• Benoit (unregistered)

    Reminds me of a colleague relating the history of someone who wanted to (under UNIX) erase all files with a dot in the name. He actually intended to issue a "rm -rf ." and got, a few seconds later, an unpleasant proof of a typo : "* : command not found"...

  • Dr Eberhard W Lisse (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo

    If I am not mistaken, MSDOS.SYS was read-only, so a simple del . would not affect it. But then it's gazillion years abd operating systems ago.

    el

  • skip (unregistered) in reply to mickeyding

    as ed wympner once wrote:

    do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and know from the beginning, wha may be the end.

  • knock it off... (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    knock it off...:
    Someone You Know:
    Hasse Wehner:
    Brilliant! :-)

    I think the word you're searching for is "brillant".

    Let's see how many ignorant people try to correct my spelling this time!

    aha, it's you again.

    those people are not "ignorant", they're just not reading this page as long as you do. it does not speak of anyone's intelligence to blame or ridicule others for such a thing.

    oh wait... perhaps it's because these other people do have a life and therefore can't read all (past) articles?

    it might have been funny, if you'd mentioned "brillant" and included the link to the original story, at least after someone has been trying to correct you, instead of ridiculing him/her.

    but nothing better than a cheap thrill, eh?

    BTW, your name is fitting indeed, I do unfortunately know others who are a lot like you.

    as it is, your know-it-all attitude is just a pain in the a...-ahem- neck. if someone knew all the stuff where you are a rookie and/or an ignoramus, I bet he'd most probably be on the brink of omniscience...

    BTW, the captcha is also a pain in the respective body part: starts with r, continues with i and ends with aa... ;-)

    I did not make any reference to anyone's intelligence. I did not ridicule anyone. I was merely making light of the fact that so many people were so quick to correct a perceived error the last time I made a similar remark.

    And yes, people who don't know something are ignorant of it. That's what the word "ignorant" means: uninformed or lacking knowledge. The fact that many people use it, incorrectly, in an insulting way is not my problem. It is not insulting to simply not know something. I wasn't making fun of anyone for not knowing the "brillant" reference. I'm sorry if you did not understand or appreciate my humor, but that is not my problem either.

    well, perhaps it came over like that because those people were in fact right when correcting this error - the paula story aside.

    the main meaning of ignorant is "Lacking education or knowledge" (which certainly is not really non-judgemental), only the third is "Unaware or uninformed" (see bartleby.com), that's perhaps why so many people use it in the sense of "stupid". it's the same in german (which is my first language) where you can also use the same form as a noun (i.e. "ein ignorant"="an ignoramus"), which is not a compliment either...

    you could've shown your "non-ignorance" ;o) by using one of the many synonyms which do not have this connotation: unaware, uninformed, nescient, unknowing... ha, a look into the dictionary additionally yielded "untaught" and "unillumined", never heard that last one, beautiful... :o)

  • david (unregistered)

    Had a GIS (survey/design) originally written in main-frame BASIC. The KILL command without parameters deleted the last open file - useful for viewing and deleting files.

    When the system was switched to a different compiler and a different OS, the new semantics for the KILL statement were that KILL without parameters was the same as KILL .

    This was in an obscure branch of the program and went out to the customers. Got a call later from a customer who noticed that his (floppy) disk was grinding away when trying to do a simple delete.

    Result: New installation disks shipped out next day by special express to site locations across the country.

Leave a comment on “Good Thing we Tested It”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article