1)"I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so it's not a lost sale" OK, so let's say I go in to get my car's wheels rebalanced (or some other service). When they're done.. I just drive off without paying. Have I done anything wrong? Well, what if "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway"? So it's not a lost sale!
Yes it is. In the time they spent balancing your wheels, they were unable to do other revenue-earning work. The time and effort involved here is a finite resource. This is in contrast to software, where copies can be made without using up the original.
Your example is more like walking into a shop, and stealing the CDs from the shelves without paying for them; this really does represent a lost sale, as the shop will no longer be able to sell those CDs. I doubt this is anywhere near as common as the "piracy" that the likes of the BSA are making a fuss about.
Similarly, linux and other X-Windows systems implements focus-follows-pointer, and doesn't insist on raising a window when it gets focus. This is a huge time saver when you get used to it. As far as I can tell, neither Windows nor OS X permits this.
Windows does have half-hearted support for this. TweakUI can turn it on -- or just edit HKCU/Control Panel/Desktop/UserPreferencesMask and set the bottom bit. (If this value is stored as 4 bytes rather than a single DWORD, remember that it's a little-endian platform, so edit the first byte.) TweakUI does some magic to make it take effect immediately; if editing it manually, you may need to reboot or relogin before it makes a difference.
This usually works fairly well provided you don't use the mouse buttons at all. Unfortunately many programs will bring themselves to the top of the Z-order whenever they're clicked on. (One notable exception is MS Excel, which usually stays where it's put. Clicking on the titlebar will still bring the window to the top.)
Worse still, there are a few programs that misguidedly bring themselves to the top whenever they get the focus. This is most unpleasant. (The last such program I found was Paint Shop Pro 9.)
nVidia's control-panel applet used to have problems with its pop-out tree window, but they seem to have fixed it in recent driver versions.
And they don't have a way to lower a window either; in X-Windows it's a single click. This means that you can push a window to the bottom when you're done with it, and get quickly to the next window. With Windows or OS X, you have to go through a real song and dance to locate and raise a hidden window (which you often didn't want to hide).
Alt+Esc will push the currently-focused window to the back; I make frequent use of this. And it also has an inverse: Shift+Alt+Esc will bring the backmost window to the top, which is useful if you've just buried a window by mistake.
Because the prototype for printf() doesn't explicitly list its argument types (for obvious reasons), the compiler has to use its default function argument conversions. In particular, this means that any floating-point parameter to printf() will be passed as a double rather than a float.
As sizeof(double)!=sizeof(int) (at least on the platform you're using), merely swapping the %d and %f over doesn't work. Assuming your ints are the same size as your floats, try replacing the last printf with something like
printf("a: %d, c: %f\n",*(int*)&a,*(float*)&c);
Or you could just swap the values back again before printing them.:-)
I've not got a gmail account, so I can't easily try it and see for myself how it behaves, but the descriptions are rather confusing.
On one hand, it says that it "creates a virtual filesystem", that it "literally adds a new drive", and that it "acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer".
But then elsewhere, it says that it "is a Shell Namespace Extension", and the only usage examples given all require the use of explorer.exe, which suggest that it's not implemented a full filesystem after all.
So which is it?
Does it implement a new local drive, from which files can be accessed using any existing program?
Or does it implement a new network drive, so that at least UNC-aware programs will work?
Or is it really restricted to force the use of explorer (or other shell-api-using tools) for file manipulation?
Even if it is restricted in this way, it still seems a worthy project -- but wouldn't it be fairer to warn people first? Or if it's not restricted, how about documenting the ability to e.g. save files directly there from any program?
>Don't forget that most of the world uses Celcius, and wouldn't have a clue what those strange 'F' units are.
Yes, but the rest of us can always get a clue if we don't already know the formula (F=9C/5+32). Google will also cope with Kelvin (K=C+273.15), but not Reamur (Re=4C/5) or Rankine (R=9K/5)
(Sorry: there should be an acute accent on the 'e' of "Reamur" and "Re", but entering a literal one, using é, and using é all seem to fail.)
Rather than just rushing into designing yet more features for the language, shouldn't existing proposals such as This 5-year-old proposal for overloading
be taken into consideration?:-)
Surely getting this much unsolicited mail from a single source is tantamount to spam. If it's all from the same sender, or if the content is more-or-less identical, then it should be fairly trivial to block it.
I had a very similar thing happen to me a while back. It was caused by a hardware problem (I was using a pair of IBM deskstar drives), so I never did recover quite all the data, but I did manage to get the RAID array back together. By a lucky coincidence, this happened shortly after drivers/ide/hptraid.h was added to the linux kernel, so I had somewhere to look for inspiration.
This file describes the structure of one sector somewhere near the start of each disk. (Sorry, I don't remember exactly which one.) The magic number had changed on one of the disks from HPT_MAGIC_OK to HPT_MAGIC_BAD. Editing it back again was sufficient to reconnect the drives.
Re:MFC and language extensions
on
wxWindows vs. MFC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
#define for if (true) for
This is a very dangerous definition, as it invites a following else to be misunderstood. For example, it breaks the following:
does anybody know what the MS-BUGFIX.EXE file/does/ anyway?
I've not looked thoroughly (just a quick look with a disassembler at parts of it), so the following is incomplete, but among other things, it looks as though it can:
Remove policies that prevent passwords from getting stored in the registry
Watch every 150ms for a window entitled "Connect To", and when found select a checkbox (probably the one to remember passwords, but I've not got DUN installed on this machine, so I can't check)
Grab all passwords stored in the registry, plus details of the machine's IP address, and that of any DNS and WINS servers.
Connect using SMTP to smtp.super.net.ph, and send these details (and a few more, e.g. username and machine name) to mailme@super.net.ph
Do something (not investigated what) with WinFAT32.exe
Add policy to disable registry editing
Set Internet Explorer's start page to about:blank
It seems incredibly poorly written. For example, lots of functions return a char* pointing to a local array. Extra padding arrays are added in an attempt to stop the stack from getting overwritten before the value is used.
But with SysRq not around, you'll just finish up customising bindings to mimic its function, as its particular task can't (simply) occur without a button to do it. I think that that symbol which is normally found amid W and R is possibly a good option for this, as it normally hasn't such an important job to do; it's usually fairly straightforward to vary what you say, to avoid wanting it to work in a standard way.
>Hmm.. Actually, claim 1 says compressed. Prior art for this, pre 1995?
Surely any digital recording can be considered a form of lossy compression, as only a finite number of samples is taken.
IANAL, but it doesn't appear as though the patent would affect much: there seems to be a very specific set of requirements, all of which have to exist at once in the same apparatus. For example, according to claim 15, anything without a wireless modem wouldn't be covered. Perhaps their lawyers made their money by doing a lengthy investigation to find a particular combination of existing ideas that nobody happend to have used before.
I think I'll go and patent something very similar, but with the additional claim that it should "be orange with blue spots, and the word 'wibble' written in yellow on the front". Or does anyone know of any prior art for that?
Slashdot Mirror
1)"I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so it's not a lost sale"
OK, so let's say I go in to get my car's wheels rebalanced (or some other service). When they're done.. I just drive off without paying. Have I done anything wrong? Well, what if "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway"? So it's not a lost sale!
Yes it is. In the time they spent balancing your wheels, they were unable to do other revenue-earning work. The time and effort involved here is a finite resource. This is in contrast to software, where copies can be made without using up the original.
Your example is more like walking into a shop, and stealing the CDs from the shelves without paying for them; this really does represent a lost sale, as the shop will no longer be able to sell those CDs. I doubt this is anywhere near as common as the "piracy" that the likes of the BSA are making a fuss about.
Windows does have half-hearted support for this. TweakUI can turn it on -- or just edit HKCU/Control Panel/Desktop/UserPreferencesMask and set the bottom bit. (If this value is stored as 4 bytes rather than a single DWORD, remember that it's a little-endian platform, so edit the first byte.) TweakUI does some magic to make it take effect immediately; if editing it manually, you may need to reboot or relogin before it makes a difference.
This usually works fairly well provided you don't use the mouse buttons at all. Unfortunately many programs will bring themselves to the top of the Z-order whenever they're clicked on. (One notable exception is MS Excel, which usually stays where it's put. Clicking on the titlebar will still bring the window to the top.)
Worse still, there are a few programs that misguidedly bring themselves to the top whenever they get the focus. This is most unpleasant. (The last such program I found was Paint Shop Pro 9.)
nVidia's control-panel applet used to have problems with its pop-out tree window, but they seem to have fixed it in recent driver versions.
Alt+Esc will push the currently-focused window to the back; I make frequent use of this. And it also has an inverse: Shift+Alt+Esc will bring the backmost window to the top, which is useful if you've just buried a window by mistake.
Because the prototype for printf() doesn't explicitly list its argument types (for obvious reasons), the compiler has to use its default function argument conversions. In particular, this means that any floating-point parameter to printf() will be passed as a double rather than a float.
As sizeof(double)!=sizeof(int) (at least on the platform you're using), merely swapping the %d and %f over doesn't work. Assuming your ints are the same size as your floats, try replacing the last printf with something like
Or you could just swap the values back again before printing them. :-)
You can do the same trick with gcc, using some portable inline assembler:
I've not got a gmail account, so I can't easily try it and see for myself how it behaves, but the descriptions are rather confusing.
On one hand, it says that it "creates a virtual filesystem", that it "literally adds a new drive", and that it "acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer".
But then elsewhere, it says that it "is a Shell Namespace Extension", and the only usage examples given all require the use of explorer.exe, which suggest that it's not implemented a full filesystem after all.
So which is it?
Even if it is restricted in this way, it still seems a worthy project -- but wouldn't it be fairer to warn people first? Or if it's not restricted, how about documenting the ability to e.g. save files directly there from any program?
>Don't forget that most of the world uses Celcius, and wouldn't have a clue what those strange 'F' units are.
Yes, but the rest of us can always get a clue if we don't already know the formula (F=9C/5+32). Google will also cope with Kelvin (K=C+273.15), but not Reamur (Re=4C/5) or Rankine (R=9K/5)
(Sorry: there should be an acute accent on the 'e' of "Reamur" and "Re", but entering a literal one, using é, and using é all seem to fail.)
Rather than just rushing into designing yet more features for the language, shouldn't existing proposals such as This 5-year-old proposal for overloading be taken into consideration? :-)
>50 to 100 emails from the RIAA every week
Surely getting this much unsolicited mail from a single source is tantamount to spam. If it's all from the same sender, or if the content is more-or-less identical, then it should be fairly trivial to block it.
I had a very similar thing happen to me a while back. It was caused by a hardware problem (I was using a pair of IBM deskstar drives), so I never did recover quite all the data, but I did manage to get the RAID array back together. By a lucky coincidence, this happened shortly after drivers/ide/hptraid.h was added to the linux kernel, so I had somewhere to look for inspiration.
This file describes the structure of one sector somewhere near the start of each disk. (Sorry, I don't remember exactly which one.) The magic number had changed on one of the disks from HPT_MAGIC_OK to HPT_MAGIC_BAD. Editing it back again was sufficient to reconnect the drives.
This is a very dangerous definition, as it invites a following else to be misunderstood. For example, it breaks the following:
if(foo) for(int i=0;i<42;++i){...}
else cout<<"Oops!\n";
A better fix is therefore
#define for if(0);else for
(Or use false instead of 0 if you prefer, but there are probably still compilers out there that don't understand bools.)
Surely using the format described in RFC2550 would be a more sensible way to represent the date? Particularly if they keep delaying it. :-)
I've not looked thoroughly (just a quick look with a disassembler at parts of it), so the following is incomplete, but among other things, it looks as though it can:
It seems incredibly poorly written. For example, lots of functions return a char* pointing to a local array. Extra padding arrays are added in an attempt to stop the stack from getting overwritten before the value is used.
>Polluting the votes of those who care with those who don't risk random results
That's easily solved: add a "Rob is a turnip" vote.
But with SysRq not around, you'll just finish up customising bindings to mimic its function, as its particular task can't (simply) occur without a button to do it. I think that that symbol which is normally found amid W and R is possibly a good option for this, as it normally hasn't such an important job to do; it's usually fairly straightforward to vary what you say, to avoid wanting it to work in a standard way.
No. But distracting animations on web pages are evil, so this is another good reason to use PNG instead of GIF.
>Hmm.. Actually, claim 1 says compressed. Prior art for this, pre 1995?
Surely any digital recording can be considered a form of lossy compression, as only a finite number of samples is taken.
IANAL, but it doesn't appear as though the patent would affect much: there seems to be a very specific set of requirements, all of which have to exist at once in the same apparatus. For example, according to claim 15, anything without a wireless modem wouldn't be covered. Perhaps their lawyers made their money by doing a lengthy investigation to find a particular combination of existing ideas that nobody happend to have used before.
I think I'll go and patent something very similar, but with the additional claim that it should "be orange with blue spots, and the word 'wibble' written in yellow on the front". Or does anyone know of any prior art for that?
Surely the solution is simple: write everything in INTERCAL.