off topic

[Derek Broughton]

Michael T. Richter wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-28-04 at 17:35 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 
>> Reminds me of a story of /. a while back - some linguist had spent
>> 2000 man hours writing a Windows program that would count how many
>> English words could be properly spelled using full element names in
>> the periodic table as letters. 2000 hours! It was all terribly
>> complicated and confusing, and took several hours to run
> 
>> Then some /. fanboy used /usr/share/dict/words and a perl one-liner to
>> do the same thing in 3.5 seconds
> 
> 
> And, naturally, Perl isn't available under Windows.  And the words file
> is in such a bizarre and obscure format that it can't be used under
> Windows.  And certainly isn't available from about a billion different
> places.
> 
> If you're going to critique a platform, how about not making shit up?

It's not about "making shit up", or even that the same thing couldn't be
done with Windows.  It's about a mental attitude.  It _can't_ be done with
the tools MS recommends.
-- 
derek