Poisonous snakes poison you when you eat them. Venomous snakes poison you when they bite you.

I pride myself with the fact that once Jehovah's witnesses called me and they themselves decided to hang up on me. I don't recall what I said exactly but I listened attentively, I actively engaged in a discussion, I never raised my voice and I always remained courteous. Now I realize I must be a absolute and genuine bastard. No matter how hard I try, my bastardness seems to ooze out out of every hole and pore of my body. Damn, my goal in life of becoming lovable remains far away on the horizon of my journey.

But _is_ set in the Windows driver? No sense in that.

I believe most of us agree that homophobia is rude (to say the least.) But as Steve Jobs wasn't gay, removing the memorial dedicated to him is highly illogical.

In any setting I need to see shortcomings in order to improve on them. So called "positive thinkers" have a tough time dealing with that. (Usually their claim to fame on my work is that they too cooperated. Usually by not inhibiting me.) But as age grinds on, I learned to naturally word my concerns in a positive sounding fashion. I sometimes utter a kind of new-speak -which I detest- but it enables me to proceed with development, so I indulge.

Would I be able to surprise mi SO with a special toy made in my full body shape. I wouldn't need sharp edges, a soft material would better suit the purpose and no toxins should be freed on body contact -especially with the mucus membranes.

We shouldn't be sentimental about crappy jobs vanishing. It's the way we go and there's no stopping the train. The main question here is how we will transition into a society where entertainment is there to keep the masses sedated and to convince them to consume stuff (like entertainment.)

I'd shed another light. They're paying way less that what it would cost themselves to develop. Picking an item is actually pretty hard. Will they find "one of us" willing to put in the hours and willing to forfeit his IP? There are plenty of bright young people around that just don't realize the scam and perhaps just buy into it.

What bugs me most about Thai food imitations is bad taste and cheap surrogates. The wost offenders IMHO are Chinese cooks pretending to. Corn starch with water an coconut flavour DOES NOT replace coconut milk. Never, ever!

Literally within days, this hot breaking news item shows on /. Impressive. How we ever managed to keep abreast before the age of internet is well beyond my metal capabilities.

It's cheap to knock a language with a huge installed base as COBOL, mostly because the syntax and the conventions are slightly awkward for "modern" eyes. (I say modern but the elitist dislike for COBOL I believe started in the 70ies.) COBOL is damn good at solving the kinds of problems it was designed for. I have even seen a shop that had/has a COBOL backend to the web applications it offered/offers.

I understand what you mean. For most projects I do I share your desire to be slightly more casual with memory management. Although I am in the fortunate position to be able to choose a different language (I'm happy to use Java's StringBuilder to append ad infinitum), I cherish the basics I learned when I programmed C. Being able to think in the most basic elements is yet another perspective.

Did you reread what you wrote? A pointer is nothing more or less than a memory address. A string pointer points to the first character in the string and the string can have any length (theoretically.)

Do you mean, perhaps, that you can't have a C string that doesn't fit into memory all at once? Let's assume you do. That would be an academic limitation. I have never ever encountered a string so big. If you have the need to handle such enormous strings then you probably should study streaming (of characters or bytes.)

That's a silly tone you'd better ditch buddy.

I give to you that concise was the wrong word to use. However, well abstracted problems result in concise code and object, while at the same time the code remains readable. Beating the optimizer is foolish, but shouldn't be mistaken with well analyzed problems. Simply punching away in order to scratch the itch is a guarantee for revisiting the code unnecessarily.

I believe none of you actually programmed in C. A string terminated by \0 can be represented by a single pointer and an have any length. You can also easily let the string keep growing (until the allocated memory is finished.) That is the epitome of KISS. If you use an 8 byte character at the beginning then you are limited to a string length of 255. A structure with a length and a string pointer (or a character array) is much more complex and that would reflect in more complex library functions.

C was invented by exceptionally bright people. For a language that was primarily designed to program kernels its remarkably versatile. If you are seeking a language to write administrative applications then you should look further. COBOL back in the days or Java nowadays would suit you better. And yes, there is a difference in programming prowess between kernel / library programmers and application programmers. The latter "just" have to get the business logic going and are allowed to use every trick in the book. The former must be very concise and consider that their code will be used by a huge amount of other programs.

You're forgetting that even if you have cached the maps in detail (e.g. by beforehand zooming in to all the parts you really need on your trip) the navigation still doesn't work without being on-line.

After having toyed around with cached Google maps for years, this year I finally got a (2nd hand) car with navigator built in. No more mucking about when crossing country boundaries. Bliss at last.

For my usage (EU, frequent border hopper), Google maps is excellent for planning a trip. Not so much for actual moving between destinations.

Is he an actual scientist? Did he do any scientific research? Did he merit a the title of university professor? Sure, he did make money, but that doesn't automatically mean he should earn a title that few people get after working very hard, usually without extreme luxury or profit.