Posts by PotNoodle

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

Poor old Elon. Signed up for a bit of budget cutting, ended up with a public sector IT "mission". He'll be begging to go back to his rockets by Christmas.

Boffins, tourists threaten Antarctica with alien invasion

So what?

Elonex to set up tech fab in Coleshill, create 400 jobs

Re: Not on the Foleshill Rd., Coventry? - Not exactly...

According to Coventry Council's website, the new Elonex site is in Coleshill, which isn't actually in Coventry at all.

How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

@Jemma - don't be ridiculous. Your argument is that providers of a tool are responsible for the consequences of third-party reactions to its use. Facebook does not facilitate crimes, it facilitates *social interaction*, which sometimes leads to crimes. If you condemn Facebook for being an arena in which things-which-provoke-violence can be said or done, you must condemn the entirety of human civilisation, past, present and future.

Yahoo! fires! CEO! Carol! Bartz!

Alert the Plain English Campaign

"We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders."

So, "we're looking for ideas that might eventually make us some money", in other words. Now there's a bold and innovative strategy for you.

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

Yeah, but...

...not to copy the copies for redistribution, which is what the fuss is about.

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

Re: syntax

My only bugbear with C++ syntax is is really more to do with fonts - if in my stupidity I've put something in normal brackets instead of curly, the two look quite similar in some default typefaces (such as the one Code::Blocks uses by default), especially when rendered in 10-point. This can lead to a lot of confused squinting before I realise what's up. Easily solvable with a little customisation, though.

I suspect the syntax could be simplified a bit if the committee felt it necessary. There's already a degree of context-sensitivity towards what each punctuation mark means - e.g. when I type a semicolon in the conditional block of a for loop, the compiler knows it doesn't mean "this is the end of the function". Personally I like using the current syntax - having plenty of different punctuation marks in play makes the code more readable once you understand what they mean. Plenty of other syntaxes (syntaces?) could use a little more variety in this area.