• (cs) in reply to JimM
    JimM:
    Not sure why tetrapacks ended up being metric by default, but there it is...
    Probably because they come from a Swedish company, who really, really didn't want to have to mess with two very nearly the same size product lines.
  • DoTheMath (unregistered) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    pink_fairy:
    "Cellar temperature," however, is not "warm," unless that is you live in a tropical swamp. Global warming hasn't got quite that bad yet.
    It's all relative, isn't it? Americans think beer's the right temperature when ice forms in it. Seriously. And to be honest, that is the right temperature for American beer, as it kills whatever it is that passes for flavor.

    Don't put all Americans in the same category! Yes, the large corporate brewers like Anheuser Busch brew shitty beer geared towards those who don't know any better and they are better served cold to cover up their flavor BUT there are plenty of micro breweries that put out excellent hand crafted beers and some even specifically say to serve at cellar temperature on the label. As a home brewer and micro brew lover myself, I HATE being thrown into this category of Americans who don't know any better.

  • TopCod3r (unregistered)

    Hello!

  • RiF (unregistered) in reply to DoTheMath
    DoTheMath:
    Don't put all Americans in the same category! Yes, the large corporate brewers like Anheuser Busch brew shitty beer geared towards those who don't know any better and they are better served cold to cover up their flavor BUT there are plenty of micro breweries that put out excellent hand crafted beers and some even specifically say to serve at cellar temperature on the label. As a home brewer and micro brew lover myself, I HATE being thrown into this category of Americans who don't know any better.

    Add an "s" to your username and we might consider it! :-P

    Do you have the equivalent of CAMRA (http://www.camra.org.uk/) in the US?

  • (cs) in reply to DoTheMath
    DoTheMath:
    I HATE being thrown into this category of Americans who don't know any better.
    Then I suggest you move to the UK :)
  • Phalanx (unregistered) in reply to nobis

    Google up hexclock. (I'm too lazy to find you the link)

  • jDeepBeep (unregistered) in reply to Fair warning
    Fair warning:
    If you haven't been around much:

    When TopCod3r posts (and he will post) about how he used to require his team to code in such and such a manner, ignore it. He's trolling, and if you respond you will be mocked by all the kids here who are way cooler than you will ever be.

    By any chance, did you fall for it previously? :)

  • jDeepBeep (unregistered)

    I am upset that the code was left out which calculates the ratio of early to late wood, respectively, of a wooden table.

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered) in reply to BJ Upton
    BJ Upton:
    Loren Pechtel:
    I'm wondering if there might be at least some sanity to this? Everyone seems to be assuming 5 days/week is set in stone but it isn't.

    1. Holidays.

    2. Overtime.

    A couple of times I have written code that is suspiciously like this: It contains some information about the day and auto-initializes more as needed. In both cases there is an editor somewhere that lets you change what's in the table--the auto-initialize takes care of the normal case (including holidays), a human can use the editor if there is something unusual.

    Wouldn't it be easier to just have a table with the holidays in it?

    The problem is that it's not only holidays. For one reason or another sometimes the plant works Saturday, sometimes it doesn't work on a normal working day.

  • Atario (unregistered)

    However, there's one thing I think we can all agree on: turn off Cleartype before you take screenshots.

  • tbrown (unregistered) in reply to Loren Pechtel
    Loren Pechtel:
    I'm wondering if there might be at least some sanity to this? Everyone seems to be assuming 5 days/week is set in stone but it isn't.

    1. Holidays.

    2. Overtime.

    A couple of times I have written code that is suspiciously like this: It contains some information about the day and auto-initializes more as needed. In both cases there is an editor somewhere that lets you change what's in the table--the auto-initialize takes care of the normal case (including holidays), a human can use the editor if there is something unusual.

    Yeah, code to determine "business days" that I've seen is quite hardcoded -- usually a table lookup where the table is set in stone for the year based on the company's and country's holiday schedule. There is no way to compute this, a priori.

  • tbrown (unregistered) in reply to OutWithTheTroll
    OutWithTheTroll:
    @ TopCod3r-fans

    It's "Best Practice" to delete trolling.

    Either dedicate a website/shrine to him or get over it and move on.

    Ugh! I despise the "Best Practice" mantra. Most of the so-called "Best Practices" that people spout are so overblown and Enterprisey in nature.

    I'm with those that found the trolling to be of exceptional quality -- subtle and with that edge of realism that made it effective. What's more, unlike most trolls of the rabid or offensive variety, TopCod3r rarely, if ever, kept a thread going. More of a "fire and forget" type.

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to Justice
    Justice:
    The only problem with colonizing a planet with a longer (or shorter) day is an evolutionary one; assuming a sleep cycle of 16 Earth hours awake, 8 Earth hours asleep, the first settlers will be dealing with the mother of all jet lag.
    A (slightly) longer day might not be a problem. Humans actually seem to be biologically geared to a sleep/wake cycle that's longer than 24 hours. In studies where test subjects are cut off from any way of telling time beyond to sleep and wake based on when they're tired, they'll nearly always establish a "day" and "night" cycle that's longer than that of our planet's rotation. (I think it was something like 26 or 27 hours, but may have that part wrong. It's been quite a while since I read about that study and my memory is fuzzy on the details.)

    The practical upshot of this is that for international travelers who travel across several timezones at once, it's easier to re-sych with local time by lengthening their days rather than shortening them (even if, for example, they have to lengthen a day by 18 hours to avoid shortening one by 6 hours).

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to DMA
    DMA:
    a 200 line procedure that could take any date string and, regardless of format, turn it into a standard dd/mm/yyyy format. Thus 21-sep-2008, 21-September-2008, 21/09/2008, 21/09/08 would all be converted to a standard format. It even tested for US format so that 09/21/2008 would be corrected.
    That last would work when the date is larger than 12, but if it's set to allow either, then how would it distinguish September 8th in mm/dd/yyyy format from August 9th in dd/mm/yyyy format? Allowing a type of conversion that will only work a little over half the time is the worst WTF there.
  • (cs) in reply to DoTheMath
    DoTheMath:
    Bappi:
    pink_fairy:
    "Cellar temperature," however, is not "warm," unless that is you live in a tropical swamp. Global warming hasn't got quite that bad yet.
    It's all relative, isn't it? Americans think beer's the right temperature when ice forms in it. Seriously. And to be honest, that is the right temperature for American beer, as it kills whatever it is that passes for flavor.

    Don't put all Americans in the same category! Yes, the large corporate brewers like Anheuser Busch brew shitty beer geared towards those who don't know any better and they are better served cold to cover up their flavor BUT there are plenty of micro breweries that put out excellent hand crafted beers and some even specifically say to serve at cellar temperature on the label. As a home brewer and micro brew lover myself, I HATE being thrown into this category of Americans who don't know any better.

    Well, I realise this is at second remove, but I wasn't even prodding anyone towards this category. (That would, in fact, be a classic category error.)

    Mendocino brewery, yum. Several Portland breweries, very palatable. There's even a brew pub in Walnut Creek, of all places, that does a decent IPA, a category of beer which Americans in general don't seem to have got their head around (not having had an empire and what-not. Ho ho).

    Unfortunately it also does two really crappy IPAs at the same time. What sort of lunatic would home-brew three IPAs? Don't they realise that the East India Company went out of business in 1850 or thereabouts?

    It doesn't seem to make its beer out of walnuts, however, which is a good thing. Or to source the water from the eponymous creek, which is an even better thing (room temperature or no).

    Sam Adams is extremely acceptable for a mass-produced beer.

    And, for the Aussies ... Coopers is the dingo's nads. I don't care what kind of Coopers it is. She'll see you right, mate. (And none of this crap about schooners and midis and pathetic attempts at metric measurements. Just shake the sediment up in the bottle and pour.)

  • Lars Fosdal (unregistered) in reply to Keith
    Keith:
    100+ lines of code for something that can be done in nearly 5 lines (as long as you don't mind hard-coding the fact that there are 5 days in a work week). This is a common practice when you are dealing with people who want to keep their jobs secure. Here is one way to correct the code: 
    Function fDaysLeftInWeek(ByVal dateToTest As Date) As Integer
    Select Case Weekday(dateToTest)
        Case 1, 7:  Return 0 'Or whatever you want to return if today is Saturday/Sunday
        Case Else:  Return 6 - Weekday(dateToTest) 'The "magic number" 6 is dangerously meaningful!!! - this will return 4 on a Monday.
    End Select
End Function

    There is a small problem with this code... in Norway, the week starts on Monday...

  • SuperHappyFunTimeDeluxeLimitedEdition (unregistered) in reply to MM

    Sleep patterns are quite fluid and easily adjustable. I work 10 hour shifts, 4 nights / week in the NOC and end up sleeping in the afternoons for about six hours on 3 days of the week, and nights the other 3... basically skipping a sleep cycle every week. So sleep cycles / jet lag is not much of a hurdle, we'll adapt quite easily. More importantly is putting the fat people on Jupiter.

    Time problem has been solved: just use the seemingly random string of decimals known as a our 'stardate'.

  • SuperHappyFunTimeDeluxe (unregistered) in reply to Lars Fosdal

    Curious... if the calendar starts on Sunday, and the storybook character known as God supposedly rested on the 7th day... wouldn't that either mean that the calendar is wrong taking from the fact that people go to church on Sundays or that they're just doin' it wrong?

  • (cs) in reply to MM
    MM:
    A (slightly) longer day might not be a problem. Humans actually seem to be biologically geared to a sleep/wake cycle that's longer than 24 hours. In studies where test subjects are cut off from any way of telling time beyond to sleep and wake based on when they're tired, they'll nearly always establish a "day" and "night" cycle that's longer than that of our planet's rotation. (I think it was something like 26 or 27 hours, but may have that part wrong. It's been quite a while since I read about that study and my memory is fuzzy on the details.)
    The plural of anecdote is not data. With that noted, I tend to 28 hours, and ran for a few years on that cycle. It helps that the normal 168 hour week is exactly divisible into 6 28 hour periods.
  • Ilya Ehrenburg (unregistered) in reply to SuperHappyFunTimeDeluxe
    SuperHappyFunTimeDeluxe:
    Curious... if the calendar starts on Sunday, and the storybook character known as God supposedly rested on the 7th day... wouldn't that either mean that the calendar is wrong taking from the fact that people go to church on Sundays or that they're just doin' it wrong?
    They're doing it wrong. You might want to read the book you mentioned as well as its sequel to find that going to church on Sundays is a later development originating from the desire to distinguish the group from those having a longer relationship with aforementioned character.

    Or simply ask the nearest Rabbi.

  • MeasurementGuy (unregistered)

    "I come from the UK - we like to use imperial for milk, beer and speed limits. Everything else is metric. Not sure how we ended up like this..."

    The reason is that the metric system is just a subset of the imperial system. =)

  • NateDawg (unregistered) in reply to SuperHappyFunTimeDeluxe

    The Sabbath is the day of rest in observation of the seventh day of creation. The Sabbath does begin sundown on Friday and last until Saturday evening - basically the seventh day.

    Christians observe Sunday as The Lord's Day in observance to the resurrection of Christ - not the seventh day of creation.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    And the earth crashes into the sun. Talk about global warming ...

  • welcome to my life (unregistered)

    Graham, is that you?

  • Drambuie (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    I think it is supposed to be a badly implemented inverse-holiday table.

    That is, number of working days remaining in week depends on public holidays, etc.

  • Drambuie (unregistered) in reply to DoTheMath

    Pints elsewhere are 600ml.

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