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Not only warranty papers, but "manuals" (I'd rather call them instruction sheets) in 5-6 pt size to save paper...
I handle those by putting them on the flatbed scanner at 1200 dpi. Then I can read it on the screen, or print it out enlarged by a factor of 2-4.
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I'm one of those types who reads "terms of service", user's manuals and such.
So - I take off my glasses and read the fine print. Print that stays there until I'm finished with it . . . unlike on the screen where you're given no time (or contrast, in many cases).
You're right in part, about a cause for concern. The thing about the ones you mention is that at least they're accessible in human real time. Not bothering to read them? That's "on your own head".
| 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 seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I guess we agree on a lot. My way to escape it is not owning a TV set, not subscribing to streaming services. I buy movies on BD/DVD, or to some degree: Download from the (non-commercial) Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) archives. No ads, older quality productions. In the US, maybe PBS has some similar service, I guess with much focus on documentaries. (NRK also provide great documentaries of their own make, but carry documentaries / movies licensed from other sources as well, although sometimes only available for a few weeks, months, or years.)
My taste in movies is focused on the pre-special-effects area. A surprising number of older movies are available on DVD or even BD quality, at a moderate price. If you pick movies worth watching twice+, worth showing to your (grand)children and share with your friends, then the cost per seating is just small change. Small print disclaimers and ads have no place on the DVD (but for TV shows, you may have to explain to the youngsters why that host every now and then says "We'll be right back after this", before he goes on  )
One issue related to small print: High resolution screens allow the web designers to create web pages with text in typefaces almost exclusives using hairlines, single-pixel wide. Often they also choose the text foreground color to be silvery grey - and sometimes, the background isn't white but with a light grey or other color tint. I am so happy that I can use the thumb scroll wheel of my mouse to enlarge such text to become big enough to read, even drawn in low-contrast hairlines. Web designers should be required by law to test out all the functions of the pages they create when wearing glasses smeared with a thin layer of Vaseline, and with the display set to zero color saturation, i.e. pure greyscale
When HTML was introduced, one heavily touted feature was that any user could just replace the default style sheet with another, suiting his requirements better: Different colors, for colorblind or otherwise visually challenged users, larger fonts, higher contrast, ... I haven't seen a single web page suitable for such customization the last fifteen years! They all insist on using their specific fonts, explicitly identified in the Javascript code, so even if you manage to sneak in your own stype sheet, the settings are immediately overridden. Last time someone tried to convince me that it was possible to change the style, he worked for several hours to make CSS that was tailored to this one specific web page, useless on other pages (even from the same web side) - and it still failed on several points.
My solution, if the information is essential to me, and worth saving, is to copy/paste the entire web page into MS Word. Often it fails or creates crazy style definitions, but when it succeeds, you can often replace those hairline typefaces with something readable, change the foreground color to black and remove that disturbing background, before saving it.
Which addresses another point common to streaming and web pages: Whenever I see in some streaming service "No longer available", and I can say: But it is! Over there in my bookshelf you'll find it! Or when I have saved a URL but get a 404, and say to myself: I also saved a copy of that page/document on my hard disk, didn't I? ... That gives me a good feeling of satisfaction.
(In fact, this started with books: When I want to buy a copy of a book to give as a gift to a friend or relative, and the bookseller says "Who is that author you are talking about?" The books were in stock from my early childhood, reprinted five years ago - today they are not even listed as "out of stock" in the bookseller's catalogs! For a few of my favorite "gift" books, you can now see three or four copies in my shelves, just in case they are out of print when I want to give away a copy - which has happened several times!)
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Member 7989122 wrote: I guess we agree on a lot. My way to escape it is not owning a TV set, not subscribing to streaming services. I buy movies on BD/DVD,
I'm not saying you fall into the category, but I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
You do address it further down - but buying a BD/DVD? It's extremely rare I'd find one worth watching twice. Of the literally handful I do re-watch now and then, I can take them out of the local library for free. There are very few.
The whole family reads. I got them addicted at an early age. I read Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings aloud to my son as his bed-time stories (for about a year).
All you've written applies well, in a way, to video games. There's the Japanese style - the same thing over and over again as you perfect the trip and 'win'. The one I like (in various forms for scores of years, the Rogue-like game, Dungeon Crawl). It's different every time you play. No fancy effects. Just strategy in the face of random events with only statistical probabilities. More than anything else, playing is absorbing and ultimately relaxing. It's also open source/free.
Telephones are for making/receiving calls - not mobile entertainment centers. I prefer to live life out in the air instead of on the small-screen
| 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 seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
Not so in Norway, nowadays. If you are at all concerned about "linear TV", as the swear word goes, people will start looking for moss that is growing over you. You must be coming from some distant path.
Same with "linear radio": A regular radio program that doesn't provide their productions in podcast form, won't live long. Two years ago, all radio brodcasts (public as well as commercial) switched to digital DAB technology. Now people ask, what was the use of it, it is like giving oats to a dying horse. Printed news media - newspapers and all sorts of magazines - go the same way: Their circulation is a small fraction of what it was ten or twenty years ago.
Streaming is the one and only socially acceptable way to enjoy movies, music, talks, read news etc. Even books: I have had friends who really wanted to read one book I recommended, but turned down my offer to lend them my copy: Only if I had the book in PDF (or other electronic) format would they read it. Anything but streaming, online access, is old-fashioned. You do streaming to your PC or your smartphone. If you have one of these "smart TVs", it will connect to your WiFi to act as PC. There is no need to connect it to an old-style TV cable or an antenna.
Many people still have traditional TV sets, but mainly for displaying streamed media. Up until last newyear, if you owned TV receiving equipment, you had to pay a license fee whether you use it or not. So people might turn them on for watching news or the weather forecasts. But it is years since I read in "printed" media (that is, eletronic newspapers nowadays) any preview or review of a linear TV show or other production: There are lots of reviews, but they are all for the streaming services.
If we have anything like "elitism" in Norway (but I doubt it), it would rather be to tell that you don't care for Netflix or couldn't care less about Disney+.
"Narrow" movies and "narrow" music (for either: Typically "non-Western" or "artsy") you often won't find on streaming services; the only way to get access to them is by buying a disc (and you won't find them in your local video shop, but in some strange web shop). Then you could find some "elitism". I certainly do not consider myself "elite" just because I watch a lot of non-Hollywood-movies, more like "curious". But if some of those who like to label others flipped through my DVD/BD shelves, they might see a lot of unknown foreign, non-Hollywood movies, and therefore label me "elitist" even without a clue about what those movies really are about. The funny thing is that quite a few of them were mainstream and not at all elitist movies when I saw them decennies ago. The elitist part is caused by me not rejecting them as new mainstream movies came in.
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First, take what I wrote as I wrote it! I didn't say what one put on the TV - just a matter of ownership. I don't have cable. I stream - and now I also have a digital antenna and can watch broadcasts, too.
Fortunately, the US has never had that obscene tax on ownership of a TV. I thought it was a weird UK think but I guess Euro-thing might be more suitable. A tax that's particularly regressive.
From your description, it sounds like the whole of Norway is walking around with their noses in the air. A statement validated by your own text:Member 7989122 wrote: If we have anything like "elitism" in Norway (but I doubt it),
My hope is that your post reflects your particular view and your perceived view of your own social circles, and not he rest of the country.
| 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 seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I'm not saying you fall into the category, but I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
There's a "spot the vegan" equivalent to TV ownership (the "joke" being, you don't have to ask them, they'll tell you). No offense to the original poster - I'm mostly in that category myself. But, I'll only make the claim I haven't sit down to watch live broadcast TV in decades. I'm amazed people still put up with commercial breaks (seriously, a one-hour show can be watched in 40 minutes) or worse, what essentially amounts to banner ads on top of the program's own picture. I don't know about the US networks, but here in Canada, any channel owned by Bell is horrendous in this respect--and it's generally Bell itself trying to sell its own products. Has anyone watching network TV seen actual end-of-show credits at any point over the past decade? No, gotta make more room for more ads...
And before anyone asks, since I apparently know all of this, I can only cite these examples because the TV happens to be on when I'm visiting friends/relatives. Not because I pay attention to it in my own time.
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Part of what you say is true, here, in the USA. For example, the amount of time spent on commercials vs. programming. It used to have a legal limit but that was trashed by Ronald Reagan. There used to also be a limit as to how much media a single corporation could own in any particular market. Also trashed.
A few times, over the years, hideous things appeared on some broadcasts - animations plugging other shows on their own network. It's gone away. The main things that is plastered over the actual programming are alerts of various kinds (weather, mass shootings, &etc.). Here, I'm talking about broadcast. Streaming might do it, too, but often they hide their sleazy commercials. E.g., the English version of EuroNews will often have items that are presented intermixed with on-demand news items and turn out to be PR for Kuwait, Qatar, the Emirates. Long PR. It's audience targeted. I haven't seen them on the German language version - which is also usually much more up-to-date and has many more items (and I'm including major events in German and not in English). Actually, much of the streaming news network of news networks are for chuckle-headed millennial.
Cutting to the chase (now that the Preacher series is over), we'd be better off watching fruit ripen. None the less, we watch.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "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 seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote:
A few times, over the years, hideous things appeared on some broadcasts - animations plugging other shows on their own network. It's gone away
That's exactly what I was talking about - here in Canada, the networks haven't got that memo. I still see those all the time, and it's annoying as hell (not to mention that every once in a while, someone will speak in a foreign language, they'll have some translated captions at the bottom of the screen...and that's when they'll decide to display those ads, which can completely cover the captions--there's some geniuses over at those networks/TV stations).
Downloads/streaming services/DVDs are bliss in comparison.
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Member 7989122 wrote: My solution, if the information is essential to me, and worth saving, is to copy/paste the entire web page into MS Word. Often it fails or creates crazy style definitions, but when it succeeds, you can often replace those hairline typefaces with something readable, change the foreground color to black and remove that disturbing background, before saving it.
Worst offender: Those "web designers" who can't figure out the CSS to get it exactly the way they've envisioned, so they write the text out in Photoshop and use an image. As the end user, good luck changing those fonts...
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Java doesn't support multi-dimensional array in true sense. In a true two dimensional array, all the elements of array occupy a contiguous block of memory, but that's not true in Java. Instead, a multi-dimensional array is an array of array.
For example, two-dimensional array in Java is simply an array of a one-dimensional array
Fundamental. But never knew this. I'm not a Java developer though.
Interesting to see how the fundamental concepts get language/runtime specific.
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Why this is "Fundamental"? Why a programmer should bother about the implementation of a class? 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Because generally speaking, you can normally access memory via it's address - and that means that to more to the "next" element you have to know the actual memory organisation. (Java doesn't have pointers, but this can be very important if you want to share data with other languages.)
And ... an array of 2 lines of 10,000 chars will occupy a lot less memory than an array of 10,000 lines of 2 chars ... plus, both will use more memory than a "true" 2D array of chars with the same number of elements.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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So in other words, implementation aspects become before abstraction? No sorry, never
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Since I left C/C++, I have never accessed an array via its address. Actually, I never did before I started using C either (but using Pascal, CHILL and propritary Pascal-like languages ... not to talk of APL!). C/C++ is the only language where I ever was close to consider the memory address of an array.
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In C (and C++) the name of an array is - by definition - a pointer to the first element. Sometimes you don't realise what you are using, even with older languages! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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In C/C++, you cannnot do much decent programming if you are not aware of the array name as a pointer.
E.g. in Pascal, if you declare an array summerMonths: array[may..agust] of travelPlans; then you wouldn't care if 'summerMonths' is the address of element 'may' and actual indexes reduced by four before multiplied by the element size to get the element offset, or 'summerMonths' is the element of the (non-existing) 'january' element so that actual indexes may be directly multiplied by the element size to get the element offset. I believe that the Pascal standard says nothing about the implementation, and the compiler could do it either way. At least in the "original" Pascal that wasn't made for linking with modules in other languages. Maybe some external interface specification defines which address (of a non-existing elment 0 or of the first existing element) is transferred, to make the C programmers comfortable 
None of that affects the Pascal code, though. You address summerMonth[july] as one of four travelPlans objects, without knowing what its address is and how it was calculated. Why would you care? In C/C++ you more or less have to care.
When using C for writing machine code, e.g bottom layer drivers, where the task by definition relates to physical addresses, controlling the exact binary code emitted by the compiler, you of course have to know. Pascal wasn't meant for those kind of tasks. My guess is that well above 99% of all C/C++ code written is not at that low level either, and actual physical addresses are not relevant. Yet, because of that fraction of a percent, all C/C++ programmers must be aware of the array as a pointer, indexing as a kind of pointer arithmetic etc.
If I work at that bottom level, interfacing directly to harware, I appreciate C. For higher levels, user applications in particular, I prefer languages that does not give me the freedom of C, and that relieves me from knowing which addresses are generated by the compiler.
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Let's play "spot the developer who's never had to use pointers"...
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Java developers know this. They have to, because it works differently enough that you have to care. Also it means that something like an image is often presented as a 1D array (for example bitmap.getPixels dumps the pixels in an int[] that you supply) and you have to do the index conversion yourself.
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But can't you implement your own two (or more) -dimensional array class? Using a one-dimensional array as the backing store?
Profit.
modified 18-Feb-20 14:43pm.
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Yup, and I dare say there are array and record class libraries that you can download and import, with built-in iterators for the java.util.Arrays functions, to save a bit of work if you have to do a bunch of them of different sizes and types.
If not, it'd be a nice hobby project for someone.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Yeah of course . But why didn't the Java folks opt for the standard model?
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Maybe because they knew of other languages than C/C++
On the serious side: Newly educated Masters of today know "nothing" about langugages that are not of "the C class". If you show them something like APL, they look upon it like something from a fantasy world, cannot fathom how you can solve a problem in such a language.
Or a little closer to the C class: If you show them that in Pascal, you need not enclose conditions in parentheses, you can test "if x > 5" like we would write it in ordinary prose text; they as surprised how you can know that it is a condition when it is not parenthesized. "The standard model" uses parentheses.
"The standard model" prescibes that array indexes run from zero, and are integers. You show them a Pascal array summerMonths: array[may..august], and they worry about element zero of the array, where is that in all of this.
"The standard model" says that characters and enums "really" are integers, noting else. So a language that doesn't let you divide 'B' by 2 to get an exclamation mark, or multiply february with 3 to get april, breaks with the standard model.
Show them CHILL where you need not pre-announce that there is an exception handler. But "the standard model" requires a "try" and enclosing the block in braces! How can you know the scope of the exception handler? The 'block' to which it is attached? But isn't that what the braces do, delimit the block, so how can you avoid the braces?
And so on. 'The standard model', also known as 'C', is what young programmers know today. They believe that when they know both K&R C, C++20, Pyton and Javascript, then they know all the languages of the world. Or at least all the valuable ones. The rest is only for cases where you need one more credit point for this quarter and must choose between 101 Introduction to Japanese or 101 Introduction to SNOBOL. You don't need either, you will never be using either. The Real Thing is the C class languages.
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I've been always uncomfortable without the braces.
Python says:
try:
print(x)
except:
print("An exception occurred")
Just imagine a multi-level/nested try-catch blocks.
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After working for a while with CHILL, I never understood this "try" fixation - it is just a wart caused by exception handling being a cludge added to C long after its "design".
In CHILL, any block (and contrary to C: A simple statement is a block) can have an exception handler; just add it before the terminating semicolon, whether the block is a simple assignment, a loop, a function body, or even an entire module. To satisfy "C language class" oriented guys, you could say that an ON clause at the end of the block "implies a try at the start of the block" - but there is never any need for an explicit "try" (so it doesn't exist in the language).
Furthermore, to reduce the red tape of exception handling, "ON" is like a C "switch": The exception codes are like labels, followed by a block for handling that exception (but as a simple statement is also a block, there is no red tape for simple, one-statement handing), with an ELSE option.
So to me, C style exception handling is kludgy and inflexible.
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