Seveal years ago, the MKV format was not used for anime. Today we the 400mb files for 20 minute eps abound, but back then, people simply didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it.

Also, only hard subtitling was used, probably because no good widespread player had support for soft subs.

Audio and video are screwed? I have no idea what you're talking about. I have not had any issues with them for several years.

Managing two soundcards on Linux is not a must. If Gnome and KDE don't know how to force programs that were not designed to be configured by them to use their configurations, it's not my problem or the kernel's. Let them provide their own media apps for their users, while the rest of us use what already works. They got the deep pockets, why are they trying to offload work?

And by the way, no developer cares about "proper optimization" of specific codecs if it doesn't make a difference, and that's exactly the case on any of my machines, even the several years old ones. If somebody did, she would pick it up.

My good god, are you really a Linux user? You sound like you never heard of mplayer. I have been watching anime on Linux weekly for years, in several formats like mpeg, divx, realmedia and mkv!

I'm not an Ubuntu user, I love the simplicity of elden distros like Debian and Slackware. Maybe it's just that Ubuntu doesn't have an mplayer package, or has its very own "Super Cool Ubuntu Media Player" that overshines it. Could anybody enlight me?

Either way, when I use Windows (it's rare) I use mplayer anyway. The Windows players are that bad. I guess this is what we get for encouraging the average "click on the movie icon" Joe to use Linux, but *man* I didn't know things were this bad.

Next on Slashdot: Linux is way too hard to develop on, it doesn't have a Visual Studio alternative!

We want to implement seat belts for every citizen. Should we:

a. mandate every business and residence to keep a stash of belts on their walks; or
b. mandate every car to have seat belts built in?

The browser should ask the user if they want to keep the cookie or not. Much easier to regulate and implement.

Nope, you took the explicit "in C" part of the question and threw it out the window. Programmers ought to know the rules of their game.

And, in C++ you can always say "Except of course in C++ there's this awkward situation in which..."

Yes, and I was talking about C, because you can always say that "Except of course in C++ there's this awkward situation in which..."

The reason is I've been through a lot of interviews that consisted simply of a few questions like "open a connection to an SQL database in C++". Now, what's the answer to that? Perhaps "Okay, right after you tell me what library you're using and give me its API." or maybe "Do you really expect a good developer to remember functions they used just once? If you coded opening connections to databases more than a couple times per project, you're very likely doing something wrong."

I'm not very good with people, but I've still got a proposal for every interview with no test or a decent one, but nothing fruitful ever came from interviews with demented tests.

I think the best tests come from interesting questions that will catch the horrible people on the spot, and give the good people opportunity to shine, like "What's the difference of ++x and x++ in C?". An average person might say "they're different in when x will be incremented", but better people can answer in more details, maybe even including details on how it used to make performance differences in for loops, but doesn't anymore, and why that is so.

On a higher (but still technical) level, you probably just want to know who likes to know the technologies that are important to them in depth. With that in mind, I think it's a lot more useful to ask "Tell me about a detail of your language of choice you think I don't know about/that surprised you in your work." than telling somebody to create a very small program in an hour or to solve a bug in a program they've never seen.

Of course, that is considering you want good programmers to work on a mid-sized or even larger project. If you just want some guys to program for your sweatshop, my honest advice is you hire average skilled, unambitious people, or people who have been a few years at other sweatshops.

For me at least. Same goes for Diablo.

"Ironically your complaint that your son didn't try to figure it out himself, when you didn't try to figure out smash brothers system is itself a bit humorous. :)"

Actually, I think it's quite consistent with the way he said he plays. He just tries to find out how to play inside the game. Add to that a bunch of 10 year olds screaming in your ear how they're better than the old timer, and I think I can understand his position perfectly. In fact, getting help online would be against everything he said.

Anyway, you can't play the game without knowing the damage % isn't directly related to your performance. What counts is to make the opponent fly outside the screen through any of the four sides.

You made programming more than typing for the rest of us. That is probably the single most important professional programming contribution there is. Thank you very much for your efforts.

Would you care to share your thoughts on the current developments concerning the structuring of professional programming knowledge?

I'm a geek with limited social skills, you insensitive clod! Commitment isn't a social skill and never was the problem of any geek.

The real problem is to speak to people who have no sense of logic whatsoever and who don't listen to what you say, even though you go to great lengths to speak respectfully and precisely.

Communicating with those people is a social skill I don't have and it's the same for at least some geeks I know as well.

Seriously, you should read your own replies more carefully. Of course there's a whole lot of really bad programmers, like there are bad pros in any other career. Also, you assume too much. If you look back on my post, I didn't claim you said you thought you were in the top 5% of anything, I just said "top 5%". Clearly, if you think you're in the top 5% of anything subjective, you're most likely wrong. Think about it.

You do realize you're probably overrating your skill saying you're in the top 5%? Alas, before you weren't a professional programmer and you thought you were below average, but now that you are, you think you're in the top 5%. That actually seems to confirm most programmers overrate their skills.

me: allow!
car: "Dear Aunt, lets set so double the killer delete select all" is not an acceptable reply.
car: Deploy airbag? [Cancel | Allow]