Actually no it's not ambiguous. Your interpretation would result in an invalid sentence fragment as it has no verb. ;)

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

Another thing that drives me crazy is the bloodlust moderators have to close questions that are even remotely similar to another question on the site, even if that question is 2 years old and has no solution. Often questions will only bear a surface similarity to another question and will get closed as a duplicate (perhaps they share the same obstacle or bug) even when what is being asked is completely different. Sometimes the question is the same, but no one has provided a satisfactory answer on the other question. Give me a way to bump an old question and add my own information to it and this would be fine! But just because a question has been asked doesn't mean it should never be asked again!. SO needs a better way to merge duplicate questions instead of just closing the duplicate and preventing new answers. If someone asks the same question as another, their question should be merged with the original question and bumped as if it were a new question so that people using the site will see it and be able to answer it again. Keeping an unanswered question around historically with no new information is worthless.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

You've never had any issue? Well you clearly have not used it enough then. Pandu's mentioned problem is very real, but is compounded by the oligarchic design of the site. The authors and moderators argue that it helps to keep the content "pure" and reduces the garbage content, but it's an outdated very unfriendly methodology that punishes naive users who don't deserve to be punished, and in many cases prevents useful knowledge from being captured just because it doesn't meet the overlords' idealistic view of what the site should be. You can't change a vote after you've voted. You can't edit your own comment after 5 minutes. You can't delete a question if it has answers. Rules like this hurt the quality of a crowdsourced website, they don't improve it. Stack Overflow is an incredibly valuable resource. But it's valuable despite its horribly restrictive and big brotherish design, not because of it.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

C is lower-level (closer to the hardware) than Java and C#. I don't know anything about Delphi so I can't comment on that. For someone learning programming there are two schools of though: start with the higher-level concepts using a higher-level language, and gradually delve deeper into understanding how they are implemented and what is going on at a machine level, if necessary. These days, the deeper delving is really not all that necessary, unless you are charged with writing very high-performance code. The second school of though is to start at the low level and learn up, gradually abstracting away the lower-level concepts with higher level ones. This more closely traces the evolution of computers and languages, and if you're really serious, probably provides the "best" understanding of the whole ecosystem, but is a much higher learning curve. As for my opinion, if I were to recommend a path to someone I would probably choose the first method, of learning the high-level concepts first (probably with a dynamic language like JavaScript), and delving deeper where one is interested. It really depends on how "serious" the subject is about learning computer languages. If they're darn serious, learning lower-level-up will provide the best understanding, but if they're not sure about it, starting at the top is the best way to discover if they have a passion for programming or not.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

I wrote OrangeNote in WPF a while back that handles text clippings and extends the clipboard, but I'm not actively developing it at the moment. If you like it I could probably throw you a pro license together, but the basic edition probably does everything you need. It's Windows-only, but has a few neat tricks I'm somewhat proud of. :)

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

No prob! It's actually pretty simple, so should make a good example. If you have any questions about how anything works I'm happy to answer them!

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

My one tip is check out this tiny component I wrote to make my life easier in WPF. I call it hip:Link: http://hip.codeplex.com/[^] It allows you to define a binding in terms of a method or property in the code-behind, so you don't need to do ungodly crap in your XAML or define custom converters for every single binding. It makes things significantly easier and is dead simple to use. Seriously I use it all the time. It's open sourced too.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

I have a Mac at work and a PC at home. I've never had a problem with the Mac's fonts, and have always considered its font rendering superior. It just looks more like text and less like pixelated bitmaps of characters. The thing I love about Mac font rendering is every page looks like a Photoshop-rendered graphic. I mean look at this: http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/2215/screenshot20110817at100.png That's just a screen clip from the web page linked to above. Isn't it beautiful?

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

nesreproductions.com I'm thinking of ordering a $25 reproduction of (the real) Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan for American NES systems. P.S. If you use OrangeNote, it will keep track of your entire (textual) clipboard history and allows you to see the current clipboard just by clicking the system tray icon. And it's written in WPF, by yours truly.

:(( She was so awesome; she kept Star Trek grounded in reality and I love how Picard always tried to avoid her as Lwaxana. Star Trek won't be the same without her. I'm glad her spirit will live on in one last Trek movie, but wonder who'll they'll get to replace her as the voice of the Starfleet computer.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

Can you elaborate on that?

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

Oh nothing that I can imagine. I just intentionally constructed the longest syntax I could, using all the various options. Chances of this arising "in the wild" are slim, and good design can avoid having to resort to something like this, but my point was that DataBinding actually has a lot of complicated subtleties you have to (or should) be aware of. ...and I didn't even show the implementations of the converters. ;)

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

Colin Angus Mackay wrote:

I even saw someone call ToString() on an integer, pass it to a Method and for the method to Parse it back to an integer again. That method was only ever called from one place!

lol

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

What strikes me, is that if developers (even experienced ones) are still making this "mistake", then it indicates a conflict in how developers think versus how the compiler "thinks". In other words, it doesn't necessarily mean that the developer doesn't know what they're doing. When I design and write methods, etc., I usually assume that the object I'm working with is alive and non-null, yet later on I may set a certain property or field to null because it no longer applies. If it doesn't apply, then naturally neither does any operation that would affect that object, and therefore even if I didn't originally intend or expect to set that property or field to null, the fact that I later decide to should not break my existing code that assumes it is alive! Just to give a concrete example of how this might be the case, suppose I have some logging window that keeps track of debugging output while I'm running my program, and throughout the development process this window is always open, or at least exists and is maybe invisible. But when I start my optimizing phase, I no longer want to keep that debug window open all the time, consuming resources the end user doesn't need. However, in my code, I originally assumed it was alive, and did something like this: myApp.DebugWindow.WriteLine( "foo" ); Sure you could argue (and many will) that this is poor programming and I should in fact precede every statement with "if ( myApp.DebugWindow != null )" but frankly in my opinion this is just additional work that needs to be done that doesn't really affect the intended behavior of the program. If I set myApp.DebugWindow to null, then at least when running in release mode, any null reference exceptions should simply be absorbed by the runtime. There is no excuse to crash the whole application for something as silly as forgetting to prefix a statement with an "!= null" check first. Granted, there are ways one could do this, by installing a handler and checking for null reference exceptions, and explicitly setting them to handled (in fact that might be a good practice in general), but again this is more work and the whole point here is to make the language much friendlier with imperfectly-specified programs. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this one; but I'm all about software working as well as it possibly can, and not crashing and disrupting the user for things that aren't important. Everyone strives for "perfect" software, but it shouldn't be a requirement of the language.

I agree. I wish null exceptions were handled more friendly. They can be helpful while developing to identify potentially problematic or incorrect areas of code, but for end-user releases, they just end up getting in the way, since 90% of the time, just ignoring them is the solution anyway. Yet C# forces us to explicitly ignore them, rather than saving us the trouble. Look at WPF data binding as an example of how it can actually be helpful to default to ignoring: if you bind an object to a control in WPF and the object is null, WPF doesn't crash with a null reference exception, it just doesn't display anything.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

I wholeheartedly agree. XML is a horrible syntax to type by hand, even with Intellisense. I also strongly recommend Pete O'Hanlon's MoXAML Power Toys[^] if you do a lot of work with XAML/WPF as it allows proper XAML commenting and auto-generation of DependencyProperties.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

Well, it is called Windows Presentation Foundation ;)

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. While I agree the DataBinding is certainly powerful (and can, in certain scenarios be very simple), there are cases where the binding syntax can become quite horrific indeed. For example, imagine something like this:

Two things that I think were done exceptionally well in WPF are the layout model and the content model. I love the choices we have in designing a declarative, dynamic layout (StackPanels, DockPanels, WrapPanels, Grid) rather than the comparatively limited layout options in WinForms. It makes designing the dynamic resizing of a window in WPF a breeze. The content model is equally as great, as it allows you to embed anything inside any content control, like adding custom user controls inside a button or tab header for example, or pictures with transforms. You aren't limited to supporting only media types that the control designer intended, as you are with WinForms. It's completely universal. You can even embed blocks of custom content into a flow document, and have text flow around it and stuff.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-

That's actually a tough call. Here are the facts: * It's far more capable than WinForms, and is undoubtedly the "next generation". * It's complicated as hell, and will no doubt frustrate you beyond measure in your attempt to learn it. So it's a toss-up. If you really want a "chewy" app with all sorts of fancy capabilities, then I would say it's worth the pain learning it, but if you don't need it, it's not at a point where I can wholeheartedly say go out and learn it already, because I know how much it hurts. :P I will say this though: I love what I can do with it, but I hate how I have to go about doing it.

Sad but true: 4/3 of Americans have difficulty with simple fractions. There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. {o,o}.oO( Check out my blog! ) |)””’)          http://pihole.org/ -”-”-