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Marc Clifton wrote: I would hope that if I'm in my 70's and of sound mind, I could still find work in this industry
I never knew that sanity was a requirement for employment.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I never knew that sanity was a requirement for employment.
Good point.
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I was holding an in-house training today at a customer's site which should last the whole working day. But at 11:00 PM a departmental note was issued telling all employees to leave at 12:00 because of a storm warning.
Not a really heavy storm (max. expected wind speeds of 110 km/h) but the building is located on a pier and it lost parts of the roof with the last storm.
They can go home getting still paid while I have return to the office (and continue the training tomorrow).
Working for a civil research department of the German navy has its benefits compared to working for a "normal" company.
Thanks to all the upvoters of my QA solutions from yesterday which pushed my rep over 200K.
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Today is 256th day of the year! So congratulations to everyone on this Programmer's Day[^].
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except the 1-byters that get to start over
signature upgrade failed. Please contact our support department during office hours and quote this number:
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Those can celebrate Programmer's Eve the day before
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We should move to 64 bit celebration...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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If you measure time in nanoseconds, it will take approximately 584 years for a 64-bit counter to roll over. That's a long time between celebrations.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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But just imagine the party when it did come round!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Have you ever been to a party of only programmers?
Software Zen: delete this;
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Only on a Forum ?
In Word you can only store 2 bytes. That is why I use Writer.
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Then we should be more accurate and have picosecond resolution... and party every 7 months
Director of Transmogrification Services
Shinobi of Query Language
Master of Yoda Conditional
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It sounds perfect - my calendar is full with stupid meetings already...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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... such stuff as dreams are made on
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There is no such thing as a Happy Programmer is there?
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Indeed. Not with the amount of bugs they deal on the daily basis
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Andrew Kirillov wrote: Today is 256th day of the year!
Meh. Must have been created by a VB programmer. A real programmer's day of the year would be the 255th day.
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Consider the sentences "There once was a man who owned a car." and "There once was a company which owned a car.". You use "who" for the man, because he's a person, but "which" for the company, because it's not a person.
Now consider the sentence "This is the man whose car was stolen.". What's the equivalent for a company?
What it should be is "This is the company whiches car was stolen", but there's no such word in English. Instead, you either have to go with "whose" (and so imply that the company is a person, which it's not) or to take the same route as languages that don't have possessives and say "This is the company, the car of which was stolen". Given that the latter is clumsy, people tend to use the former; I myself go with the latter as I feel it undermines the word "who" if people use "whose" in reference to inanimate objects. Also, it jars even more when used for abstract nouns ("I liked her attitude, whose forthrightness I found refreshing.").
What I really want is a "whiches".
What's annoying about this is that Middle English did have the word "whiches" in the sense that I want to use it. There's a record of a 1387 sermon by Thomas Wimbledon that includes the line: "Kyng Achab slow þe pore man Nabyoth, for he wolde nouȝt sille hym his vyneȝerd Vpon whiches processe þus seiþ Seynt Ambrose, 'How fer wole ȝe riche men strecche ȝoure coueytise?'. ". [Translation: King Achab slew the poor man Nabyoth, for he would not sell him his vineyard, upon the process of which said Saint Ambrose, 'How far will you rich men stretch your covetousness?'.] That "whiches" is exactly what I want, but I had to translate "whiches process" to "the process of which". Somewhere along the line, Middle English's common-sense word was lost and we had to use an ill-fitting word instead or rephrase the sentence.
I also want a word that means the same as "where" but that doesn't suggest it's referring to a place, so I don't see "This is the episode where Tyrion gets slapped."; "in which" is, sadly, two words, and therefore a word too long for most people.
There is actually a word "whiches" in modern English, but it means more than one occurrence of the word "which", as in "How many whiches were there in that book?".
I feel the language is deliberately mocking me.
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Hast thou become bereft of wit? Bring back Thorn first, so "ye olde shope" makes sense, restore Wynn, Yogh, Ash, and Eth to the Alphabet where they are so sadly unmissed!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: restore Wynn, Yogh, Ash, and Eth to the Alphabet I quite understand you, and sympathies with your needs (almost to the point of sweeping away a crocodile tear), but in the civilized world we've no use for the above-mentioned characters.*
* Were they important in writing love-poems to sheep, perhaps?
Ravings en masse^ |
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: Were they important in writing love-poems to sheep, perhaps?
No, we have Welsh and Australian for that.
But they were so useful! Thorn-with-a-bar was a single character meaning "that", and was used as much as the single character word "and": "&" which got downgraded to "half a boolean operator".
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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"This is the company from which the car was stolen."
Please, no whiches. There is a reason it became archaic.
It Is The Absolute Verifiable Truth & Proven Fact
That Your Belly-Button Signature Ties
To Viviparous Mama.
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Whether it is proper English or not, a lot of people use 'the episode where'.
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Has to vote this interesting excursion into etymology and linguistics ... up !
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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