Let's not forget that SPAM is a registered
trademark of Hormel foods.
Hormel
says that they don't object to the use of the
word "spam" to refer to unsolicited email, but
they'd really like you to NOT use their trademark
"SPAM" for that purpose.
I think it's a reasonable position for them to
take, and out of respect for their delicious
spiced ham food like product, we should all be
using "spam" to mean "UCE", and "SPAM" to mean
"delicious food".
What about radiation shielding?
on
Tool Box PC
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
But is it practical? He didn't put any radiation
shielding in there, and the toolbox has a plastic
lid. That means that the toolbox computer will
be leaking radiation like buggery, interfering
with other electrical and electronic equipment
nearby.
And why is this box better than say a small
desktop machine? He must have spent hours
building it, so it would have been cheaper to
just spend a few hundred dollars to get a cheap
machine.
Making videogames a pay per use item...Sorry to say that, I don't know EAs plans, but if people have to pay any amount however small its too much. Don't take this wrong, I know it hasn't happend yet, I'm just tired of how much our society is becoming a pay-per-use society.
Maybe you don't remember "The Olden Days", when
to play a video game you had to go down to the
video arcade and... PAY! You had to pay for every
game you played! This changed a bit with the
introduction of "TV games", which didn't require
a payment for every play, but TV games weren't
as powerful as arcade games, and the graphics
weren't as good either. If the makers of console
games can start getting money for each play of a
game, then they can charge less for the game and
the console and make up the money through people
playing the game.
maybe then the "poor sucker" will do something about it so that they won't get "borrowed" again.
What can they do? Suppose a spammer uses
john@johndaileysoftware.com as their "From"
address, what can the legitimate owner of that
email address do about it? Especially when they
are suddenly flooded with thousands of bounce
messages...
The paradox is that if companies are too successful at this then there is no competition anymore.
However, it can still be capitalism with no
competition. Similarly, it is possible to have
socialism with a lot of competition, or none.
"Capitalism" is not another word for "competition". Capitalism refers to private
ownership of capital.
Web sharing would be another example. On the Mac, you can literally just drag HTML files into your web sharing folder. On Linux, you'd have to spend two days learning Apache, and only a system administrator would even succeed in that.
Come on, Apache isn't hard to install. I got a
phone call from a guy who couldn't get CGI scripts
working on IIS. I couldn't fix the problem, so I
suggested that he install Apache instead. Ten
minutes later, he had it running and was happy.
Apache is really easy to install.
And you can't call it "baMessage" for what reason?
You can call it "baMessage". I don't really know
why, but a lot of code I've seen that uses
Hungarian doesn't do that. I think that once
people stick the four or five characters on the
front indicating the type and the scope of the
variable, they start to think the variable name
is too long and abbreviate the rest. This leads
to names like "m_baBuf".
Let's say I'm writing software for a portrait studio. Each picture you take is called a pose.
What would you think "PoseNumber" would be? Would it surprise you to discover that it is actually a string, and not a number?
This is precisely the problem that object-oriented
programming is there to solve. I don't care
what data type you use to represent "PoseNumber".
Hide it inside a class so that I never see it.
Encapsulate the data type so that you can change
it to a String, an int, or a bitfield if you
feel like it, and it makes no difference to the
users of that class.
What about the difference between an int, long, a short, or an unsigned __int64? "index" doesn't tell you anything about what you're dealing with. It tells you you're dealing with a datatype that represents the index, but nothing about the datatype itself; so every time that becomes important (say, when you want to write it out to disk in some ass backwards format that the client needs it in, or display it on the screen), you've got to wast 5 minutes finding where the variable is declaired.
Stick it in a class, then when you want to write
it to disk you call index.writeToDisk(). If you
want to display it on screen, index.displayOnScreen(). You don't need to worry
about what type the internal variables are
except for one time when you write the class.
You may think it's fine to spend time searching through 300mb of source code to see where a variable is declaired, but it's a waste of my time -- especially when one or two characters would have told me what I needed to know.
No, I get my editor to tell me where the declaration is. Emacs can do that fine using tags.
Other editors like JBuilder already know the
type of the variable and will tell you if you want. If your editor won't tell you, get a new
editor.
Stop being lazy and spend time making your code clear, not ambiguous. Your variable names should be descriptive and tell you what they are. Not most of what they are.
Your variable names should tell you what the
variable does, not what type it is. The declaration tells you the type.
Obviously, MS biggest problem though is that they don't know when to give up and actually rewrite. For instance, it seems that the windows series of operating systems are all made with the intent of being backwards compatible and reusing core parts back to early DOS systems. Backwards compatability and code reuse is nice and all, but there is a limit to it and a time to give up.
Just the other day I was wondering what would
happen if Microsoft "pulled an Apple" and
released a brand-new version of Windows based
on BSD code. Then they could get stability,
scalability, and portability, and still maintain
backwards compatibility right back to DOS using
some things like Dosemu and Wine. They could
firmly glom a pretty GUI onto it, so that the
average user would still be able to use it. But
they would never go BSD, would they?
Clear, Consistant Formatting: [...] variables use Hungarian Notation or some other standard
I find Hungarian notation much harder to read than
not using it. For example, I find the Unix man page
for strcpy which looks like this: char *strcpy(char *dest, const char *src);
much easier to read than the Windows-style Help
which is full of stuff like "LPCSTR lpBuf" and
suchlike. The idea which is commonly called
"Hungarian Notation" says that a variable name
should include the type of the variable
as a prefixed abbreviation in front of the name.
This leads to stuff like: byte[] baBuf;
whereas without Hungarian, it might be called: byte[] message;
which would be much more meaningful.
Especially in object-oriented programming, the
type of a variable is the least important piece
of information about the variable, and has no
place being abbreviated and prefixed to the name.
The most important thing about a variable is what
the programmer is using the variable for, and that
information should be what the name of the variable tells another programmer. If somebody
really wants to know the type of a variable, then
their editor or IDE should tell them what it is.
If it doesn't tell them automatically, then they
should look at the variable declaration, which
will state exactly what type the variable is.
If programmers want the variable name to tell
them the type, then what is the point of declarations? And why bother putting a comment
near the declaration saying what the variable is
for, because people aren't going to read the
declaration or comment anyway, because they are
just going to look at the Hungarian warts.
The argument that Hungarian notation reduces the
possibility of assigning variables of different
type to each other is long dead with compilers
well capable of throwing errors if any incompatible type assignments are attended. I
think that Hungarian notation is dead, or at
least should be.
However, not all comments are useful. I have seen code that goes like this:
//
// Now we can release the lock on the handle.
//
Handle->ReleaseLock();
And it goes on like that for hundreds of lines, in one function. Every line has three lines of comments that give no more information than the line of code gives. Every function is hundreds of lines long with multiple "if" and "else" branches. This is nothing more than:
i++;// add one to i
It is crap, and it doesn't help. Not all comments are good. But I can just imagine the programmer writing it thinking "I'm writing some really good stuff here! Look at all those comments! This MUST be good!". But it's bad. Very, very bad.
Dude, it doesn't "reclaim heat". It uses a generator as a brake, thus avoiding using brake pads to convert kinetic energy into heat. From
the link you posted:
* When decelerating or braking, the electric motor turns into a generator to charge the batteries automatically. It's a unique hybrid feature called regenerative braking. Normally when you brake, all that energy is converted into heat into the brakes. Toyota's Prius actually recaptures about 30 percent of that energy to recharge the nickel-medal-hydride batteries in the back.
To stop the car, it needs to remove kinetic energy
from the car. In normal braking, the energy is
absorbed by the brakes, which radiate the
energy away later. Regenerative braking instead
uses a generator to convert the kinetic energy
into electricity (and heat), storing it in the
car's batteries. Electric trains have been doing
this for years.
We can convert electricity directly to heat, without having to "cool something else down" in the process. Why doesn't it work in reverse?
Actually, you do have to "cool something else down"
to convert electricity to heat. The thing that has
to be cooled down is over at the power plant, but
without that cooling you wouldn't get the electricty, and then you couldn't make the heat.
It's similar to if you say "Wood fires make too much pollution to heat my house, so I'm going to
use electric heaters". If the electricity comes
from a coal-fired power plant, there is still
pollution, it's just not directly at your house.
Only if somebody invents a CPU that doesn't melt
at 250 degrees Celsius. In the article, it says that's the temperature you need to make this thing
work. I think that's a bit too hot for a computer,
because it would be quite a fire hazard.
How the hell is it that we, in the USA, are reduced to using techniques Heinlein was driven to using in the freaking Soviet Union under Leninist Communism, just to avoid being ripped off and cheated?
Huhhhh??? "Ripped off and cheated"? How are they
ripping you off? Where's the cheating? If the
record companies sell a product, and you
know that it won't suit your purposes,
don't buy it! Really, what do
you expect? Do you want the record companies to
offer to sell you a copy-protected CD, and
because you don't like that, they should instead
give you a free CD with MP3s of all the music
on it? I'm going to start a campaign where we
all go and complain about the shops selling
Windows software because it won't run on my
Linux box!
Nobody has any right to decide what
products a company sells. If the record companies
want to sell these copy-protected CDs, that's up
to them. If you think that a record company could
make more money by selling non-copy-protected CDs,
then start your own record company and show them
how it's done. Now if you'll excuse me, I have
to go down to the video rental shop and complain
that the VHS tape they rented me won't play in
my CD-ROM drive.
Also essentially it's unfair competition - is a genetically modified runner still in the same league as "real humans"? I mean if I really wanted to move extremely fast, running would be the least attractive choice. I could use a car, motorcycle or jet plane, depending on the distance.
Ok then, let's have two Olympic Gameses.
One would be the "Traditional Olympic Games",
which would be for normal humans. The other
would be the "Modified Olympic Games", where
athletes can bang up steroids on the starting
line if they want to. They can drink a gallon
of testosterone mixed with human growth hormone
for breakfast, and bolt springs to their feet.
They can do whatever they like. Then everybody
would be happy! If a "Traditional Olympic Games"
competitor is caught using any performance-enhancing drugs, genetic modifcation,
or illegal equipment, they would be banned for
life from all sporting competitions.
Sounds fair to me.
How can they enforce a clause that says that you
agree to the terms of the licence by using the
software? Do they force you to read the licence
before using the software? It's like those signs
that I've heard they have at the supermarkets
which say something like (I've never read one
of these signs, so I'm just guessing here)
"By entering this store you agree that we can
search your bag when you try to leave". Can you
enforce one of those signs? I'm going to the
supermarket to buy food, not to read all
the signs they stick up all over the place to
make sure that I am not "agreeing" to something
merely by trying to avoid starvation! Am I
required to read all the signs before
I enter the store? Even the ones that say
"SPECIAL SIX ROLLS OF TOILET PAPER $2.00"? Does
anybody read and understand all the terms of
a EULA or one of those online "agreements" before
they click "OK"? Does "clicking OK" cause a
legally binding agreement to be formed? Are law
enforcement agents not allowed to enter a pr0n
site because of the disclaimer on the front page
which says they're not allowed?
...Apple's license agreement, which you accepted upon purchasing a copy of the Software,
Did you really accept the licence agreement
upon purchasing a copy of the software? I think it's time that software companies require people
to sign the licence agreement at time
of purchase if they want the EULA to be enforceable. It's a pretty unfair contract for it
to say that you accepted it at the time of
purchase when you couldn't even read it
before purchasing the product.
if you're looking for a secure non-anonymous ftp...
You're not going to find one. I looked at the
link to untroubled.org that you provided, and
there is no mention of encryption. If the user
needs to send their username and password in
plain text, as they do with telnet and non-anonymous ftp, then anybody with a packet
sniffer can get usernames and passwords without
much effort. This is the definition of "insecure".
Please, don't use telnet or ftp. Use ssh and scp,
and encourage others to do the same.
So you think Firaxis should be punished for what
Infogrames Germany has done? I would much prefer
if people didn't send email to that Firaxis
address, because the programmers there should be
spending their time working furiously on the patch
that Civ3 desperately needs, not reading a bunch of
mail that has nothing to do with them.
How can the OS/2 team we're talking about release their project under the GPL? It makes no sense! You cannot take someone's project, modify it and just because you had access to the source you can decide for yourself what you'll do of that code.
I thought about it some more (owww my brane hurts!) and I hope this will be my final position on this subject:
MPlayer authors claim that their project is
not released under the GPL
Their project includes a file (ac3-iec958.c)
which was released under the GPL, therefore they
should have released MPlayer under the GPL
Their project also includes the source code
to several GPLd libraries (libac3, libmpeg2,
libvo) and some other GPLd code as well
These GPLd libraries are not only not
LGPLd, they are also statically linked, which
greatly weakens the "they are only libraries"
argument
They really should have released MPlayer under
the GPL
Warpvision still had no right to use MPlayer's code without permission, even if Warpvision
released their modified code under the GPL
Even if we ignore all the libraries, there's still
ac3-iec958.c which is in the main MPlayer source
directory. It's not in one of those library sub-directories. Also, the libraries distributed with
MPlayer are GPL, not LGPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget that SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel foods. Hormel says that they don't object to the use of the word "spam" to refer to unsolicited email, but they'd really like you to NOT use their trademark "SPAM" for that purpose.
I think it's a reasonable position for them to take, and out of respect for their delicious spiced ham food like product, we should all be using "spam" to mean "UCE", and "SPAM" to mean "delicious food".
But is it practical? He didn't put any radiation shielding in there, and the toolbox has a plastic lid. That means that the toolbox computer will be leaking radiation like buggery, interfering with other electrical and electronic equipment nearby.
And why is this box better than say a small desktop machine? He must have spent hours building it, so it would have been cheaper to just spend a few hundred dollars to get a cheap machine.
Maybe you don't remember "The Olden Days", when to play a video game you had to go down to the video arcade and... PAY! You had to pay for every game you played! This changed a bit with the introduction of "TV games", which didn't require a payment for every play, but TV games weren't as powerful as arcade games, and the graphics weren't as good either. If the makers of console games can start getting money for each play of a game, then they can charge less for the game and the console and make up the money through people playing the game.
What can they do? Suppose a spammer uses john@johndaileysoftware.com as their "From" address, what can the legitimate owner of that email address do about it? Especially when they are suddenly flooded with thousands of bounce messages...
However, it can still be capitalism with no competition. Similarly, it is possible to have socialism with a lot of competition, or none. "Capitalism" is not another word for "competition". Capitalism refers to private ownership of capital.
The laaaaand of the freeeeeee,
And the hooooome of the braaaaaave.
Your variable names should tell you what the variable does, not what type it is. The declaration tells you the type.
char *strcpy(char *dest, const char *src);
much easier to read than the Windows-style Help which is full of stuff like "LPCSTR lpBuf" and suchlike. The idea which is commonly called "Hungarian Notation" says that a variable name should include the type of the variable as a prefixed abbreviation in front of the name. This leads to stuff like:
byte[] baBuf;
whereas without Hungarian, it might be called:
byte[] message;
which would be much more meaningful.
Especially in object-oriented programming, the type of a variable is the least important piece of information about the variable, and has no place being abbreviated and prefixed to the name. The most important thing about a variable is what the programmer is using the variable for, and that information should be what the name of the variable tells another programmer. If somebody really wants to know the type of a variable, then their editor or IDE should tell them what it is. If it doesn't tell them automatically, then they should look at the variable declaration, which will state exactly what type the variable is. If programmers want the variable name to tell them the type, then what is the point of declarations? And why bother putting a comment near the declaration saying what the variable is for, because people aren't going to read the declaration or comment anyway, because they are just going to look at the Hungarian warts.
The argument that Hungarian notation reduces the possibility of assigning variables of different type to each other is long dead with compilers well capable of throwing errors if any incompatible type assignments are attended. I think that Hungarian notation is dead, or at least should be.
free(array[i]);
free(array);
Actually, it's freeing the contents of the array and it's also freeing the array. Maybe you need to write some more comments, dude.
However, not all comments are useful. I have seen code that goes like this:
//
// Now we can release the lock on the handle.
//
// add one to i
Handle->ReleaseLock();
And it goes on like that for hundreds of lines, in one function. Every line has three lines of comments that give no more information than the line of code gives. Every function is hundreds of lines long with multiple "if" and "else" branches. This is nothing more than:
i++;
It is crap, and it doesn't help. Not all comments are good. But I can just imagine the programmer writing it thinking "I'm writing some really good stuff here! Look at all those comments! This MUST be good!". But it's bad. Very, very bad.
How does the PS2 compare to a PC? What would be the specifications of a PC with similar power to a PS2?
Also, it appears that uServ is not open source. So maybe it's not so good after all.
It's similar to if you say "Wood fires make too much pollution to heat my house, so I'm going to use electric heaters". If the electricity comes from a coal-fired power plant, there is still pollution, it's just not directly at your house.
Only if somebody invents a CPU that doesn't melt at 250 degrees Celsius. In the article, it says that's the temperature you need to make this thing work. I think that's a bit too hot for a computer, because it would be quite a fire hazard.
Nobody has any right to decide what products a company sells. If the record companies want to sell these copy-protected CDs, that's up to them. If you think that a record company could make more money by selling non-copy-protected CDs, then start your own record company and show them how it's done. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go down to the video rental shop and complain that the VHS tape they rented me won't play in my CD-ROM drive.
How can they enforce a clause that says that you agree to the terms of the licence by using the software? Do they force you to read the licence before using the software? It's like those signs that I've heard they have at the supermarkets which say something like (I've never read one of these signs, so I'm just guessing here) "By entering this store you agree that we can search your bag when you try to leave". Can you enforce one of those signs? I'm going to the supermarket to buy food, not to read all the signs they stick up all over the place to make sure that I am not "agreeing" to something merely by trying to avoid starvation! Am I required to read all the signs before I enter the store? Even the ones that say "SPECIAL SIX ROLLS OF TOILET PAPER $2.00"? Does anybody read and understand all the terms of a EULA or one of those online "agreements" before they click "OK"? Does "clicking OK" cause a legally binding agreement to be formed? Are law enforcement agents not allowed to enter a pr0n site because of the disclaimer on the front page which says they're not allowed?
So you think Firaxis should be punished for what Infogrames Germany has done? I would much prefer if people didn't send email to that Firaxis address, because the programmers there should be spending their time working furiously on the patch that Civ3 desperately needs, not reading a bunch of mail that has nothing to do with them.
- MPlayer authors claim that their project is
not released under the GPL
- Their project includes a file (ac3-iec958.c)
which was released under the GPL, therefore they
should have released MPlayer under the GPL
- Their project also includes the source code
to several GPLd libraries (libac3, libmpeg2,
libvo) and some other GPLd code as well
- These GPLd libraries are not only not
LGPLd, they are also statically linked, which
greatly weakens the "they are only libraries"
argument
- They really should have released MPlayer under
the GPL
- Warpvision still had no right to use MPlayer's code without permission, even if Warpvision
released their modified code under the GPL
So there we go! Everybody's wrong!Even if we ignore all the libraries, there's still ac3-iec958.c which is in the main MPlayer source directory. It's not in one of those library sub-directories. Also, the libraries distributed with MPlayer are GPL, not LGPL.