When someone is shot in a movie, and the person behind is splattered by blood (but not hit by a bullet). I assume the blood must come from the exit wound, meaning there must be a projectile flying out of it. What the fuck is up with that?

Wow, I've never thought of that.

What about the "elevator trap door"? Look up in an elevator sometime.

Do you have a particular movie in mind?

I have a lot of pet peeves. Too many to list.

I've seen elevators with trap doors.

Conduct some field tests to confirm your theory?

Maybe the bullet takes on a different trajectory and not exit out in line with it's entry vector?

I find it funny how they manage to break into a car and escape with it just by pulling out some cords from the ignition switch and then start the car by connecting two lose ends. They don't actually connect the ignition. They don't unlock the steering lock. I saw the best escape the other night in a movie - I think it was the one about a hi-jacked train, Steven Segal, a young Katherine Heigl - where the guy just ripped open the hood and found two lose cable ends there, started the engine with them and drove away.

But a real pet peeve of mine is the thing with image aspects. People really don't give a shit. It's amazing how many n*10k€ budget tv commercials end up in a screwed image aspect. It's amazing how many tv programs are shown in a strange letterbox format, where you get black bars at left, right, top and bottom, ending up in maybe 55% black screen. And it's amazing how many people prefer to set their wide screen tv sets on 16:9 instead of original aspect.

Two of my pet peeves are movies and television. So ... yeah.

When people at stores leave stuff (which they suddenly decide they don't want) out on the lane in random places, rather than giving them to us. We have an 'abandons' box for that (Ya, I'm a cashier).

I've spent some time programming something called "Bullet through the head analysis" though I've never made my ideas/source code public. Heres a classic song by RATM.

Pulp Fiction would be a textbook example.

Which scene?

Car scene? Or does the window behind the guy shatter?

I hate it when my Schwartz gets twisted.

I hate all the stupid explosions in movies. Supposedly thousands of people die every year because would-be Samaritans are worried about being blown to bits when the gas tank explodes. What really happens when a gas tank blows is a huge whoosh with an impressive fireball, with a blast that might move some clothes on a clothesline right next to it, OTOH it might not. On the gripping hand, if you stand within 15 meters of this car after the gas tank went, you'll probably get second degree burns in 30 seconds or so. The adrenaline rush might keep you from feeling the pain.

cry babies

That happened around here I think maybe in 2009, could of been 2010, and it ended up taking out a bridge (because the truck was under said bridge when it stopped)

On the theme of the fitness thread: people who don't want to lift weights because they "don't want to become too big". They clearly have absolutely no concept of how much dedication is involved. It's a bit like saying "I don't want a job because I wouldn't want to be super-rich".

This scene, where Vincent Vega shoots Marvin in the face inside a car. The rear window is all splattered with blood, but remains intact.

Unless it was a tanker truck BLEVE, I have a hard time believing that. Gasoline just doesn't work that way.

There's no way for us to know whether or not the bullet made it through both sides. Depending on the ammunition, I imagine that could have damn near taken his head off at such short range.

I imagine a bullet will build pressure inside as it enters, which probably means that blood will be put under pressure and find the easiest path out, whether that's in the front, or in the back (assuming an exit has been opened up).

I don't know. I don't see anything in that scene that we can know is wrong. Though I definitely want to watch that movie now!

Yea, it was a tanker truck.

The fire probably caused more damage than the initial explosion. Gasoline is a rather low velocity explosive. The most you get out of it is the fireball, the pressure wave it rather low for most explosives, it surely won't take out a well made concrete bridge by itself. Now high temperatures can crack and otherwise undermine a bridge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLEVE maybe?

Yes there is. It's very easy: people's heads don't just spontaneously puncture. Stuff exiting at the back => exit wound => the bullet passed through => the window should crack/shatter.

OK, that sounds reasonable. Though I wonder if the bullet could have lost enough energy to not (though if that were the case I wouldn't expect so much energy in the blood/brain matter). Mythbusters, anyone?

Without something to contain the explosion so the pressure builds up, that's true for just about anything. Gunpowder and nitroglycerin will burn quite nicely if unconfined. OTOH, gasoline explodes quite forcefully when properly confined, just check YouTube for burnout videos. The reason a gas tank doesn't confine the explosion is because the gas can't burn without air.

Even unconfined nitroglycerin will detonate if set off by shock. But like most explosives it's flammable, and small amounts will deflagrate harmlessly if set fire to.
Black powder OTOH is a low explosive and needs to be confined to have any destructive power.

It's the inertia that "confines" it.

Now try confining a high explosive and compare the two

Yes, you can get spectacular fireworks out of gasoline, but it doesn't give the same bang for the buck as it were as high explosives regardless how you set it up.

No doubt that the gasoline in a tanker is under some pressure (especially if heated), and will explode rather spectacularly, but its still mostly fire and shrapnel.

My pet peeve is people who use this style of bracketing:

That's nothing compared to being well-mixed with air in a stoiciometrically correct ratio under 12 to 1 compression ratio and fired at the right time.

Indeed. Vaporized gasoline can make for an awesome show.

HELLS YES

Minus a million points for brackets that don't line up vertically, minus another million for using them to enclose a single statement. I run into the following all the time in my current maintenance project ...

   // if something is true do something else
   if(somethingIstrue()){
       doSomethingElse();
   } // end if something is true do something else

/headdesk

But lots of people will make the following mistake

   // if something is true do something else
   if(somethingIstrue())
       doSomethingElse();

Add another statement, meant to be in the "if" block

   // if something is true do something else
   if(somethingIstrue())
       doSomethingElse();
       doSomeMore();

and doSomeMore() is executed whether somethingIstrue() or not.

I use that style all the time (plus a space)

For single statements, either I had more and ended up removing them all (maybe I found a one-line later on), or think I'll be adding more.

Define "lots". Lots of people will make mistakes when their code reads like a Shakespearean soliloquy too. If you code is written in a way that reads well (and it should) then redundant comments shouldn't be necessary:

    // describe WHY thing is important when other thing is true here
    if(somethingIstrue())
        doSomethingElse();

Can't beat that for clarity. If you need brackets for more code later, then it should be obvious to add brackets.

Your company should have code style guidelines so that everyone's code looks the same.

What is your opinion of a construct like this?

if (somethingIsTrue())
    doSomething1();
else {
    doSomething2();
    doSomething3();
}

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++){
    doSomething(i);
}

^ This. Another pet peeve is when people don't add white space (I have at least one colleague that writes entire OO JavaScript scripts and C# source files with no empty lines).

int x = getX();
if(somethingIsTrue(x)){
    doSomethingAboutIt(x);
}
for(int i=0; i<getLength(); i++){
    doSomethingForEach(getItem(i));
}
Object foo = getFoo();
if(somethingElseEntirelyIsTrue(foo)){
    doSomethingAboutThat(foo);
}else{
    doSomethingAboutThat(foo + 5);
    doSomethingDifferently(foo);
}

I would much prefer to see that as:

if (somethingIsTrue())
    doSomething1();
else {
    doSomething2();
    doSomething3();
}

If one block in a single chained statement needs braces then they should all have braces.

** APPEND **

Another pet peeve is when people put a space between a statement keyword and parenthesized parameters:

if (condition) ... ;
for (start; condition; next) ... ;
while (condition) ... ;

The space is unnecessary because the parenthesis already separates the statement from the parameters that follow. If that made sense then so would:

doSomething (doSomethingElse (5));

** APPEND **

On a related note, another pet peeve is when people add unnecessary spacing inside parenthesis like this:

doSomething ( 5 );

As long as there's a set convention that everyone is consistently using, I don't care at all how it is formatted.

I happen to use the Flex SDK Coding Conventions, which is why I put the space there.

Newline between the else and the {. Otherwise, dandy.

I dislike Allegro's conventions of spaces for indentation and braces that don't line up.

But my biggest programming related annoyance is dealing with people who have no problem solving or debugging skills.

I got quite a fright when I discovered a colleague, whose job title is "Java Programmer", was new to the concept of using a debugger to step through code. Mind you, Netbeans' debugger is crap compared to Visual Studio's.

This +1

if ()
{
}

Is a waste of vertical screen real estate. You can easily find the previous { by looking for the first thing upwards that matches the }'s spacing. Also, I think it's good coding style to use { } in EVERY block. Half the time you just end up adding them anyway.

Quoted for truth

My screen is big enough that I can sacrifice an occasional line for improved readability. I can see where the "if() {" appeal comes from, but I can't stand it personally. Pet peeve, I tell you!

If I thought the { on a separate line actually added any readability, I might use it. To me it's just a wasted line, nothing more. But I don't really care if someone else uses it in code I'm reading. I don't worry about other people's coding style until they start editing my code. On projects with multiple developers, it's always good to have a standard, and as long as that's followed, there's no issue.

"if() {" is for nostalgic C days.

"if()
{
"
is for readability.

^^^

In full disclosure, it's probably at least partially my OCD kicking in. If the opening bracket isn't directly above the corresponding closing bracket, my heart rate goes up and I get a twitch in my left eye.

Just saying "it's more readable", doesn't make it so ... if you could quantify the readability of those two and compare them, I might be convinced. But it's not going to happen.

P.S.: Most coders I know (myself not included) are very attached to their coding style so much that they find some minor change in formatting less readable. Personally, my brain is smart enough to read both of those bracket styles perfectly fine.

On my C64, I did not use any extra spaces, but I'm not stuck on a 40x25 terminal anymore.

Usefulness of a monitor doesn't keep going up as the monitor size increases. 10,000x10,000 characters isn't going to be very easy to use. What's the sweet spot? Maybe 200x200 or so? I'm sort of with you on this though. I don't understand why people still write code for an 80x25 terminal. My terminal starts out 80x25 but if I start writing long lines I just maximize it. Same can apply to using { on a separate line. I just don't find it any more readable. The block is already delineated so it's just extra typing, extra lines used, extra keys to navigate rows, etc... I just don't like it. Though I do put it on separate lines for function and class definitions, so it's probably something like the OCD 23yrold is talking about.

With a larger monitor with more lines of visible code, I find the "blank" line makes it more readable in that it helps visually offset a block of code.

But the bracket on the same line doesn't bother me too much, especially as I saw some undeniably horrible coding styles as a GA at university.

Too many people crushing up the parenthesis to the keyword these days. What is wrong with you people?!

I never do that except in the Allegro cmake files. Mainly because that's the way they were when I first edited them .

Re-railment time please Let's not make this about religion politics coding conventions

Seperate. Could/Should/Would of. "Could care less". Intensive purposes. Sheild/Theif/Gaurd/Rouge (when you really mean "rogue")/Wierd/etc. It's/Its mistakes. Then/Than. Their/They're/There. Your/You're.

At least "alot" doesn't bother me anymore...

My usual screen layout for web development is this:

• left monitor - full-screen web browser

• right monitor - two terminals and one or two gvims

If everything is written for 80x25 (or 80x{anything}), this works nicely - my terminal is configured so that two 80-character windows fit exactly.

• "u r", "im"

• posting in the wrong language

• answering posts in a wrong language in the same language

• lack of capitalization and punctuation

• People who think a preposition is something you must never end a sentence with, and make it something to obsess about, when really it is not something the English language has a rule against - it is Latin where this notion comes from.

"This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."
(See also: split infinitive)

{"name":"3YFVx.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/c\/5c48f988ae40bd77aff27740f546839b.jpg","w":463,"h":700,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/c\/5c48f988ae40bd77aff27740f546839b"}

Pick one?

^ This.

Since Superstar brought it up: all kinds of woo.

Pseudoscientific psychology like Myers-Briggs isn't even half as bad as, say, homeopathy though. A while ago, there used to be a pickup truck on the parking lot outside my house with a sign proclaiming it to be from "The Alternative Clinic - homeopathy for both people and animals!". It almost sent me into apoplexy every time I saw it.
It's one thing if people decide to drink water instead of medicine for their own illnesses, but a whole other thing to foist it on the defenseless.

And what's even worse is that not only does a large part of my fellow humans believe in homeopathy and even tries to sell it to me as medicine, they also happily confuse "homeopathic" with "made of plants", and then somehow assume that things made of plants are automatically harmless. Mentioning Heroine usually shuts them up though.

How about baseball bats? Those can be deadly weapons.

There's an annoying ad on the radio here for a product that's basically "herbal" Viagra. What annoys me about the ad is that they mention twice that "The best thing about Herbal Ignite is you're not taking a drug. It's a 100% natural product."

I even made a complaint about it to the Advertising Standards Authority, but it wasn't upheld.

Homeopathy

Talking about "energy", when it's something else doesn't bother me very much, like "After swimming 500 m each morning, I feel full of energy". But mixing pseudo-energy with "real" energy makes me annoyed. Hear on radio: "Fine thing with nuts is that they give you energy. The downside is all the calories they contain." Or "low-cal energy drinks".

How about a homeopathic baseball bat? That is, a lump of wood, soaked in water with extremely small quantities of ground baseballs dissolved in it.

Meh. A complaint about Viagra that doesn't hold up.

I like vertically aligned brackets because you can see matching pairs and spot mistakes more easily.

I detest xml with all the white space missing. Either give me something readable or use binary if those extra tabs and carriage returns cause problems.

I agree. "I've just been to the gym and now I feel great and all full of energy!" Evidently not a very productive gym session.

They're not mutually exclusive.

Depends on what you're doing... Regular workouts and general exercise actually helps keep you awake, and feels like it gives you energy. I know after years of doing jack all, doing jack all makes you more tired than anything else.

^ This. My unscientific explanation would be that the exercise incites your body to actually turn stored and consumed calories into consumable fuel, whereas if you don't get much exercise then your body's instinctual reaction to calories will be to store them, making them not available for immediate use.

You always feel better and more energetic after exercising. Of course, somebody actually trying to push their body to its limits will likely not have much energy after a workout, but your average individual going to a gym is just trying to lose weight or not gain any.

You should vary the routine and difficulty of exercise sessions to avoid getting in a rut, and to allow muscles to rebuild. The lighter sessions will leave you feeling quite peppy, the medium sessions will leave you feeling pleasantly fatigued, and the heavy sessions (maybe one every two weeks) will leave you impressed with your ability.

Not putting { and } on their own lines is a pet peeve of mine. As is using them for single lines of code in an if statement.

Also, just ugly looking code in general. Stuff like "int i = blah(); return i;" when there is no reason you can't just do "return blah();"

If the "int i = blah(); return i;" had a line break there, there may have been some debugging stuff that was there that got removed. If it's on one line, then only if the language has some odd rule that breaks with that setup would I see a reason.

Yeah, with a line break in there. The latest example that comes to mind probably was for debugging, especially since the one-line version was commented out right below it.

As GA, I had to teach many of "my" C++ students not to do that in trivial cases. This was quite common:

bool flag = func();
if (flag) ...

Most of them would have never thought to directly test the value of the function. "You can do that?" they would ask with amazement.

Here's a minor one: not having a newline at the end of a text file.

[bamccaig@sephiroth ~]$ cat your_file
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here. HUGE SUCCESS.[bamccaig@sephiroth ~]$ 

{"name":"FFFFFUUUUU.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/2\/e24b2cbb5f7cdeee04e0b10689a54437.jpg","w":358,"h":315,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/e\/2\/e24b2cbb5f7cdeee04e0b10689a54437"}

What are you doing? Blasting it to the screen with cat(1)?

I believe C compilers complain because they think it's a read error in the middle of a line.

Appended. I don't actually cat other people's files to stdout though. It even bothers me opening the file in a text editor. I bet I've added newlines to the end of files in Trezker's Cumulate and clipboard projects.

There where missing newlines in those?
That's weird, I've been rather conscious about always having a newline at the end... And I think geany puts them in at save if missing.

I don't like the tools that complain to high heaven about it. Sure I prefer the new line at the end, but sometimes I forget. (Thank god I haven't had to use some tool that would crash or something if it was there)

I don't know. I thought that I had fixed some, but I could be thinking of something else. I drink a lot.

Also, things like if(blah == true) ... bug me.

I hate when people unload an entire cart full of groceries into a pile on the 20 items or fewer checkout.

Those registers should stop scanning after the limit is reached. Then everything else should be thrown back into the person's face.

Maybe they could have a switch (operated by the managers key) that would refuse to scan more than 20 items?

Nah. It sucks, but micromanagement like that is too much overhead to really be worth it. One of my pet peeves is sitting around waiting for a manager to flick a switch!

The lane is just suppose to be smaller, so you can't fit that much on it.

I hate when stores put in self checkouts, effectively making you work for free. If I have to ring myself out, I should get a discount on my items.

I love them. It's usually faster, and I don't have to interact with other people.

The BAFsters stay away from them, resulting in shorter lines. I'd suppose Adam Smith's invisible hand would reduce prices in the store due to less workload, although I don't see why they couldn't program in a discount right into the self-checkout to encourage its use.

You don't have to interact if you're buying one or two things and you bag everything. Try buying a case of beer or Pepsi or water or whatever, and then having the balls to put it back in your cart rather than playing Jenga with it on that tiny platform. Everything goes to hell.

About the only time I'll use one of those things is if all the lines are really long and I'm buying one or two things.

They could, but there's no need. People are using them anyway, because they're faster and you can avoid the awkward social contact.

Awkward social contact? What the hell do the cashiers over there do? Still, I'd love they got some of those self-checkouts over here for just a couple of items.

They touch my food. They talk to me, saying all sorts of numbers. Some of them even greet me.

They just do that so they can take your money!

I actually prefer normal cashiers. I've only used the self-checkouts at one place, but the experience was not pleasant. It's probably been close to two years now, but I scanned the one thing that I was buying and put it in a bag. As I was paying, my brother picked up the bag to get ready to go, and the computer freaked out and said to put the bag back down and ask for assistance (from a person!)... NEVER AGAIN.

That particular place even has the self-checkouts arranged in a square with an employee standing at a podium in between you. Her job: basically to watch you and awkwardly help you if you have trouble.

They're not designed for people that aren't comfortable around people. They're designed to reduce the number of required employees. Computers should be my preferred checkout option, but it turns out the cashiers are less awkward to deal with than the computers. Plus, there's a chance that the cashier will be hot and nice, which only makes the experience pleasant.

OH NO THEY SAID HI!!!!!! RUN FOR THE MOUNTAINS!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, I've never had an 'awkward social encounter' with a cashier. What annoys me more is when they have someone standing at the door chasing you down to check your receipt, as if you're a criminal.

Sam's Club really annoys me. You have to have a membership card to shop at their store. And if you don't, then they will not let you SPEND MONEY ON THEIR CRAP! It just seems so asinine...

Your sarcasm detector broken?

What's that all about? Never seen anything like that over here. I triggered the alarm once while entering a shop, and was tempted to not cooperate when asked if they might take a look inside my bag, but I figured I'd have an easier time explaining myself when I'd trigger the same alarm again on exit.

Then you go on to mention triggering door alarms, which is basically what BAF is talking about...

Some stores may have somebody checking your receipt on exit if you are walking out with something expensive like a laptop. Most people wouldn't expect a little kid like BAF to buy a supercomputer.

I've never seen anyone being checked for a receipt without triggering the alarm first, or behaving in an extremely suspicious manner.

Also, the kind of store where I would normally buy a laptop doesn't even HAVE an alarm, it's just three guys, a counter, and a bunch of empty boxes.

Like BAF.

And obviously a small shop isn't going to ask for your receipt, since the same guy who sold you thing is watching you leave the building with it.

So I'm not sure why you acted so surprised at BAF's comment.

I pictured someone at the exit checking every single customer for a receipt. Which would be kind of silly.

I used to trig the alarms very once in a while. Usually they just said something like "sorry, our system is a bit too sensitive" and they let me go, without checking. But once they took me to a side room and used a hand held scanner to detect what caused the alarm. They found an old envelope to a memory card in my winter coat pocket. It was a strange pocket that I didn't even use regularly. I had bought the memory card in Siracusa, Italy, the previous year. Obviously they never removed or inactivated the theft prevent thing and I just put the stuff in my pocket after inserting the card itself into my camera. The guy with the scanner did check their database over items not sold and compared with the number of items on the shelf before letting me go.

Our local supermarket had a "shoplifting action plan" poster put up next to the entrance, intended for internal purposes, explaining exactly what to do when witnessing a shoplifter in action. Following the flowchart presented on that poster, the clever thing to do, as a customer, is to not cooperate at all, because the flowchart then ends in the scenario "do nothing". That poster wasn't up long.

Here's one: when people violate road lines. This includes people that drive too fast through intersections and have to skip across 3 lanes to make a corner in their huge-ass PoS pickup trucks, people that cut corners in the road and cut you off, and people that drive down the middle of the fucking road instead of just wearing down the snow on both sides... I would love to make a million diagrams, but I don't have the time, appropriate software, nor functional mouse.

If you're carrying a large item that won't fit into a bag in the local Wal-Mart, the greeters will ask you every time, with an expression on their face that implies you're a homeless person that hasn't taken a bath in three months. And they were so friendly when you entered!

Costco does this (or did the last time I went there). Kind of silly or not, this is a real thing.

Never seen it in Europe either, but it's happened to me in the US. I suspect it's (mainly) a North-American thing. That said, based on the store I was at in the US when it happened, they might do something similar if you go to the Makro.

Evidently there are enough shoplifters to warrant an employee's wages. That wouldn't really surprise me though.

They have security standing guard at the doors at a grocery store across the street. They'll ask for a receipt if they suspect you stole something, but so far they haven't bothered to ask me when I'm coming from the checkout lines with bags. I think they might have asked me once when I left without buying anything, but they didn't ask me to empty my pockets or anything. I'd say they were friendly enough.

It isn't the stores that you need to be upset with. It's the ass hats that blatantly do shoplift (especially those that can afford not to), which is the reason they need to harass everyone. I've heard of a number of acquaintances that got caught doing it. Most likely, they were just trying to acquire social status items that they couldn't otherwise afford. Society is partly to blame for that.

** APPEND **

I was probably thinking of j0rb.

Sam's Club. I've only been there two or three times, but I've never seen anyone walk out without having their receipt checked.

• People that believe the more RAM a PC has, the faster it'll work/respond/copy/load/load p0rn for them. I'd really like to know who was the goon who spread that, wouldn't it just be better of replacing that thought with CPUs? At least people would try to buy more expensive stuff than RAM. Or maybe it's a good excuse for fitting a computer with 4gigs and maybe some cheap CPU/Mother/PSU.

At one time the amount of RAM you had did affect the speed a lot more than it does today since RAM is cheap and most PC's come with sufficient RAM. However, I do remember the days when 16MB of RAM made a big difference over 8MB and it cost something like $200

Because the first thing you want to try upgrading first is the ram. Generally people will buy machines with too little ram, then keep them for years, and rarely upgrade, so the largest bottleneck is usually the amount of ram, and how much SWAP is getting used.

More ram can help, but not if you have plenty already. In fact, if you already have a lot, more ram can make your machine slightly slower. It can cause latency increases.

Well, of course there's the situation when the RAM usage is quite limited, which it'll obviously be a big speedup. But I'm referring to the statement, the more it has, the faster it'll be.

I overhear a conversation, "Wow, 8GB of RAM? That must make <insert benchmarking game here> 60 FPS all the time!". Then I rage. Yup, it fits the definition of a pet peeve perfectly.

EDIT: But I definitely wouldn't mind so much if the marketing people didn't use it constantly.

EDIT2: On a related note, is it true that 64-bit systems should support up to 256TB of ram? I wonder if we'll reach that considering the rate technology has advanced in some years.

Some places *cough*walmart*cough* *cough*best buy*cough* always do this, especially when they're busy and they have just watched you walk from the checkout lines.

Though typically, I'm only buying a single item, or a collection of items that don't make sense to put in a bag (case of soda or water, etc), so they get suspicious when they see you with no bags. They typically check everyone who walks by though.

I only get checked at walmart when I come out with something big, or not in a bag (or both obviously).

I save the Wal-Mart bags for little trash bags, I could easily walk in, load up a few small items after checking for transponder tags and walk out without being stopped, I suppose.

As I said, I think it's mostly a North-American thing.

It's definitely not a "North American" thing. Maybe a BAF-town thing.

I shop at Walmart a lot, and I've never been stopped unless I triggered the exit alarm. The last time that happened, the old guy just told me, "I trust you" and didn't even check my bags or receipt.

I've never seen anybody stopped unless the alarm was triggered. Maybe BAF lives in a neighborhood where all the young white punks steal things.

They're afraid that your entourage of fifty groupies will attack them if they diss you.

People like to believe that the responsiveness of something as complex as a PC always depends on one simple factor, following the formula "more is more", when in fact, one would have to see where the bottlenecks are and solve them one by one. On most PCs in use today, I'd say the bottlenecks are, in this order:

• crapware & malware

• choice of tools

• user

• hdd

• OS

• RAM

• other system components

And yes, the CPU is not on that list. With typical PC usage (excluding games and photoshopping), the CPU is usually idling around most of the time (mine rarely hits the 50% mark under normal usage).

But still, if you have insufficient RAM, the OS will start dipping into swap like crazy, and since the hdd is typically one of the more severe bottlenecks, you'll definitely feel this. Once you have "enough" RAM though, there is little point in adding more.

Oh, and here's one of mine: They used to market special editions of certain cellphones here, where you'd receive a free 2 GB SD card with your phone - only that the cellphone in question couldn't handle anything above 1 GB. Similarly, I've seen PCs marketed as having "4 GB of RAM", but they had 32-bit CPUs and were running windows (vista I think it was), so you'd end up with no more than maybe 3.6 GB.

When I was using x86 system with 4GB of ram, I used to install Eboostr.

It's a ready boost clone that can be configured to use the usually lost RAM for some file caching.

Trust it or not, I've tested it and it works like a charm. You definitely can feel the improvement when lauching apps.

The feature are here:
http://www.eboostr.com/tech.html

On a side note, I feel the price a little too high for that kind of product.

Thanks, there's no need for me. Linux seems to be a lot smarter with RAM usage, I hardly see it dip into swap even though I have only 2 GiB.

My RAM is at 50% used most of the time, and Windows STILL use the page file. The HD is a real pain in the ass bottleneck on my system for some unknown reason however. I had a HD that was supposed to be much slower, and it's like 10x times faster then my current one...

That's why 'OS' is on my list.
Windows seems to have at least two problems regarding swapfiles: It uses them more often than necessary (that is, when there's still plenty of physical RAM available), and it puts them on a regular NTFS partition (which means the swapfile sits between all the other fragmented files, and has to go through the full filesystem mechanism, instead of writing raw data to its own partition).

Yep, I've witnessed that too. Swap partition is constantly unused and everything runs smooth. As I boot into Win7 it even yelled at me it doesn't have memory and I should stop programs (well I was running Maya 2011...). I had to turn the swap on and it still uses it. On the other hand it seems that Windows can run much longer on the battery with window compositing compared to Mint 10 with Compiz.

Anyway I would second Johan with the TV broadcast aspect ratio. It's pain in the ...

If you read up on how and why Windows uses the pagefile, it makes perfect sense.

Oh yeah, aspect ratio. Why did someone at some point decide that 16:9 or 16:10 were acceptable aspect ratios for computer screens? The only thing for which this is useful is watching movies full-screen. That's hardly ever what I do though, my computers are for working, and procrastinating on the internet.

Because that way, you can sell people a smaller screen with a larger size metric. Measuring the length of the diagonal (in Illogical, no less!) is an exceptionally silly way of comparing screen sizes.

I like 16:9. Let's leave it at that, I'm sure if I elaborated further Tobias would prove that I can't possibly like 16:9.

What about 9:16?

(If I ever get the desk space to get a second monitor, I would so get one that allows me to rotate it to portrait mode)

People licking things to help pick them up is one of my pet peeves. Keep your saliva to yourself you filthy individual! slap

Generally poor code that the author clearly didn't allocate very many brain cells to. One of the things that bothers me is when people name variables temp, temp2, etc. That describes its lifetime, not its purpose, and anyway in good software most variables are temporary; so it's not even a very unique name.

Hey, practically all my variables are global. Have to keep track of them somehow.

I don't like 3:00 PM. I don't know why, I just don't. Makes me feel all weird.

People who put cutlery with the handle down in the dishwasher basket. To get them out you need to prick yourself, or handle the bit that touches your food.

I don't like mix & matching of glasses when they get put away in the cupboard. I always line them up in rows of the same type. It used to be subconsciously, but even if I think about it the urge is there to line them up. It's borderline OCD.

And washing pegs. Must have the same coloured pegs (of the same type) on an item of washing. Again, it used to be a subconscious thing, but now there's an unshakable urge to maintain habit.

I need Dr Phil

If you're washing a lot of cutlery, and you put it in handles up, you're not likely to get good water circulation around the dirty parts of the cutlery.

People on the internet.

All of them.

Especially myself.

Me neither. 12-hour clocks are awful.

People who tell me about the dream they had last night, and people who watch a documentary on the Multiverse and then claim to understand string theory.

A couple of hours ago, I took a nap, and dreamed that I took a nap. In the dream, I woke up three hours late for work, then when I woke up IRL I was all "WTF??!?".

You're probably still dreaming. In the real world, you actually ARE three hours late for work.

I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I N C E P T I O N

EDIT:

I just realized that on a 16:10 screen, 320x200 VGA has square pixels. *mind blown*

Wow. That really does blow the mind.

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: people who keep asking questions that are in a tutorial/manual AFTER you pointed them to it or even to the specific page where it's pointed out.

RTFM

Example:

Him: Why is this not compiling?(followed by a class with a function without parameters and accessing variables that aren't part of the class/globals)
Me: You should pass this and this variable in a parameter. The compiler can't find these variables because they aren't in scope.
Him: How do I do that?
Me: If you don't know how parameters work, I suggest you should first read up on functions here(link to a c++-tutorial)
Him: But why doesn't it compile? That variable is there on line 22(in main(), that is), so why can't the compiler find it?
Me: getting freaked out Read this page(link to the tutorial page on functions+parameters).
Him: But why doesn't it do what I want?

/EDIT: He finally got the hint... phew

Wow! I could have sworn they were rectangular.

You never made a 3D game in VGA mode 19? You had to multiply three of the vars in your matrix to avoid distortion. Seriously, you never even drew a circle with GW-Basic?

"Hey, you wanna know something?"
" No "
"I was in the supermarket yesterday..."

I admit that this is stupid on my part but... it kinda gets to me when people say cut and paste when they obviously mean copy and paste.

That reminds me: people who use the word "lag" to denote any kind of stutter, jitter or performance problem.

You're not alone!

Another Pet peeve: I get really annoyed when people claim all games on consoles run at a steady 60 fps, while the truth is some of these games can only reach 30fps at all. (And also the people who think anything else lower than 60fps is unplayable)

Actually one of my pet peeves is playing anything with less than 60fps, or more than 25ms latency.

I hate when I try to cut and paste something if the lag makes the frame rate drop below 60 fps.