Posts by Reverend Jim

Welcome to Daniweb.

it looks as if rproffit downvoted you -4 points on one of your posts. But he also upvoted you +17 points on another one of your posts

So a net proffit of +13.

Why is it your job to determine it?

It isn't my job to determine it but I think it is a fair question.

The only thing that is against our community rules is to not specifically ask for help to do something illegal

I did not flag the post as violating any rules. I also did not down-vote the post. I wasn't trying to suggest that the intentions were illegal, and there is no way to determine the OP's actual intentions, but if someone were to ask me "where can I learn how to pick locks", I would ask the same question. Hacking skills are a dangerous tool set likely far more often used to bad ends rather than good.

On checking your posts I see that you had one down-vote for posting in an 8 year old thread. When a thread is that old there is no reason to post in it unless you have something pertinent to add to the conversation. In your case you basically duplicated what had already been said. We frequently see old threads revived with posts like "Thanks. I found this really useful." In this case, instead of adding to the thread with a new post you should use the comment feature. This provides useful feedback without bubbling the thread back to the top.

Don't sweat the points. I've had my share of down votes, and so has Dani. Not everyone will agree with everything you have to say.

How are we to determine whether you want to learn hacking for ethical, or for non-ethical use?

I'd definitely follow that. My older son does a fair bit of AI work and he exclusively uses Python with Pytorch. I would strongly recommend that over C++. Also, if you aren't familiar with Jupyter notebooks I suggest you have a look - I found that vscode was the interface that was the easiest to set up and use.

What are you trying to do with collect2.exe?

Hello and welcome to Daniweb.

What error?

Hello and welcome to Daniweb.

I've never really paid attention to tags before now except for when I was asked to add tags when posting. I don't search for posts by tak (only by content) and I always go directly to latest.

There should be a little + sign\

Well, how about that. how convenient. I was looking on the edit page.

I'd be surprised if it was Python. Typically a function call like

read_image (Image1, 'C:/Users/29185/Desktop/图片1.png')

would return a value and assign it to something. More in the line of

Image1 = read_image ('C:/Users/29185/Desktop/图片1.png')

All I can say is that statements in C end with a semi-colon and I don't see one of those in there. Regardless, I don't see any way for me to add or delete a tag.

This thread was tagged as "c" but it is not c code.

you lose your rankings if the mobile version differs in any meaningful way from the desktop version

Seriously? You lose points for catering to a wider audience? Would providing the exact same data in a wider format count as meaningful?

Home-theatre? Absolutely. I wouldn't have thought to look for that one.

Ah. I see the typical user gets presented with twenty (ish) tags rather than the five I get. Still a very small subset of the total available tags, but better. I still don't see that as an ideal solution though. Perhaps consider my "no tags needed for geeks lounge" suggestion since geeks lounge is a catch-all. In the mean time if I have anything useful to add I'll certainly pass it along.

Would it be feasable to scan the title and post body for words and auto-populate a suggested tag list with possible fuzzy matches?

you love DaniWeb too much to ever log out

Yeah, pretty much the case :-)

A while back a large number of people were asked what were their biggest concerns at work. One of the top (if not THE top) complaint was feeling stupid at work. At this point I may be right but I fear that I am supremely off. One of us is missing the point and I hope it isn't me.

Let's take an example that could easily come up but isn't obviously in the tag list. Movies or music could be tagged (generically) as Video or Audio, which would be accurate but misleading, but if I were to start a thread for favourite books, perhaps science fiction. How would I tag that?

the goal is to make the tagging system useful

I think that what will end up happening is people picking a non-relevant tag just because they are forced to pick a tag but get frustrated at trying to guess one, or can't be bothered to peruse several hundred approved tags for a reasonably close match.

zap2it seems to have a handle on it. You can select all channels, or sub-groups, and scroll up or down through the listings. It uses the full width of the display and allows you to select whether you want three hours on a page (more textual information) of six hours, and you can scroll left or right to show earlier or later shows. Very little wasted space.

I posted this as a PM but I want to post it again to open up the discussion to others. Rather than starting a new thread and trying to figure out an appropriate tag I'll just extend this thread.

If I want to start a thread in geeks lounge to discuss favourite movies, I go to the tag field and type "m" which gives me nothing related to movies. Neither does "mo" or "mov". I also tried e, then n, then t thinking entertainment might work (although it's so vague as to useless), then h, o, for hobbies, and still nothing. So now I have to just keep guessing what might be appropriate letters to see the next five best matches for tags? Adding a tag should not be a game of twenty questions.

And if I do stumble on a match I am going to pick it even if there may be a much better match I have not yet seen. I could always go to "Top Tags" but that would require opening up another tab in my browser and navigating away from the post I am working on.

As I recall, the geeks lounge used to be an area where we could start threads to discuss just about any topic (while adhering to rules governing suitability, etc). I don't see how we can do that under the new tagging rules. Perhaps a compromise by not requiring tags in geeks lounge.

I see a design intended for desktop use, not mobile

The current format is formatted for desktop, although I don't understand the logic in displaying only six hours on less than half a page, then requiring me to click something to "scroll" in six more hours. That would be like Daniweb using (effectively) only a third of my display height and rendering blank space on the remaining third (the rest being address bar, header, etc) and justifying it by saying "just scroll down to see the rest".

And regardless of how wasteful the current format is, the beta (likely to go live shortly) is even more wasteful showing less useful data per page.

I agree that filling the screen with solid text is hard to read, but we are talking tabular data.

Let's not discount the untold thousands of office workers who will also view the site on (likely) 16x9 or 16x10 displays. Most Smart TVs also use the same wide formats.

I think it's high time that web developers focused less on mobile users, and more on what is really important.

Me ;-)

I suppose a better question would have been is it reasonable, or unreasonable to expect a major site like The Weather Network to allow for larger (desktop) displays rather than focus exclusively on mobile devices?

So, not a big deal.

I'm thinking of the time I got on to the VLC Media Player forum and asked why VLC could not automatically trim unused black space from the player window that is added when the window is manually resized. It's something that is already done when you resize using alt-# shortcuts. This resulted in my getting flamed with comments like, "if it's so easy then grab the source code and just do it yourself."

I don't care to learn javascript for this one simple thing. I just want to know if allowing for different displays is such a big deal. I know that Dani has designed Daniweb to be usable on both desktop and mobile devices. I was curious as to whether it was a technical nightmare to do so.

First I want to say that my only interest in the technical details of web development are from an end user perspective. I usually go to this site to get my weather forecasts. Their current display format is to present the forecasts horizontally but it will likely be changing soon to vertical. My two most visited pages are the hourly and seven day forecasts. It's always annoyed me that on my display (16x9 laptop) most of the space is wasted. On the seven day page it doesn't matter, but on the hourly page it could easily display twelve hours or more of data.

But when the switch is made to the vertical format the hourly page will show only five hours of data with pointless "content continues below" page breaks. The seven day forecast shows only one day per screen. It seems to me that if you are planning, for example, a multi-day activity (perhaps a trip to the beach/cottage) it makes for easier planning to see multiple days (the more the better) on one page. For single-day events, perhaps a trip to the park, seeing more hours at once is much better than fewer.

My question (and I do have one) is, how difficult is it for the web site to customize the html for the target device? I realize that many more people would access this site on a smart phone than a desktop/laptop computer, but shouldn't major sites like this try to please both …

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

I can write much better than I speak.

As do I. Plus when I write I can edit and organize during and after the fact. I find it difficult these days to speak a complete thought without someone interrupting.

By the way, repetition can be an effective tool when trying to make a point. But like salt, a pinch is sufficient.

A big problem today is that people have forgotten the purpose of language. In my day (cue Seth Meyers routine) language was intended to convey ideas from one person to another. Similarly to data transmission, we want to get the information from one person to another as quickly and as error free (unambiguously) as possible. Consider how the following three examples fail utterly to do this.

The first example is from this blog where the author is discussing system design.

The goal of the design process is not to generate a single point solution, but to instead characterize the design space for a given problem: a single point should then fall naturally out of that space given the problem constraints.

Clearly, the intent of this post is to impress upon the reader both the depth of the blogger's knowledge as well as the blogger's vocabulary. But as to imparting knowledge, I think it falls flat.

Here is a second example from the Steven Bochco series, Raising the Bar. In this episode a lawyer is defending a prisoner who was forced to attack a rival gang member. He was severely beaten several times prior to the attack to demonstrate the consequences of disobedience. His expert witness testifies:

The situational use of violence is central to both the order and hierarchy of prisons.

When the lawyer asks the witness to respond in English she says:

Generally they'll beat the crap out of someone until they do …

members with more than 15 reputation points

Perhaps she meant "less than"

A lot of editors support libraries of code snippets which are generally written and debugged by humans.

Based on the proliferation of AI generated content, and the age-old rule of garbage in, garbage out, what will be the result of AI models being trained on ever increasing amounts of content generated by other AI platforms? Will we get into a negative feedback loop where the output will become so polluted with bad input that it will be effectively useless?

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

Welcome to Daniweb. What brought you here, and what do you hope to find?

Improve Content Quality

@Muhammed_356 - Do you not see the irony in this? You insist on making posts that almost literally duplicate what everyone else has said. This does nothing to improve content quality.

Not a chance. My knees would last about five seconds.

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

Actually, I think they did with the same results. Supposedly the temperature of the cigarette is below the flash point of gasoline.

Did anyone else suffer through the final season of Star Trek: Discovery?

Why is it that when people in shows light a fire (like when setting a vehicle on fire) with a lighter, they always throw the lighter into the puddle of gasoline? Do they not realize that a lighter is reusable?

On a related note, researchers tried hundreds of times to ignite a puddle of gasoline by throwing a burning cigarette into it. They were successful exactly zero times.

I understand this script does not work in all cases. If not you can try Policy Plus which is available on GitHub and MajorGeeks.

Again, why should anyone here care about that?

What relevance is the mining industry to Daniweb?

Welcome to Daniweb

Very few humans are surfing the Web any more

I disagree. Just because the number of bots has grown exponentially relative to the number of meat-based surfers does not mean that very few humans are still surfing. Consider how much spam e-mail is sent every minute. That does not mean e-mail is dying.

BTW I realize this was a question about Mac software but there's no reason the images can't be put on external media and scanned on a PC. I'm also working on a Python app that will do this but it is slow going now that spring is here and there is yard work to be done.

Since getting the laptop back the rear USB/power port has started acting up again. I've adjusted by glueing a clip to the lid so that the power cord does not move when plugged in. Three screws have fallen off the bottom and I have replaced them with my own screws that I can tighten without the need of a special ($$$) tool. The rubber feet have fallen off the bottom as well. The rubber pads on the left and right of the inside of the screen (spacers for when the lid is closed) have fallen off. In short, this ASUS laptop is, in my opinion, a complete piece of shit. At least the insides are still running.

There are at least two free options. One is VisiPics which I find works well. The interface is straightforward and it allows you to select a similarity threshhold. While not as robust as perhaps an AI based tool (I don[t know of any yet) I find it does the trick. Another is SimilarImages. It's a little more complex but can be used where VisiPics falls short. Both have not been updated in several years.

If you have multiple photos of the same subject that are similar but not identical, of multiple copies of the same image at different resolutions then both of these apps will detect them. VisiPics will also optionally detect images with different rotations.

Similar to your post in the hard drive thread, a generic recommendation is useless without getting into specific software. In this case I can recommend two. One is VisiPics which I find works well. The interface is straightforward and it allows you to select a similarity threshhold. While not as robust as perhaps an AI based tool (I don[t know of any yet) I find it does the trick. Another is SimilarImages. It's a little more complex but can be used where VisiPics falls short. Both have not been updated in several years.

You should use a disk management tool

There are hundreds of them out there. Care to recommend one or two with an explanation as to why you picked them?

My biggest fear is an expansion of misinformation to the extent that we will not be able to trust that anything we see, hear, or read will have any basis in reality.