Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
Old school gamer here. Headline should definitely say Quake II.
There might not seem to be much difference to a casual observer, but from that standpoint there’s not much difference between either and any other FPS. Even Minecraft to some extent.
Speaking of which, the Minecraft equivalent to this had all the same problems outlined in other comments here. Interesting as a proof of concept, but there are almost certainly better ways of using AI.
Package version 0.01: Built with libraries abc version 2, def version 0.1 and ghi version 7.2.2
Your system has requirements: abc version 2, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.0
Package version 0.02: Requires abc version 3, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.1
You realise that those differences in version would mean that you would have to basically recompile (then debug and recompile) your entire operating system with the three upgraded packages, and deal with a full cascade of dependencies, not just the package you really want to compile, OR basically sit down and rewrite Package 0.02 from the ground up using older libraries than it was originally written for.
You decide to make do with the old version of the package.
If endl is a function call and/or macro that magically knows the right line ending for whatever ultimately stores or reads the output stream, then, ugly though it is, endl is the right thing to use.
If a language or compiler automatically “do(es) the right thing” with \n as well, then check your local style guide. Is this your code? Do what you will. Is this for your company? Better to check what’s acceptable.
If you want to guarantee a Unix line ending use \012 instead. Or \cJ if your language is sufficiently warped.
Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there’s no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.
As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can’t have been that strong in the first place.
Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that’s even possible to control in the first place.
I see I’ve forgotten to put on my head net today. You know the one. Looks like a volleyball net. C shape. Attaches at the back. Catches things that go woosh.
Those “almost completely forgotten” characters were important when ASCII was invented, and a lot of that data is still around in some form or another. There’s also that, since they’re there, they’re still available for the use for which they were designed. You can be sure that someone would want to re-invent them if they weren’t already there.
Some operating systems did assign symbols to those characters anyway. MS-DOS being notable for this. Other standards also had code pages where different languages had different meanings for the byte ranges beyond ASCII. One language might have “é” in one place and another language in another. This caused problems.
Unicode is an extension of ASCII that covers all bases and has all the necessary symbols in fixed places.
That languages X, Y and Z don’t happen to have their alphabets in contiguous runs because they’re extended Latin is a problem, but not something that much can be done about.
It’s understandable that anyone would want their alphabet to be the base language, but one has to be or you end up in code page hell again. English happened to get there first.
If you want a fun exercise (for various interpretations of “fun”), design your own standard. Do you put the digits 0-9 as code points 0-9 or do you start with your preferred alphabet there? What about upper and lower case? Which goes first? Where do you put Chinese?
It’s a “joke” because it comes from an era when memory was at a premium and, for better or worse, the English-speaking world was at the forefront of technology.
The fact that English has an alphabet of length just shy of a power of two probably helped spur on technological advancement that would have otherwise quickly been bogged down in trying to represent all the necessary glyphs and squeeze them into available RAM.
… Or ROM for that matter. In the ROM, you’d need bit patterns or vector lists that describe each and every character and that’s necessarily an order of magnitude bigger than what’s needed to store a value per glyph. ROM is an order of magnitude cheaper, but those two orders of magnitude basically cancel out and you have a ROM that costs as much to make as the RAM.
And when you look at ASCII’s contemporary EBCDIC, you’ll realise what a marvel ASCII is by comparison. Things could have been much, much worse.
Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.
As long as it’s free-range, organic, low cannabinoid hemp, I can get with this, man. Most stoners will be too stoned to notice it’s the clean-livin’ hippie kind of hemp, and hey, it’ll be great for the environment too.
I bet it works great with my SATA mulch bin.
Somewhat ironically, it was about 10 years ago that I had to quit, and that was because of my mental health.
In my case, I’m a vanilla cis-het male, but if you go out along that other axis, the one that’s neurodivergence, well, that’s where years of trying to get by in a world heavily geared to neurotypicals finally took its toll and my brain just couldn’t take it any more.
This must be the new landscape. Before I had to quit, the male-dominated IT landscape I worked in had no apparent cross-dressers. Or furries for that matter. Admittedly, the companies were relatively small so maybe they didn’t hit the threshold for there necessarily being someone who didn’t present as cis male.
A handful of gay dudes, sure, but pretty sure none of them dressed this way. Even if one of them hit some level of stereotype and did drag in their spare time - which I have no evidence of - that’s not the same as whatever this is.
I’m surprised that got through the vetting process, which I thought existed in most places.
Here in the UK, potentially offensive plates are altered or just plain skipped. There was a sitcom in the '90s that used one such “illegal” plate as an end-of-episode visual punchline, which had, up to that point, only been referred to as a “pornographic number plate”. There’s no way it would have made it onto the road in reality. P one five five OLE as I recall.
To give you some idea of how stringent it is here, back in 2007, one region had one of their region codes temporarily changed to TN from SN so that their plates wouldn’t start with “SN07”, i.e. “snot”. Something similar almost certainly happened in 2017 for the SH region code, but I don’t remember any news stories about that.
If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.
Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?
If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.
Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.
How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.
Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.
Technically, if you ignore the inherent contradiction in the name, some languages treat NaN as a falsy number and the IEEE standards admit trillions of possible NaNs.
FWIW, I’ve a relative who dislikes fish, but who often makes an exception for local fish & chips. Locally the preference is for haddock which is what’s generally served, and what that relative gets.
The same relative is less fond of cod, so I guess the advice there, if any, is if you try cod and don’t like it, try haddock. Or vice versa.
Ada is a language that leaves a lot of things “implementation dependent” as it’s not supposed to grant easy access to underlying data types like those you’ll find in C, or literally on the silicon. You’re supposed to be able to declare your own integer type of any size and the compiler is supposed to figure it out. If it chooses to use a native data type, then so be it.
This doesn’t guarantee the correctness of the compiler nor the programmer who absolutely has to work with native types because it’s an embedded system though.
This has ended in disaster at least once: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/
How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.
Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.
Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.
And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.
There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.
Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.
Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.
I tend to use right shift for pretty much everything. The arrow glyph has worn off the key I use it so much.
Important factors:
British English keyboards, like the one I have, tend to be ISO, with a larger shift key on the right. Bigger target. Easier to hit.
I have at least a couple of passwords that each have at least one shifted character from the left side of the keyboard and it’s much easier to use both hands when I need to type those.
It might even go back to the fact that most of my early typing was on a Commodore 64C and the positions of surrounding keys. Hitting shift-lock or run/stop by mistake would have been a nuisance. Caps lock isn’t quite as annoying because it’s not a literal mechanical toggle, but even so, the right shift avoids that particular error.
This is a bit niche but is the first thing that sprung to mind: I strongly dislike the Ubuntu font family. It’s one of the first things I remove from Mint when I reinstall.
I don’t use the default Cinnamon look either, and picked one that looks even more like Windows 7, which is what I was using before I switched. Now it ‘s just a case of old habits dying hard, I guess. The icon set I use is blue though. Way better than Windows’ yellow or Mint’s default of green, IMO.
Dark mode? Check? Custom shell prompt? Check. Old school Minecraft grass block icon because the creeper one is awful? Check. Shell aliases, ~/bin dir and custom keybinds? Check.
More generally, there are a few websites that store what ought to be user-attached session-spanning settings in short-lived cookies. That means that certain things go back to defaults when I restart the browser, even though my login persists. Grumble, grumble, etc.