I don't see anything specific to them seeking monetary damages (obligatory IANAL). From Green Welling LLP's site:
The class action lawsuit seeks to enjoin Nintendo from continuing its unfair or deceptive business practices as it relates to the Nintendo Wii.The lawsuit also seeks an injunction that requires Nintendo to correct the defect in the Wii remote and to provide a refund to the purchaser or to replace the defective Wii remote with a Wii remote that functions as it is warranted and intended. If you would like additional information regarding the Nintendo WII Replacement Strap
I might be hopelessly naive but it seems that they are only seeking replacement remotes. Which I think Nintendo was going to do anyway...?
Cutting files is stupid ...cutting is a bad solution to the problem
I'm fairly new to the Mac world, but I've really missed the ability to cut files. Windows has it, and it works pretty well, in fact, it's one of the few things that seems to work exactly as I'd expect: if the cut fails for some reason, the file is left alone. I don't see how this is 'stupid'.
It just passes references by value. At the risk of sounding pendantic, I'm pretty sure that's what 'pass by reference' means. You aren't doing anything different when you stick an & in front of your objects in a method call in C++.
Sorry I should have been a bit more clear, the native types are passed by value, but in the case of passing an object, it's the reference that's copied into the new stack frame. C++ will, by default, make copies of objects that are passed into methods (analogous to calling 'clone' in Java).
I never used Java (tried it a bit and intend to use it soon), but that sounds terrible. I don't like special cases in languages. It's actually not really a special case when you consider what's going on in the JVM. Aside from the native types (int, char, boolean...) the only other type is reference. All of these types are copied onto the new stack frame when a method is called (it is pass by value). Working with objects implicilty involves working with these references, but the abstraction works pretty well so you don't have to think about it. Like I said, I thought it would be bad at first too, but I've not found it to be a problem in experience.
For the record, I'm by no means a Java evangelist. There's a few design decisions that seem wrong at this point (checked exceptions for example). But, thinking that because a language is 'harder' immediately makes it 'better' is not the way to go. I don't think this is the point you're making, but some people seem to think that way.
What kind of language would have resulted from passing variables of type int by value and objects by reference? Sorry, but I don't think I would want to program in that.
But that is exactly what Java does. I thought it sounded bad at first too, but it works really well.
Is it so hard to accept that there might be languages which are "better" (I don't even know, if harder and needing more experienced programmers is "better") in some way or other?
When I first started on Java (I was 'forced' to learn it for a Uni class) I thought it was lame. 'How will I be able to do anything without pointers?!' After a few weeks I gave up the ghost deciding that there was a lot of stuff in Java that made life easier. C++ does need developers that are very experienced--in C++, but I don't think that necessarily makes them 'better'. As I said, it has its place in a few specialised areas, but it's not the general purpose tool it one was. It just seems like Bjarne can't really see that.
It would be silly to fault someone for not having 20/20 foresight, so I can hardly blame BS for not including things that we know now to be good, but not necessarily then. One example would be pass by value, which at the time seemed like the safest default for parameter passing (the thinking was probably to avoid unintentional side effects). Extending this to objects though causes pains involving copy constructors and other esoteric stuff. Java decided on always pass by reference, and from my experience, unintentioned side effects almost never come up (the fact that the 'native objects' were immutable might have helped).
Yet to read these articles, it's almost like he still thinks that C++ is the top language, and anyone who's not using it is just a poorer programmer who can't handle the power.
When I hear him reply with stuff about Java's success coming from 'massive corporate backing' it just sounds like tired whining. C++ did fill an important role, it introduced a lot of people to OO by piggy backing on a very popular language. It also allowed for OO programming on a lot slower hardware. But the cost was it wasn't much of an abstraction. I think it can be put to rest for the majority of projects. There's still some areas where it will shine for quite awhile (graphics maybe) but those are the minority.
decentralization, remixability, co-creation, and their side-effect of emergent systems
I have read this type of thing quite a few times in articles discussing web 2.0. It's one of the reasons the whole thing sounds like hype. What are some examples of these? (not trolling, honestly curious)
I think it's always a good idea, did you have a problem in mind?
I agree and no I didn't. I think that is what lead to my initial confusion about the issue, I couldn't conceive of a case where parameterization shouldn't be used so I thought that perhaps this 'hole' was a problem that affected parametrized statements. (ie. everyone should be using parameterized statements, so the only hole a db can have is in it's native escaping functions...) I understand the issue much better now, and for what it's worth I think the Postgres team has been more than reasonable in fixing this.
Someone in another thread mentioned 'query by example' forms as not being suitable for prepared statements, but even those I've done before using parameters (there was some string parsing before hand to figure out operators, but I managed to get the '?' marks in in the end).
which will call the native escaping function for you in a portable way (which is a big help if you want to support multiple databases)
That's one of the things that I've really come to appreciate with JDBC. Playing with Postgres has been very fun simply because their was almost no problem moving over from Oracle. This isn't strictly because of JDBC either. I think I must have come to Postgres at the right time. I installed it on my local windows box first (flawlessly) which apparently wasn't a normal option for quite awhile. The pgAmin tool is quite handy and seemingly full featured. The support for foreign keys, constraints, stored procs, and all that stuff that I've really come to appreciate is all there! I didn't mean to turn this into a PostgreSQL fan rant, but there was so many bad things I heard about it before trying it out myself. Thus far, it would seem most of those things are myths that have been fixed (or perhaps never existed in the first place).
Yeah after re-reading the article I realized they appeared to be focusing on a PHP function, my bad... It seems strange to me that this could even be considered an injection hole on Postgres's end of things. Maybe someone can point out a case where parameterized PreparedStatement style SQL is NOT a good idea, or is it just a case where some languages have better 'off the shelf' support for them?
I've only recently begun playing with PostgreSQL coming from Oracle. I've also been primarily a Java (JDBC) guy for the last couple years. I'm not sure I completely understand where this vulnerability lies. Would a Java PreparedStatement be vulnerable to this? Would the Postgres implementation of JDBC use 'addslashes()' to bind variables in a prepared statement? Or is this a higher level function? (I have not come across it myself, but like I said I'm still pretty new to Postgres).
I guess I see "affects PostgreSQL servers exposed to untrusted input, such as input coming from Web forms" and wonder if they're talking about some further functionality where postgres acts like a web server. My understanding of PreparedStatements is that they are bound at a very low level in the db to allow for maximum speed through caching etc...
I believe SVG is the answer for showing pictorial representations of dynamically generated data on the web. Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs etc. are just way too useful. The web is still all about giving people access to information in an easy to digest format.
Of course SVG isn't all that new, but good support for it has been sorely lacking. Adobe's plugin is the best of a bad lot (ok I've only seen Corel's and IE's native support), and I can't imagine Adobe's gonna be pushing to fix up their's with the recent acquisition of Macromedia. On top of that, my Firefox doesn't seem to like the Adobe plugin much (actually crashes!).
SVG should be standard in browsers. Not having it should be like not having the ability to view jpegs. (And yes the "spamvertising" possibilities suck but at the risk of paraphrasing a certain someone, if we don't adopt SVG because of that, then the spammers have already won.)
Aside from what others have mentioned about choosing the right algorithm in the first place, it seems that with the way a lot of hardware optimizes stuff these days (eg intels out-of-order execution) that pre runtime optimization should be less of a focus. I seem to remember reading that the latest CPU's can consider many hundreds of instructions when reordering. At this level, does what the compiler do even matter?
Aside from the fact that I agree silly nudity in movies serves no purpose, are you saying that if it wasn't for the topless women this movie is fine for your pre-teen boys? I seem to remember a lot of people killing each other (maybe it was all flashbacks, but it was still depicted pretty greusomely).
Somehow violence and murder is fine for children but a breast is not? I'd like to believe that there are many more people having sex in this world than there are people killing each other. Maybe I'm wrong.
The use of pop-up ads really seem to suggest that they don't ever use the web. Or at least not ofen enough to know how annoying, and pretty useless, pop up (or pop under) ads are.
It's similiar to how so many of the top spammers admit to being computer illiterate before discovering spam as a way to make money. And it's the same reason scalpers are rarely fans of the band or sports team they sell tickets for. Anyone with a vested interest in the activity will not want to destroy it.
Alright, I'll admit that pop ups are not destroying the web, but I stand by the fact that those who advocate their use must rarely surf the web themselves.
Methinks your like me--stuck in North America. The stuff that comes on commercial radio where I am is pretty crappy, if only because it all sounds the f@%!@in same!
Australia has a kick ass national radio station though, called triple J. Just so happens that the author of this piece is a triple J broadcaster. Listening to this station does make you want to buy albums again. Only problem is so many of them arent on shelves here *sigh*.
Filesharing or no filesharing, when's the record labels gonna wise up to the fact that the gooey-soft-pop-rock hegemony that is commercial radio is whats really behiund the decline of album sales.
I highly recommend triple J radio:
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/
Why would I ever want to send a document to a client in.doc format? My tables will appear outlined, abbreviations and names will have scwiggly red lines under them, bullet points scwiggly green. If I want to send a professional looking document I might make it in Word, but I'll definitely convert it to pdf before sending. And wouldn't you know it, open office has that feature built in!
And another thing, in my experience I've had way more problems moving between different versions of word than open office. Even the SAME versions of word on different machines.
Slashdot Mirror
The class action lawsuit seeks to enjoin Nintendo from continuing its unfair or deceptive business practices as it relates to the Nintendo Wii.The lawsuit also seeks an injunction that requires Nintendo to correct the defect in the Wii remote and to provide a refund to the purchaser or to replace the defective Wii remote with a Wii remote that functions as it is warranted and intended. If you would like additional information regarding the Nintendo WII Replacement Strap
I might be hopelessly naive but it seems that they are only seeking replacement remotes. Which I think Nintendo was going to do anyway...?
Cutting files is stupid
...cutting is a bad solution to the problem
I'm fairly new to the Mac world, but I've really missed the ability to cut files. Windows has it, and it works pretty well, in fact, it's one of the few things that seems to work exactly as I'd expect: if the cut fails for some reason, the file is left alone. I don't see how this is 'stupid'.
Sorry I should have been a bit more clear, the native types are passed by value, but in the case of passing an object, it's the reference that's copied into the new stack frame. C++ will, by default, make copies of objects that are passed into methods (analogous to calling 'clone' in Java).
For the record, I'm by no means a Java evangelist. There's a few design decisions that seem wrong at this point (checked exceptions for example). But, thinking that because a language is 'harder' immediately makes it 'better' is not the way to go. I don't think this is the point you're making, but some people seem to think that way.
What kind of language would have resulted from passing variables of type int by value and objects by reference? Sorry, but I don't think I would want to program in that.
But that is exactly what Java does. I thought it sounded bad at first too, but it works really well.Is it so hard to accept that there might be languages which are "better" (I don't even know, if harder and needing more experienced programmers is "better") in some way or other?
When I first started on Java (I was 'forced' to learn it for a Uni class) I thought it was lame. 'How will I be able to do anything without pointers?!' After a few weeks I gave up the ghost deciding that there was a lot of stuff in Java that made life easier. C++ does need developers that are very experienced--in C++, but I don't think that necessarily makes them 'better'. As I said, it has its place in a few specialised areas, but it's not the general purpose tool it one was. It just seems like Bjarne can't really see that.It would be silly to fault someone for not having 20/20 foresight, so I can hardly blame BS for not including things that we know now to be good, but not necessarily then. One example would be pass by value, which at the time seemed like the safest default for parameter passing (the thinking was probably to avoid unintentional side effects). Extending this to objects though causes pains involving copy constructors and other esoteric stuff. Java decided on always pass by reference, and from my experience, unintentioned side effects almost never come up (the fact that the 'native objects' were immutable might have helped).
Yet to read these articles, it's almost like he still thinks that C++ is the top language, and anyone who's not using it is just a poorer programmer who can't handle the power. When I hear him reply with stuff about Java's success coming from 'massive corporate backing' it just sounds like tired whining. C++ did fill an important role, it introduced a lot of people to OO by piggy backing on a very popular language. It also allowed for OO programming on a lot slower hardware. But the cost was it wasn't much of an abstraction. I think it can be put to rest for the majority of projects. There's still some areas where it will shine for quite awhile (graphics maybe) but those are the minority.
decentralization, remixability, co-creation, and their side-effect of emergent systems
I have read this type of thing quite a few times in articles discussing web 2.0. It's one of the reasons the whole thing sounds like hype. What are some examples of these? (not trolling, honestly curious)
I think it's always a good idea, did you have a problem in mind?
I agree and no I didn't. I think that is what lead to my initial confusion about the issue, I couldn't conceive of a case where parameterization shouldn't be used so I thought that perhaps this 'hole' was a problem that affected parametrized statements. (ie. everyone should be using parameterized statements, so the only hole a db can have is in it's native escaping functions...) I understand the issue much better now, and for what it's worth I think the Postgres team has been more than reasonable in fixing this.
Someone in another thread mentioned 'query by example' forms as not being suitable for prepared statements, but even those I've done before using parameters (there was some string parsing before hand to figure out operators, but I managed to get the '?' marks in in the end).
which will call the native escaping function for you in a portable way (which is a big help if you want to support multiple databases)
That's one of the things that I've really come to appreciate with JDBC. Playing with Postgres has been very fun simply because their was almost no problem moving over from Oracle. This isn't strictly because of JDBC either. I think I must have come to Postgres at the right time. I installed it on my local windows box first (flawlessly) which apparently wasn't a normal option for quite awhile. The pgAmin tool is quite handy and seemingly full featured. The support for foreign keys, constraints, stored procs, and all that stuff that I've really come to appreciate is all there! I didn't mean to turn this into a PostgreSQL fan rant, but there was so many bad things I heard about it before trying it out myself. Thus far, it would seem most of those things are myths that have been fixed (or perhaps never existed in the first place).
Yeah after re-reading the article I realized they appeared to be focusing on a PHP function, my bad... It seems strange to me that this could even be considered an injection hole on Postgres's end of things. Maybe someone can point out a case where parameterized PreparedStatement style SQL is NOT a good idea, or is it just a case where some languages have better 'off the shelf' support for them?
I've only recently begun playing with PostgreSQL coming from Oracle. I've also been primarily a Java (JDBC) guy for the last couple years. I'm not sure I completely understand where this vulnerability lies. Would a Java PreparedStatement be vulnerable to this? Would the Postgres implementation of JDBC use 'addslashes()' to bind variables in a prepared statement? Or is this a higher level function? (I have not come across it myself, but like I said I'm still pretty new to Postgres).
I guess I see "affects PostgreSQL servers exposed to untrusted input, such as input coming from Web forms" and wonder if they're talking about some further functionality where postgres acts like a web server. My understanding of PreparedStatements is that they are bound at a very low level in the db to allow for maximum speed through caching etc...
I believe SVG is the answer for showing pictorial representations of dynamically generated data on the web. Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs etc. are just way too useful. The web is still all about giving people access to information in an easy to digest format.
Of course SVG isn't all that new, but good support for it has been sorely lacking. Adobe's plugin is the best of a bad lot (ok I've only seen Corel's and IE's native support), and I can't imagine Adobe's gonna be pushing to fix up their's with the recent acquisition of Macromedia. On top of that, my Firefox doesn't seem to like the Adobe plugin much (actually crashes!).
SVG should be standard in browsers. Not having it should be like not having the ability to view jpegs. (And yes the "spamvertising" possibilities suck but at the risk of paraphrasing a certain someone, if we don't adopt SVG because of that, then the spammers have already won.)
Aside from what others have mentioned about choosing the right algorithm in the first place, it seems that with the way a lot of hardware optimizes stuff these days (eg intels out-of-order execution) that pre runtime optimization should be less of a focus. I seem to remember reading that the latest CPU's can consider many hundreds of instructions when reordering. At this level, does what the compiler do even matter?
None, that's gonna happen whether he sees naked women or not.
Aside from the fact that I agree silly nudity in movies serves no purpose, are you saying that if it wasn't for the topless women this movie is fine for your pre-teen boys? I seem to remember a lot of people killing each other (maybe it was all flashbacks, but it was still depicted pretty greusomely).
Somehow violence and murder is fine for children but a breast is not? I'd like to believe that there are many more people having sex in this world than there are people killing each other. Maybe I'm wrong.
The use of pop-up ads really seem to suggest that they don't ever use the web. Or at least not ofen enough to know how annoying, and pretty useless, pop up (or pop under) ads are.
It's similiar to how so many of the top spammers admit to being computer illiterate before discovering spam as a way to make money. And it's the same reason scalpers are rarely fans of the band or sports team they sell tickets for. Anyone with a vested interest in the activity will not want to destroy it.
Alright, I'll admit that pop ups are not destroying the web, but I stand by the fact that those who advocate their use must rarely surf the web themselves.
Methinks your like me--stuck in North America. The stuff that comes on commercial radio where I am is pretty crappy, if only because it all sounds the f@%!@in same!
Australia has a kick ass national radio station though, called triple J. Just so happens that the author of this piece is a triple J broadcaster. Listening to this station does make you want to buy albums again. Only problem is so many of them arent on shelves here *sigh*.
Filesharing or no filesharing, when's the record labels gonna wise up to the fact that the gooey-soft-pop-rock hegemony that is commercial radio is whats really behiund the decline of album sales.
I highly recommend triple J radio: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/
Why would I ever want to send a document to a client in .doc format? My tables will appear outlined, abbreviations and names will have scwiggly red lines under them, bullet points scwiggly green. If I want to send a professional looking document I might make it in Word, but I'll definitely convert it to pdf before sending. And wouldn't you know it, open office has that feature built in!
And another thing, in my experience I've had way more problems moving between different versions of word than open office. Even the SAME versions of word on different machines.