The diary entries of a little girl who is now 30! ~ Part 2 - Page 9

How many pages already discussing about furries? It's the longest I have ever seen lol.

Yeah that is a problem cause the cable usually gives out first 

Same here. I always use the body of the IEM and avoid using the cable. I hate having to deal with RMA. I've had way more than my fair share. Especially with Chinese-Audiophile DAPs ;).

Edited by lee730 - 9/12/12 at 7:27am

 

I'm meeting with a furry friend tomorrow actually. He is trying to get into an art/design course and wants some input on his folio submission. I wonder how many works he will submit with his fursona...

Wow, that looks way better than the Q701 IMO. Way more classy, and less endorsement.

Oh lordy, now I see how expensive it is. Here I am planning to get it someday...

 

I must confess that most often I don't bother and just grab the cable. But hey, someone's gotta test those strain reliefs!  

 

 

Hmm, I know of some Chinese DAPs for audiophiles, but Chinese audiophile DAPs are news to me. 

Even a collector like you feel it's expensive. But I guess you have other targets in the near future.

 

He's an otter. Fennec foxes are seemingly a popular obscure choice. I was once told of, in hushed tones, a type of fur that had tentacles and etcetera - some particularly creepy type into vore or something. I cannot remember the actual classification unfortunately. I don't really know all that much from the bestiary though.

Hah. It sounds wrong to just say "3" equals 3...

For those besides the programmer-types here who're having difficulty following along: We're discussing the various ways that a program or script retains a value.

There are myriad types -- that is, the kind of value that a value is. The two simplest examples are the string and the number. "3" is a string -- it's the textual expression of the number three; while 3 is a number -- it is the number itself, an element that can be manipulated mathematically. There are also common types like boolean (a value of either TRUE or FALSE), array (a structured set of values), and so on. In most languages, when you compare two things, the type is relevant to the comparison by default. So in Java, C, and as far as I know most other common languages, "3" does not equal 3; but in Javascript, PHP, and many other recent scripting languages, "3" does equal 3 unless you require the environment to also take type into consideration. In programmatic shorthand:
Anyway. Usually you want to make sure that when you're comparing two things, you're as strict as possible in the comparison -- you usually don't want "0" to equal FALSE. But there are times, particularly when you work on web pages, where you can't get what you want in the way you want it -- numbers and booleans all arrive as strings. The classical way of dealing with this is to convert the data -- every value that arrives as the string "false" gets replaced with the boolean FALSE. But when you're dealing with a flood of incoming data, that becomes the slower, less-convenient method that consumes more execution time, and Javascript's available shortcut of allowing "3" to equal 3 becomes a good-enough initial data filter. (Data which you, as a responsible programmer, later re-check and sanitize!)

And, CdC -- sorry, didn't mean to sound like I was accusing you of wanting to cheat. It's mostly a problem of mine to not know when to stop thinking aloud. As you can see.

I would be one of those old C programmers whose head was about to explode over the "3" == 3...

However, C was actually considered loosely typed compared to languages like Pascal. In C, characters are synonymous & interchangeable with integers - a char is just a 1 byte int. However, there was NO automatic type conversion. So, although you could say that char three = '3', it would not actually equal 3 - it would actually equal 51! (the ASCII table index for '3' is decimal 51). You could also treat any int or char as a boolean, so anything nonzero was TRUE. Doing these sorts of tricks was considered "bad practice" by the purists, but EVERYONE did them.

It's been a long time since I was a code-slinger, so I hope I have all that correct - my apologies if I don't...

Edit: Oh and what REALLY threw me when I tried to move to Java was that strings were no longer just a char array with a trailing null. That habit was really hard to break. So, I became a manager instead...
Edited by billybob_jcv - 9/12/12 at 7:39am

Loose typing is usually considered problematic for programmers, but I think that it isn't inherently bad; it becomes incumbent on the developer to enforce rigor on himself, but does not prevent him from being rigorous. Mostly it's problematic for language designers and makes their own lives more difficult. The following example (by Douglas Crockford) is my favorite demonstration of what happens when Javascript's language designer is almost but not quite thorough enough. Or thorough in the wrong way. Or has given up trying...
Of course, when comparing type as well as value, all of the above evaluate FALSE.
Edited by ardgedee - 9/12/12 at 7:58am

This is still used in web development as a way to compress long number lists where the number values will all be within a particular range. It's not the most efficient in terms of compression ratio, but it's crazy-fast because you can use the browser's Javascript engine to natively convert the value, rather than write your own Javascript routine for the engine to interpret and then execute. On the web, where data scale and local execution are both premiums, it's a neat way to maintain a balance. Google uses a technique like this to comdense the data used for its Charts service.
Edited by ardgedee - 9/12/12 at 8:14am

One of the things I needed to do all the time was bit twiddle floating point numbers to convert their binary formats between different operating systems. C was made for that sort of work - you could read the odd format binary float into a 32 bit integer, twiddle the bits in the mantissa & exponent and swap bytes around for little vs big endian, then dump it back into a float and use it in scientific calculations. Automatic type conversions would have just screwed that up.