..and by asking those questions you've trashed the original question.. so when the person asking does know their stuff the end result of your involvement is that you just fucked their thread over. At the very very best you've delayed any meaningful response by literally days because now everyone else is waiting for you to be answered.

Day 1, you ask: "Have you tried to [blah blah] your [woo hoo]?"

Day 2, you ask "Have you gotten all the latest [goo mo]?""

Finally day 4 or 5 comes around and you finally admit that you can't help (something you actually knew on day 1), but now the thread is pushed down, off everyones radar, and is filled with complete crap initiated by you. All because when you didn't know the answer, you decided that you must get involved anyways.

Do everyone in the world a favor and don't get involved when you don't know the answer. Don't pretend to be more than you are. The feel-good moment you get when you click "post" is a sham - you are harming the other person, not helping them.

Structure, from the sound of it, although mostly this is people committing various fallacies of reification and making false claims of "natural kinds".

Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention. The only infinitely sharp edge is the edge of our attention (because we scale the edge to match the scale we are attending to, so whatever scale we are attending to seems to have a sharp division between the things we are selecting out.)

"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case: they fade into each other, and we draw edges around them in more-or-less arbitrary ways. When we find new varieties we can either create new categories (by drawing new edges) or lump them into old categories (by moving old edges). Which move is to be preferred depends on the purposes of the knowing subject.

Its stated quite specifically already so when you then go and ask that, you are of course doing exactly what I said you would do, proving my initial response that it really isn't helpful to describe in excruciating detail what is being tried.

The important specifics are already there: I need my generic class library to enforce a constructor contract on 3rd party code that calls my library.

Maybe you imagine that there isnt a need for it, but thats just proving the GPPP's point also.. that you think you know what other people need better than they do.

So you just proved us both right, showing that literally everyone else in the world would be better off if you didnt open your mouth when you dont know the answer but want to fish for a different question that you actually can answer (which is just self serving shit, harmful to the discussion as signal to noise goes righrt into the toilet .. your the noise.)

i was the proud owner of a Gravis UltraSound, but "potential" isnt what it had.


The GF1 and later GF2 chips were basically the END of an era, not the "potential" beginning of one. By the time the Pentium rolled in, software mixing of 32 channel 16-bit stereo with 32-bit internal mixing was down to single-digit percentages of CPU power.

MSDOS users simply didnt notice what was going on elsewhere. The Gravis was much better than an SB16 for sure, but the SB16 was just a 16-bit stereo DAC packaged together with a Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesis chip, so the bar in the DOS world was set so low that when the DOS world finally caught up with the times it looked like innovation to DOS users but was actually just the final incremental improvements to what clearly was on its way out. The DOS demo scene was already doing 32 channel software mixing on 386 computer several years BEFORE the first Gravis UltraSound.

Not only was software mixing the true "innovation" -- it was driven by the vision of complete software synthesis, which came within the same decade that the UltraSound was released. Cards that did hardware mixing offered no advantages over simpler DACs in the new era.

If you're using HDMI or some other digital output, the "hardware in the middle" isn't generating any audio, it's just passing along the digital information that was generate in software, or better yet, if you're bitstreaming, stored in the original recording.

Heck, when you're using audio over HDMI, your soundcard isn't even involved in the process, it's your videocard that's handling the audio data.

Soundblaster cards haven't done FM synthesis for decades. If you want to experience that today, you're going to want to do that with an emulator. Luckily, there are lots of Yamaha OPL-3 (the chip that the SB16 used for FM synthesis) emulators available. DOSBox has several, I believe.

And those noise problems don't matter if you're using digital audio connections, say over HDMI or TOSLINK or S/PDIF. In fact, if you're doing digital audio over HDMI, you're not even using your onboard sound, you're using your videocard's sound output.

Even then, the signal-to-noise ratios of onboard has been good enough for years now. Sure, you might notice a slight difference with a good pair of headphones, but in practice, not so much.

What you might not have known (but should have) is all those listings in the yellow pages were paid advertisements. The yellow page market used to be extremely competitive with numerous companies fighting for a business' 2" x 2" to full page ad. We're talking about free (as in beer) marketing and the ole adage "you get what you pay for" applies here. It's word of mouth in the internet age which is both good and bad. If just one person can get your customers to believe something unflattering about your business it can ruin you. That's why another adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" is just as true. The quicker you can catch the nefarious mischief the quicker you can curtail any damage.

Molotov cocktails and machetes!

No, the local cop saw someone speeding, chased him down, and then charged the person with drug possession after tossing a dime bag in the back seat after pulling them over.

They have shown that they can not be trusted. They must lose the power to do this.

Pull someones certificates or kill some CA. Someone needs to suffer because of this.

What happens now is that there's an investigation. Depending on the outcome the CA may be revoked for good, or merely forced to reissue lots of certificates. The deciding factor is the reason for the screwup - for instance they may have got hacked, rather than been actively corrupt. In that case Microsoft will have to decide if they have patched things up enough to continue as part of their root store program or whether to pull the plug. I doubt many people have certs issued by this CA so the damage would be relatively minimal.

Unfortunately you can't just kill any CA that screws up. For one, if the CA was widely used it'd be disrupted. For another, nothing is unhackable, especially when you get the NSA involved. Expecting CA's to be able to reliably fight off professional hackers from dozens of governments and never ever fail is likely an impossible standard to ever meet.

Hard decisions ahead for browser and OS makers for sure ...

This seems to be quite typical for government consultations. There's very little in the way of rigorous process. I remember years ago in the UK there was some poll that showed people were worried about anti-money laundering laws and their effect on freedom and civil liberties (it was a poll about risks to civil liberties, Ithink). So the British government said they'd respond to this by ordering a consultation on how best to improve Britain's AML laws. They invited public comments, etc. 6 months later the consultation was published and it recommended making the laws even stricter. There was absolutely no evidence-based approach used at all.

yeah but imagine if half the city started biking! It would stimulate local industries, people would get healthier (lowering healthcare cost and increasing lifespan of productive people) and it would reduce wear and tear more expensive thoroughfares (not to mention parking problems). I'd argue it's smart money, but maybe not for a city. This should be done at a national level!

Seriously, I know UAE is a desert, but there are animals in the desert and a big smegging dome will have a real impact on insects, birds, lizards and other animals (and plants). The worst part (to me) is that they will be putting English style gardens with non-native plants under glass (similar to what is done in parts of California). It's such a misuse of resources compared to allowing the natural wonder that already exists there (beautiful cacti, palm trees, etc) to flourish.

Of course suburbia leads to sprawl, traffic problems, fuel overconsumption, and it's not exactly possible where population density is high, so possibly some kind of halfway point in between suburban sprawl and dense-domed cities is the best compromise. A city planned for to create livability alongside population density, but also sustainable and with access to nature, community gardens and/or solar panels rooftops, pedestrian and bicycle friendly. If only I could get a wealthy shiekh to build one within 5 miles of my workplace ....

It really isn't.

A ran into a fine example of why you are wrong just last week.

I was looking for a way for a .NET library developer to specify a type contract that included a non-default constructor with a specific prototype/signature. Now for some this may sound like an Interface, but others will argue that Interfaces should not specify implementation details and they (rightly or wrongly) include constructor prototypes as an implementation detail and argue that this is why interfaces should not (and do not) define constructor prototypes. The questions that appear throughout the internet (on msdn, stackoverflow, etc..) always involved the use of generics and so did the usage I had intended, so of course generic type constraints also came up. Quite specifically my need (and many others) is to develop a library which can construct generic types, however there is another related class of problems dealing with operator overloading that also spawns a similar set of questions based on the same framework limitation.

It did not matter how accurately anyone had described their need to define a constructor signature contract. Every discussion devolved into the same lesson about why interfaces shouldn't specify constructors or any other static functions and methods.

Every single time it was suggested that the person asking the question include a non-static method in the interface which could then construct the type. When it is pointed out that that would require an instance of the type to begin with, it then occurs to these people you suggest coddling, "have you tried the factory pattern?"

Isnt that what they are trying to implement? sigh...

So then the discussions devolve into these people devising more and more complex contortions to defend their belief that interfaces should not ever under any circumstances leak any implementation detail so therefore the questioner is wrong about needing a constructor contract, as if one actually led to the other. Quite remarkably they suggest alternatives that leak far more implementation details the other direction.

They just cannot imagine the need and no amount of explaining will get them to acknowledge that there really is one, therefore its all about something unimportant like the philosophy of interfaces rather than an alternative method of enforcing a constructor contract in the setting of a generic type constraint.

The GPP is 100% right when he says "Just because you don't understand their needs doesn't mean you need to step in and try to change what you think they need. (Ever think they just MIGHT be smarter than you or know their needs better?)"

You sit here defending that behavior on the grounds that you also default to the position that you understand the questioners needs better than they do, and I know why.

You learned that you shouldnt pretend to have answers that you don't have... but you've not handled that knowledge correctly. The proper course of action is to acknowledge to yourself that you don't have the answer, rather than attempt to alter the question so that you do have the answer. When you try to alter the question, it stops being about you helping the questioner and starts being about you helping yourself look smarter.