The Internet Meme Timeline 235
CNet pointed out a great use of timeline creation site "Dipity" that has resulted a timeline of internet fads and memes. While there are some subtle inaccuracies and a few notable omissions, it seems to have touched on most of the big stuff. Everything from GOTO being considered harmful to "the website is down," it's a great trip down memory lane if you don't mind a few speedbumps like the goatse guy.
Better edit the summary (Score:5, Funny)
if you don't mind a few speedbumps like the goatse guy.
Goatse is a sinkhole, not a speedbump.
Re:Better edit the summary (Score:5, Funny)
no, there are bumps. you just have to look harder.
Re:Better edit the summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Thank you for sharing that. I'll have to double up on my Xanax and bourbon to get that image out of my head.
Re:Better edit the summary (Score:5, Funny)
It does have something of a mandala-like quality to it.
Do you know if you move your head from side to side while staring at goatse, it appears to follow you as you move, like that picture of Jesus you can buy at the flea market?
signed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any information there yet on the slashdot "signed" tag meme?
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unsigned short response = 0;
Re:signed? (Score:4, Funny)
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That seems unlikely. First, in that such a thing would be public and muddled in with the system to tag an article based on its content. Second, on the basis that it supposed slashdot articles are reviewed/corrected.
Re:signed? (Score:4, Funny)
I am finding it starting to appear a bit after a story emerges from the firehose. My best guess means that the "signed" tag means that the staff reviewed (and possibly corrected) it.
You think the editors correct articles? You must be new here.
I dont see any mention of this meme... (Score:2)
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That's no more a meme than cunnilingus on a hardwood floor [slashdot.org]. And I even tried to help get that one going, too!
Goto is Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Goto is evil and I am not going to cave in on that.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
GOTO being evil wasn't just a meme. When I took Intro to Computer Science in college in 1984, the course was in FORTRAN. I was informed that GOTO's led to unstructured code and that any project we handed in with a GOTO in it would receive a score of zero, as would any test on which we used one to solve a problem.
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Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Funny)
Man, I had a teacher who thought breaks were evil.
That's OK, the whole state of California almost outlawed water [msn.com] for being evil!
assembly (Score:5, Insightful)
And for that matter, when you make a method/function call, doesn't the compiler create a JMP (goto) instruction?
And does that mean that assembly programmers are evil?
Re:assembly (Score:5, Funny)
And does that mean that assembly programmers are evil?
Yes
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And does that mean that assembly programmers are evil?
Yes
Not evil, just misunderstood.
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So if you're coding in assembly and have to branch, what do you do?
Graduate before you write assembly.
And for that matter, when you make a method/function call, doesn't the compiler create a JMP (goto) instruction?
For one thing, that's a GOSUB, not a GOTO. For another thing, it appears in the object file, not the paper that you hand in to the instructor.
Re:assembly (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody who has to ask the questions which were posed obviously is incapable of writing good code and using GOTO. Therefor the rule applies until such time as a programmer no longer has to ask. Once a programmer no longer has to ask, he may use GOTO however much he wants. However, the need for GOTO is less required at this stage than earlier in the process, and the programmer realizes there is no GOTO, just DO.
It's a zen thing.
Re:assembly (Score:4, Insightful)
that's a GOSUB, not a GOTO.
No, it isn't. [wikipedia.org]
Re:assembly (Score:5, Informative)
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So if you're coding in assembly and have to branch, what do you do? And for that matter, when you make a method/function call, doesn't the compiler create a JMP (goto) instruction?
Clearly the reference is for actual programming languages, not dirty hacks, which assembly language inherently is. ;)
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So if you're coding in assembly and have to branch, what do you do?
You can always push a constant and do a RET.
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I probably shouldn't be laughing... and yet I am...
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Along the same lines as what I said in the COBOL thread yesterday, your compiled code probably contains a lot of whatever JMP gets to be at the machine code level, and that's nothing but a goto spelled differently.
Anything can be used incorrectly and/or incomprehesibly, even comments. I'd rather just get my programs to work and be maintainable than articially limit my toolbox.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget that things like break and continue are also gotos with funny sounding names.
Even Dijkstra, the author of Go To Statements Considered Harmful, wrote "Please don't fall into the trap of thinking I am terribly dogmatic about the go to statement. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline."
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Don't forget that things like break and continue are also gotos with funny sounding names.
Actually no, if the language you're using (e.g. Java) restricts break and continues to refer only to loops that they appear in the body of, then the program's control flow graph is still reducible [acm.org]. Break and continue without this restriction lead to irreducible flow graphs. This makes a big difference in the conceptual complexity (and sometimes runtime complexity) of compiler algorithms, in particular the construction of SSA form.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but there's a reason very few people program in assembly today. Structured programming was a huge step forward, and it matters very little that every structured OOP program ends up as a bunch of load, store, add, compare, and jump instructions.
By telling people to avoid goto, the overall quality of code and acceptance of structured programming has been increased tremendously, which has done a lot of good things for computing. There are always exceptions, and obviously there are cases where a goto (by that or another name) is the best way to do it. But in the overwhelming number of cases, a higher-level structure will be a much better choice. That's what this is about.
The only thing I wonder about is what that has to do with the Internet.
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I went thru CS/Programming coursework before the GoTo instruction was banned by those who "knew better" and I found GoTo to be one of the most powerful and useful of instructions - but with this power and utility there came an enormous responsibility on the programmer to carefully choose and specify the arguments needed.
With practice, I even frequently used GoTo statements with "calculated" destinations (which were fraught with even more possible ways to go wrong) to allow the construction of code using onl
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also just not frequently important to get the linear increase in speed or decrease in executable or memory footprint that you get with these techniques any more.
A program that runs half as fast but is twice as easy to maintain is almost always the correct design on modern systems.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Buying faster hardware is generally much cheaper - and a more likely to see a quantifiable return on investment - than buying faster programmers.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, this is the theme of a recent DailyWTF [thedailywtf.com].
tl;dr version: a software team spends five months optimizing some code, because the server keeps on running out of memory. They manage a 54% reduction in the memory footprint - but the server was running on 512 MB of ram. $60 would have bought them a 2 GB stick.
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Even if you reach back in time, find some guru out of Bell Labs or the MIT AI project or DARPA or wherever who can write ruthlessly efficient machine code, you've still got to maintain their work, and the extra hours of mere mortals' time isn't going to be worth the extra efficiency.
Now I'm not one for throwing design patterns and agile paradigms at a problem until it stops making noise. I think an ideal team is a small group of exceptional programmers who decide on their own standards, maintain their own
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My ilk started that rumor, but thanks for spreading it around and the resulting boost in job security... after all, who will be able to maintain code with GOTO's in it now? Who will be able to tell which GOTO's are legitimate uses and which aren't? NO ONE but ME! MUHAHAHA!
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Informative)
I had a professor who allowed gotos as long as they were used for getting out of deeply nested loops, and were jumping to a label within the same function, no more than about 15 or 20 lines of text away. He asserted (and I agree) that this is more readable than flag values and cascading
if (flag) break;
I've seen a goto used in place of more traditional looping constructs deep within the inner loop of a very performance intense application. This thing already had resorted to inline assembly in other areas, so ease of code reading most definitely being sacrificed for bleeding edge performance.
This isn't the type of thing that anyone does very often, and most people probably never need to.
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Absolutely.
To me, an easy exit from nested logic seems to be the best possible use of a goto / continue / break type statement.
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Better than COME FROM [catb.org] or PERFORM A THRU B [csis.ul.ie].
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One word. INTERCAL [catb.org].
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Yeah, but you can argue that FORTRAN's DO and COBOL's PERFORM THRU are variants of COME FROM. Add computed GOTO and an ordinary GOTO doesn't look so evil any more.
And if you compare that with the contorted OO code you sometimes see I wonder what the lesser evil is.
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Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
of what you're reading.
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
it's hard to keep track [slashdot.org]
Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with gotos [slashdot.org] is that
I bet it was cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:5, Funny)
8/6/08: Added 'Digged' meme to timeline.
8/7/08: Added 'Farked' meme to timeline.
8/8/08: Added 'Slashdotted' meme to timeline.
8/9/08: Added 'DNS Poisoned' meme to timeline. Buy V1@GrA Now!
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood the whole "this was on Digg/Fark/Reddit/BoingBoing/Inquirer/Register/Kuro5shin yesterday" thing.
Was it? Great. When choosing between seeing it two days later, or having to go to one of those other sites that are polluted with even more nonsense than exists on Slashdot, I've chosen the former. The real question is, if people have already see this stuff on other sites, why don't they go there and stop coming here?
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:4, Insightful)
firehose (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to improve the site submit your own properly edited stories and use your influence over the firehose to promote stories of interest.
Re:firehose (Score:4, Funny)
That's not as easy as complaining.
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People migrating from Slashdot to Digg increase the average IQ of both sites. -- to paraphrase a politician from the 1970s.
No, I'm not serious :-) I read Digg too.
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I am coming here more and more and in fact, take Slashdot more seriously because of Digg. It showed people what would unlimited karma mean.
abuse.
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:4, Funny)
8/8/08: Added 'Slashdotted' meme to timeline.
8/9/08: Added 'DNS Poisoned' meme to timeline. Buy V1@GrA Now!
There was another one on the 8/8 which you missed:
8/8/08: Added 'Duped' meme to timeline.
Re:I bet it was cool (Score:5, Funny)
8/8/08: Added 'Slashdotted' meme to timeline.
8/9/08: Added 'DNS Poisoned' meme to timeline. Buy V1@GrA Now!
There was another one on the 8/8 which you missed:
8/8/08: Added 'Duped' meme to timeline.
8/9/08: Added 'Duped' meme to timeline
Slashdotted... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted... (Score:5, Funny)
It probably doesn't run linux
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I just hope it's not running BSD. That'd be end of that meme.
Re:Slashdotted... (Score:4, Funny)
What do you know? It has the timeline and lifetime of a meme.
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Great. You just killed any desire I had to see it... and I'm not kidding.
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Actually, it's not flash. It's just JavaScript, and I'd actually wager that it probably wouldn't take a terribly long time on dial-up.
Obvious Joke (Score:5, Funny)
The website is down.
Re:Obvious Joke (Score:4, Funny)
Speedbumps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, things like goatse is why I would want such a tool in the first place.
I have warm, fond memories of him, tubgirl, the lemonparty, twogirlsonecup. They comfort me at night, and keep me warm inside my heda, where they frolic and romp through green and brown fields. Ah, the heady springtime of the internet, where such creatures roam easy and free. Now we enter the dark says of summer, where the storms of incomprehensible images and video come upon us, cheapening these rare jewels.
Re:Speedbumps? (Score:4, Informative)
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And don't forget sticky. And the smells...my god, it's like stars!
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If this is summer, my god September will be bad.
ISR (Score:4, Funny)
Is it me (Score:5, Informative)
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When did the "Slashdot effect" term get coined? (Score:2)
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It's a recursive meme...
Where? (Score:5, Funny)
Where are the GRITS?
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Fuck the grits (well, after they cool down), but whatever happened to Craig McPherson?
Bonsai kitten (Score:2)
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The original Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Lonleygirl15 (Score:3, Funny)
She's pretty....
GOTO Considered Harmful predates the internet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GOTO Considered Harmful predates the internet.. (Score:2)
Mustangs predate automobiles, so how can it be considered a car?
Wow... (Score:2)
...imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
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1. Soviet Russia the Memes timeline you.
2. ???
3. Profit
This website is down (Score:2)
Anyone have a mirror?
Proof Goto is evil (Score:3, Funny)
665 print "You are sentenced to eternal damnation In "
666 print "HELL!"
667 goto 666
missing something important ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A Real Internet Meme Timeline would say "September" for every month after March 1994.
Re:missing something important ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, for every month after August 1993 [wikipedia.org]
Badgers? (Score:3, Funny)
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Unfortunately, I can't see the article because it's slashdotted. Anyone know if he got the Hamster Dance? How about Jenni the original web cam person? The ICQ craze? Does he have ANYTHING old school or is it all modern playskool?
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We still use a lot of ICQ here at work... which is funny, 'cause most of us have 7 digit id numbers...
ok good job (Score:2, Funny)
NOW, it's slashdottted :)
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yep, he removed it.
but, it's still available here: http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes/timeline/Internet_Memes_1/ [dipity.com]
let the slashdotting continue!
Funny as all hell but sooooooooo not nice. :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You must be new here.
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Nah man, even with your UID... AC's been around forever! I just wish that AC would pick a personality and stick with it for a day.
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I know, you'd think that for consistency's sake they'd have at least made use of the "nothing to see here, please move along" meme.
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I lost the game.
Here [xkcd.com] you go, you poor sod.
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yeah, i think so.
you're not alone.
Re:GOTO (Score:4, Funny)
FACT: Goto being harmful isn't a meme.