You can put chicken, on pizza.

(That comma has no business being there, but it doesn’t read right without it.)

It’s an even-numbered Star Trek movie. They followed a pattern for a while where they were the good ones and if you were going to skip one, you skipped the odd numbered ones, even the first. Especially the first.

As for recommend, it depends how much you love / know the characters. I grew up on re-runs of the 60s TV show and am pretty sure I saw it for the first time at the cinema. That would have been a couple of years before TNG was even a thing, so my opinion might not mean much even then.

But yeah, sure. Watch it on a grey rainy afternoon with friends or family when you’ve nothing else to do. Trust me when I say that specific weather outside will definitely add to the experience.

Somewhere around here I have a “Learn C++ in 24 hours” book that was published in 1999. I have a feeling that a modern C++ expert would react the same way 22nd century McCoy reacted to 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV.

(For you youngsters, I’ll-get-around-to-its and nope-not-for-mes who haven’t seen it, he mutters things about “dark ages” and “Spanish Inquisition”. The whole movie is goofy, including the otherwise terrifying main plot point.)

Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can’t see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.

Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8

That \\. part doesn’t look right, but what do I know. Apparently control codes are valid elsewhere, so a literal backslash followed by any character, even a space or a newline, might actually be valid there.

“Yeah, my e-mail address is abc, carriage return, three backspaces and a terminal bell at example dot com. … What do you mean your mail program doesn’t support it?”

Sometimes, when something won’t even compile, I have try to compile it a second time - and get the exact same error message(s) - before my brain will accept there is a problem and perhaps begin to see the cause.

Somewhere in my head must be a gremlin who says, “No! It is the compiler that is wrong!”

The same can apply to semantic errors (the code is valid but does not do what it was intended to do) but those take longer to track down. To make the trick work, the debugging output has to be in just the right place in order to print proof of the wrong logic and then do the same on the next run, preferably in under a minute, so that I can begin to see the error.

Front end versus back end. The people who make programming languages are back-end developers. Their strengths lie with making something that works, not something that looks pretty.

It’s kind of easy to forget about or ignore any experience they might have if they’re asking questions like that. Sure, maybe it was a brain fart from a panicked intern who’s having orders barked at them from a powerful individual that they want to impress, but that doesn’t make it any better, does it?

There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character

Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

For outdated, read “known stable”. Unfortunately newer software very often has dependencies on even less well-tested new things that conflict with other pieces of software and their dependencies, on and on, and the whole thing cascades to either needing to be bleeding edge or very safe. Mint deliberately chooses the latter.

The memory leaks are there, I grant you, but you’ll need an exceptionally long uptime to see any kind of problem from them. And it’s not like restarting the DE is hard. And it takes less than a second.

As for slowness, I don’t remember anything being annoyingly slow even when I was running Mint 17 from an honest-to-goodness HDD on a then 10±year-old computer. 1st gen i7.

That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.

Sometimes, programs that need to start up an editor will honour the $EDITOR environment variable, which should contain the name of, or full path to, a user’s preferred editor.

It’s not set by default though, and a lot of things will naturally default to vi or even ed. Something to be set in a .profile, .bashrc or similar.

$VISUAL is another variable that is used for similar purposes.

The resemblance to certain two letter commands is not entirely a coincidence.

You could, and I’m just spitballing here, start sending your compiled executables to the anti-virus provider and only continuing work once they’ve been added to the upstream exceptions. Bonus points for compiling hundreds and sending them all. Do that for a day or two and there is sure to be a number of communications many levels above you.

If executed perfectly and all goes well, you’ll get your exceptions access.

Worst case… uh. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.

This is actually the correct way to do it in JavaScript, especially if the right hand side is more than 1.

If JavaScript thinks i contains a string, and let’s say its value is 27, i += 1 will result in i containing 271.

Subtraction doesn’t have any weird string-versus-number semantics and neither does unary minus, so i -=- 1 guarantees 28 in this case.

For the increment case, ++ works properly whether JavaScript thinks i is a string or not, but since the joke is to avoid it, here we are.

There is no problem if both of these people are sane and are getting sane, non conflicting direction from those interested parties who are not involved in the software design.

Ha! Hahaha.

Hahahahahaha.

Oh, I made myself sad.

Oh yeah. Trying to get Black Mesa - which is a HL2 mod that became a game in its own right - to look right on a modern Linux PC has been less than fun. Textures, lighting and shadows are messed up in many places, basically breaking the flashlight most of the time. The game is 99% there, but that other 1% is impossible to ignore. The game plays fine… when you can see.

Kind of glad I got the game on sale.

But anyway, yes I’m kind of surprised that the textures seem to be different in the two screenshots. The lighting is necessarily different because HDR isn’t well supported (if it is at all) on Linux, but I would have thought that keeping the textures in line would be something Valve would be able to do.

Hey, back in the late 90s I bought a laptop from a reputable seller and had literally no idea who the manufacturer was. Was a pretty good laptop for the era too. The badge on the back of the monitor said “Notebook”.

I had to put the product ID code on the bottom into an online search engine - possibly very early Google - to find out it was made by Taiwanese company called Kapok.

Kind of wish I still had it, but I donated it to a good cause years ago.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).