 more seconds I need to spend tracing this code in my head are probably worth more than any sort of performance gains I could get from it.
This
Yes!
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
(from Kernighan, says the All-Mighty Web) -
RE: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement (article)
For me, it's much more important to have code that is easy to read and understand than the simplest possible algorithm. Yes, of course, when it becomes a performance issue you have to do something, but on the whole, it's much easier to misunderstand "optimal" code and either miss a bug or introduce one while tweaking something.
The first slide is for me much easier to follow than the second one. It's clear what it does, I can go through it without needing to picture pointers-to-pointers. Everything that adds mental overhead while reading the code is bad for me as it forces me to focus on the mechanics rather than the idea.
That being said, I probably wrote less than 0.0...01% of the code that Linus has written, so for him that might seem obvious. Basically, I'd say, write code that you are comfortable with. You can never know what future maintainers (including yourself!) will consider "obvious", so your only comparison point is you and now.
-
RE: Why you should never use Upwork, ever.
@The_Quiet_One said in Why you should never use Upwork, ever.:
I just don't see how that's been a viable strategy for them. Yes, in the short run they give clients the impression that they are on their side and want to keep them satisfied, but in the long run they are going to find themselves with the bottom-of-the-barrel for freelancers who have nothing to lose, with the quality ones running away.
That's assumption 1: assuming that there is, in effect, a limited pool of freelancers from which their site gets some share. I get the impression that, between the natural growth (i.e. new people coming into the job market) and the huge size of the freelance market overall, they are far from that limitation.
How is it that by now they haven't reached that brick wall yet where the only freelancers left are the code monkeys who have no critical thinking skills, which will only satisfy the worst of clients who don't know better.
Assumption 2: you're assuming that code monkeys are not fulfilling the needs of the average client. I might have an overly dark view of the market here, but I get the feeling that the actual average quality of IT/design work is very low (or rather, the median... hopefully there are a few excellent projects that lift the average up...).
All in all, that does not make for a very seducing company, but it may very well makes them money in the long term.
Also, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". I expect that they didn't really think things that far and are just riding along, as most people/companies are in reality, whatever they may say.
-
RE: THE HOT BATON ISSUES THREAD
@pydsigner said in THE HOT BATON ISSUES THREAD:
@masonwheeler said in THE HOT BATON ISSUES THREAD:
heavy pickups (F-150…)
???
That's a war plane, right ?
(I tried to be a smart-ass and find a variant of the F15 that would be a 150 or 15O, the closest I found is a F15D... meh... from far enough and if you squint your eyes, that should do...)
-
RE: Enlightened
@dkf said in Enlightened:
@NeighborhoodButcher said in Enlightened:
Fun fact - you can't erase you personal (including health) data from S Health because their server returns a 500 upon request.
Fun fact: the fines for fucking around in the face of a court order are usually rather noticeable on a company's bottom line. ;)
Although I always wonder about this: say you actually take them to court and a judge order them to remove the data. How are they going to prove that they actually did it? I guess an expert will have to certify it. How likely is it that the expert will really be able to check that the database has been properly cleaned of all references, including whatever weird partial dump that someone made for testing 2 years ago and that happens to include your info and other usual mess that exists in all big companies?
-
RE: Internet of shit
@tufty I don't know if they really outlast filament bulbs (actually, I know they don't, you are right...) but I find that in practice, under normal conditions (*) they last long enough that it doesn't matter.
I still have some old ones that are more than 10 years old (you know, leftovers from previous homes that stayed at the bottom of the bulb-box...) and work perfectly. To me, that's long enough that if they last less than conventional bulbs, I won't really see the difference.
(*) I know, everyone has weird stories of a socket that burnt bulbs in a few months or so... mine is an outside lamp in my front garden, I guess some water must creep in somehow.
-
RE: Internet of shit
@Bulb I lived in a newly built house in the UK and all ceilings had some weird fittings which looked like it was a low-energy bulb with the electronics in the fitting instead of in the bulb. Which makes sense (assuming the part that breaks is not the electronics), but I never saw this fitting anywhere else, and more worryingly I never saw any matching bulb in any shop.
Luckily for me, the bulbs lasted longer than I lived there (which was about 5-6 years, so at least they were not too shitty...) so I never really needed new ones, but to this day I have no idea what standard they were.
-
RE: The IRC quotes Thread
@Onyx said in The IRC quotes Thread:
<BenLubar> cadt driven development
I thought that was a typo for "cat driven development". As in, let the cat walk on the keyboard and commit the result. That would explain a few of the articles.
-
RE: TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML)
@dkf said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
In practice, the best options seem to be ones that encourage people to stop and think.
Yeah but the thing is, people don't want to have to think about this. Not that they are stupid (well, a lot are, but that's not related), more that what we, as developers or otherwise used to the arcane of the system, see as important steps of a process, most users see as simply one thing ("get this from the interwebz").
So all the flak Microsoft/Apple/... get for making things automatic is actually not so stupid. You don't bother (anymore) checking anything before starting your car, except that there are no red lights on the dashboard, because all the intermediate checks and stuff are hidden from you. Yes, that means you cannot do much by yourself except driving, but on the other hand this is what most people want to do...
In that regard, it's good to remember that computers in the general public are about 30 years old at max (more like 15 or so, I'd say), so even taking into account that things move faster, that's about the state of the auto industry in the 30's or so... far, far away from where we are now!
-
RE: GoDaddy blocks their own accounts as spam
@accalia To be fair, is there any tech-support that isn't like that?
-
RE: Case (in)?sensitive filesystems are :doing_it_wrong:
@Khudzlin In other words, when you go into the details, history and local variations, all languages are complicated :-)
inb4: lojban?
-
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Yamikuronue said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
The jacket thing is him casting out demons to cure people of their sicknesses. I assume the later punching is as well.
Ah, of course! (hem) Any idea why one attendant hits the preacher? At this point, I can either guess that the demon in the guy makes him hit the preacher (nice one: you can do anything you want and blame it on demons... and then the same people freak out that you can't have a moral without a god... go figure!), or that somehow the preacher is infected, maybe because he did something before to channel the demon to himself.
(all my years playing RPG might actually be helpful! I just need to find out which ruleset they are following...)
-
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Boner Uh, OK. I guess. I'm not sure that I would love being hit to feel that some God loves me, but, well, to each is own. Or not. This is stupid.
I love how the suggested video that popups is for a MMA fight. Looks like youtube has perfectly nailed it.