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The Internet Meme Timeline
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Aug 08, 2008 01:47 PM
from the i-can-has-timeline dept.
from the i-can-has-timeline dept.
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.
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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.
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Re:Better edit the summary (Score:5, Funny)
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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?
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signed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any information there yet on the slashdot "signed" tag meme?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:signed? (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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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!
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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?
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Re:assembly (Score:5, Funny)
And does that mean that assembly programmers are evil?
Yes
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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.
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Re:assembly (Score:4, Insightful)
that's a GOSUB, not a GOTO.
No, it isn't. [wikipedia.org]
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Re:assembly (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
of what you're reading.
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Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
it's hard to keep track [slashdot.org]
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Re:Goto is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with gotos [slashdot.org] is that
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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!
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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?
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Re:I bet it was cool (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:firehose (Score:4, Funny)
That's not as easy as complaining.
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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.
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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
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Obvious Joke (Score:5, Funny)
The website is down.
Re:Obvious Joke (Score:4, Funny)
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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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ISR (Score:4, Funny)
Is it me (Score:5, Informative)
Where? (Score:5, Funny)
Where are the GRITS?
The original Meme (Score:5, Informative)
Lonleygirl15 (Score:3, Funny)
She's pretty....
GOTO Considered Harmful predates the internet... (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
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Re:Slashdotted... (Score:5, Funny)
It probably doesn't run linux
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Re:Slashdotted... (Score:4, Funny)
What do you know? It has the timeline and lifetime of a meme.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a recursive meme...
Re:GOTO (Score:4, Funny)
FACT: Goto being harmful isn't a meme.
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