The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
Fonts are considered software programs and contain a flag that indicates if they are allowed to be embedded in an electronic document or not. If ITC were to set the flag in these fonts and Adobe ignored it and embedded the font anyway, then Adobe might be considered to be circumventing a copy protection mechanism.
Pretty weak, I know, but that's the only way I can see this being suit falling under the DMCA.
You can't infer exceptions thrown or caught by code that didn't exist when you wrote yours.
True enough, however, you also can't be omniscient and predict every possible type of exception a class might need to throw. Just declaring Throwable or Exception in your throws clause is a cop out. I'm not saying a good exception hierarchy is impossible, just that it can't always be "perfect".
If the exception information is stored in the classes, however, then when you add new code, you can rerun your "exception checker" tool and discover the new "hole" and fix it.
BTW, I haven't analyzed this idea thoroughly, so there may be problems with it in some cases (dynamic loading?), but it seems to make sense.
As for the "lusers" writing empty or otherwise useless exception handlers, I would guess that nearly every C++ or Java programmer has done it. Usually it's accidental (e.g., you add the handler section, then get distracted by a phone call, lunch, etc., then forget to finish it). It happens, and it would be handy to have an easy way to find them.
Is it really too much to ask that the editors of/. take 5 minutes each day to at least give a cursory glance over the headlines of the last day or so? It greatly reduces your credibility.
BTW, I realize that this comment is somewhat of a duplicate of other comments, but since I'm not an editor, I'll side-step any potential hypocrisy.
1. Look at code written by many Java programmers. You will often find try/catch blocks inserted "Just to make the compiler happy". It does nobody any good to hide exceptions this way, and it is extremely common. Bugs can lie dormant for years since they are silently caught and ignored. Checked exceptions are supposed to improve reliability and robustness, not hinder it.
2. Checked exceptions are a compile-time check, and require the programmer to provide information that the compiler could easily gather itself. The C# compiler could (although it doesn't currently) figure out what exceptions are thrown by any given method by examining the source code, and the.class files it links to. The exception info would have to be stored in the.class files, so there is a small downside. A good tool, however, would be able to tell you where all the "holes" are in your exception handling.
Of course, C# doesn't provide such a facility either, so leaving out checked exceptions without substituting something better is still a curious choice.
On a tangential note, I find working with exceptions in Java extremely annoying at times. The JDK often uses exceptions as an error handling mechanism for commonly occuring situations rather than reserving them (exceptions) for "exceptional" cases. That topic, however, has been argued to death, and I won't mention anything further about it.
Conversation with a publisher without Dave Taylor and American McGee presenting for you:
You: "We have this really cool game idea we want to develop!"
Publisher: "And you would be?"
Conversation with a publisher with Dave Taylor and Amercian McGee presenting for you:
Amercian McGee: "I worked for id."
Dave Taylor: "Me too."
Publisher: "How many zeros should I add behind the "1" on the cheque?"
No, really! That's pretty much how it works! If you have successful published titles, then you can easily get money for another title. If you just have an idea and a team, it's much harder to find money.
First of all, I was not the one who hooked it up. Second, it was the only SCSI-equipped system in the office. Third, if you think that connecting a SCSI scanner to a SCSI connection should result in data loss on another device, then YOU are the stupid one.
I've got your picture right here! Give me your email address and I'll send it right out you whimpering little coward!
When you say "catastrophic data loss", I hope you simply mean that the drive failed completely.
I mean seriously, if it made "horrible clunking" noises for "a month or two", and you still suffered "catastrophic data loss", then it's your own fault.
The drive may still be a piece of shite, but at least it gave you plenty of warning!
By the way, I've owned two WD drives, neither of which ever gave me a lick of trouble. Each was in daily use for about two years.
Don't get me started on IBM 75GXP drives though! I've had four out of five fail within two months in a Promise IDE RAID system. Mind you, I never could rule out the Promise controller, and I've had no trouble since RMAing the defective drives and switching to an Adaptec 2400A.
Actually, since LCDs use three "sub-pixels" placed horizontally next to each other for each pixel, a 15" LCD with 1600x1200 resolution actually has much better than 300 "dots" per inch horizontally.
Sub-pixel font rendering technologies such as ClearType make use of this unique property of LCDs to generate amazingly crisp text. See this page for more details.
The actual width of a 15" LCD is about 12", so (1600x3)/12 = 400 "dots" per inch!
Of course, the vertical direction is limited to about 1200/9 = 133 "dots" per inch, but for reading text we need the extra resolution in the horizontal direction much more, so text still looks damn good.
Unfortunately, full-color graphics don't benefit from this "extra resolution", so we still have a ways to go there.
We have a Promise RM8000, an external SCSI device that houses an IDE RAID unit with 8 drive bays.
When we first installed it, we put four 160 gig drives in it and created a RAID 5 array formatted as an NTFS volume. We needed the space right away, so we started using it.
When the remaining four 160 gig drives came in, we converted the disk to a Windows "dynamic disk". This allowed us to simply plug in the four new drives and extend the existing volume onto them.
After a day or so of whizzing and whirring the RAID 5 array was happy with its reorganization and we had a happy little 1 terabyte volume. And in case you are wondering, yes, it really did take almost 24 hours before the RAID array stopped shuttling data around. The volume was available for use immediately, however.
A couple of weeks later we added a high-speed SCSI scanner onto the same SCSI chain as the RM8000. Suddenly the drive was not visible in Windows anymore. We checked for proper SCSI termination, etc., but it wouldn't show up.
We removed the scanner and put all cable and termination settings back to their previous values. The drive showed up again, but Windows said that it was Unallocated!!!
That's right...our 1 terabyte drive was gone...poof! We had 600 gigs of data on that thing!
Promise told us that what we were describing was "impossible". Microsoft also had no explanation. Thanks...thanks a lot.
I probably won't touch IDE RAID or dynamic disks ever again, unless I see some real proof that they have become much more reliable.
Re:Good conclusion, poor article
on
Qt vs MFC
·
· Score: 1
You could make a MultiAction class that you can Add and Remove any number of actions to/from.
Granted this would be nicer integrated directly into the framework, but you can still do it yourself if necessary.
It is just so sad to see an ADSL connection with a 96kbps upstream rate. This is quite simply not a broadband connection. U.S. phone companies seem to be the worst offenders in this area.
Our DSL in British Columbia is at least 640kbps upstream, which is much better, though still not great.
ISPs will tell you that it's so people don't run servers. What about video conferencing? One of the main reasons the "general public" gets broadband is to see the grandkids or other family and friends over the internet.
I've even seen advertisements from the ISPs showing video conferencing as a feature. Sure, it will work if the other guy has a real broadband connection, but not if he's on a crappy ADSL connection too.
They had booth babes wearing a similar getup (but without a 15" display) at the 2001 E3. Each girl had 4 (as I recall) GBAs strapped to her waist. Each unit was attached via a thin cable on a recoil mechanism so it snapped back into place.
Judging by the looks on some of the girls' faces, I think they were equipped with geek-recoil mechanisms. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by four fat, smelly computer geeks playing games and staring at your tits! (Or so I'm told!)
Since I quite clearly stated that I am using it stand-alone, your statement is incorrect. Also, since I was not the one who asked for or implemented the ability for it to run stand-alone, one might reasonably expect that others have been wanting the feature.
PHP may not currently be widely used as a stand-alone scripting language, but neither was Perl at one time.
It appears we basically agree, but that my definition of an "idea" is quite different from yours. To me, a "mere idea", as the USPTO calls it, is nothing more than a whimsical passing thought.
An actual idea, on the other hand, is the innovation that will make the patent unique. It's the thing that the patent describes.
Slashdot Mirror
The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
Fonts are considered software programs and contain a flag that indicates if they are allowed to be embedded in an electronic document or not. If ITC were to set the flag in these fonts and Adobe ignored it and embedded the font anyway, then Adobe might be considered to be circumventing a copy protection mechanism.
Pretty weak, I know, but that's the only way I can see this being suit falling under the DMCA.
You can't infer exceptions thrown or caught by code that didn't exist when you wrote yours.
True enough, however, you also can't be omniscient and predict every possible type of exception a class might need to throw. Just declaring Throwable or Exception in your throws clause is a cop out. I'm not saying a good exception hierarchy is impossible, just that it can't always be "perfect".
If the exception information is stored in the classes, however, then when you add new code, you can rerun your "exception checker" tool and discover the new "hole" and fix it.
BTW, I haven't analyzed this idea thoroughly, so there may be problems with it in some cases (dynamic loading?), but it seems to make sense.
As for the "lusers" writing empty or otherwise useless exception handlers, I would guess that nearly every C++ or Java programmer has done it. Usually it's accidental (e.g., you add the handler section, then get distracted by a phone call, lunch, etc., then forget to finish it). It happens, and it would be handy to have an easy way to find them.
Is it really too much to ask that the editors of /. take 5 minutes each day to at least give a cursory glance over the headlines of the last day or so? It greatly reduces your credibility.
BTW, I realize that this comment is somewhat of a duplicate of other comments, but since I'm not an editor, I'll side-step any potential hypocrisy.
OK. Why would you leave out checked exceptions?
.class files it links to. The exception info would have to be stored in the .class files, so there is a small downside. A good tool, however, would be able to tell you where all the "holes" are in your exception handling.
1. Look at code written by many Java programmers. You will often find try/catch blocks inserted "Just to make the compiler happy". It does nobody any good to hide exceptions this way, and it is extremely common. Bugs can lie dormant for years since they are silently caught and ignored. Checked exceptions are supposed to improve reliability and robustness, not hinder it.
2. Checked exceptions are a compile-time check, and require the programmer to provide information that the compiler could easily gather itself. The C# compiler could (although it doesn't currently) figure out what exceptions are thrown by any given method by examining the source code, and the
Of course, C# doesn't provide such a facility either, so leaving out checked exceptions without substituting something better is still a curious choice.
On a tangential note, I find working with exceptions in Java extremely annoying at times. The JDK often uses exceptions as an error handling mechanism for commonly occuring situations rather than reserving them (exceptions) for "exceptional" cases. That topic, however, has been argued to death, and I won't mention anything further about it.
Would everyone please stop using theft analogies to refer to copyright violations .
They are completely different things with completely different laws.
If public perception is that music sharing is theft, then it will be much harder to get to the promised land of "Open Source Music".
You mean like this Floppy Disc Interface for Memory Stick Media
Or like this SanDisk FlashPath SmartMedia Floppy Adaptor
Conversation with a publisher without Dave Taylor and American McGee presenting for you:
You: "We have this really cool game idea we want to develop!"
Publisher: "And you would be?"
Conversation with a publisher with Dave Taylor and Amercian McGee presenting for you:
Amercian McGee: "I worked for id."
Dave Taylor: "Me too."
Publisher: "How many zeros should I add behind the "1" on the cheque?"
No, really! That's pretty much how it works! If you have successful published titles, then you can easily get money for another title. If you just have an idea and a team, it's much harder to find money.
First of all, I was not the one who hooked it up. Second, it was the only SCSI-equipped system in the office. Third, if you think that connecting a SCSI scanner to a SCSI connection should result in data loss on another device, then YOU are the stupid one.
I've got your picture right here! Give me your email address and I'll send it right out you whimpering little coward!
When you say "catastrophic data loss", I hope you simply mean that the drive failed completely.
I mean seriously, if it made "horrible clunking" noises for "a month or two", and you still suffered "catastrophic data loss", then it's your own fault.
The drive may still be a piece of shite, but at least it gave you plenty of warning!
By the way, I've owned two WD drives, neither of which ever gave me a lick of trouble. Each was in daily use for about two years.
Don't get me started on IBM 75GXP drives though! I've had four out of five fail within two months in a Promise IDE RAID system. Mind you, I never could rule out the Promise controller, and I've had no trouble since RMAing the defective drives and switching to an Adaptec 2400A.
Actually, since LCDs use three "sub-pixels" placed horizontally next to each other for each pixel, a 15" LCD with 1600x1200 resolution actually has much better than 300 "dots" per inch horizontally.
Sub-pixel font rendering technologies such as ClearType make use of this unique property of LCDs to generate amazingly crisp text. See this page for more details.
The actual width of a 15" LCD is about 12", so (1600x3)/12 = 400 "dots" per inch!
Of course, the vertical direction is limited to about 1200/9 = 133 "dots" per inch, but for reading text we need the extra resolution in the horizontal direction much more, so text still looks damn good.
Unfortunately, full-color graphics don't benefit from this "extra resolution", so we still have a ways to go there.
We have a Promise RM8000, an external SCSI device that houses an IDE RAID unit with 8 drive bays.
When we first installed it, we put four 160 gig drives in it and created a RAID 5 array formatted as an NTFS volume. We needed the space right away, so we started using it.
When the remaining four 160 gig drives came in, we converted the disk to a Windows "dynamic disk". This allowed us to simply plug in the four new drives and extend the existing volume onto them.
After a day or so of whizzing and whirring the RAID 5 array was happy with its reorganization and we had a happy little 1 terabyte volume. And in case you are wondering, yes, it really did take almost 24 hours before the RAID array stopped shuttling data around. The volume was available for use immediately, however.
A couple of weeks later we added a high-speed SCSI scanner onto the same SCSI chain as the RM8000. Suddenly the drive was not visible in Windows anymore. We checked for proper SCSI termination, etc., but it wouldn't show up.
We removed the scanner and put all cable and termination settings back to their previous values. The drive showed up again, but Windows said that it was Unallocated!!!
That's right...our 1 terabyte drive was gone...poof! We had 600 gigs of data on that thing!
Promise told us that what we were describing was "impossible". Microsoft also had no explanation. Thanks...thanks a lot.
I probably won't touch IDE RAID or dynamic disks ever again, unless I see some real proof that they have become much more reliable.
You could make a MultiAction class that you can Add and Remove any number of actions to/from.
Granted this would be nicer integrated directly into the framework, but you can still do it yourself if necessary.
I agree that hrm is correct, however, it was not Richard Menta who wrote the incorrect quote.
He claims it is the title of the email sent to him by his Edison Research contact.
It is just so sad to see an ADSL connection with a 96kbps upstream rate. This is quite simply not a broadband connection. U.S. phone companies seem to be the worst offenders in this area.
Our DSL in British Columbia is at least 640kbps upstream, which is much better, though still not great.
ISPs will tell you that it's so people don't run servers. What about video conferencing ? One of the main reasons the "general public" gets broadband is to see the grandkids or other family and friends over the internet.
I've even seen advertisements from the ISPs showing video conferencing as a feature. Sure, it will work if the other guy has a real broadband connection, but not if he's on a crappy ADSL connection too.
It's just sick.
My brother's Dell has 1400x1050 resolution on a 14.1" screen! Now they're selling 1600x1200 on a 15" screen!
:-)
How much better resolution do you want?
I forgot to mention that the ones I saw at E3 were similar to the belt-unit shown in the story, but much more high-tech looking.
They had booth babes wearing a similar getup (but without a 15" display) at the 2001 E3. Each girl had 4 (as I recall) GBAs strapped to her waist. Each unit was attached via a thin cable on a recoil mechanism so it snapped back into place.
Judging by the looks on some of the girls' faces, I think they were equipped with geek-recoil mechanisms. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by four fat, smelly computer geeks playing games and staring at your tits! (Or so I'm told!)
"You'sa soundin' like you be needin' a Pepsi, Ani."
That's the funniest thing I've read in some time. Thanks for the good laugh!
Can be but isn't.
Since I quite clearly stated that I am using it stand-alone, your statement is incorrect. Also, since I was not the one who asked for or implemented the ability for it to run stand-alone, one might reasonably expect that others have been wanting the feature.
PHP may not currently be widely used as a stand-alone scripting language, but neither was Perl at one time.
I guess that makes you yet another bozo on the bus of folks who think that PHP is only good for CGI.
It can be used as a generic scripting language too. It can be called stand-alone. No web server required.
I'm using it as a code generation engine (generating C++ code from XML metadata).
The key here is that they "offer" a huge choice of things to install. You don't have to install EVERYTHING.
WinXP would come on many CDs too if MS Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, Visual Studio, etc. were all included.
Claiming that "this is exactly the reason I will never use Linux" is just zealous rhetoric.
Now that I've proven your reason for avoiding Linux wrong will you try it now?
I'd put Canada's nuclear safety record up against the United States' any day.
Damn bastards! They changed it fast!
One of their screenshots shows a CD burning utilty about to burn an ISO image file.
/home/admin/snapshot1.png
The file is named:
It appears we basically agree, but that my definition of an "idea" is quite different from yours. To me, a "mere idea", as the USPTO calls it, is nothing more than a whimsical passing thought.
:-)
/.
An actual idea, on the other hand, is the innovation that will make the patent unique. It's the thing that the patent describes.
Perhaps I've been too influenced by those Invention Submission Corporation commercials.
P.S. IANAL, but IPO on