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| Religious technical opinions |
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| billbyrd1945:
--- Quote from: Monkeh on February 25, 2022, 08:22:18 pm ---Because Apple have a gigantic marketing budget and, unlike HP and Dell, do not own the market, so they're the ones spending money to gain market share. It's called product placement. --- End quote --- Yep. I don't know why I didn't think of that. You're right. |
| RJSV:
I did not see any reference here, but 'another' pain, happened when, God forbid, a WEB Site guy, (complete criminal hack, actually), got hold of my document (US Patent appl), and proceeded to 're-format' my huge document...by script commands...(sighhhh). Oh...and MADE MY COPIES READ-ONLY... Now, what was your prob, again ? (lol) |
| rstofer:
--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on February 25, 2022, 09:26:28 pm --- --- Quote ---It's not the '70s anymore, file size isn't that important when you have multiple multiple terabyte drives. --- End quote --- It has nothing whatever to do with file size. So far as I'm aware, it never has. --- End quote --- I kind of think it was, back in the day where we only had SSSD 8" floppies (and maybe only one drive at that) of 256k bytes. https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/f/Floppy_disk.htm UCSD Pascal used to encode the space count at the beginning of a line into 2 byte sequences when working with text files. See --tabs page 30 here: http://ucsd-psystem-fs.sourceforge.net/ucsd-psystem-fs-1.22.pdf Of course, this was a long time ago. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: billbyrd1945 on February 25, 2022, 08:12:14 pm ---I'm primitive and backward and slow and from the south. --- End quote --- I'm primitive and backward and slow and from the far north. I hate cellphones. I hate instant messaging even more. E-mail and SMS are fine. I understand how certain words and concepts are rude and maybe disgusting, like talking about the smells one encounters fixing sewers, at a formal dinner. What I do not understand is how certain words and concepts can be banned. There is a time and place for everything, and banning seems to me to be a religious closing-of-eyes ruling. "Lalalalala I can't hear you, and therefore you don't exist." As to the subject at hand, it may be more useful to consider axiomatic technical opinions instead. The difference is that religious belief is an assertion; an axiom is an initial condition used to base useful knowledge on. For example, Kirchhoff's circuit laws aren't a religious opinion, they are just an axiom a DC or (long-wavelength AC) circuit designer can use to build an useful working circuit; or a person can use to analyze the operation of such an existing circuit. It becomes a religious belief only when you deny the existence and applicability of Maxwell's equations; or if you assert that Kirchhoff's circuit laws apply to high-frequency/short-wavelength AC circuits too. As to tabs/spaces, I don't have any trouble using whatever the project I'm working on. I do have a personal preference, but it's about as strong as my preference for ice cream flavours, or pizza. (I don't get fazed by pineapple on pizza, either. My favourite tea flavours have bergamot oil [a citrus derivative, in Earl Grey tea], and I enjoy a bit of vanilla in my coffee [with milk, too], but I dislike cinnamon, after an unfortunate incident of gorging myself with cinnamon buns as a small child.) I believe the reason for this is that because I have done so much drive-by bug-fixing and patches, the fact that the diffs apply cleanly is much more important for me, in terms of time and effort. The way I like to align my variable names and in my own code prefer to add an extra space at certain places is a much bigger "issue"; many people don't like them. Because I'm backward and slow, I value the interaction with others more than my own inconsequential preferences, so when not "hacking" or providing "a crude example", I worry more about readability and maintainability considering the possible developer set. This also explains why I often use Python for UIs and C for the actual number crunching: a majority of my potential users have machines with Python already installed, it is a scripting language (no development environment needed) with a gentle learning curve, so users who have ideas can easily try and enhance the UIs I've made, and if they succeed, they'll hopefully let me know too. Python itself isn't that good in my opinion, it's just the least unsuitable one. A completely different aspect is that humans love their tools. The religious aspect shows up only when they want to use their favourite tool to solve all problems, especially in domains they have zero experience in themselves. "When the hammer is your only tool, all problems start looking like nails." The best antidote to this is experimenting with a wide variety of tools and wildly different problems. |
| Nominal Animal:
Story time. It's related, I promise. At the end of the last century, I taught basic IT skills at an university: things like how to use email, email attachments, word processing in structured writing (essays, articles, thesis, as you normally have to do at an university), and so on. (Yes, I was a very young, barely adult whippersnapper back then.) I did not teach Microsoft Word. I taught how word processing programs work and approach the task of structured writing, with Microsoft Word as the example at hand. Things like why one needs to use styles instead of just picking the font and size (answer: because that way you mark the structure of your writing, and get things like indexes and lists of figures automatically), how to control section numbering and numbering formats, page numbering, and so on. I created the material online, and the only compulsory part was a basic test (that anyone with actual word processing skills could do in fifteen minutes or less) that was only graded as pass/fail, passing required before participating in courses that required those skills. (Another was image processing, with Adobe Photoshop as the example.) The students split into three completely distinct groups: * Hey, I didn't know I could be this efficient with a word processing program! Neat, this saves me a LOT of time. * I've used Word for years, and this test is a pain in the butt. An hour is not enough time to number the 45 pages (of supplied Lorem Ipsum -like filler text)! This is unfair! I'm going to complain to the head of the department so I can get a pass anyway. * I'm NOT interested in knowing how these programs work. Can't you just show me which buttons to press so I can memorize them, and be done with this stupid computer stuff? I loved dealing with the first group. My approach was to always show how to do things the easy way, without compromising say visual layout. (Things like showing that if you have a specific layout you use very often –– like I do with article-like notes I write for myself for long-term use ––, you can do a template with those pre-set.) Showing the third group that the work in the "exam" was exactly like the stuff they are supposed to work on later on in their studies, was usually enough. That the course/exam was necessary, for them to be able to do the work in reasonable time, and to be able to communicate effectively with each other (future colleagues) and the lecturers and professors. Some were just overwhelmed with the stuff they needed to learn, and had a culture shock with how different university was to high school. The second group was the hardest to deal with. (It was only later that I realized that power users who only have used a single operating system, have the most difficulties in transferring their skill-set to another operating system, for exactly the same reason. Simply put, it is easier to teach a typical computer illiterate to become a Linux/Unix sysadmin, than it is to teach a typical Windows-only power user or sysadmin for the same position, because the latter has to un-learn first.) They had already learned and adopted an approach to using programs, especially word processing programs. So, when that turned out to be completely bass-ackwards and inefficient, not only does it mean they had to un-learn, they also had to admit that they didn't know what they thought they knew. That's a blow to anyones ego; I know from personal experience. Repeated personal experience. Note, however, that none of this involved "religious" or "axiomatic" opinions. It was just an end result of using a tool (word processing) like another tool (typewriters, except with More Fonts) they knew before, without spending the time or effort to understand how that tool can be used in the easiest and most efficient manner. Compare to the space/tab discussion above: the points of when to use spaces and when to use tabs that describe an actual use case, are very useful. There is nothing religious or axiomatic in that, just discussing scenarios where using a tool in a specific way is useful. On the other hand, those who simply state what they prefer, only provide a single data point, a single factoid; and nothing others can evaluate or consider. Thus, we come to my perennial complaint: Instead of stating your opinion only, please describe the reasoning or experience you base your opinion on. If you cannot describe such basis, do consider whether your opinion has any worth, even to yourself; or perhaps it is something you ought to reconsider. It is only that reasoning or experience that is useful to others, because we're not religious automata that adopt new opinions just because they were presented to us. Well, I definitely hope we aren't, that is. |
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