Warning to newbies

[James]

Babbage's machine is now working in London and it works with manual
power.

This may be way off base on many levels because I have a very limited
knowledge of the low-level inner workings of the human body, but, a human is
using "electricity" to manually operate a Babbage's machine right?

I mean that the signal from the brain to the appendage that is actually
mutating the machine is "based" in electrical signals from said brain to
arm, hand and of course fingers which render all of the "beautiful" fine
motor movements that are "necessary" to "operate" such machinery?

Please, cut me some slack as I wrote this after a sleepless night. I know
that's not a "good" excuse in any way shape or form, but it's sadly the
truth.

;^(...

 

[James]

...who dropped out because of kids and the job, who has respect for
education

AFAICT, you obviously love your family oh so very much for you to go ahead
and "drop out". Well, IMVHO, you did not actually "drop out", you just took
a necessary "break" perhaps?

;^)

, and who was so qualified as to teach CS as an adjunct
professor...

IMO, it's very noble of you to spend some of your precious "time and energy"
to spread valuable knowledge around to CS students! Thank you.


Also, IMHO, a good education has the "ability" to enhance anybody's life and
the providers of said education are essential for all of our lives as a
whole.



Therefore, I say bless Earth and all of its inhabitants!


:^)

 

[Gus Gassmann]

OK, I had assumed you reviewed the 1st edn. But the point remains if
there was "just" a single new edition, few books are so successful, so
it's hard to see evidence of "harm". (Of course, Nilges could assert
your review forestalled a fifth edition.)

And to the question of "lying": Nilges has often asserted that
"Schildt was harmed" by the review, and never backed it up with any
evidence, other than he "knows" it from Schildt, he implies, but can't
reveal how. So we have no evidence either way, but I feel it's a safe
bet that Nilges just made it up. And I'm pretty sure he makes up or
vastly exaggerates all his supposed connections with important people
and institutions.




Well, I'm not sure if you have to have two or more to justify a
plural, you do say "one and a half decades".

Also referred to as "a decade_ and a half". Isn't English wonderful?

 

[Walter Banks]

...who dropped out because of kids and the job, who has respect for
education, and who was so qualified as to teach CS as an adjunct
professor...

As I said CS drop out.

 

[santosh]

This may be way off base on many levels because I have a very limited
knowledge of the low-level inner workings of the human body, but, a human is
using "electricity" to manually operate a Babbage's machine right?

I mean that the signal from the brain to the appendage that is actually
mutating the machine is "based" in electrical signals from said brain to
arm, hand and of course fingers which render all of the "beautiful" fine
motor movements that are "necessary" to "operate" such machinery?

Please, cut me some slack as I wrote this after a sleepless night. I know
that's not a "good" excuse in any way shape or form, but it's sadly the
truth.

Yeah. All biochemical reactions can be explained in terms of
electromagnetism, but going a step further down your train of logic...
it's all due to gravity!! And gravity is the manifestation of
Love!!! ;-)

 

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

While it's possible that you communicated with Schildt, he is surely
not such a fool as to have endorsed your "campaign" which is doing an
excellent job of making his book a laughing stock for a whole new
generation after it had been forgotten. If he actually had made such a
communication encouraging you to libel Seebs as you have over and
over, Seebs would have an excellent case to sue him. And as Schildt
seems to have made a nice pile from his books, there might be a
payoff, whereas suing you would be for laughs alone.

Since Schildt is not an idiot, though somewhat slapdash in his fact
checking, it follows that you made it up.

I have always described my connections with important and noteworthy
people and institutions with a great deal of care.

A great deal of care to magnify your own role.

Since your accounts of events online where I can follow exactly what
did happen are always wildly at variance with the facts, I don't
believe anything you say about events where your word is the only
evidence offered.
Feel free to rebut me in verse, that surely helps your credibility.

 

[Seebs]

[Baldrick wrote]

I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

I have no idea what "cleaning up" ocurred on the Wikipedia article, which
says now the same thing it's said as long as I've been aware of it.

While it's possible that you communicated with Schildt, he is surely
not such a fool as to have endorsed your "campaign" which is doing an
excellent job of making his book a laughing stock for a whole new
generation after it had been forgotten.

This is not obvious to me.

In particular, if Baldrick wrote him on a relatively lucid day, and
Schildt didn't bother to do any fact checking (hardly a ridiculous
suggestion), he might well have endorsed what was presented to him,
which might not be what the rest of us observe happening.

If he actually had made such a
communication encouraging you to libel Seebs as you have over and
over, Seebs would have an excellent case to sue him.

I would doubt it. I suppose I could go for libel per se, because accusations
of incompetence or malfeasance are sometimes actionable even in the absence
of demonstrated damages, I believe, but in general you have to have some
kind of demonstrated damages, and "tummy hurts from laughing" is not something
you want to ask a judge to assign a monetary value to.

A great deal of care to magnify your own role.

Yeah. And an obsession with the fact that he is connected to important
people, whose importance he feels makes him important. Huh. Can anyone
name a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder this guy DOESN'T
show?

-s

 

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

[Baldrick wrote]

I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

I have no idea what "cleaning up" ocurred on the Wikipedia article, which
says now the same thing it's said as long as I've been aware of it.

If you look at the history of the article, for a while Nilges had been
able to delete all criticism of Schildt. But eventually some editors
cited some references, such as your critique, and so it could no
longer be excluded. Nilges kept deleting it, until he was banned as an
abusive editor. And that's when you entered Nilges' Enemies List, as
of course you had planned all that.

This is not obvious to me.

In particular, if Baldrick wrote him on a relatively lucid day, and
Schildt didn't bother to do any fact checking (hardly a ridiculous
suggestion), he might well have endorsed what was presented to him,
which might not be what the rest of us observe happening.

I meant that Schildt did not endorse "the campaign" as it really is,
as Nilges implies he has.
It's conceivable that Nilges wrote some letter along the lines that he
was doing his best to contradict abuse of the book, and Schildt
responded with some platitude like "Thanks for your concern".
Perhaps Nilges is operating on the "Silence gives consent" rule.

I would doubt it. I suppose I could go for libel per se, because accusations
of incompetence or malfeasance are sometimes actionable even in the absence
of demonstrated damages, I believe, but in general you have to have some
kind of demonstrated damages, and "tummy hurts from laughing" is not something
you want to ask a judge to assign a monetary value to.

I suppose there must be a high bar to meet to prove damages from
Usenet nutters' postings, or the courts would be full of such cases.

If for a moment we imagine that Nilges' charges that you are liable
for damages for your "malicious" critique were to go to court, you
would have a much stronger case on that same principle.
(Of course it won't, as all Nilges' threatened imminent legal cases
for the last decade, or possibly decades, have been hot air.)

 

[spinoza1111]

On 02/02/2010 11:15,spinoza1111wrote:
[snip]

A sensible "C standard" would have in fact defined a new C free of
these problems:
...

reaching the end of a non-void function without finding a return
statement, when the return value is used
But "reaching the end of a non-void function" and falling off the end
of the world is flat-earth thinking, the unnecessary preservation of
the mistakes of the past and the limitations of old machines. You
should have FORCED vendors to hire compiler developers to FIX this
problem by simply adding a machine language return statement behind
ALL such functions as a guard, or behind functions where the return is
missing. This isn't rocket science.

You've missed the point here, Baldrick. It's not that the function won't
return, but that because execution reaches the end of the function
without encountering a "return x" statement, the value that the function
returns is undefined. This is obviously a problem if the caller expects
to use the returned value.

And "undefined" simply means that the value seen by the caller will be
implementation-defined and therefore could be anything. I add this as
you don't appear to understand this simple point.

To say it's "implementation defined" and to claim this is a standard
is bullshit. If it's "implementation defined" then it's not a
standard.

"International standard for dildoes"! "Anything you like including
exploding ones!"

That is: standardization is for the safety and convenience of the
consumer/user, not for compiler vendors. Underwriter's Laboratories
certifies electrical products as safe, it does NOT say that "the
result is undefined", because it's acting in the interests of insurers
and thus, indirectly, in the interests of vendors.

Whereas by 1989, compiler developers had been indoctrinated into holy
private property and private firms' unquestionable rights to highjack
the public interest, therefore the standard was written so that
vendors wouldn't have to change compilers.

 

[spinoza1111]

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

While it's possible that you communicated with Schildt, he is surely
not such a fool as to have endorsed your "campaign" which is doing an
excellent job of making his book a laughing stock for a whole new
generation after it had been forgotten. If he actually had made such a
communication encouraging you to libel Seebs as you have over and
over,  Seebs would have an excellent case to sue him. And as Schildt
seems to have made a nice pile from his books, there might be a
payoff, whereas suing you would be for laughs alone.

Since Schildt is not an idiot, though somewhat slapdash in his fact
checking, it follows that you made it up.

No, it follows for you since you're an isolated creep and a psycho
loser. News of solidarity, collegiality, or association means to you
that you're the one who needs to look at his problems, including the
deviant behavior in which you're engaging: it appears to me that you
are not even technically qualified to post here, and instead you
cruise networks (dressed in a bra, panties and Nazi hat?) looking for
people who manifest the inner weakness you feel. You don't post
anything technical, you merely chime in, which indicates to me that
you are using this newsgroup inappropriately for fantasy.

A great deal of care to magnify your own role.

Since your accounts of events online where I can follow exactly what
did happen are always wildly at variance with the facts, I don't
believe anything you say about events where your word is the only
evidence offered.
Feel free to rebut me in verse, that surely helps your credibility.

A sad sad man in the base base ment
Dressed in bra, panties and a Nazi Hat
Cruises the network alone.
Outside, the wind picks up, and a wolf begins to howl.

 

[spinoza1111]

[Baldrick wrote]

I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

I have no idea what "cleaning up" ocurred on the Wikipedia article, which
says now the same thing it's said as long as I've been aware of it.

You're lying. Here is an example of the crap I had removed: it speaks
of "preciseness" but is so half-literate that the author didn't know
of the word "precision".

I made a complaint under BLP and the complaint stuck. Deal with it.


Criticisms

As the reviews of his books indicate, Schildt sacrifices rigor and
preciseness to appeal to the general reader. Critics in reviews point
out that those to whom Schildt's style appeals do not actually know
enough to know they are being misled by his explanations.
His name was used to coin a new word, [bullschildt] in the Jargon
File. Schildt's name has become a byword for: "A confident, but
incorrect, statement about a programming language."
Schildt's early books showed a decided slant towards the MS-DOS
operating system and the PC architecture, making them useless to those
on other platforms. Often, these books would appear to be about a
language such as C, but were really MS-DOS systems programming
tutorials. (It is difficult to cite this, because most of these books
are out of print. Topics include writing MS-DOS code for TSR programs,
understanding memory models, etc. Interested readers will have to
track down early works.)
His later (post-1995) books also show a considerable PC slant,
including chapters in general C and C++ books about Microsoft Windows
(C: The Complete Reference, starting with the fourth edition, had a
chapter on building a Windows 95 skeleton, essentially a bare-bones
framework written in the raw Windows API a la the Petzold book.)
Schildt is known in C circles for "void main(void)", an affectation
which predates ANSI C. Schildt was slow to update his books to conform
to the ANSI standard declaration of main(). His later books change
this to "int main()", but the stigma of his use of the earlier
declaration has become attached to his name.
Schildt is an observing member of the ANSI C and C++ committees.
Frequently, the distinction between an observing and contributing
member is not made in various advertising and blurbs, inaccurately
portraying Schildt as an actual voting member who had something to do
with the standard. (Schildt also has a book on the ANSI C standard,
furthering the confusion.)

 

[spinoza1111]

[Baldrick wrote]
I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.
You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

I have no idea what "cleaning up" ocurred on the Wikipedia article, which
says now the same thing it's said as long as I've been aware of it.

If you look at the history of the article, for a while Nilges had been
able to delete all criticism of Schildt. But eventually some editors
cited some references, such as your critique, and so it could no
longer be excluded. Nilges kept deleting it, until he was banned as an
abusive editor.  And that's when you entered Nilges' Enemies List, as
of course you had planned all that.

I'd already been "banned" as "abusive" for standing up to a
convenience store clerk who was vandalizing my changes in the Kant
article, but wikipedians are so childish as to "ban" people who can of
course edit under new IP addresses anytime they choose. As a "banned"
user I brought the case and it was accepted. Just because you're a
dickless wonder doesn't mean I am.

The abusive material cited above is OUT. There is no more childish
reference to "Bullschildt", and I was thanked by Schildt.

You creeps have an immoral mental model of the Internet in which you
think that you must conform to the Big Other and that your
personalities must converge to the young, the hip, the slick, the
knowing and the deliberately rude, but it's about real people and real
harm done. This harm is in fact reversible and your masturbatory
fantasies must have a stop.

 

[Richard Tobin]

that you're the one who needs to look at his problems, including the
deviant behavior in which you're engaging: it appears to me that you
are not even technically qualified to post here, and instead you
cruise networks (dressed in a bra, panties and Nazi hat?)

If anyone was in any doubt about you, this should clear it up.
I quote you here so that you cannot remove your disgusting
statements from the public record.

-- Richard

 

[spinoza1111]

AFAICT, you obviously love your family oh so very much for you to go ahead
and "drop out". Well, IMVHO, you did not actually "drop out", you just took
a necessary "break" perhaps?

;^)


IMO, it's very noble of you to spend some of your precious "time and energy"
to spread valuable knowledge around to CS students! Thank you.

Also, IMHO, a good education has the "ability" to enhance anybody's life and
the providers of said education are essential for all of our lives as a
whole.

Therefore, I say bless Earth and all of its inhabitants!

:^)

I thought this was sarcasm so unusual it is for anyone to have the
courage to be either supportive or sincere, but it is not,
apparently.

This newsgroup is not the personal property of people like Peter
Seebach who compensate for serious personal inadequacies by bullying
people as they have been in the past, and perhaps today. It is for
discussion of the C programming language AS REAL PEOPLE UNDERSTAND IT,
where many of us feel that vendor-driven standardization is a joke.
But as it happened, useful discussion (such as my discussion with
Thomasson) almost never occurs, as it used to when programmers were
problem-solving grownups and not dickless wonders as they are today.
It is constantly disrupted by savage and unhappy people like Peter
Seebach who are inadequate on the job and off.

 

[spinoza1111]

[Baldrick wrote]

I sent Schildt email informing him of my campaign and asking him if he
felt it was appropriate. Herb said it was and confirmed that the anti-
Schildt campaign harmed him. Herb thanked me very deeply after I was
able to get the wikipedia article cleaned up.

You're lying again.
Though as Seebs pointed out, you probably have convinced yourself it
did, so I should rather say "it didn't happen".

I have no idea what "cleaning up" ocurred on the Wikipedia article, which
says now the same thing it's said as long as I've been aware of it.

While it's possible that you communicated with Schildt, he is surely
not such a fool as to have endorsed your "campaign" which is doing an
excellent job of making his book a laughing stock for a whole new
generation after it had been forgotten.

This is not obvious to me.

In particular, if Baldrick wrote him on a relatively lucid day, and
Schildt didn't bother to do any fact checking (hardly a ridiculous
suggestion), he might well have endorsed what was presented to him,
which might not be what the rest of us observe happening.

If he actually had made such a
communication encouraging you to libel Seebs as you have over and
over,  Seebs would have an excellent case to sue him.

I would doubt it.  I suppose I could go for libel per se, because accusations
of incompetence or malfeasance are sometimes actionable even in the absence
of demonstrated damages, I believe, but in general you have to have some
kind of demonstrated damages, and "tummy hurts from laughing" is not something
you want to ask a judge to assign a monetary value to.

A great deal of care to magnify your own role.

Yeah.  And an obsession with the fact that he is connected to important
people, whose importance he feels makes him important.  Huh.  Can anyone
name a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder this guy DOESN'T
show?

Yes, I can. The fact is I acquired the connections I have mentioned
honestly, by being employed by Princeton and Bell Northern for
significant lengths of time. And during that time, I discovered that
the "important" people I cared to know at all were very different from
the "senior technicians" I'd known in Chicago, and to whom I was
supposed to be "respectful". The Chicago technicians were in fact
incompetent, unimaginative, uncultured and racist, and resembled the
regs here.

If you'd learned anything at that psychology major which you'd claim,
you'd have learned that in all cases, diagnosing something as a
"disorder" requires the clinician to find that the subject is a danger
to himself or others or has a dysfunctional life. But as Sylvia Nasar
points out in her book on Nash, Nash's dysfunctionality was relative
to a community. If he lived as he lived in Roanoke amongst redneck
assholes, his behavior was condemned and he was "dysfunctional". But
in the Princeton community he was functional because we were more
enlightened and more tolerant than rednecks in Virginia.

Here, the tone is set by yobs like Heathfield and creeps like you, so
of course I'm dysfunctional in your eyes. But you've bragged about
being unqualified academically for your job and popping pills to stay
focused, so why should we believe you?

You need to go away and learn your job, Peter.

 

[Seebs]

If anyone was in any doubt about you, this should clear it up.
I quote you here so that you cannot remove your disgusting
statements from the public record.

This stuff makes me wonder sometimes if he's a Poe.

-s

 

[Nick Keighley]

hence "mostly"

This may be way off base on many levels because I have a very limited
knowledge of the low-level inner workings of the human body, but, a human is
using "electricity" to manually operate a Babbage's machine right?

that's straining things. Supposed we replaced the man with a windmill.

I mean that the signal from the brain to the appendage that is actually
mutating the machine is "based" in electrical signals from said brain to
arm, hand and of course fingers which render all of the "beautiful" fine
motor movements that are "necessary" to "operate" such machinery?

Please, cut me some slack as I wrote this after a sleepless night. I know
that's not a "good" excuse in any way shape or form, but it's sadly the
truth.

;^(...

and incidently if you are ever near the London Science Museum then go
and vist Babbage's Engine. It's really cool.

 

[Nick Keighley]

In <[email protected]>,
spinoza1111 wrote:


No, it's reality. The C Standard leaves quite a number of decisions up
to the implementation.

is there a programming language standard that /doesn't/ do this?

 

[James]

hence "mostly"



that's straining things. Supposed we replaced the man with a windmill.

Well, I am not exactly sure how good the windmill would be at actually
programming the machine.

and incidently if you are ever near the London Science Museum then go
and vist Babbage's Engine. It's really cool.

Will do! :^)

 

[James]

Well, I am not exactly sure how good the windmill would be at actually
programming the machine.

[...]


Ah, but that's not really the point...


The point is that the machine can execute a program without using any
electricity (e.g., a windmill).


Okay, thanks for taking the time to set me straight Nick!




Note to self: Don't post after a sleepless night!

;^D