Re: How to destroy Leopard/Vista/Dragon, all at one fell swoop

In article
<jollyroger-E3C094.09372504112007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jolly Roger <jollyroger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Blah, blah, blah...




Don't get me wrong, I admire your Herculean efforts to resolve this
issue, very few people would take the time and effort to do so.

You are to be commended and praised for that.



Others here resort to ridicule, name calling, outright lies, slander,
mockery, derision, scorn, contempt, sarcasm, and many other despicable
things too numerous to mention in this polite NG, which is why I am much
too polite to mention them.



The bone of contention about this subject can be easily summarized.

I prefer to use words to get across meaning, as in "hex zero", which is
short for "hexadecimal zero".

By contrast, you and others here prefer to use words and phrases to be
technically correct, which I will admit is an admirable aim on the face
of it.

The problem with your approach is that in order to be technically
correct, you _have_ to be posting to someone with your same level of
expertise in the subject under discussion.



Here is an example:

When I post:
"I am wiping my disk free space with hex zeroes"

....then there is very little doubt in the readers mind about what is
happening.



By contrast, if you post:

"I am wiping my disk free space with zeroes"

....then there is _considerable_ doubt about what is happening.


(is he wiping with 00 00 00 00 00)

(or is he wiping with 30 30 30 30 30)




To clear up the readers concerns, you essentially have to go into a long
winded technical explanation about characters, bytes, numbers,
unprintable characters, ASCII, and about how zero is represented in a
utility like HexEdit that uses "hex notation" to represent decimal,
octal, binary, and other number systems.

Try explaining "hex notation" to an unknowledgeable reader, while you
are at it.

....and that is just the tip of the iceberg. In order to get our reader
to completely understand "zero", you would have to explain concepts like
null, 32 and 64 bit binary notation, your "record separator", also
character/decimal/octal/binary representation of numbers, what zero is
equal-to and what zero is NOT equal to, and what you mean by "equal-to".

Better people than us have stumbled badly over that "equal to" land-mine.



Then you would have to explain that there is a difference between
characters and numbers.

Hopefully it would end there, but there are other things besides
characters and numbers. There are symbols, which are often discussed in
the same breath as characters and numbers.

There are subclasses of numbers themselves, such as floating-point,
ratios, integers, negative numbers, exponents, imaginary numbers, etc.,
etc.

Not important? You bet it is important, if our reader tries to enter
0.0 when he should have entered 00 or 0





Do you really want to subject yourself to all that?

I advocate steering clear of all that technical jargon, at least when
posting to the great unwashed masses of Mac users.

Posting "hex zero" works for me, even though it may not be 100%
technically correct.

Bad enough that I have to explain why to enter 00 instead of 0

Bad enough I have to explain "byte" and/or "hex byte".

Bad enough I have to explain FF, and whether it is okay to us ff instead.



Stubborn old buzzard, am I not?

Mark-
.