Sounds a lot like the use case for a try/finally block (obviously not available in C). I agree that GOTO has its uses, but you better have a dang good justification. The above code is one of them.

Problem is that most services (currently) that can communicate with FB users requires that you have a FB account--so that it knows WHICH FB users to communicate with.

The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully--and have more than 4GB of RAM.

Yes you need new machines to do this, but really, if you are buying NEW machines, you should probably upgrade. The question then becomes a matter of whether or not new machines are worthwhile. Your old machines may be still serviceable, but would newer machines result in getting work done enough faster to offset (even partially) the cost of the upgrade.

In many cases, the answer is no--a LOT of secretaries & folks that mainly do word processing are better off just staying where they are--their machines are fast enough for what they do, and additional RAM & extra cores aren't going to make a difference.

That said, if you are doing statistical analysis, engineering, graphic design, programming (and compiling), and a number of other jobs, then you should ABSOLUTELY be on a very aggressive upgrade schedule. Additionally, 8GB of RAM is more than just a good idea for many of those jobs--some of them should be stuffing as MUCH memory as they can into their machines so that they can do their jobs more efficiently.

In any work setting the bottleneck for employee performance should not be the environment or resources, but rather human capacities. That's the ideal. Obviously cost of achieving that and other considerations prevent most companies from getting to the point where that's true--but it should be the goal.

So either move to Win7-x64 OR move to another 64-bit OS with lots of power & memory in the hardware. Staying where you are only makes sense if you are doing mostly word processing.

You weren't? Cause I certainly was. My wife found it moving and touching and all that, but in the end, I'm just left wishing I has SOME FREAKING ANSWERS!!!!!! To ANYTHING IMPORTANT!!!!

The Dharma initiative? Gone--no explanations. The Light? No answers. The OTHER Light? Lame--and NOT an answer. The Island? Nope, not a single REAL answer. The Others? Nope, not a single answer! How did Jacob learn more about the island? Nope, nothing (in fact this question wasn't even RAISED until late season 6, so...). Who is the woman that killed Jacob's real mom? (Again a late-coming question).

Answers in general--NOPE!!

SO screw all this...I'm officially ticked at the waste of time it all was...

I think most Tolkien fans would agree that elves had higher morals than that.

Hollywood, however, has none. Thus we get...Frodo saving the shire from dinosaurs on frickin pogo sticks--30 years before he was born.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this:
if the doctor isn't an expert in statistics, how can he properly evaluate the effectiveness of the medicine he's handing you?

Can he say (with any really justified confidence) that it will actually help? Can he claim to know how the true probability that you have disease X when manifesting symptoms y & z? Does he understand the effect of false positives?

Without a solid grounding in stats, the answers are sadly, no he cannot make justified statements about the effectiveness of the medicine (sorry, relying on the pamphlets handed out by big pharma to tell him means taht i want to go elsewhere for my medical treatment).

My signature has NEVER been more appropriate.

MANY people using stats have NO CLUE what they are doing, but they do it VERY carefully.

I hate it when I see people double-dip on data sets....

For my thesis, approximately 5% of my correlations were statistically significant, and even THOSE were WEAK. I told my committee that I wasn't confident of any of the relationships.

Yes, I expect my doc to know stats. The THEORY behind them is just as important as the math.

Amen to that. If you've ever read Brothers Karamazov and were not intimately familiar with Russian naming conventions in the 19th century, you're pretty much lost for half of the book. I spent the first 10 chapters sifting out that Ivan, Ivan Fyodorovich, and Vanya were all the same person. Having a nice little abstract at the beginning of the book would have worked wonders. Great book, by the way, if you have time for 1500 pages.

They do.

I've been using Deposit@Home for a few years now. I'm not sure if you have to have a credit card through them or not to make it work, but it is a very slick process.

I was confused why this is news--the USAA iPhone app was featured on /. when it first became public information. Other banks are just slow I guess....

OR, we could adamantly claim he was born in the US despite overwhelming evidence that it was in Canada and go ahead and knight him anyway.

Well, that would work, except for one problem. Bill Shatner's Canadian.

This isn't exactly astronomy related like Niel deGrass Tyson's stuff, but when I was a kid I got an electronics set, complete with a bread-board, several LED's, a rheostat, heaps and heaps of resistors and capacitors, and several other things having to do with digital and analog circuitry. That was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, and still from time to time wish I had it to pull out and tinker with. I remember one time I probably could have burned the house down had I not smelled the melting plastic on the set. What happened was that I had learned at school how to make an electromagnet out of a battery, a coil of wire, and a nail. Well, I did the same thing with the set when I got home, but then left it on for about an hour. As you well may know, connecting the two terminals of a battery without any resistor can cause the batteries to overheat, and most likely rupture. I think I probably caught the thing just before the batteries broke, because they were very hot. Anyway, I'm rambling, but you get the idea: I learned to love tinkering with electronics as a kid, and now am majoring in Computer Science.

Depends on the endian-ness of your architecture. I'm getting 0xFECABEBA on an intel architecture running linux.

Have you ever used OOo? It's a steaming pile of garbage. It might work on hobby linux boxes, but it is nowhere near the caliber of software that MS Office is, nor is it appropriate in a corporate environment. Whenever I use have to use OOo I end up spending half my time trying to figure out how to get automatic numbering to work correctly (the other day, it was trying to number things ai. bii. ciii., etc for me. That's not acceptable.). In addition, it's not accurate in it's representation. After trying to copy said screwed up list from OOo to a plain text editor, I got a list like 1. asdf 1. foo 2. bar .... where it was originaly 1. asdf 2. foo 3. bar in OOo. If I have to spend this much time to get something to work that's supposed to streamline your use of the software, something is horribly wrong. OOo is a direct analog of the GIMP: a noble effort to recreate a professional software suite that turned into an epic fail. Just like it's near impossible to create anything good in the GIMP in comparison with Photoshop, likewise it's near impossible to create anything good from OOo in comparison with MS Office.

And who uses WinZip anymore? Ever since Windows started including built in zip compression/decompression, I have seen no use at all for WinZip.

From the "report" cited in the article:

Yeah, I'd say that's a good foot to start off on, especially when you're a security company fearmongering people into buying your product.

For the apparently shoddy and buggy product that you describe as Ubuntu, it sure has done well. It has done what no other distro has done, which is to make Linux accessible to the non-hardcore user. I can't remember the last time I had to do a ./configure, make all, make install to install a program. Much like a mac, it just works. Now, I agree that it's far from the "install this on your grandma's computer" status, but it's a far cry from the first Linux I ever used (I want to say it was Mandrake 5 or 6 - helium was the code name). And even though I've gone through the wondrous joy of manually compiling a program, I still prefer a simple `sudo apt-get install foo`.

As for Canonical being an evil money-hungry corporation, honestly what do think they are in it for? Just because they happen to make a dime along the way doesn't instantly make it an inferior product. Take away the profit aspect, and you get a product with an unbearably long life-cycle run by volunteers (*cough* debian *cough cough*). Just be thankful that it hasn't devolved into the state that Red Hat did where you had to buy "support" just to get updates.