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That one appeared on The News Quiz (sans photo, obviously, what with The News Quiz being on the wireless - although seeing the photo of the chap does accentuate one's amusement from the prose )
The important point for me was that he wasn't saying that the fallacies had ceased to be fallacies, just that it was easier for us to believe that they had become truths.
Whenever I see stuff on sites like stackoverflow.com, or even Usenet newsgroups like comp.lang.javascript, where people say that they want to make synchronous HTTP requests via XHR from the browser (they always call it "Ajax" BTW) because sometimes an asynchronous request doesn't work... oh, I don't know where to start to address that amount of fail
Even worse is when they start out with something like "Hi, I'm using [PHP | ASP.NET | JSP | some crap I found somewhere] and my AJAX call isn't working in jQuery. I put a call to System.out.writeln in my code {not their code, they grabbed it from the first result of a Google} but it's not showing up in Firebug {total lack of understanding of the fact that server code and client code are two separate and unrelated execution contexts - ASP.NET is particularly bad at reinforcing this failure to understand the basics}. Should I be using [Prototype | mootools | Dojo] as well as jQuery? I looked on w3schools.com but I didn't know what the fsck I was trying to do in the first place so it didn't help, although it wouldn't have helped even if I knew what I wanted because w3schools.com sucks too."
Today I gained 60 reputation points on stackoverflow.com in the space of fifteen minutes for telling somebody of the * html CSS hack for IE < 7.
This is tragic. All my previous posts on stackoverflow.com have been useful and worthwhile. This was somebody saying "I know conditional comments are better, but I want the more faily way." I told them it, and got more upvotes than for all the good and right and proper things I've ever said on there
It's sites like that which remind me that most people in this industry not only have minimal knowledge of what they're up to: they don't even want to learn.
"I found this script and it doesn't work, it's urgent, tell me how to do this..."
At least we don't see so much of the old Usenet bugbear: "I don't read this group so pls email me the answer k thx bai" - although I actually saw that (roughly speaking) on a high-traffic Google group last Thursday
One of these days I'll stop trying to be helpful and there'll be mass sackings for incompetence throughout the industry. Don't say I didn't warn you
Last edited by NickFitz; 13 June 2009, 02:54.
Reason: typo fail :-(
Tell her (or him, or it, according to preference) to take the 7 steps. Exercise keeps her (or him, or it) lean and fit. No reason for you to shuffle about the place
but you can go back and edit the word back in place of the *'s
Indeed - although IIRC there are some other things where it makes the filtering absolute. Or maybe I'm thinking of quoting something that contains such matter.
I'm pretty sure I uncovered some indeterminacies (well, non-obvious features to be precise) of the naughty words filter a while back, but I didn't pursue the matter and have now forgotten them
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