User talk:Quuxplusone

←Archive1

List of the Daily Show guests AFD

Since you voted on the previous AFD (here) I thought you may wish to vote again on the article's second AFD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of The Daily Show guests (2nd nomination). Cburnett 01:09, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Bill Brasky, and others.

Thanks. Sure, I'll check them out. I'll try to do what I can to keep them down. (I don't know much about the subjects, or what is going on there, but I will do what I can.) I will add the articles to my watchlist, and try to keep a watchfull eye. Thanks again for your consideration. It's nice to be appreciated here (for once). Wavy G 08:50, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Binary Semaphore

Hi, I added some comments about the difference between binary semaphore and mutex. You undid that comments. Can you explain is there anything wrong in the comments that's why u undid it or is there any other reason?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vinluvin (talk • contribs) 06:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC).

You wrote something like "a mutex can be unlocked only by the thread that locked it, while a semaphore can be unlocked by any thread." This may be true for some implementations of mutexes or semaphores, on some platforms, but it's obviously not true in general, and specific threading-security models don't really have any relevance to the theoretical concept of "semaphore".

If you are talking specifically about POSIX semaphores, then I'd buy it. In that case, you should have qualified your statement something like, "POSIX specifies a semaphore interface in which any process can lock or unlock any named semaphore in the system, as opposed to the POSIX mutex interface, in which attempting to unlock a mutex owned by another thread produces undefined behavior." (But then again, the biggest difference between semaphores and mutexes in POSIX seems to be that semaphores are designed to work at the process level and mutexes at the thread level. And that's even further removed from the theoretical discussion.) --Quuxplusone 17:32, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! got it.. essentially from theoretical point of view there is no comparison between mutex and semaphore.. both are meant for different uses.. right?? I thought the discussion is from programming point of view (as mentioned in the title) and I checked the point I added in three different implementation of Operating systems practically by writing the programs and I observed all behaved the same, that's why I added the comments:). - Vinluvin

Cwatsets

Hello, Quuxplusone.

I see that you've nominated cwatset for deletion. I've read your comments on the associated talk page. Apparently you're not real big on abstract algebra, so I thought I'd clear a couple of things up for you.

The addition used in the article is modulo two. That is,

• 0 + 0 = 0
• 0 + 1 = 1
• 1 + 0 = 1
• 1 + 1 = 0

You may be more familiar with the concept of exclusive or, or exclusive disjunction.

Anyway, there's a huge and very deep field of mathematics, the theory of finite fields (of order 2ⁿ), which is entirely based on binary arithmetic modulo two. Most of the theory of error correcting codes is traditionally expressed in terms of these finite fields. So the kind of "addition" you found so odd in cwatset is in fact quite widely used by mathematicians. DavidCBryant 12:02, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm aware of addition mod two, and yes, being a programmer, I'd call it "XOR" or "addition without carry". (And I'd say, IMHO, using the "+" sign to denote it, instead of , is more than a little misleading, since it doesn't behave much like regular addition from a layman's perspective.) Anyway, my opinion on the Cwatset article now is not so much that it's nonsense per se, as that it's so obscured and abbreviated (for example, by using the word "addition" where "addition without carry" is meant) as to be nonsensical to the average reader. (And of course it was still a copyvio.) The rewrite is helping, though, and I bet it'll be kept. I'll try to help it along by cleaning up some obscure language right now. --Quuxplusone 05:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Image:Smallcaps.png listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:Smallcaps.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 03:38, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Katabasis

If you want to merge pars of Katabasis into Descent to the underworld then I suggest you do it. However if you want to leave the template in place, please add the opposite template "mergefrom" to the article "Descent to the underworld" and add a section to the appropriate talk page so that people can discuss it. --Philip Baird Shearer 11:10, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane

How do you figure that Rynn killed Mrs. Hallet -- either intentionally or unintentionally -- in the film version of the story? (Remember, the synopsis refers only to the film version.) Mrs. Hallet walked down to the cellar (despite Rynn's repeated warnings), accidentally tripped the prop on her way up, and caused the door to slam on her head. I don't see how Rynn was directly involved at all in this process.

The added Trivia note also states that Mrs. Hallet was *accidentally* killed in the film version. I think the synopsis should be changed to avoid confusion with the events in the novel. Jphillst 00:50, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

SPARC

I am a little confused by what happened to this page SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Corporation you changed to a redirect yesterday --I see the speedy for the redirect but I did not notice the speedy or other deletion process for the original. In any case i want to recreate it as it is one of the things I know about & I'm sure i could do a proper article whatever may have been wrong with the first--If you're an admin could you restore it to my user space for the purpose?DGG 00:25, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice and help. If there's nothing worth restoring, that's fine. (And personally I think my librarian friends were not very wise in the first place when they chose to use an acronym that was so well known as meaning something else entirely in a slightly related field.) DGG 02:41, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Image restoration

Hey. I don't know if you have followed these matters, but there was a reason I remove the pictures at Parthian Shot. As far as this goes [1], I removed the Shapur II picture because its supposed source according to its description page [2] does not feature this picture at all. So it is completely unwarranted to call it 'Shapur II' or more importantly, a "Parthian Shot".

As far as the Amazon, the source, CAIS, has been determined as a non-RS committing copyvios per a number of discussions, and really the pictures are going to be removed entirely sometime. Certainly such a picture is not appropriate in any article, so I removed it.

I ask that you please undo your action. Also, next time please use an edit summary so I know why you undid my edit. Thanks. The Behnam 16:34, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Your edit simply removed two images from the Parthian shot article. (Two images that were of Parthian shots, according to the definition of "Parthian shot".) I put them back. Since I thought that was obvious, I didn't bother to change the automatically supplied edit summary.

The Amazon image (from CAIS) is licensed under the GFDL, according to its image page and according to the CAIS page linked there. If you believe CAIS is lying about the license, that's fine, but you should take it up with WP:CP or something. Does Assume Good Faith apply to our dealings with organizations that aren't Wikipedia editors? :)     If "the pictures are going to be removed entirely sometime", then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but there's no point in removing informative pictures from an article just because you think they might disappear sometime.

The Sassanid image is more problematic. As you say, it doesn't actually appear at the URL given in its description page, so there's a problem there no matter what its copyright status may be — we have no source for the claim that it's Shapur II being depicted. I've commented on the bogus source at User talk:Amir85 and on the image page, Image:E3 5 4a sassanian.jpg. Hopefully Amir85 will clear up the source of the image; otherwise, I could see its getting deleted pretty soon, and when it does, obviously the dead link will have to be removed from the Parthian shot article.

Hope this helps. Good luck getting those images' copyrights clarified! --Quuxplusone 20:52, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Well I mention CAIS because there have been a number of discussions and admins have stated that the source cannot be trusted. So really AGF doesn't apply here. I'll look around and try to find links to the CAIS-related discussions. The Behnam 20:56, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Could you help?

Hello! I noticed you fixed the problem when somebody had moved 311 to 311 (year). I noticed that somebody had done the same fault to 411 (moving it to 411 (year). I tried to move it back, but it didn't work out quite as I wanted it (the history wasn't moved). Now, I wonder, if you could fix this too. I would be much obliged if you did. I'm rather desperate, since 411 is now blank. Secondly, is it only admins who can move a page back or can I, who's only an ordinary user, do this as well? Thanks in advance! /Ludde23 ^{Talk Contrib} 08:52, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Ordinary users, such as you and me, can move pages using the "move" tab (between "history" and "watch" at the top of the page, in the default page style), but only if the destination page is blank or has never contained anything but a redirect. Unregistered users can't move pages at all (I think). Admins (I am not one) can move pages pretty much anywhere, I think. Anyway, it looks like the system worked in this case; by the time I saw your message this morning, someone else had already fixed the problem. :) --Quuxplusone 16:19, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Source tag

← I noticed your recent AWB change to Singleton pattern, replacing the <code> tags with <source lang=...>. I'm happy that somebody finally got around to designing a tag to indicate the particular language used in a snippet of source code, but I'm extremely disappointed in the fruit-salad syntax coloring, especially since there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it — the coloring is different between different languages, and it's not obviously based on any prior art (Borland for Pascal/C/C++, Microsoft for C/C++/C#, the ACM or Knuth for Algol/Pascal,...).

I respectfully request that you not convert any more articles' source code until the problems with syntax coloring have been sorted out. In the meantime, could you tell me how you learned about the <source lang=...> tag? I don't see it mentioned anywhere obvious. (For example, Wikipedia:Algorithms on Wikipedia, Wikipedia:WikiProject Programming languages, Wikipedia:Community Portal.) --Quuxplusone 04:53, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I found out about it by keeping my ears open.

You can find out all about it here.

As for "fixing" the colours, etc, I suspect that CSS will be involved somewhere: I don't know how much leeway we have for using custom colours as opposed to those which come standard with the GeSHi code (I see we did have an article on that, but it got deleted: maybe we should resurrect it minus the "blatant advertising" ;-).

HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 07:28, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Just to keep you up-to-date with the latest developments, see here. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 15:17, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Request for comment on computer program

The Computer program article is in need of repair. Would you comment on any improvement suggestions? I joined the talk starting with the thread talk:computer program#Definition of a computer program. Timhowardriley 00:44, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your stimulating comments. I hope you can make time for more participation. Timhowardriley 19:33, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Copyedit on Computer program

Quuxplusone thanks for the copy-editing. I like what you've done so far, but I have one minor clarification. You changed a sentence in the intro to read "Computer programs, also known as software, may be categorized along functional lines". Technically computer programs encompass both software and firmware. Is this a distinction we want to make, or do we want to classify firmware as a subset of software (as is this case with this wording)? Thanks. SqlPac 02:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hey, if you get the urge, would you mind giving our article over at Null (SQL) a once-over? Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. SqlPac 03:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I would say that firmware is not "important" enough to warrant a special mention in the intro paragraph. Someone who is ignorant of the definition of computer program (or else why would they be reading the article?) probably doesn't want to be bothered with minor distinctions right off the bat. Let the distinction be made further down in the article — I think it's repeated further down already, in fact.

You might be right about the distinction between firmware and software, but the main distinction I was concerned with was between program and software; assuming that distinction is important enough to make. OTOH, if it's not important to make that distinction, then the authors on the Computer software article are probably right, and the articles should be merged. SqlPac 20:34, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Re the aside: I'm not a SQL person, I'm a C hacker. I might look anyway, but don't count on it. --Quuxplusone 03:40, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Ahh well, no problem :) I dabble a bit in a bunch of languages, although haven't done much in C lately. Thanks :) SqlPac 20:34, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposed Micronation Wikiproject

I've published a proposal to gauge the level of interest in setting up a micronation Wikiproject, which I thought might be of interest to you based on your past contributions. Comments and suggestions are welcome: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals#Micronations --Gene_poole 02:02, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Gallery of named graphs

I have replaced broken images per your discussion at this page in January. Let me know if you have comments. Nimur 16:35, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, the general case requires someone with admin privileges to change the default broken-image image, and on any specific page, it seems easier simply to remove the broken images instead of replacing them with a customized red-X logo. So IMHO, your edit didn't really help matters; but it didn't hurt either. --Quuxplusone 16:49, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Hey

I removed the notice because the AfD is closed. I was asked to do that in IRC by an admin. Please don't put it back. Whsitchy 14:18, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

GeSHi syntax highlighting

GeSHi is an external project, and it's important that we support that project, contributing to the open source community in general, rather than forking the software and making our improvements for Wikimedia alone.

Report GeSHi bugs to their tracker on sourceforge. To make your own changes to source files, check out a copy from their subversion repository using a subversion client, then use the diff feature to generate a patch file containing the changes. Submit your patch file by email to the GeSHi developers, or as an attachment to a bug report.

Once they've approved and incorporated your changes, we'll update our copy on Wikimedia. -- Tim Starling 20:35, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Snowclones

Hi.

I noticed you went through and removed a bunch of snowclones from this list. Two of them I had added just the day before, and I'm curious as to what criteria you used to select the ones you wanted to delete. Some of them I understand (I haven't heard any other iterations of "Be afraid, be very afraid", so it probably doesn't qualify), but for (to pick an example at random) "This is Sparta!" I have seen "This is Sbarro!", "This is Karma!", and a whole mess of others that don't occur to me at the moment.

I'm not "angry" or anything, and I'm trying not to be even terribly defensive. But it felt kind of like personal dislike, more than anything else, guided your "pruning" session, and I really do want to know what the rationale was behind deleting a whole bunch of things from a list that's supposed to be long. Thor Rudebeck 19:24, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

See Talk:List of snowclones for several rationales, some of them mine. :) --Quuxplusone 02:24, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

You're right, of course. The "This is" one is vague in the extreme. Internet memes - well, we'll agree to disagree. Sorry if I was rash or offensive. Thor Rudebeck 03:28, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Trabb Pardo-Knuth algorithm & Source highlighting

c.f. Talk:ALGOL#Source highlighting in ALGOL, and some other issues.

Cheers NevilleDNZ 08:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Signed Magnitude

Noticed you reversed my edits of "sign and magnitude". Did a google search "sign and magnitude" 250,000 atrticles, "signed magnitude" 27,000. Your right, I will change the floating point article. Charles Esson 19:50, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

GeSHi syntax highlighting

I've found a few errors with GeSHi (with LaTeX, and have submitted these bugs), however I don't see anything upsetting with the examples in C file input/output. Could you point them out for me, and I'll submit the report. If this concern is in regards to the selection of colours ... I think I'd prefer darker colours overall, and I might submit these recommendations for the default Monobook.css. Thanks. + 21:54, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

The colors are certainly wrong; "light-green on white" makes the parentheses impossible to see. (And of course parentheses are important to syntax in C!) Until the colors are fixed, it is wrong to use <source> for C code on Wikipedia. (Pascal is okay, and while Python is still inconsistent with the standard colors, it's at least readable.)

However, a deeper problem prevents the "quick fix" of changing monobook.css — In fact the entire "c.php" language description file is wrong! I've reported this in various places around Wikipedia and to various admins, but nobody's taken it up yet. Basically, "c.php" should look like this. Once that's done, it will be possible to change "monobook.css" so that keywords are highlighted correctly; but until then, GeSHi won't even know what a keyword in C looks like!

If you can get any of GeSHi's problems fixed, I'll be grateful. Myself, I've given up on GeSHi for now; it's a neat idea, but its implementation is horribly broken even aside from all these "minor" language-specific issues. (No wikilink support, whitespace issues, difficulty of adding new languages, naive and limited parser,...) --Quuxplusone 22:04, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see you are far more involved with the underling issues then myself (and I now read your previous discussions here). Hopefully we'll have a good and extendable syntax highlighter sometime in the coming months (or year, depending how things get). Thanks for the infos.+ 22:13, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Category:Year of death missing

You reverted an edit of mine there. Per Wikipedia:Avoid self reference, it isn't appropriate for articles or article categories to point to Wikipedia or to the editing process itself. A reader browsing that category in a book would not want to know about bookmarklets. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:51, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Category:Year of death missing is not a Wikipedia article. It is an administrative category that is used by editors (not, generally speaking, readers) for an explicitly self-referential purpose: namely, does Wikipedia contain information on the date of death of the individual profiled in a certain article? The entire category is a self-reference!

Anyway, it's obviously useful for editors to know that the bookmarklet exists. If you can phrase that self-reference in a way that seems to you less self-referential, be my guest. I've replaced the words "this bookmarklet" with a more paper-friendly phrase. --Quuxplusone 01:24, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Green Hills Software

You made the last edit of GHS, I made the second to last. Hi! :-) Many of your edits, I agree with. Others not.

I am an journalist covering embedded tools for a professional electronics magazine. GHS is one of the companies that I talk to and write about, since it is has a big customer base and is often innovative in its products.

Some points where I don't agree with your changes:

• The term "Optimizing Compiler" is, I think, just a marketing term. All compilers optimize their code.

• The list of competitors seems generic and imprecise. It is very similar to the other embedded tools vendors competitors list. It also only adresses competitors for the RTOS products and not the compilers and probes, which seems assymetric. I actually do think it would be nice to have a paragraph on competitors, as there are interesting things to be said about this -- there are not many 178B RTOS:es to choose from, for example.

• "royalty free". This is a slogan GHS uses to describe the pricing of its products. But I do not think for example that these products are license free. So, if you introduce info on pricing, like "royalty free", please be complete in that info and specify for example that there is a license cost, if there is one, which I think there is.

• "low cost". Compared to what? Other USB probes? I think "low cost" quite obviously should be deleted. The alternative would be to add "high cost" to describe the other probes ... ;-)

• "ANSI C, including all the features of ANSI C" is a tautology.

• "multi platform" -- almost all the IDE:s in this business are, so this is in practise redundant. In fact, the interesting platform issue about GHS Multi is that is not Eclipse adapted. I think just about only GHS and Microsoft are not Eclipse now.

• Awards. Well. Hm. They all have some award to show up, or another, I think. So this does not say much.

So, Quuxplusone, what have you to say to the above? --gnirre 16:53, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

In fact, lets take this to the GHS discussion page. --gnirre 16:53, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Doubling the cube

Hello Quuxplusone,

If you have the time, can you let me know where you found the (DoubleTheCubeWithUnitRuler.png) diagram located in the "Double the Cube" article.

Thanks!

--Ecb0038 16:21, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Did you know that you can save time by giving the proper names to things? The article you're asking about is called Doubling the cube. The image you're talking about is called Image:DoublingTheCubeWithUnitRuler.png. Clicking on that wikilink (or clicking on the image itself in the article Doubling the cube) will take you to the "image information" page, which would have told you that I created the image myself.

Lastly, did you know that you can sign your comments with four tildes ~~~~ like this? --Quuxplusone 17:44, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Glen Barker

I had cut and pasted the top of the Jose Cruz (another former outfielder for the Houston Astros) article for help with the format. I accidentally left the line in question in the Glen Barker article and removed it as soon as I noticed. As for the capitalization, that was another mistake and I'll fix it as soon as I figure out how - thanks for bringing that mistake to my attention. As far as your smug tone, I'm not sure how to address that, but I'll try...I am so honored that you find my edit history "reasonably" legit [/sarcasm] and that you thought the Barker article might be nonsense or a hoax, though absolutely nothing in it, save two typos, are out of the ordinary. I realize that an article on a guy who played three seasons of major league baseball might be nonsense to some, but he's clearly relevant as per the terms of Wikipedia and a simple web search would prove that he actually exists. Maybe you could have used your obviously strong powers of observation to deduce that I'm just a guy who is fairly new to Wikipedia and is having a hard time with the finer points of style. Maybe to promote goodwill on Wikipedia you could have instead begun your message with, "Could you please clarify..." and/or helped me to fix my errors? Thanks pal. --PSully 10:49, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Re: (User talk:ais523) MediaWiki:Geshi.css

I've filed bug 11351 in response to your comment. --ais523 16:01, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

...and it wasn't very bureaucratic this time; the bug was fixed almost instantly, and the fix will be live on Wikimedia wikis once they upgrade to version r25873 of the software (the software's currently running version 1.14alpha (r43634)). --ais523 16:13, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Hatnote templates

Hello. You reverted my replacing a hardcoded dab notice with a {{For}} template on small caps (diff).

However, WP:DAB and WP:HAT are explicit NOT to subst dab notices. (From what I've read, it's long been decided that consistency and updatability trump minor perfs concerns because we build an encyclopedia not an engine, and perfs can always be upgraded mechanically on the server side; that's why most articles are happily littered with permanent {{For}}), {{Main}}, {{Seealso}}, {{Reflist}}, {{Imdb}}, navboxes and footboxes, not to mention all the temporary {{Unreferenced}}, {{Cleanup}}, etc.)

So, I'm putting back a hatnote template. Since you seemed to miss the intro of the hardcoded dab, I'm using {{Otheruses4}} this time:

{{Otheruses4|typography|the stock market "small cap"|Market capitalization}}

But I'd prefer you to consider the original:

{{For|the stock market "small cap"|Market capitalization}}

IMO, it was enough because a reader sent in error on this page will read the short dab notice and go, "Oh, right, that's what I was reading about, market stuff, I'm clicking there". He doesn't need the extra "This article is about typography" intro to get in the way of the hatnote, especially since the article starts with it too, making it a but redundant IMO.

Anyway, I'm putting {{Otheruses4}} and I'll let you decide about the shorter {{For}} instead. Cheers. — Komusou ^talk @ 18:41, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Parser (CGI language)

Hi,

You prodded Parser (CGI language) and i missed it, so i couldn't contest it.

Parser is nowhere near PHP in its popularity, but it is used by at least hundreds of websites. You can see a list of Russian websites and international websites. Some of them are the Russian websites of pretty notable companies such as Samsung, Apple and Microsoft, and there are also Tyumen Oblast and Volgograd city. So at least in Russia this language is somewhat notable. These lists are self-published and i don't know how to verify the information in them, but if you are not familiar with the Russian web industry, then you should know that Art. Lebedev Studio is a very well-known and trustworthy company. Also, Parser being a GPL'd product, they don't have much commercial interest in lying about the number of its users. I don't work there and i don't have any incentive to promote it; i just wrote an article about a language which is more obscure than PHP, but definitely not entirely obscure, and i was unpleasantly surprised to see it prodded without any discussion.

If you would like to propose it for AfD or merger, then i don't mind. In the meantime, do you agree to undeletion?

Thanks in advance. --Amir E. Aharoni 15:24, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not an admin, so you'll have to ask someone else to actually undelete the article. But since I see you objected to the deletion, I don't object to the undeletion. However, I still think the article ought to be merged into Art. Lebedev Studio, because...

I took a quick look at those lists of Web sites using Parser, and it looks to me as if most of them are sites that were actually designed by Lebedev, not third-party sites who used Parser of their own free will. I could be wrong about that (I only glanced through quickly), but it seems that while a lot of [Russian] people use sites powered by Parser, there are only a handful of people who actually use (i.e., write in) the language itself. --Quuxplusone 20:36, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks like to get the page undeleted, you should ask Moonriddengirl, who actually carried out the deletion. --Quuxplusone 20:38, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I am an admin myself, but to avoid any imaginable conflicts of interest, i asked Moonriddengirl to undelete it.

When it's undeleted, please propose merger on the talk page. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Redirect of -Human

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Thiele's interpolation formula - context

I disagree with you about this article: the problem is not that it has "insufficient context" - after all, in the first line there is a reference back to interpolation, which seems to cover the matter (just about) adequately; so here is (just another) interpolation (and, by extension, extrapolation) formula. Rather, it is that there is an insufficiency of pages referencing the article. Am I not right? (I say this as one who has added quite a lot to the page.) Hair Commodore 20:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Graves' disease

Hi, I saw your request for page move was enacted. Apparently the modern trend is to remove the possessive form of naming eponymous diseases, on the basis that Graves did not have the disease hence "Graves disease" rather than "Graves' disease". Likewise see Parkinson's disease mentions alternative form. Personally I liked the old form, but others pointed out the current thinking. However I can't easily find past discussion threads on this and so have set up a discussiomn thread at the medical wikiproject WT:MED. David Ruben ^Talk 20:03, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

RE: Sacra Corona Unita

FYI - if you had not already noticed, I recently closed your proposed move with a result of "move to Sacra Corona Unita". The soul opposer, User:Timeineurope, has opted to revert this move as he was not happy with the "2:1 majority" for the move. If this is an item you feel strongly about, feel free to once again propose the move at WP:RM and we will see if it gets any further extended discussion this time. Have a nice day. JPG-GR (talk) 17:12, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Timeineurope keeps moving Sacra Corona Unita to Sacra corona unita. I know it is silly but maybe you could have a look at it again. - Mafia Expert (talk) 18:45, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Rollerball

Mainly to appease the Wikipedians hostile to "trivia", I moved the roller derby article's "in pop culture" section to a separate wiki a while back. There's now just a link to it from the External Links section. That's where both Rollerball films are mentioned, as well as Whip It!. —mjb (talk) 19:03, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Type punning

Your type punning page has some dangerous information (in that your information if assumed correct could be used to change correct code into broken code). I removed the dangerous information, but you edited it back. The major problem is that the union is the c-standard way to eliminate the aliasing bugs, yet you state otherwise. A reader of your article would be hesitant to use the union to fix the aliasing bugs, when in fact it is the only way to do so. Read the links you provide in the page and you should see the way you describe things is wrong. Also, your comments when removing the change was: (-fstrict-aliasing is irrelevant to the first example; with only one object, no aliasing can possibly take place). Are you sure that if the function is inlined there are not potential aliasing problems? I'm not opposed to removal of the -fstrict-aliasing references, but I am absolutely opposed to your comments that the union approach is incorrect. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.220.79.192 (talk) 00:48, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

What do you think about N869 paragraph 6.5.2.1? "With one exception, if the value of a member of a union object is used when the most recent store to the object was to a different member, the behavior is implementation-defined." (I don't have a copy of the real Standard at home, but I'll try to remember to check tomorrow at work and get back to you. I believe C++ has similar wording.)   K&R didn't provide unions as a magic way to subvert the type system; that's why they provided casts. :) Unions are only guaranteed to be useful as a way to conserve storage space by storing one field on top of another unused field — they're not guaranteed to be useful for type punning. --Quuxplusone (talk) 02:56, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

"Are you sure that if the function is inlined there are not potential aliasing problems?" No, I guess I'm not. Inliners can be temperamental. (I should know; I'm dealing with one right now!) But I'd be surprised if any existing compiler reordered something like (x = 1.0, is_negative(x)) after inlining is_negative. (If you're lucky, any use of a dubious-looking cast will alert the compiler to turn off optimizations that rely on strict can't-alias rules — if the compiler is complicated enough to have any such optimizations in the first place.)

The really Standard C way to solve the problem, of course, is to memcpy the bit pattern into an array of unsigned char. That's extremely slow, compared to the ways we're discussing, but it is guaranteed to get the job done. All these other type punning methods depend on implementation-defined or undefined behavior, which makes them fragile. --Quuxplusone (talk) 03:09, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm! N869 paragraph 6.5.2.1 corresponded to one of the paragraphs of 6.3.2.3 in C90, but it has disappeared in C99. C99 does appear to completely condone this use of unions (except for one bullet point in the informative Annex J: "The value of a union member other than the last one stored into (6.2.6.1)" is listed as an example of unspecified behavior). C++2003's paragraph 9.5/1 says that if a union contains several POD-structs with common initial sequences, then "it is permitted to inspect the common initial sequence of any of [those] POD-struct members" — from which I infer that it's not "permitted" to type-pun in any other cases; C90 and C99 have similar wording.

I'll make some tweaks to the article based on what I've said here, but I still mistrust this use of unions. Of course, this is still a wiki; I don't own the article, despite appearances. ;)   I'm willing to tone down the objections to the union method, but I don't want to claim that unions are 100% safe for this purpose if they're not. See above re memcpy for the Safe way to do it, which is the way I'd advise anyone to do it if they cared about compiling with more than one compiler, or long-term portability. (Then again, if you care about portability, you shouldn't be type-punning at all, ever, in the first place!) --Quuxplusone (talk) 17:13, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

The United States Steel Hour

Hi. I came back to the The United States Steel Hour article today and noticed you reverted my change of the tense (it was over a month ago so no worries if you don't remember the edit). The reason I changed "was" to "is" has to do with WP:TENSE which states that works of fiction should be referred to in the present tense. I work on a bunch of television articles, but since I'm not familiar with this particular series, is there a reason why it shouldn't fall under the policy as well? I haven't changed the tense back because I wanted to touch base with you first. Thanks. 03:40, 4 November 2008 (UTC)