• will (unregistered) in reply to Me
    Me:
    Bob:
    Er?!? World Cup?? Is that like the World Series?
    No, nothing like it at all. The World Cup involves more than one country playing a game that is played all over the World.

    And Canada gets the shaft yet again.

  • Scoldog (unregistered)

    I'm unsubscribing because of Toto! I'm sick and tired of hearing that MIDI file of "Africa" playing when I enter this webpage!

    Do you really think I'd be sick and tired of titi?

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Me
    Me:
    Bob:
    Er?!? World Cup?? Is that like the World Series?
    No, nothing like it at all. The World Cup involves more than one country playing a game that is played all over the World called Football. You Americans may have heard of it as Soccer.

    Well done on picking up on the humour there! P.S. I'm BRITISH!!

  • davee123 (unregistered) in reply to Johnno

    No, the webpage with the Animaniacs' country list eventually got replaced with a completely re-vamped webpage some years later. Somewhere around 2004 to 2007 I'd guess. And when we did the re-write, we got a proper source for the country list that was (in theory) kept up to date by another internal source.

    By and large, though, nobody cared about the list being accurate. For all intents and purposes, the list could have been limited to about 20 countries, since those were the only ones ever used. As long as they were on the list, I could've added whatever other goofy names I had wanted to and they probably would've gone unnoticed.

    Almost makes me want to insert a fake country name, just to see if anyone would ever notice. Seriously, if you saw "Simania" or "Remoa" or something, would you actually notice? Or would you gloss over it?

    DaveE

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Florent
    Florent:
    Using "toto" as a dummy variable is very common in French computer science classes (it then shows in the industry I guess).

    I'll have to remember this for future internationalization efforts.

    if (country==USA)
{
  dummyname[0]="foo";
  dummyname[1]="bar";
}
else if (country==FRANCE)
{
  dummyname[0]="toto";
  dummyname[1]="titi";
}
else if (country==ANTARTICA)
{
  // ??
}
  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to JoLoCo
    JoLoCo:
    Stiggy:
    True, Antarctica is a continent. But it's also the only continent that is not otherwise divided into countries.

    I knew Australia was a myth!

    Reminds me of the old riddle:

    Question: What was the largest island in the world before Australia was discovered?

    Answer: Australia.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Photoplex
    Photoplex:
    That's totally besides the point. The question being asked is for your country of residence, not the country you wish to hire a vehicle in.

    It is technically possible to claim residence in Antarctica, but as far as I know it has never been done. The continent does not have any permanent residents, and in order to claim residency (say in the British Antarctic Territory) you would need to maintain a continuous period of residency there, and not in the UK.

    On the serious side -- am I allowed to be serious on this site? -- this is a classic example of requirements that sound complete but really aren't.

    I'm sure someone said, "We need to ask for country of residence", and thought that was a question that could always be definitively answered. But what if someone is living in Antartica or the International Space Station? They're not living in any country. Maybe they could fake it by giving their country of citizenship, maybe not, depending on what we intend to do with this information. Hmm, I wonder if there are prople in the world who aren't legally "citizens" of any country? Perhaps people exiled from their homeland in some political dispute who have not met the requirements for citizenship anywhere else.

    I regularly go through this sort of thing with users when trying to nail down requirements. What is the exact definition of this term? What is someone falls into neither category A nor category B? I can't count the number of times a user has told me, "Don't worry about that, that never happens." Then I try to explain that I can't tell the computer to just "not worry about something". I've had many cases where they've gotten frustrated or angry at me for wasting their time talking about these unlikely cases. But if a condition is possible, no matter how unlikely, we have to do SOMETHING, and I'd generally rather it not be "crash the entire system". With manual systems, you can often tell the workers, "If any other case comes up, just use your judgement and do something reasonable" or "Call your manager and we'll work something out". Computers aren't so good at "if (country==US) processUS(); else if (country=CANADA) prcessCanada(); else do something reasonable". And of course, whenever a user says "that will never happen", it always seems to happen six times the next day.

  • BushIdo (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Question: What was the largest island in the world before Australia was discovered?

    Answer: Australia.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley would respectully disagree.

  • James (unregistered)

    Perhaps fish is an acronym for File ISn't Here...

  • (cs)

    Fish? Was Flash written by the Joker? This explains much.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to BushIdo
    BushIdo:
    Jay:
    Question: What was the largest island in the world before Australia was discovered?

    Answer: Australia.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley would respectully disagree.

    When someone says, "There is no such thing as absolute truth", my immediate reaction is, "Oh really? Is that statement you just made 'true'?"

    Just like when someone tells me, "You shouldn't impose your morals on others", my reaction is, "Oh, would it be 'wrong' for me to impose my morals on others? If not, then why shouldn't I do it? If so, then this is a moral judgment that you are trying to impose on me. You're a terrible hypocrite imposing your morality on others at the same time that you tell them not to do the same."

    :-)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    When someone says, "There is no such thing as absolute truth"...

    Just like when someone tells me, "You shouldn't impose your morals on others"...

    Sounds like you need to stop hanging around with philosophy students.

  • (cs)

    Obviously the correct way to handle a "False Fish Cast Exception" is to catch it with a try/catch hook. Pffft.

  • (cs)

    A new Bumper Sticker: "Save the titi !"

  • nerfer (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    JoLoCo:
    Stiggy:
    True, Antarctica is a continent. But it's also the only continent that is not otherwise divided into countries.

    I knew Australia was a myth!

    Reminds me of the old riddle:

    Question: What was the largest island in the world before Australia was discovered?

    Answer: Australia.

    Now there's a WTF. The answer is Greenland. Of course that's the answer after Australia was discovered too.

  • (cs) in reply to nerfer
    nerfer:
    Jay:
    JoLoCo:
    Stiggy:
    True, Antarctica is a continent. But it's also the only continent that is not otherwise divided into countries.

    I knew Australia was a myth!

    Reminds me of the old riddle:

    Question: What was the largest island in the world before Australia was discovered?

    Answer: Australia.

    Now there's a WTF. The answer is Greenland. Of course that's the answer after Australia was discovered too.

    WTF? No. Hair-splitting? Yes.

  • (cs)

    If you give a program a fish, it will fail for a day. If you teach it to fish, it will fail forever.

  • Ant32bit (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Pangea was the largest island before Australia was discovered. WAY before.

  • Noel Vargas (unregistered)

    I've figured it out: It's "Africa" by Toto!

  • Teoríc (unregistered) in reply to Johnno
    Johnno:
    avee123:
    So, giving up, I eventually used the list from the Animaniacs' song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDtdQ8bTvRc

    I notice Yugoslavia is not split in that song, and the Baltic Nations (and some others in that area) don't appear to get a mention (presumably they were considered part of Russia at the time).
    (What time was that? They at least claimed independence before Germany was re-unified, but it could have been between October 1990 and August 1991?)

    By the way, Note that close to the end Crete has an entry as a free country, which Greece won't comprend. ;-)

  • andrew4400 (unregistered) in reply to SR

    AS3 is very Java like... AS2 and AS1 are the javascript-like ones.

  • Juergen (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Florent:
    Using "toto" as a dummy variable is very common in French computer science classes (it then shows in the industry I guess).

    I'll have to remember this for future internationalization efforts.

    if (country==USA)
{
  dummyname[0]="foo";
  dummyname[1]="bar";
}
else if (country==FRANCE)
{
  dummyname[0]="toto";
  dummyname[1]="titi";
}
else if (country==ANTARTICA)
{
  // ??
}

    Hardcoding this is utterly wrong, the proper place is in the locale.

  • Toto...or titi? (unregistered)

    Toto...or titi? I don't think we ever found a satisfactory answer to that question.

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