C the complete nonsense

J

J de Boyne Pollard

If what you say is right then we've actually discovered
If you sell something under false pretences then of course
you get a few sales. But Schildt is the best-selling C
author.

I very much doubt that. Who says that?
It's most unlikely that so many people are buying the
book on the basis of its cover, then regretting their
purchase.

Why not? Why, equally, is it unlikely that many people are
buying the book, realizing that it only teaches DOS C
programming, and relegating it to a dusty shelf somewhere,
now that they don't program on DOS?
I've tried to find a positive review of the book from a
notable name, and so far failed. The books must be
valuable to the people who buy them.

The latter doesn't follow from the former.
You're right, however. it's not really a dichotomy - mass delusion
versus the books are valuable - there might be another explanation.
It's just that no obvious one presents itself.

Plenty do. One only has to look at one's own experience
to find some to start off with. As I said to M. Heathfield,
try it. I can name a few books that I've bought that have
turned out to be poor. Jolitz' and Jolitz' book on the BSD
kernel is one. They sit on shelves unused, gathering dust.
I'm sure that many here can relate various things that
they do with bad computer books, none of which will show
up in analyses of sales figures.
 
J

J de Boyne Pollard

You didn't send the address to me. And anyone who
happens across this post in the future
would also be left out of the loop.

That's a failing of some of the Usenet nodes that carry
comp.lang.c. You want to complain about it to someone,
complain to them.
Exactly.  And it will be mangled by NUAs that word-wrap it
in quotations, mangled in Usenet gateways, mangled in
archives of Usenet postings accessible from the WWW, and
mangled by programs that "helpfully" do things like
replacing slashes, minus signs, and other characters in
URL-like text with various kinds of quoting sequences.
You should see some of the broken incoming links that
Google Webmaster Tools reports pointing to my WWW pages.
And those are just the ones where the breakage has
occurred far enough into the URL to miss the domain names
and account names.
Ask yourself this:  Do we give out hyperlinks with the
intention that people are able to follow them and read
what is hyperlinked to, or just to decorate postings?
Only in the latter case does it not matter that people
reading the post, and quotes of the post, and copies of
the post on WWW sites, will get something mangled and
unusable.
And that's even discounting all of the
but-that-hyperlink-doesn't-work-for-me timewasting that
occurs.

You've wasted far more time in this long justification
for your refusal to post links in Usenet posts, [...]

You're being foolish. I post plenty of hyperlinks in
Usenet posts. I posted one just two hours ago in another
newsgroup. What I don't do is any of the broken,
counterproductive, and wasteful things that you want
people to do.
several simple and reliable methods being suggested.

The only reliable method is hyperlinks as hypertext.
Nothing else works. The fact that you explain that
they each don't work in the very list of supposedly
"reliable" methods that you've just given, should be
telling you something. Read what you are actually
writing as you write it, and think.
Thanks, but I didn't really expect that a FAQ on
DOS EOF markers would be related to Whatever the
Hell CIS URLs are, so I did not look at the rest
of that site. From the snarky tone of your reply

.... that is entirely in your imagination, given
that the above is a simple straightforward set
of instructions and nothing more ...
I suspect now that when you say "Frequently Given
Answer" that you are in fact referring to your
website, not a generic "Frequently given answer",
if so, WHY NOT SAY SO?

Your question has a falsehood as its premise.
[...] it does seem that you make giving a URL into
a needlessly dramatic and complex affair.

Actually, it isn't. But other people do. As I
said, I've been handing out hyperlinks for years,
and the ways that people find, as you here do, of
reacting stupidly to being helped, or to being
given just simple straightforward instructions,
are many and varied. That doesn't make such
reactions anyone's fault, or anyone's problem,
but their own. This "timewasting discussion" that
you think that to be someone else's fault resulted
from your asking questions in the first place,
for example.
Are you actually trying to be helpful, or
looking for an opportunity to sneer at people
for not knowing how to decipher your references?

You're the only one sneering here. Indeed, you're
the only one who is apparently posting in order to
set things up so that when people answer your
questions you immediately become combative.
 
J

J de Boyne Pollard

The "CIS" is an abbreviation for "Common Internet Scheme", a term
An RFC which JdeBP violates on that very page! Classic.

You really should read the page before posting
such things, because they do rather make you look
foolish. Hint: Read what the FGA is telling you
about RFC 1738.
 
J

J de Boyne Pollard

Possibly Jonathan playing around with headers.
You were playing around with headers long before Rod's observation.

Again, moving discussions to appropriate newsgroups is not
"playing around", kiddo. It's, indeed, one of the things
that people *often ask* to be done here and elsewhere.
And your disparaging remark about him is invalid, by the way. His
comments unfailingly show a good deal of thought, [...]

Your reading is selectively blind. You could start with
Rod Pemberton's less-than-stellar contributions to this very
thread to demonstrate to yourself otherwise. Take the
blinkers off and look.
Please change subject lines less frequently than you have
been doing.

Wrong. This is a Usenet FAQ answer of long standing, kiddo.
Change the subject line when the discussion changes, to keep
the subject indicative of the subject matter, and *don't*
deliberately start wholly new threads for ongoing
discussion.

Hint: When you find yourself saying exactly the same
thing as Emily Postnews does (which you are here, kiddo),
you know that you're getting things wrong.
Please include more context in your quotes.

This too is a Usenet FAQ answer of long standing, kiddo.
Minimalism in quoting is a very good thing, recommended
in a large number of places.
And he silently *replaced* all groups with followups to

  news.newusers.questions

in the message I'm replying to. Hoping to catch me out,
no doubt.

Hoping that you'd read some of the aforementioned
Usenet FAQs, kiddo, as well as move discussion to
an appropriate newsgroup. That's the newsgroup
where one discusses Usenet itself; and pointers
to the aforementioned FAQs are (or used to be)
regularly posted in that hierarchy.

You're channelling Emily Postnews, selectively blind
in reading Pemberton's posts, and complaining at
length about how a discussion of MS-DOS programming
and the OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler's _dos_findclose()
function was nudged towards comp.os.msdos.programmer
and openwatcom.users.c_cpp. These are not good, kiddo.
 
R

Richard Bos

Malcolm McLean said:
The "type" of a "function" in non-C terms would be "real" or
"integral", as well as other characteristics like "monotonic" or
"differentiable".

And these are common English words? If you told a common Englishman, I'd
expect him to tell you that he finds _all_ programming as well as maths
to be particularly monotonic, and that he'd much rather discuss the
unexpected chances of Pompey in the cup final.

Richard
 
B

BruceS

If you wish to be credited as something other than "some random guy on
Usenet", let me know.  :)

No, actually that was great. If I'd done something more substantial
than providing a pseudo-random number, maybe I'd want more, but
probably not even then. Anonymity suits me just fine. The
description made me laugh, which was more than sufficient payment for
my effort. I told my wife, and she laughed too, so we got bonus
payment.
 
S

Seebs

No, actually that was great. If I'd done something more substantial
than providing a pseudo-random number, maybe I'd want more, but
probably not even then. Anonymity suits me just fine. The
description made me laugh, which was more than sufficient payment for
my effort. I told my wife, and she laughed too, so we got bonus
payment.

Awesome.

And thanks; you did a great job. I started looking at 168, didn't see
anything, thought "hey, cool, he picked a section with nothing obvious
wrong in it, I can illustrate the general nitpickiness".

Boy, was I wrong. I remain amazed.

-s
 
B

blmblm

[ snip ]

Grrr ....

Maybe the reply I just composed and attempted to send will
show up eventually; for now it appears to have disappeared
into the ether, presumably because follow-ups were set to a
moderated group (news.newusers.questions), and while I reset the
Newsgroups line to include the original groups, I didn't realize
news.newusers.questions was moderated. I guess that will teach
me -- something.

At least I'll trim the newsgroups line here to the group in
which I'm reading this thread.
 
B

blmblm

[ snip ]
Wrong. This is a Usenet FAQ answer of long standing, kiddo.
Change the subject line when the discussion changes, to keep
the subject indicative of the subject matter, and *don't*
deliberately start wholly new threads for ongoing
discussion.

I'm not optimistic that the following suggestion will have any
effect, given how little effect the repeated requests to include
attributions have had, but ....

Changing subject lines has its merits, but it does rather break the
connection with the previous discussion. Better, in my opinion, is
to use the convention "new subject (was old subject)". It's true
that if the References headers are correctly set up a threading
newsreader can connect them. But the one I use [*] only makes
that connection if there are posts with old subject line still
unread; otherwise the post with the new subject line looks like
a new and unrelated thread. Anyone else have similar problems?

[*] trn. Yes, really.

Oh, and I was under the impression that if one had set follow-ups
to another newsgroup, as was the case with JdeBP's post, it was
courteous to point this out. Well, whatever. I'm going to add
the original newsgroups back in, but with "OT" in the subject line
in the hopes of reducing the clutter a bit.
 
S

spinoza1111

No, actually that was great.  If I'd done something more substantial
than providing a pseudo-random number, maybe I'd want more, but
probably not even then.  Anonymity suits me just fine.  The
description made me laugh, which was more than sufficient payment for
my effort.  I told my wife, and she laughed too, so we got bonus
payment.

Seebs' Acknowledgement section in CTCN-4 is surprisingly gracious and
I appreciate the credit, even if it was intended ironically or as a
backhand compliment, because they way it's worded trusts to Peter's
buddies' feelings about me for it to be read as irony. The credit to
Malcolm is quite sincere.

I'd "stand down" save for the new material which was based on the
discredited "drinking game" approach. Applied to most tutorials, it
can find errors.

Also, the wikipedia article MUST be repaired, since its main reference
is still to a polemical and NNPOV document, and this is inappropriate
under wikipedia's bio of living persons policies.
 

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