Testing Chat Episode VI: Return of the Chat

[Ralin]

Congrats!

Is there now a research component, or is it all done?

I have to finish and defend my thesis, but it's am interdisciplinary liberal arts program with fairly loose standards so I'm pretty much free to do what I want. It's about halfway done and I'm pretty sure none of the people on my committee actually know anything about the subject, which is not surprising seeing as I appear to be one of the four or five people on earth who cares about 1930s Chinese detective literature.

[Ralin]

So, I think Elfdart is an annoying idiot most of the time, but when it comes to Game of Thrones it honestly is pretty impressive how on the mark some of his predictions are.

He usually follows them with something incredibly wrong, but his overall accuracy is still way better than it should be.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

He's probably read the books.

[Darksi4190]

Then why is he getting predictions wrong and not being all smug and superior in the book spoilers thread?

Do you guys really think he'd stoop so low as to lie about reading the books to impress people with his magic T.V. prediction powers? He's not that much of an attention whore.

[Gands]

Throw in a few wrong ones periodically to make it look credible.

I've seen it done.

[RogueIce]

Always in motion is the future.

[Veef]

do you any of you guys like firely?

http://store.qmxonline.com/Malcolm-Reyn ... p_286.html#

i just got passed some news about this thing

it's a doll

[joviwan]

I liked Godzilla. It was a really good godzilla movie.

[Dude]

do you any of you guys like firely?

http://store.qmxonline.com/Malcolm-Reyn ... p_286.html#

i just got passed some news about this thing

it's a doll

I was interested but 179$ for a plastic man is more then I'm willing to pay.

[Vasey]

i always find it funny that when a language apologist tells you "now you don't have worry about memory management/types/const/whatever" what they usually mean is you can't "worry" about those things when you need them, essentially taking away

"You don't have to worry about memory management" is a common selling point for garbage collected languages, but it's a real work of fiction. It's entirely possible to create gigantic memory leaks in Java or whatever by just not hanging on to your object references when you're done with them which is exactly the sort of casual lack of thought that causes memory leaks in Cish languages. You can't really release a Java or TCL or whatever application without testing its memory usage over time and, oh, hey, that's exactly what I have to do with my C++ thingymajiggers using Valgrind, Purify, etc.

And garbage collection doesn't help at all with managing things like file handles and sockets that are still constrained but aren't plain memory. For those, you want the deterministic destruction of something like C++, not the 'when we feel like it' approach of Java.

I'm told C# is better than Java for this sort of thing but I've never had the opportunity to try it. I mostly work on UNIX-a-likes and .NET might as well not exist there. Open source knock-offs with dubious legal status aren't exactly what you'd call king of that particular hill.

Saying this, Java and scripting languages are still much more appropriate for non-resource-constrained tasks. They're just much quicker and easier environments to knock something that mostly works together in, especially for non-specialists. C++ is hard unless you spend a lot of time in it and keep it all fresh in your mind or you're some super-genius far smarter than anyone I know.

[Oxymoron]

I liked Godzilla. It was a really good godzilla movie.

I liked it too.

Meanwhile, most of my colleagues, who only know Godzilla from the 1997 movie (as I do, too), found it "shitty" and "stupid". Criticism I've heard:

- Godzilla's design is shitty (they preserved the original design but it happen to look too much like a man in a suit; by contrast, 1997 godzilla was more visually interesting, a sentiment I'd tend to agree with)
- A feeling that Godzilla's origin wasn't explained ("Where the fuck does he come from?")
- Overall stupidity of the scenario (the human characters felt flat, and the scenario has the texture of swiss cheese)

[joviwan]

Man the movie spent like twenty minutes explaining where he came from

Godzilla has a terrific design and the 97 film was the worst.

The human people were flat though. Ken watanabe spends the entire movie just being "profoundly, cryptically perturbed Japanese Wiseman"

[phongn]

"You don't have to worry about memory management" is a common selling point for garbage collected languages, but it's a real work of fiction. It's entirely possible to create gigantic memory leaks in Java or whatever by just not hanging on to your object references when you're done with them which is exactly the sort of casual lack of thought that causes memory leaks in Cish languages. You can't really release a Java or TCL or whatever application without testing its memory usage over time and, oh, hey, that's exactly what I have to do with my C++ thingymajiggers using Valgrind, Purify, etc.

Well, C++ at least has RAII to simplify memory management. It's a lot easier to deal with than straight-C.

And garbage collection doesn't help at all with managing things like file handles and sockets that are still constrained but aren't plain memory. For those, you want the deterministic destruction of something like C++, not the 'when we feel like it' approach of Java.

I'm told C# is better than Java for this sort of thing but I've never had the opportunity to try it. I mostly work on UNIX-a-likes and .NET might as well not exist there. Open source knock-offs with dubious legal status aren't exactly what you'd call king of that particular hill.

You can have deterministic release of non-memory resources in Java. It was tedious boilerplate, but Java 7 introduced try-with-resources, borrowing C#'s using semantics.

[adr]

omg the jeopardy! tournament was amazing

[Bounty]

i always find it funny that when a language apologist tells you "now you don't have worry about memory management/types/const/whatever" what they usually mean is you can't "worry" about those things when you need them, essentially taking away

"You don't have to worry about memory management" is a common selling point for garbage collected languages, but it's a real work of fiction. It's entirely possible to create gigantic memory leaks in Java or whatever by just not hanging on to your object references when you're done with them which is exactly the sort of casual lack of thought that causes memory leaks in Cish languages. You can't really release a Java or TCL or whatever application without testing its memory usage over time and, oh, hey, that's exactly what I have to do with my C++ thingymajiggers using Valgrind, Purify, etc.

I'm working on an enterprise (lol) Spring/Java application. It's been in development for nearly two years and until our team started a few months ago no-one had bothered to check its memory usage cause 'Java has a garbage collector'. Turns out the application continuously makes hard references to one-time-use objects and then hangs on to them until shutdown. Oops.

Memory usage graphs that go up at a 45° angle: not good. Watching GC not even make a dent in said graph: very not good.

Nowadays, when I come home from another day of shitty spaghetti code and four business analysts per dev at meetings, I unwind with a non-network-connected Raspberry Pi, vi, gcc and my new copy of K&R C. It's surprisingly refreshing.

[Veef]

I was interested but 179$ for a plastic man is more then I'm willing to pay.

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodi ... 3dOh_ldWSo

how about ten bucks for a retro Kenner style action figure

[Bounty]

I'm buying the Star Trek Ship Collection off fo BBTS, and if you aren't and like Star Trek, go have a look. The models are really nice and the booklet that comes with them is even semi-decent with concept art and stories about the design process. I've got four so far and the rest on pre-order (except the Bajoran sunship and the Krenim temporal weapon, don't care about those). Can't wait for the Constellation Class to arrive, that thing is the tits.

Also Veef: I got the NECA Cherno Alpha and love it.

[Dude]

I was interested but 179$ for a plastic man is more then I'm willing to pay.

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodi ... 3dOh_ldWSo

how about ten bucks for a retro Kenner style action figure

Much realism, look at his head!

I'm liking that starship collection though, I'm a sucker for Klingon ships

[Stofsk]

I'm buying the Star Trek Ship Collection off fo BBTS, and if you aren't and like Star Trek, go have a look.

Got a link?

[Veef]

Much realism, look at his head!

did you see the twilight zone william shatner they're also doing?

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodi ... 3d8l_ldWSo

perfect hair forever

[Darksi4190]

Went out drink in with my friends for my birthday last night. Which was fun.


Now suffering the after effects of alcohol poisoning, which is not.

[Bounty]

I'm buying the Star Trek Ship Collection off fo BBTS, and if you aren't and like Star Trek, go have a look.

Got a link?

http://www.startrek-starships.com/index-choose.html

The quality is pretty damn nice, certainly more than enough for display and a *huge* step up from my old Micro Machines. These are the ones that I have so far (with the tail end of Apollo 8 ):



They're also bigger than they look in this picture.

[Oxymoron]

So, as an experiment / dare, I tried hair removal cream. On my junk.

(depending on your sensibilities, the following may be TMI)

Man that stuff is nasty.

If you have a LOT of body hair like I do and want to try it, here's a tip: try to shave most of the hairs first, and only use the cream when the remaining hairs are, like, less than 0.25-0.5cm in length.

Because the way the stuff work, the more hair you have, the longer the cream will have to stay on the area for effect, the more it'll affect you skin and start to itch like a chemical burn (and given what that stuff DOES, I suspect it -is- actually a chemical burn).

I let the cream on the skin for, like, 9 minutes, when the bottle said "do not let the cream on the area for more than 10 minutes"; and when I tried to put back some cream after having washed the first wave, the area started to itch like a motherfucking chemical burn. On my junk.


So, yeah, it is somewhat efficient, but the area need to be prepared beforehand for optimal results.

[Crazedwraith]

doesn't that stuff also say basically 'do not use on genitals' right there on the bottle?

[evilsoup]

as if that would ever stop the french