Comment silly (Score 5, Insightful) 315
It's 25 years old. How can it be the word of this year?
GIF Becomes Word of the Year 2012 315
mikejuk writes "GIF started out as a humble acronym 25 years ago, entered common parlance as the format used for web graphics and now achieves fame as a verb by becoming Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year 2012. GIF as a noun has always been an all-capital letter noun. Becoming a verb has caused problems concerning the use of capital and lower case letters. The common form is to keep the noun in caps and add the verbal endings in lower case — as in GIFed,GIFing), However, an all lower-case spelling with the f duplicated (giffed, giffing) is also being used."
Comment solved (Score 2) 80
The wording of the bet states the criterion for deciding the result. You'd be betting on what the department of labor says, not "reality".
Comment Comment before reading (Score 1) 80
Always write your comment before reading the article. That way your mind will remain uncluttered.
Dutch Cold Case Murder Solved After 8000 People Gave Their DNA 513
sciencewatcher writes "A 1999 cold case rape and murder in The Netherlands has been solved. Dutch police asked 8000+ men living within 5 kilometers of the crime scene to volunteer their DNA so that the murderer could be traced through (close or distant) family members sharing part of this DNA. As it turned out, the man now in custody turned in his own DNA, resulting in a 100% match. The request of the police was discussed here on Slashdot in September. The percentage of people participating was closing in on 90%; in the midsize town of the victim it was 96%."
Comment failure (Score 1) 113
This was a bad demonstration of relativistic effects. All it really does is demonstrate the Doppler effect, and it does that poorly. People are evidently not warm, because they do not glow when infrared light becomes visible. Chimneys do, but so do shadows under roofs.
The huge mushrooms emit what, gamma rays? They emit light that is visible even when enormously red-shifted.
There is no Sun or sky. No campfires. No warm machinery. No radios. No flowers with UV patterns. Nothing familiar that will illustrate something interesting about the Doppler shift and the world of invisible light.
It's a nifty idea, but finish it before releasing it.
Comment Re:Kinda Subjective but... (Score 1) 479
If you don't understand the difference between coding and writing a text document, you are beyond help.
Comment Re:Kinda Subjective but... (Score 1) 479
You may be using a computer, but you're not understanding what you're doing with it.
Comment Re:It's easy with an IDE (Score 1) 479
Because the former is less of a burden than the latter?
Comment Aspergers [sic] (Score 1) 479
Sounds like somebody lost his job to a better coder, but doesn't want to admit it.
Comment Re:It doesn't matter (Score 1) 479
If it's so easy, what's stopping you from refactoring your code to fit the common style? I'm amazed you still have to make this an issue.
Comment Re:It depends on whatcha mean when you say style (Score 1) 479
Seriously? You are reading the code, fixing bugs, and you find formatting problems. So you back out your half-complete changes, fix the formatting, commit that change, then re-apply your fix-in-progress? You actually do that? Of course you don't.
The better policy is that code must be formatted correctly when it is committed the first time. Which is why we have style guidelines in the first place.
Coders should spend their time looking at the code, not getting distracted by style variations.
Comment Re:Style has always mattered (Score 1) 479
What, your editor is too dumb to insert the right number of spaces when you hit enter? Ouch.
Comment Re:Formatting is the IDE's job (Score 1) 479
So nobody at your shop puts comments on the same line as code? Why? Was it forbidden by the style?
Comment Re:Wow - Doesn't get it (Score 1) 479
By that reasoning, you shouldn't be concerned with getting dressed before going to work. Clothing does not produce cool code, does it?
