If you can't hold on to the user's data if and when you I/O fails then it's time to take a look at the design..
OK. Yank the hard drive from the computer while it's still on. Now lock the hard drive in a safe. Now try to recover your last hour's worth of changes. Are you implying that all programs should always transparently backup off-site? That would result in unacceptable latency for users on 56K or slower connections who try to edit large documents.
OK. Now do something to make the computer swap a lot. Now yank the hard drive. How is the OS supposed to continue in such a situation?
When i type NYC with WingDings, i get: a skull and bones, something that looks like the star of david and a bomb???
Wingdings gives me skull and crossbones, star of david, and thumbs-up. The 'M' looks like the bomb icon from the old Macintosh "sorry, a system error occured" dialog, and the 'z' looks like the symbol on Macintosh keyboards' command keys.
However, Webdings produces eye, heart icon, city skyline. (But will they remove those two towers in the next service pack?) It also gives a "Do Not Pirate Microsoft Software" icon if you type '#'.
As soon as someone can get this thing to accept MP3s from a PeeCee running Windoze and/or Linux
If, as other posters have suggested, the iPod is an IEEE 1394-compliant external storage device, it may be possible to use generic Windows drivers with it. (This is how the USB Zip drives work.)
They'll look for what turns out to be fair use and just ass-u-me it's piracy. Nintendo follows the same policy, assuming that even programs that you yourself wrote for NES or GBA hardware violate Nintendo's copyright.
Error messages need to have numbers associated with them. For instance when I have ORA-1241 in oracle, a quick search in groups.google.com will give me a lot of informations about this error, and why it occured and what I can do about.
C's strerror() uses another approach: a short 6-character name for each error ("no such file or directory" is ENOENT, etc.) that stays constant across localizations.
The situation is even worse for people who used localised versions of the software, as you don't have the English translation
Whether you get "Non ci è tale archivio o indice (ENOENT)" or "Es gibt keine solche Datei oder Verzeichnis (ENOENT)", you can still search on the ENOENT. (Translations by Babel Fish.)
/*
The trick in writing C code that handles errors correctly is to know your
scope. Whenever you have a constructor (such as malloc() or fopen()), try
to put your destructor (such as free() or fclose()) in the same scope, unless
of course you are writing a constructor or destructor for some datatype.
*/
/*
Sorry for the readability issues, but Slashdot does NOT like code. When
I used my standard method header, it told me I violated "junk character".
When I removed the asterisks from the method header, it told me I still
violated "postercomment compression". Here, I use the preprocessor to
compress the source before the lameness filter sees it.
*/
#define LMNS1 malloc(SOME_NUMBER*sizeof(int))
#define LMNS2 else rval = ENOMEM
/* allocate_3()
Description of method.
Returns 0 for success or an errno code for failure.
*/
int allocate_3(void)
{
int *p1;
int rval = 0;
p1 = LMNS1;
if(p1)
{
int *p2 = LMNS1;
if(p2)
{
int *p3 = LMNS1;
if(p3)
{
/* Here we do something with p1, p2, p3 */
rval = 0;
free(p3);
}
LMNS2;
free(p2) ;
}
LMNS2;
free(p1) ;
}
LMNS2;
return rval;
}
/*
I will REMOVE your "All Your Radical Touching Base Are Already Occurred to The Lesbian Monkey Puppy" Philosophy on me if you don't eat my soy google balls, hatt-baby. Real or Malarky?
*/
a system that has been revised throughout development to have rock-solid error handling/reporting/recovery.
What is an application supposed to do when the user presses "Save" but the OS gives error "Disk full" and the file is larger than 1.44 MB? What about fopen() failing with "Not enough memory to allocate a FILE structure"? How is code supposed to recover from that kind of error without losing data (i.e. the document the user is editing)?
facistic is different from fascist. both are adjectives
But the real difference between "facist" (FAY-sihst) and "fascist" (FASH-ihst) is that "facist" refers to discrimination based on surface features, especially the appearance of the face, whereas "fascist" refers to a totalitarian government. Fascism often includes facism or other racism.
'users to delete data from their hard drive' presumably refers to the secure delete facility thats new to XP. Because users want to make really sure that an undelete... can't be done
Knowing Microsoft, the company is probably in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and may have disabled Windows XP's "secure delete" feature (i.e. hard drive free space wiping, which can be done in less than 100 lines of C code) for media files, so that the RIAA and MPAA can pay Microsoft to cr4ck j00r b0x and look for fair use.
Also, the shade of blue is the new "XP Blue" color that you see on the login box, menus and stuff. It's much, much nicer to look at.
What color is that? The old blue screen was VGA color 15 (i.e. #ffffff white) text on a VGA color 1 (i.e. #0000aa blue) background, in the BIOS font. The 8x12 pixel font in Command Prompt is based on older BIOS fonts. Now you can create your own fake blue screens.
Oh yes MS is so sucessful because they make great products
And you consider the blue screen of death and a 1.5 GB desktop environment (unlike the typical GNU/Linux distribution's workstation install footprint, this figure does not include dev tools or even a basic office suite) where changing the sound or joy driver or changing your IP address requires restarting the graphics server to be a "great product"? Do you call a product that uses "anti-piracy" excuses to gather marketing information on its users a "great product"?
that compete on the open market.
Microsoft's typical bootloader license (half price if a PC vendor installs nothing but Windows on all PCs it sells) keeps Windows from competing in a truly open market.
NES cartridges contained more than ROM
on
Portable N64
·
· Score: 3, Informative
why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms
A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.
Regarding interpretation of "FPS": Heck, even Duck Hunt is a first-person view shooting game.
Perhaps we should have fs^-1 for framerate instead
We already have a term for this: "hertz", abbreviated Hz. Hertz refers to the number of repeated actions per second. Examples of such actions include wave crests in audio or display renders or refreshes in video.
(I dunno how to do superscript, so I've used the power symbol instead).
On Kuro5hin (and many other Scoop-based sites), Everything, or Wikipedia (or other wiki-like sites that allow HTML), use <sup>...</sup>. On Slashdot (and many other Slash-based sites), you can't.
Make the applications do what I want. Make them bug free. If an application ends up being 4 MB instead of 200 KB, but is more stable and/or more featureful, I could care less about the size.
Unless your target platform has a limited amount of storage. For instance, how are you going to fit a 2 MB game into a 256 KB NES cartridge, an 8 MB game into a 4 MB GBA cartridge, or a 2 MB bootloader and kernel for a 486 firewall into a 1.44 MB bootdisk?
Getting an exception for all modules your app uses
on
Qt Released For OS X
·
· Score: 1
There's nothing stopping an author from making a modification to the GPL (as documented on the TrollTech site) allowing for linking to non-GPL libraries.
However, if your project contains any code written by other people, it may be difficult to get permission from them to link their code to Qt. For instance, if your program uses both GNU readline and Qt, or some other GPL library and Qt, tough luck.
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include... the operating system"
I have written more about this operating system loophole in the GNU GPL. Some software publishers might claim, and some courts would believe, that Qt qualifies as an "operating system" under which other applications can run. It certainly is a "platform."
I mostly use lynx while I browse/. so ads aren't a problem for me.
Now watch Slashdot throw up big ass ASCII banners for users of Lynx, Links, and w3m. Note that this would be asymmetric: they can post ASCII, but you can't because of the lameness filter.
But on the Mac, I used the key controls all the time. And on the PC I used those commands that translated easily (cut, paste, etc.), but I never learned the menu access commands. (e.g., alt-F, ??). Fortunately, I can usually figure them out eventually, when I need to. But I rarely need to.
What if you have a repetitive stress injury makes using a mouse difficult for you, and you need to Save As... or change your Preferences? Frankly, I don't like having to use Mouse Keys (cmd+shift+clear) and slo-o-o-o-owly move the cursor around the screen. What if you're legally blind?
Cocoa is the "real deal" for OS X, and is based on C++.
No, Cocoa is based on Objective-C, the NeXTstep language. Objective-C is not C++, and C++ is not Objective-C. (Yes, the fact that the names of things in ObjC start with NS (NeXTstep) makes it confusing to read Mozilla C++ code, where things also start with NS (Netscape).)
Yes, but you're breaking the law
on
Qt Released For OS X
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is great because it means a whole load of great apps can now be ported to run native on Macs.
Technically yes, but legally no. Many common apps that use Qt are under the GNU GPL and may not be linked with non-free libraries nor compiled with non-free headers.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't hold on to the user's data if and when you I/O fails then it's time to take a look at the design..
OK. Yank the hard drive from the computer while it's still on. Now lock the hard drive in a safe. Now try to recover your last hour's worth of changes. Are you implying that all programs should always transparently backup off-site? That would result in unacceptable latency for users on 56K or slower connections who try to edit large documents.
OK. Now do something to make the computer swap a lot. Now yank the hard drive. How is the OS supposed to continue in such a situation?
a) not crash
b) alert the user, who presumably can do something about it
Putting up an alert box requires allocating memory, which you cannot do because you are already out of memory.
Simple, detect it and tell the user the problem. Make the user be the one to conciously try to rectify the problem or exit the program.
If you can't allocate a FILE structure, you certainly can't allocate a DIALOG_BOX structure.
does the GNU spell checker make you replace Linux with GNU/Linux?
No, because "Linux" is also a valid word; it is the kernel of the GNU/Linux system.
When i type NYC with WingDings, i get: a skull and bones, something that looks like the star of david and a bomb???
Wingdings gives me skull and crossbones, star of david, and thumbs-up. The 'M' looks like the bomb icon from the old Macintosh "sorry, a system error occured" dialog, and the 'z' looks like the symbol on Macintosh keyboards' command keys.
However, Webdings produces eye, heart icon, city skyline. (But will they remove those two towers in the next service pack?) It also gives a "Do Not Pirate Microsoft Software" icon if you type '#'.
As soon as someone can get this thing to accept MP3s from a PeeCee running Windoze and/or Linux
If, as other posters have suggested, the iPod is an IEEE 1394-compliant external storage device, it may be possible to use generic Windows drivers with it. (This is how the USB Zip drives work.)
How can they look for fair use
They'll look for what turns out to be fair use and just ass-u-me it's piracy. Nintendo follows the same policy, assuming that even programs that you yourself wrote for NES or GBA hardware violate Nintendo's copyright.
what the fuck? ms god rid of the need for those reboots back in *win2000*
Microsoft never got rid of the reboots in any operating system that 1. is marketed to home users and 2. respects users' privacy. Many of us:
Error messages need to have numbers associated with them. For instance when I have ORA-1241 in oracle, a quick search in groups.google.com will give me a lot of informations about this error, and why it occured and what I can do about.
C's strerror() uses another approach: a short 6-character name for each error ("no such file or directory" is ENOENT, etc.) that stays constant across localizations.
The situation is even worse for people who used localised versions of the software, as you don't have the English translation
Whether you get "Non ci è tale archivio o indice (ENOENT)" or "Es gibt keine solche Datei oder Verzeichnis (ENOENT)", you can still search on the ENOENT. (Translations by Babel Fish.)
Now if only the popular apps did this...
/*
/* Here we do something with p1, p2, p3 */
The trick in writing C code that handles errors correctly is to know your
scope. Whenever you have a constructor (such as malloc() or fopen()), try
to put your destructor (such as free() or fclose()) in the same scope, unless
of course you are writing a constructor or destructor for some datatype.
*/
/*
Sorry for the readability issues, but Slashdot does NOT like code. When
I used my standard method header, it told me I violated "junk character".
When I removed the asterisks from the method header, it told me I still
violated "postercomment compression". Here, I use the preprocessor to
compress the source before the lameness filter sees it.
*/
#define LMNS1 malloc(SOME_NUMBER*sizeof(int))
#define LMNS2 else rval = ENOMEM
/* allocate_3()
Description of method.
Returns 0 for success or an errno code for failure.
*/
int allocate_3(void)
{
int *p1;
int rval = 0;
p1 = LMNS1;
if(p1)
{
int *p2 = LMNS1;
if(p2)
{
int *p3 = LMNS1;
if(p3)
{
rval = 0;
free(p3);
}
LMNS2;
free(p2) ;
}
LMNS2;
free(p1) ;
}
LMNS2;
return rval;
}
/*
I will REMOVE your "All Your Radical Touching Base Are Already Occurred to The Lesbian Monkey Puppy" Philosophy on me if you don't eat my soy google balls, hatt-baby. Real or Malarky?
*/
a system that has been revised throughout development to have rock-solid error handling/reporting/recovery.
What is an application supposed to do when the user presses "Save" but the OS gives error "Disk full" and the file is larger than 1.44 MB? What about fopen() failing with "Not enough memory to allocate a FILE structure"? How is code supposed to recover from that kind of error without losing data (i.e. the document the user is editing)?
facistic is different from fascist. both are adjectives
But the real difference between "facist" (FAY-sihst) and "fascist" (FASH-ihst) is that "facist" refers to discrimination based on surface features, especially the appearance of the face, whereas "fascist" refers to a totalitarian government. Fascism often includes facism or other racism.
'users to delete data from their hard drive' presumably refers to the secure delete facility thats new to XP. Because users want to make really sure that an undelete ... can't be done
Knowing Microsoft, the company is probably in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and may have disabled Windows XP's "secure delete" feature (i.e. hard drive free space wiping, which can be done in less than 100 lines of C code) for media files, so that the RIAA and MPAA can pay Microsoft to cr4ck j00r b0x and look for fair use.
Also, the shade of blue is the new "XP Blue" color that you see on the login box, menus and stuff. It's much, much nicer to look at.
What color is that? The old blue screen was VGA color 15 (i.e. #ffffff white) text on a VGA color 1 (i.e. #0000aa blue) background, in the BIOS font. The 8x12 pixel font in Command Prompt is based on older BIOS fonts. Now you can create your own fake blue screens.
Oh yes MS is so sucessful because they make great products
And you consider the blue screen of death and a 1.5 GB desktop environment (unlike the typical GNU/Linux distribution's workstation install footprint, this figure does not include dev tools or even a basic office suite) where changing the sound or joy driver or changing your IP address requires restarting the graphics server to be a "great product"? Do you call a product that uses "anti-piracy" excuses to gather marketing information on its users a "great product"?
that compete on the open market.
Microsoft's typical bootloader license (half price if a PC vendor installs nothing but Windows on all PCs it sells) keeps Windows from competing in a truly open market.
why not make some device based around an atari on a chip or a nes on a chip that used a portable cdrom or compact flash or something and just loaded roms
A typical NES cartridge contained a program ROM, either a tile ROM or an 8 KB tile RAM, and "mapper" hardware that bankswitched the ROMs and often provided timers. Emulating the different varieties of mappers in an FPGA may be trouble, given that you have to take into account CNROM (for Milon and Tetyais (tengen's tetris clone) plus fallback for old games such as SMB1, Duck Hunt, and one of my favorites, Binary Land), UNROM (for Contra, Ikari, Mega Man 1, and the Codemasters games), MMC1 (for Metroid, Zelda, Tetris, and Dr. Mario), MMC2 (for Punch-Out), MMC3 (for SMB2, SMB3, TMNT2, Mega Man 3-6, etc.), MMC5 (complex monster used in Castlevania 3), and more.
Learn more about mappers from Firebug's document at NESdev
Regarding interpretation of "FPS": Heck, even Duck Hunt is a first-person view shooting game.
Perhaps we should have fs^-1 for framerate instead
We already have a term for this: "hertz", abbreviated Hz. Hertz refers to the number of repeated actions per second. Examples of such actions include wave crests in audio or display renders or refreshes in video.
(I dunno how to do superscript, so I've used the power symbol instead).
On Kuro5hin (and many other Scoop-based sites), Everything, or Wikipedia (or other wiki-like sites that allow HTML), use <sup>...</sup>. On Slashdot (and many other Slash-based sites), you can't.
Make the applications do what I want. Make them bug free. If an application ends up being 4 MB instead of 200 KB, but is more stable and/or more featureful, I could care less about the size.
Unless your target platform has a limited amount of storage. For instance, how are you going to fit a 2 MB game into a 256 KB NES cartridge, an 8 MB game into a 4 MB GBA cartridge, or a 2 MB bootloader and kernel for a 486 firewall into a 1.44 MB bootdisk?
bloat, most of which could be removed by taking look-and-feel instructions out of the HTML and placing them into stylesheets.
Kuro5hin's readers discussed doing something similar but rejected it because not only does Netscape 4.x not render CSS unless you have popup ads turned on, but it also crashes when fed some perfectly valid CSS. Many of Slashdot's readers do not have a powerful enough computer to run Mozilla or Konqueror.
There's nothing stopping an author from making a modification to the GPL (as documented on the TrollTech site) allowing for linking to non-GPL libraries.
However, if your project contains any code written by other people, it may be difficult to get permission from them to link their code to Qt. For instance, if your program uses both GNU readline and Qt, or some other GPL library and Qt, tough luck.
That is, unless you take advantage of the GPL's OS loophole.
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include ... the operating system"
I have written more about this operating system loophole in the GNU GPL. Some software publishers might claim, and some courts would believe, that Qt qualifies as an "operating system" under which other applications can run. It certainly is a "platform."
I mostly use lynx while I browse /. so ads aren't a problem for me.
Now watch Slashdot throw up big ass ASCII banners for users of Lynx, Links, and w3m. Note that this would be asymmetric: they can post ASCII, but you can't because of the lameness filter.
But on the Mac, I used the key controls all the time. And on the PC I used those commands that translated easily (cut, paste, etc.), but I never learned the menu access commands. (e.g., alt-F, ??). Fortunately, I can usually figure them out eventually, when I need to. But I rarely need to.
What if you have a repetitive stress injury makes using a mouse difficult for you, and you need to Save As... or change your Preferences? Frankly, I don't like having to use Mouse Keys (cmd+shift+clear) and slo-o-o-o-owly move the cursor around the screen. What if you're legally blind?
Cocoa is the "real deal" for OS X, and is based on C++.
No, Cocoa is based on Objective-C, the NeXTstep language. Objective-C is not C++, and C++ is not Objective-C. (Yes, the fact that the names of things in ObjC start with NS (NeXTstep) makes it confusing to read Mozilla C++ code, where things also start with NS (Netscape).)
This is great because it means a whole load of great apps can now be ported to run native on Macs.
Technically yes, but legally no. Many common apps that use Qt are under the GNU GPL and may not be linked with non-free libraries nor compiled with non-free headers.