• (disco) in reply to rc4
    rc4:
    Steve_The_Cynic:
    **30 seconds** spent hacking in another if() statement **is** **five minutes** too long.

    :wtf:

    It's a paraphrase of an idiom, saying that one of something very undesirable is two too many.

    Sigh.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    and instead keep a more generic processing engine.
    Just make sure you call it the Inner Platform.
  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic
    Steve_The_Cynic:
    Just make sure you call it the Inner Platform.

    And write it to do everything using RDF for being extra Enterprise Ready!

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend

    The standard actually prohibits combining multiple prefixes. Which is why, though the kilogram is the base mass unit (in the current standard MKSA), all prefixes combine with gram.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    So does `MGM` represent a microgram, a milligram or a megagram?

    KGM → KG MGM → MG GRM → G

    Just my best guess...

    dcon:
    He's trained me to look at the source for all articles now...
    PJH:
    He's the only one I bother doing it for - have any of the others been caught doing it?

    You still look at the source? I have a greasemonkey script for that.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    MGM → MG

    Would actually be MegaGram

  • (disco)
    everyone:
    we don't know about the remify bookmarklet, wahh, help us

    Here's the Remify bookmarklet that I use:

    javascript:(function(){var b=document.getElementById('ArticleFull')||document.getElementsByClassName('ArticleBody')[0]||document.getElementsByClassName('article-body')[0];b.innerHTML=b.innerHTML.replace(/<!\-\-/g,'<span style="color: green;">').replace(/\-\->/g,'</span>');})()
  • (disco) in reply to Fox

    The G still shouldn't be capital. They've obviously been converted to all-caps.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    So, following that pattern, a megagram would be "mG".

  • (disco) in reply to Fox

    No, Megagram is Mg

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Perhaps it is all-caps FOR THAT MAINFRAME EXPERIENCE! IT ALSO NEEDS TO BE GREEN TEXT ON A BLACK BACKGROUND.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss

    "Converted to all-caps" does not imply that capitals get converted to lowercase too.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    It does if they "converted" it by typing with caps lock on.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Also true.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Then you are left with a milligram and a megagram both having the same symbol, throwing the validity of any data stored in --

    Wait. Are we still talking about SAP? Never mind. You could change all of the unit symbols to 𞉀󀩭 and the results would still be just as reliable.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss

    Nobody worth supporting uses megagrams. And case-sensitive abbreviations are fucking stupid anyway.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Also true.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Firstly, anyone who would even consider using the term "megagram" in a real-world system is an idiot. Just like those people who insist on calling the # symbol an "octothorpe", or implementation engineers who think it's cute to display nonsensical status messages like "reticulating splines".

    I'm sure that in the target domain there are a set of commonly used, non-ambiguous units, hence the reason someone wrote a helpful function to convert from SAP terminology to a notation familiar to the system's users. The only WTF thing is the unnecessary self-deprecating comment which implies that there is a more appropriate way of performing a string substitution.

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    or implementation engineers who think it's cute to display nonsensical status messages like "reticulating splines".

    What if that's actually what is happening, though? I know it's not in the case of the original game, but still...I might make a game about procedurally generated spline networks...

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Mandating all-uppercase or all-lowercase is even stupider than case-sensitive abbreviations. Not to mention, SI is case-sensitive (and has been since mega was introduced in the 19th century). It has also been non-ASCII from that time (since micro was adopted at the same time).

  • (disco) in reply to LB_
    LB_:
    caffiend:
    or implementation engineers who think it's cute to display nonsensical status messages like "reticulating splines".

    What if that's actually what is happening, though? I know it's not in the case of the original game, but still...I might make a game about procedurally generated spline networks...

    Take a lesson from Randall Munroe. Explain using only the ten hundred words people use the most often.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Take a lesson from Randall Munroe. Explain using only the ten hundred words people use the most often.

    You can use this computer page thing to see if you are doing it right.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    dkf:
    So does `MGM` represent a microgram, a milligram or a megagram?

    KGM → KG MGM → MG GRM → G

    Just my best guess...

    Actually, KG should be kilogauss, MG megagauss, and G just plain old Gauss. Not sure about the M in the originals, though.
  • (disco) in reply to Khudzlin
    Khudzlin:
    Mandating all-uppercase or all-lowercase is even stupider than case-sensitive abbreviations. Not to mention, SI is case-sensitive (and has been since mega was introduced in the 19th century). It has also been non-ASCII from that time (since micro was adopted at the same time).

    All units in SI which are named after people are abbreviated with a capital letters. All other units are abbreviated with a lower case letter. I don't know when that was introduced, but it may be even older than the M/µ introduction.

  • (disco) in reply to Khudzlin
    Khudzlin:
    Mandating all-uppercase or all-lowercase is even stupider than case-sensitive abbreviations.

    Mandating? If they have to be all-uppercase or all-lowercase, then they are case sensitive.

    Khudzlin:
    Not to mention, SI is case-sensitive

    Fuck that. Either mega or milli needs to go away, depending on the context. I.e. megahertz and megabytes can stick around (because I'll never need to use millihertz, and millibytes makes no sense) and in all other contexts mega can go die in a fire. Scientific notation works just fine.

    Khudzlin:
    It has also been non-ASCII from that time (since micro was adopted at the same time).

    Fuck that too. I'll have you know that the standard code page for extended ASCII did contain a μ character, and most everyone just types u instead anyway even still.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    and most everyone just types u instead anyway even still.

    Lots of keyboards lack µ, and laziness is a powerful incentive.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    all other contexts mega can go die in a fire. Scientific notation works just fine.
    [image] SON I AM DISAPPOINT.
  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Lots of keyboards lack µ, and laziness is a powerful incentive.

    My keyboard has a μ but I don't use it, on purpose, to annoy the kind of person who uses the kibble prefixes.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Fuck that. Either mega or milli needs to go away, depending on the context. I.e. megahertz and megabytes can stick around (because I'll never need to use millihertz, and millibytes makes no sense) and in all other contexts mega can go die in a fire.
    Megalitres and millilitres are both useful (inb4 litre not being an official SI unit; byte isn't, either, so we're not restricting ourselves to that context). Megajoules and megawatts are also useful, as well as their milli- counterparts.

    I agree, there are very few contexts where we will get confused by whether "milli" or "mega" is meant; a factor of 109 usually eliminates one or the other. A power plant output is not going to be milliwatts, you're not going to use megalitres of milk in your recipe, and your electric circuit current is not going to be megaamps. Or if it is, you are doing something pretty awesome that I nevertheless do not want to be anywhere near.

    If anything, there's more of an issue distinguishing between milli and micro. I notice this a lot with medicines: was that 50 milligrams or 50 micrograms of the active ingredient? Could be either, depending on the drug. They don't stick to the standard prefixes, either: among other things I've seen "mcg" used for micrograms.

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    I really don't see the WTF.

    Unless there is a a requirement for this to be user configurable or localisable, whether the implementer used an if / else if ladder, a switch statement or a hashmap is kinda trivial.

    This. So much this.

    I really hope no one here would dare change that code:

    • The passive aggressive comments show that some "one" has already analyzed how much effort the problem merits, and has gotten the answer.
    • The people who decided to take the cheap route deserve all of the consequences of that decision. Bandaid is available now; every new unit is a change request, with extra cost. They're SAP customers, for gosh sakes, that's S.O.P.
    • Regardless of how clunky this approach is. this will always ever be crap code on the edges. It isn't worth the effort of increasing maintainability. Any refactoring should be in the core business logic -- the crap code that people deal with every week.
  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Fuck that too. I'll have you know that the standard code page for extended ASCII *did* contain a μ character, and most everyone just types u instead anyway even still.

    The standard code page for extended ASCII? You're full of shit. None of the 8-bit extensions of ASCII has ever been standard outside of the countries whose languages it was made for, so not a single one can be described as the standard one. I'll also second @dkf there (the standard keyboard in my country has µ, but lacks some crucial features to fully work for the language, so people have come to tolerate the errors that come of it).

    @PleegWat: There were no units named after people when the metric system was created. I believe the ampere was the first such unit to be introduced (with the other electrical units, many of which are also named after people), but I don't know when that was in relation to when micro and mega were introduced. So I'll just add "at least" before "since".

  • (disco) in reply to Khudzlin
    Khudzlin:
    anotherusername:
    Fuck that too. I'll have you know that the standard code page for extended ASCII *did* contain a μ character, and most everyone just types u instead anyway even still.

    The standard code page for extended ASCII? You're full of shit. None of the 8-bit extensions of ASCII has ever been standard outside of the countries whose languages it was made for, so not a single one can be described as the standard one.

    No, I'm not. While other code pages did exist, and were the default in some localized PCs, even then code page 437 was the hardware default:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

    In a strict sense, this character set was not conceived as a code page; it was simply the graphical glyph repertoire available in the original IBM PC. **This character set remains the primary font in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card.**
  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Still doesn't make it the standard. Who in hell uses their graphical card for writing text? You seem to have missed (or ignored) the following part:

    It is sometimes referred to as the "OEM font" or "high ASCII", or as "extended ASCII" (one of many mutually incompatible ASCII extensions)

  • (disco) in reply to Khudzlin
    Khudzlin:
    Who in hell uses their graphical card for writing text?

    Only literally everyone who used text-based graphic modes in DOS?

    EGA and VGA-compatible graphics cards. The thing in your computer that made it even capable of connecting to a monitor. I mean sure, there were also a bunch of less popular graphics adapters, like the Hercules graphics adapter, but the de facto standards of their time were CGA, EGA, VGS, SVGA, XGA.

    Fuck, man, back then the RAM didn't even contain the graphical representation for a text screen. Your graphics adapter read out a string of 8-bit color + 8-bit ASCII codes and generated the graphical representation you actually saw on the screen.

    And yeah, OEM font... because everything shipped with it. Even if DOS selected a different default code page, the BIOS used code page 437.

  • (disco) in reply to prueg

    The article states that Apo was there to add tonnes to a list that includes milligrams, grams and kilograms. I suspect that there really only were three entries in the code, and that all the talk of maps vs branching is slightly missing the point. Doing it right would mean importing the full list of possible values so as to not have to add them one-by-one only after customers complain, which would have made a ‘proper’ implementation basically unavoidable. Not that obtaining such a list is anything near a 5-minute task; I was at it for at least 15 minutes and this is the best I could find: http://scn.sap.com/thread/442723

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    In a strict sense, this character set was not conceived as a code page; it was simply the graphical glyph repertoire available in the original IBM PC.

    This character set remains the primary font in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card.

    The world is so simple when viewed through the prism of a ignorant North American.

    The standard EGA cards had a different configuration of hardware, since it's just data in ROM and easily localized,, which I agree to be a separate WTF. But there you go, no defacto ASCII standard outside of the Center Of The Universe.

  • (disco) in reply to hidralisk

    It was the most widely used. It's the only code page that every computer had built-in. It's the (only?) code page that was later replicated as a Windows font specifically meant for compatibility to display ASCII text. It's also the code page required for opening .nfo files.

    "US Latin" and "extended ASCII" are virtually synonymous. It's as close to a de facto standard as there is. Everyone else has moved over to Unicode for region-specific text anyway, so there's no problem with acknowledging code page 437 as a "standard" OEM font.

  • (disco) in reply to hidralisk
    hidralisk:
    The world is so simple when viewed through the prism of a ignorant North American.

    Well you Europeeans had your own vastly successful local computer systems to use instead of all the ones designed in the US, so that was ok.

    Oh wait you didn't. The British kind of did. I guess. The French had that weird TV thing. The rest of you guys just slept through the entire computer revolution, and now just bitch and moan that all the computers and OSes designed in the US are US-centric. Well duh.

  • (disco) in reply to blakeyrat

    Because that USA companies are giving it for free to them, so they can't complain, right?

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac
    fbmac:
    Because that USA companies are giving it for free to them, so they can't complain, right?

    Gibberish.

    Assuming you meant "the USA companies":

    No. My point is this: the computer industry is US-centric because the US is one of the very few nations that actually encouraged the computer industry. Virtually all of Europe completely ignored computers. There are no European OSes around. There's no European computer hardware. There are only a tiny number of European software companies, and virtually none of which that were founded before it was obvious computers were the future.

    Europe slept through the computer revolution. European governments fucked up, bad. As a result, instead of (say) France using their own home-grown OS, they're buying Windows and OS X just like Germany, just like Sweden, etc. You idiots are using computers and OSes developed in China and the US to run your goddamned missile guidance systems.

    Anyway. It's always annoyed/amused me how fucking much European governments fucked-up over the last 30 years. Bitching about computer OSes being US-centric is almost a joke. Yeah, of course they are. YOU GUYS NEVER BOTHERED TO MAKE A EURO-CENTRIC ONE! IDIOTS!

    Don't get me wrong, it'd be great to have more OS diversity now. But WAY too late for that, Europe.

  • (disco) in reply to blakeyrat

    Well, here we didn't ignore computers. We had an awesome plan that making importing them illegal would help kickstart a national computer industry.

    That didn't work as well as we hoped for.

  • (disco) in reply to blakeyrat
    blakeyrat:
    Virtually all of Europe completely ignored computers.

    You're really cracking open the blakeyfacts today. Europe had a big computer industry. It just mostly sucked.

    Wooo, Discourse! You're being really responsive today! Too bad that response is 500 Internal Server Error, but at least you're quick to return it…

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    You're really cracking open the blakeyfacts today.

    Otherwise known as Truth. Capital-T Truth.

    dkf:
    Europe had a big computer industry.

    "big".

    dkf:
    It just mostly sucked.

    And is gone now.

    So stop whining about US control of OSes (that don't suck), US control of the Internet, etc. Because you guys had your chance and you blew it.

  • (disco) in reply to blakeyrat
    blakeyrat:
    US control of OSes (that don't suck)

    Operating System Not Found

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    blakeyrat:
    US control of OSes (that don't suck)

    Operating System Not Found

    i have a sudden desire to write an operating system called "BlowOS"

  • (disco) in reply to blakeyrat
    blakeyrat:
    And is gone now.

    Not entirely: SAP.

    :trolleybus:

  • (disco) in reply to RFoxmich

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/books/releasing-old-nonfiction-books-when-facts-have-changed.html?_r=1

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