palordrolap

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.

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.

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.

$ man woman 
No manual entry for woman

Linux knows the importance of consent / If you’re not one already, Linux can’t help you understand / <Your own interpretation here>

My roof and my walls are not the same thing, but if demolish my walls, will my roof hover there magically?

You completely skipped the part about what you’re buying and selling. That’s not suspicious at all.

Yes

Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they’ll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can’t be bought?

“So what, people can run with the last good codebase!”

Sure, until there’s a critical bug that Google don’t publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

And don’t say “that’ll never happen”. Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?

In this instance, I think there was some suggestion to write code in mostly lower case, including all user variables, or at least inCamelCaseLikeThis with a leading lower case letter, and so to make True and False stand out, they’ve got to be capitalised.

I mean. They could have been TRUE and FALSE. Would that have been preferable? Or how about a slightly more Pythonic style: __true__ and __false__

Ah, the old Ben Shapiro logic. If you don’t want your house that’s at risk of flooding, don’t worry, simply sell it! Someone’s bound to give you a good price for it!

This whole situation reminds me of this joke: Two guys out hunting in the wilds somewhere. One of them falls ill and collapses. The other can’t rouse him.

He grabs his phone or radio and calls for help. “My friend collapsed. I think he’s dead!”

The responder says “Well, first we need to make sure if he’s actually dead.”

“Just a minute…” BANG!

“OK, now what?”

Bringing “no garden” back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.

The alternative is Apple. They don’t want to install a billboard just yet, and there’s no obvious fountain, but there’s a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don’t live their way you have to move.

Somewhere around here I have an old (1970’s Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; “did be” do be pretty weird, after all.

The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

I’d like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don’t seem to be able to find it right now.

Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.

This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.

Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.

(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)

99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).

Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.

Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.

And a new PC, or are you lucky enough to have sufficiently recent hardware that will support it, unlike thousands of others with otherwise perfectly good hardware?

My parents’ house never had and still doesn’t have Internet. I was the one with the computer desk and it had a Commodore 64C and a 13" portable colour TV on it originally.

It finally became an Internet desk at some point in the mid '00s when I got my own place.

I’m still using it right now… and kind of afraid that if I mention its age, it will spontaneously fall apart.

Let’s just say that it’s older than Google.

Did you ever have a crazy friend who hated you for weeks because of something you said or did in one of their dreams? How about if they could have ticketed you for that?