The Random Thread

Sometimes, engineers think they are smarter than everybody else and end up making very silly decisions. The fact that POSIX standards define the end of a sentence as needing two spaces after the period is asinine, regardless of the technical reasons that may have led to such a conclusion. In English and in any other language that uses the Roman alphabet you never use two consecutive spaces for anything, let alone after a period. Thanks to this genius decision, one cannot navigate or operate on real sentences when editing a common text file in nvi. This opinion is not mine, but God's, who has decided to reveal it to me, so don't even try to contradict it or justify the standard.
 
Hrmm...I was always taught--perhaps by my mother, perhaps by my 8th grade typing teacher in the 60's--to put two spaces after a period. I do it here
as well. As for God, when I was talking to Her the other day, She mentioned that you sometimes misinterpret what She told you. :)
 
cracauer@ said:
The two spaces only appear after a period that terminates a sentence. Not after one for an abbreviation. That is how you tell the two cases apart.
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That's a very BIG NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. What a bad argument! Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Besides, no one uses double spacing today (except stubborn engineers trying to enforce standards from the 1960s that don't make sense anymore).
 
Same here though I don't do it anymore.

Took typing class in high school with Mrs. Fischer. Was only one of three guys in the class. The rest were all girls cause girls would just become secretaries, right?
 
AlfredoLlaquet said:
Sometimes, engineers think they are smarter than everybody else and end up making very silly decisions. The fact that POSIX standards define the end of a sentence as needing two spaces after the period is asinine, regardless of the technical reasons that may have led to such a conclusion. In English and in any other language that uses the Roman alphabet you never use two consecutive spaces for anything, let alone after a period. Thanks to this genius decision, one cannot navigate or operate on real sentences when editing a common text file in nvi. This opinion is not mine, but God's, who has decided to reveal it to me, so don't even try to contradict it or justify the standard.
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1 case in Dutch that I know is a postal code followed up by a town name on a letter or package. No idea where it originates from but it's done a lot. It may have to do with the code format xxxx yy that contains a space itself but should be considered a word. The parts separated have no meaning. Maybe a space is added after it for clarity. because there should be no period.
 
I just accidentally threw away a whole week's worth of work by entering
Bash: 
 tar xzf ../myproject.tar.gz
instead of
Bash: 
 tar czf ../myproject.tar.gz .
in myproject dir.

Damn you, bash history. 👹
 
loveydovey said:
Nope
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6ray9e-1738844404.jpg
 
cracauer@ said:
We've all been there.
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Decades ago, I had nothing to do. I was an electronics guy but I had nothing to do one day and the software manager asked me to do him a favor and erase/reformat about 50 floppy disks using a computer in one large room. No, we didn't have a bulk eraser.

I carefully carried the stack of floppies and set them on the table and got to work. A couple of hours later, the software manager came at me red with anger. "You erased a week's worth of work!" Turns out one of the software guys left his one and only copy of his work on a floppy he left on the table and, when I set my stack of 50 on the table, I didn't see that I now had a stack of 51 disks.
 
Well, I brought down my company's mailserver last Friday afternoon. (No, I didn't go home, leaving it broken). And, I'm sorta exaggerating. The time was way off on the server, I reset the time, checked right after to see mail wasn't working, sort of expected. I immediately restarted the Dovecot service and its message amused me. What an emo program. The message was something like "I detect a major time change something something, but the kicker was the last line.

I'm going to kill myself now.
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I found it amusing. The other part is that no one even noticed the server was down save the person who called my attention to the time being off. It was down for about 2 minutes.
 
scottro said:
I found it amusing. The other part is that no one even noticed the server was down save the person who called my attention to the time being off. It was down for about 2 minutes.
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It's darkly hilarious. I like it.
cracauer@ said:
We've all been there.
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I never caused any data loss in my company. At home, I did. I always took more precautions at work than at home. I'm speaking from the afterlife.
drhowarddrfine said:
Turns out one of the software guys [...]
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If you ask me, it was that software guy's fault, not yours.
 
Lately, I'm watching an American game show from the 1970s. It's called "Match Game XX," XX being the edition (PM, 73, 74, 75). I'm not sure if "PM" was the first or the last one. It's really entertaining. It's similar to Family Feud in that it's about pop culture, current (in those days) language, common sense, and, most of all, filling the blank.

You can find a lot of its episodes in this YouTube channel. It seems to be legit:

www.youtube.com

MG Productions

MATCH GAME and the rest of our Goodson/Todman Productions are trademarks of FremantleMedia Operations BV. No challange of ownership is implied. Videos are posted in memory of Gene Rayburn, Richard Dawson, Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, and the rest of the gang. Please make sure that...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

This other channel (it seems legit as well) has also a lot of episodes:

 
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