sorting was: The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3890

writes:

Even worse, many of them are proud of it.

This is what led to my academic downfall. The math majors were off playing their theoretical games on a cloud somewhere; I lost it in math when I could no longer relate it to the real world. I had a brief reprieve when a physics clbutt showed how neatly complex numbers work when calculating electrical impedance and phase angles, but the battle was basically lost by then.

Meanwhile, my CS clbuttes where pushing ever more obscure high-level languages - again for esoteric theoretical applications - just at the time I discovered that bashing bits in buttembly language was how I got my jollies.

I got lucky; I found a job in a real-world shop and dropped out.

The glaring example of ignorance of sorting principles that I'm seeing right now is in the alt.binaries groups. People will give multi-part postings subject names like "01-20 foo", "02-20 foo", etc. The next day they'll post "01-20 bar", "02-20 bar", and a sorted subject list will mix the "foo" and "bar" posts together. It's not much use trying to tell them what they're doing wrong; even if their ignorance of sorting is less than 100% they'll just huffily say I should be sorting by date - so that their postings can be interspersed with those of someone else who posted at the same time.

Grrr...

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