Posts made by tonyshowoff

@Dashrender Damn straight! The worst McDonald's in the world is in Hongkong, that I've tried. Oh my god, it was disgusting, and it wasn't anything specific to the region, it was supposed to be a damn hamburger.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

I prefer peanut butter too, but growing up in the US can cause that.

I find myself in the same boat.

I love American food, it's the best food in the world. Traditional Eastern European food is the worst food in the world. Italian food is great too, and I do get a lot of BS for liking peanut butter more than nutella from my European friends and family. They can all go to hell, I'll eat McDonald's in Rome any time.

@scottalanmiller Some are aware, but those who like the complex spelling tend to come from the point of view that memorising many spellings makes them intelligent, so a less complex spelling system would take that away from them. The astonishing part is that there is an obsession with spelling bees at all, the idea memorising a list of things makes on intelligent is just bafflingly bizarre.

Then there are those who claim that complex spelling means that it creates English's vast vocabulary, and I've seen this even in conferences related to the English language. This takes almost no effort to figure out how logically moronic this is, the idea the spelling of a word influences whether or not the word exists.

In college I went all the way to the Anglo-Saxon Studies program, primarily because the history of English was fascinating to me, because it's so unusual and complex compared to other Germanic languages. Hungarian, on the other hand, is barely any different than it was 1,000 years ago, and Hungarian needs some reforms, but compared to English, it's pretty easy, though spoken Hungarian is vastly more complex than spoken English. English is pretty easy to learn to speak, but really complex to learn to read/write. I've noticed a lot of people take pride in thinking "English is the most complex language" when it's absolutely not, it's pretty simple, though not as simple as Afrikaans or something, it's the spelling that slows people down.

My daughters learned to read and write almost all Hungarian words by the age of 5, however even now my youngest at 7 still has a lot of difficulty with spelling more complex English words.

Additionally, I hate how illogical-spelling -defenders say "the meaning is in the spelling" or "you can figure out the etymology from how it's spelled," this is 100% useless for children learning to read/write, and many times it's not even true.

I mean "island" is that related to insula? Nope, it's from "iland" and the "s" was added arbitrarily to make it "look more Latin." A lot of this crazy shit goes back to the creator of the first dictionary who had a photographic memory and thought anyone else who didn't was "a moron." He intentionally screwed up spellings. Additionally, Dutch speaking printers who didn't speak English would arbitrarily add letters to words like "ghost" and "though".

Why defend something so screwed up? Holy cow.

@scottalanmiller said:

It's really just the European equivalent of peanut butter.

Yeah but peanut butter is better At least I think so. The funny part is the reverse was often true with finding peanut butter in some parts of Europe. At one point I had to get a friend who lived on an American military post to buy some and bring it to me.

@scottalanmiller I got an itch to disassemble it, I gotta see it! It's tearing me apart!

@scottalanmiller said:

@s.hackleman said:

I know everyone always goes on about the social aspect, and it is clear that that can be solved.

Social aspect is actually often a positive. Read Hackers and Painters, which is a software engineering book, but it goes on and go about the negative social aspects of the normal school system teaching social interactions that have to be unlearned because in the adult world you can't act like kids in school. The author, a rather prominent figure, believes that homeschooling is better because it teaches how to function in an adult world rather than in the prison-like, "Lord of the Flies" world of the school system.

Plus also I'm sure we're all aware, there are no lonely, unhappy, or anti-social children in school, it's a massive, endless playground of constant social interaction and happiness.

@s.hackleman said:

Is there a major downside to homeschooling? I know everyone always goes on about the social aspect, and it is clear that that can be solved. Do you find there is anything else missing in the homeschool environment?

It takes a lot of time and effort to do it correctly, and it takes some bravery (and money) to hire (or get someone) to help teach something you don't understand as your child advances. Anyone who mentions lack of "social interaction" as a downside, well all I have to say is: if your kid is only getting social interaction through school, your kid is probably pretty damn unhappy and lonely.

@scottalanmiller Yeah 103 or go to hell!

Thanks for the welcome wagon everyone

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Kids love to learn how to spell words?
Of course, my kids are my kids and I have read two histories of the Oxford dictionary and am currently reading "Made in America", a history of the American dialect of English

I'm pretty anal about spelling, using British (Queen's English) form when possible and using the full alphabet, not the American shortened one lacking letters like æ and œ.

I use English-English spelling all the time, unless spell check changes it, or I make a strange mistake since English is not my first language. And of course I use French and Mediæval Latin letters like @scottalanmiller mentions, and I'm especially anal about this in words like résumé where not having them changes the meaning of the word, or if people misspell them and put stuff like "resumé," I actually had a guy apply for a job and spell it that way, I didn't correct him, but I did email him a response and spelled it correctly (résumé) and this moron emails me back to tell me I misspelled it.

Having a Hungarian keyboard makes this all pretty easy, especially with the dead key that lets me throw out basically any Latin-1 and Latin-2 character.

Has there been a dump of this published or maybe what sort of drives and the address space of where it is or anything?

@scottalanmiller said:

Did you grow up in Europe?

I've known Nutella since I was very young, maybe New York had it earlier than other regions.

Yes, and I think that's true, I noticed more in the NYC area then later on when I went else where in the US it became impossible to find. Even though I didn't really enjoy it, it would typically come up at some point and then people wanted to try it.

I remember in the late 90s and early 2000s I barely knew any Americans who even knew what Nutella was let alone tasted it, and it could mostly only be found at stores specialising in foreign imports. I was really surprised when they started advertising in the US. It's been a continental staple for so long, but now Americans get to enjoy it. I personally never really liked it, even as a kid.

@JaredBusch said:

Going to bed (at 4am CST) oops...

Wuss, I'm still up, programming, like a star, because I am a super star. I'm also delirious from lack of sleep

@Carnival-Boy said:

I also pronounce Porche with a silent 'e', even though I know it's wrong, because I think the correct pronunciation sounds a bit crap.

As a German speaker from a very young age, the silent "e" that I (don't) hear from Americans and some English is weird sounding to me, it's simply "Porsha", but I get why it's such a cultural norm, because English spelling is retarded, most languages don't have silent letters or spelling bees, because things are mostly spelled closer to pronunciation than "just because," and more confusing is when people defend the bizarre spelling as a feature which makes English unique, instead of the large vocabulary which is actually what makes English unique, and vocabulary doesn't care how it's spelled, but that's way off topic.

Anyway, I've had similar issue over the years with initialisms and acronyms, FSMO was one, and years ago so was GUI, gif, and a billion others I can't think of but managed to get way wrong for years; you never get the chance to really know how they should be pronounced unless speaking in person or someone happens to be having a conversation like this one. If nothing else, mispronunciation of common acronyms may show more of a lack of AFK-contact with other computer people, rather than lack of knowledge.

Here's a current snap shot of our corporate offices:

@scottalanmiller said:

@tonyshowoff said:

What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?

Hire hot people. People who own strip clubs are almost always old and ugly, but the draw isn't the owners.

Note to self, hire strippers. Got it.

@scottalanmiller Just wait until the OOP version comes out, then you'll be afraid

What about us business owners who are neither young, nor hip, nor good looking? Especially not good lucking? What are we to do!?

@scottalanmiller said:

But that XHTML can talk to a database shows that he has absolutely no idea what he is saying and is just repeating terms.

Could you imagine the utter fresh hell like:

<input type="submit" sql="UPDATE ..." />