Fair use is not a right. Fair use is an excuse (a legally acceptable one) to do things that are outside your rights. When you invoke fair use, you automatically admit that the infringement did occur (but you can't be punished for it). If you can get around stuff and fairly use it, more power to you. But nobody's helping you with fair use.
MIDI is a wire protocol and physical interface for communicating between different instruments. (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) It has nothing whatsoever to do with notation.
And MP3 is a compression codec and has nothing to do with music, right?
MIDI is both a wire interface/protocol and a file format; it lends itself to describing music in terms of notes as opposed to waveforms, which is what this guy was asking about.
macphail.com seems to have a use for the name in that it resells e-mail accounts under the domain so you can have your own @macphail.com e-mail. This hardly seems legitimate to me but would probably pass in court because they have made a business of it. This bothers me because they are potentially making a profit from thousands of last names they have no claim to other than having registered the domain first.
Anyone ever been able to get their last name out of the grips of a company like these?
Whaddaya mean, your last name? You're obviously not the only person named MacPhail, based on the success of macphail.com. Who are you to say that the last name belongs to you and you alone?
Unless you're using your whole name, or you're famous somehow, you don't deserve macphail.com. What the current owner is doing with it is fair - offering relevant services to all MacPhails, including yourself. What could you possibly do with the website or domain name that would be fair to the thousands of other MacPhails?
And if you, T. MacPhail, can take the domain name from the current owner, what's there to stop P.D.Q. MacPhail from taking the domain from you?
we must always find someone else to hold responsible for problems
Yes. Because the average BBC columnist has neither the time nor the experience to audit every single OSS application on his computer. OSS has an advantage that the source is there, but many OSS writers think that it means they don't have to guarantee their software - after all, they can see that it's safe. The user's rights include the right to use safe code, and free programs (in either sense) don't relieve the programmer of the responsibility to write safe code.
And that's not just the average BBC columnist. How many people who run Linux have read through the entire kernel? How many people who install a GNU system, or KDE, or Mozilla, or whatever, on top of it, also read through the source code of those? I'm guessing zero. For that matter, I doubt Bill Gates has read through Windows' source code, although he certainly is capable of reading it and he has access to the whole thing. It's just that nobody has the time to read large software.
I think the solution is a security auditing OSS group. A few respected members of the community - and a few regular volunteers - should get together and read through at least the important parts of important existing software (e.g., Firefox, not xeyes, and the SSL code, not the about dialog), and verify those. With enough approval, the group says that the code is safe. This takes advantage of the open nature, but makes the concept practical.
1. Take an old 486 and install Weatherbug on it. 2. Sniff the network connection to the 486. 3. Extract the weather data and send it to your program. 4. Remove the 486, now that you've reverse-engineered Weatherbug.
5. ??? 6. Weather!
There's no need to generate your own data if equivalent data already exists.
So really, anything particularly special that Bittorrent manages to do, can't anyone else just copy it?
Kinda hard to copy brand recognition and marketing efforts using the MIT license. Whatever they're doing will be relating to business, not to programming. If anything, they'll just pay Mr. Cohen so that he can develop BitTorrent as a more viable platform for them to contract to other companies.
What benefits are there, and what things do we lose? What problems will occur?"
If you're looking mainly at upgrading the compiler, you can download the command-line compilers for free and you can see if it compiles well or not, or if language features you wanted to use are there. These are both the.NET compilers (CSC, VBC, etc.) and the regular compilers (CL, etc.). CL compiles both normal C++ (I've used it on the same code I gave to g++) and Managed (Embraces and) Extensions for C++.
Otherwise you're looking at upgrading the IDE, which is motivated by how much your programmers like or dislike the 6.0 IDE. And if you buy 2005, you're probably going to be upgrading both, so you need to make sure that both will work better (or one better, one as well) as those in 6.0.
Are you guys *trying* to put yourselves out of business?
Yes.
Because if the industry's failing, it's a lot easier to blame it on copyright infringement than poor business decisions, because copyright infringement is defined and illegal but poor business decisions are just poor decision, and it's difficult to prove either bad faith by the execs or that copyright infringement has no effect. And you can get a lot more money by suing people than by playing with a fair market (especially one with IP, which has zero marginal cost and the customers realize it).
I know you're joking, but you're actually right on the spot about intelligent design. These items were intelligently designed by someone who knew what designs humans would like. They didn't just combine e.g. some transistors, an antenna, and a speaker; or a display, a microchip, and a control device, stick them in a random box, and see what designs people bought (which is more or less a genetic algorithm). Granted, they did a little bit of market research, but a large part of it was brainstorming "this looks good, let's write it down, that looks bad, let's throw it away, that's a great idea, let's build it".
And the wheel interface wasn't designed for humans, it's designed for the variable capacitor in the TR-I and other radios. By the time the iPod started, the need for the wheel was just that humans had become used to wheels in audio devices. Remember that most other audio devices have buttons, not wheels, so the iPod couldn't've easily "evolved" on its own. It's possible - but then why did the iPod arrive at virtually the same time as other music players?
(I'm not making a statement regarding the truth of biological intelligent design here, just defending its claim to validity. Just as bad as those who would censor evolutionism are those who would censor creationism or intelligent design. Evolution is incomplete, because every scientifically-testable theory must be incomplete. Intelligent design is incomplete, because it depends on faith as much as proof.)
How will they differentiate between The Hunchback of Notre Dame and something that is not public domain and restrictive?
The Hunchback of Notre Dame has fallen into the public domain by an oversight in the DMCA. It was never licensed, so its not proper to distribute it. Victor Hugo's publisher's great-grandchildren are starving because you aren't paying $50/copy for the book. Won't anyone please think of the great-grandchildren? </sarcasm>
In all seriousness, public domain should trigger when the public benefit of a work outweighs the artist's benefit, and also the incentive for the artist to create new works - which is the rationale for copyright. Then you can put any (non-collateral-damaging) restriction on copyrighted stuff, because it'll reach PD in a proper timeframe.
You know, I'm sure I remember some of these fictional, made-up terrorists flying aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon....
Actually no. The government flew those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon. The Illuminati wanted the US economy to suffer for a few days. Also, it was good national security strategy to attack the Department of Defense's main building.
The USS Cole was actually attacked by aliens from Area 51 using secret German submarines. And they invented the bombing to cover it up.
The embassies aren't actually embassies, they're secret nuclear laboratories so that we can blow up other countries. A few of them melted down. And they invented the terrorists to cover it up.
And just for those who missed the sarcasm so far...the prior bombing of the WTC in 1993 was a staging run while the elder Bush was president.
Meanwhile the Majestic Twelve is having fun wasting money on having random wars in random places instead of keeping themselves rich.
- You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have? - Dolphins. -...Right. - They're US Navy dolphins. - Do they have frickin' dart guns attached to their heads? - Absolutely. - Oh well, that's a start.
Why even bother with word processors these days when LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs?
You answered your own question. They want a word processor to process words easily, not a typesetter to set type professionally. Call me when LaTeX (or a LaTeX editor) has built-in spelling and grammar check, summarizing and wort count, changes tracking (CVS and SVN don't count), WYSIWYG mouse-based graphics tools, a clipart library, WordArt, etc.
LyX's home page agrees with me. "LyX...encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software."
In governments often the appearance is as important as the content. With a word processor they can standardize appearance however they want. With LyX it's certainly possible, but someone has to write a lot of LaTeX code and make a package, and possibly modify LyX's interface itself. Moreover, a) people are familiar with the Word/WordPerfect/Claris/etc. interface, and b) they want a WYSIWYG editor.
WYSIWYG is important. I had to print some text on a preprinted form; I did that by scanning it as a JPEG, typing over the picture in Word, deleting the picture, and printing. There's no way I could've done that in even one day had I been using LaTeX. No offense, but their margin system is impossible to use if you don't like the defaults (which are better, so they say, but sometimes you want different margins or positioning). Even CSS/positioning would work better.
Indeed. Think about non-computer works from the ages.
Take Shakespeare - the standard editions have their spelling fixed, and there are many editions paraphrased into modern English.
Take Dante - the Italian he used, though it practically created the language, is most definitely not the common modern vernacular. Or as another example, I know modern, standard French pretty well. With some effort I can read Le Petit Prince (1943), but it's not enjoyable. I can kinda get the gist of Les Miserables (1862). I looked at the original Song of Roland (11th century) once and the only words I recognized were stupid stuff like "le" and "est" (and I think even those weren't in their modern forms) - the vocabulary looked very different. But these works are still read today; they aren't lost.
Take Beowulf, which was written in English. I'm assuming everyone here knows English. But "Beowulf is min nama" (Beowulf is my name) may be the limit for modern English speakers trying to read it. Can you understand (without cheating) the meaning of "his modsefa manegum gecyðed, wig ond wisdom"? And even though there's only one manuscript, and that bound, burned, rebound, and now missing letters, we still have modern versions, and the manuscript remains as intact as possible in the British Museum.
What about The Epic of Gilgamesh? The thing is carved in a Sumerian stone tablet, yet there are translations today.
If words on stone tablets from three or four millennia ago by people who didn't even suspect forward-compatibility problems is still readable as an e-text, I'm fairly sure there will be a mechanism to get important files back in 50 years. There will be some important material that will be continually transfered to more modern materials - think of the US Constitution, which was written on sheepskin, afterwards published in books of the period, and now available on the Internet. Of course, not everything will be saved, just as Shakespeare's doodles from age eight haven't been recovered. But just as we can analyze parchment and stone tablets, people will analyze CDs - even deteriorated ones - so long as the content is sufficiently important. Just as always.
Log in to your Yahoo! Mail account and click What's New. From there you can sign up for the Beta, and they'll eventually upgrade your client. It's a random beta.
This is a degeneration? We've always had eminent domain in the US. The fact that it applies to IP is a direct, expected, and logical consequence of the concept of "intellectual property". Whether IP exists or is valid is debatable, and may be a degeneration, but eminent domain must necessarily apply to IP if IP is indeed property.
Frankie of Bungie.net fame praised the controller in his Weekly Update last week, which covered his visit to the Tokyo Game Show.
"Oh. And I know what the Revolution controller is. You will too soon enough. I am not going to enrage our friends at Nintendo by revealing that here. But it is gonna be a big talking point." Again, this is from Frankie, of Bungie, owned by Microsoft, who admits earlier in the story that he'll be pushing the MS stuff.
Offtopic: For all the defense of Microsoft that Slashdot does whenever someone attacks them without reason (e.g., here), we sure do a lot of attacking them without reason....
setting environment variables to allow Terminal.app to interact with the X server.
Do it. Don't put down documentation on any process that others might not have done
Even though I know a way to do this, what's the best way to? set in.*rc? defaults on Terminal.app? set in an RC when the OS runs? Getting X11 to somehow hook all the running apps and add the variables when it starts and take them out when it quits? This is just an example -- there's plenty of places to do things, but only one is right.
For example, there was a recent discussion on macosxhints wherein some people suggested replacing the xterm executable with a small shell script to launch Terminal.app (for whatever reason). Of course, replacing major executables is a Bad Idea. There was another suggestion to edit.xinitrc, which seems to be a more popular solution, but a lot of people said that creating a ~/.xinitrc overrides the standard file, so that's not a good suggestion either. So what's the right way to do stuff?
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, at least not for real work (but maybe when I'm amusing myself by stress-testing the compiler). Why would you do this? A long isn't a pointer type. Just use a void*. Why would you need a long? To pass it in a badly-defined callback? Windows' callbacks, for example, use LPARAM, HRESULT, etc. as macros, so they should recompile nicely on 64-bit machines.
Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out?
Uh, no. Can't you keep the pointers somewhere and the window references somewhere else? If you need a variable to store something, why don't you declare it as the right type?
This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code.
Why, for the love of God (oops, can't use His name, Moses and Slashdot will both get on my case), why do you need this? It's just an office suite. It doesn't even do enough graphics or math to have those crazy optimizations. It needs to handle input, display, and output of several types, and that's it. OOo is writable in Java or VB (emphasis on the -able; it'd probably take a few years to do so). So why is it doing crazy C nonportable nonstandard pointer arithmetic?
Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long.
You should be using C++, or checking your C code better. Reinterpret casts are evil and nonportable. Casts between number types are acceptable as long as you have a routine to handle overflows (if it's a downcast). Casts between pointer types are rarely acceptable, except in malloc() and other generic pointer functions. Casts that use operator type() in C++ are quite acceptable, because you define the cast function. If at all you have to turn a pointer into a non-pointer type, turn it into a class that encapsulates a pointer. If it can't have a pointer as a member, it should have a char[sizeof(void*]] member.
Pretty much every phone has blue tooth OR an IR POrt. Just get a receiver.
Pretty much every? Pretty much every phone created in the last couple of months. This penalizes not only students without cell phones but also those who (like me) got a cheap cell phone 2 years ago that does what they need and haven't upgraded it.
I could suggest using SMS instead of BT/IR, but that still requires a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair use is not a right. Fair use is an excuse (a legally acceptable one) to do things that are outside your rights. When you invoke fair use, you automatically admit that the infringement did occur (but you can't be punished for it). If you can get around stuff and fairly use it, more power to you. But nobody's helping you with fair use.
MIDI is a wire protocol and physical interface for communicating between different instruments. (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
It has nothing whatsoever to do with notation.
And MP3 is a compression codec and has nothing to do with music, right?
MIDI is both a wire interface/protocol and a file format; it lends itself to describing music in terms of notes as opposed to waveforms, which is what this guy was asking about.
macphail.com seems to have a use for the name in that it resells e-mail accounts under the domain so you can have your own @macphail.com e-mail. This hardly seems legitimate to me but would probably pass in court because they have made a business of it. This bothers me because they are potentially making a profit from thousands of last names they have no claim to other than having registered the domain first.
Anyone ever been able to get their last name out of the grips of a company like these?
Whaddaya mean, your last name? You're obviously not the only person named MacPhail, based on the success of macphail.com. Who are you to say that the last name belongs to you and you alone?
Unless you're using your whole name, or you're famous somehow, you don't deserve macphail.com. What the current owner is doing with it is fair - offering relevant services to all MacPhails, including yourself. What could you possibly do with the website or domain name that would be fair to the thousands of other MacPhails?
And if you, T. MacPhail, can take the domain name from the current owner, what's there to stop P.D.Q. MacPhail from taking the domain from you?
we must always find someone else to hold responsible for problems
Yes. Because the average BBC columnist has neither the time nor the experience to audit every single OSS application on his computer. OSS has an advantage that the source is there, but many OSS writers think that it means they don't have to guarantee their software - after all, they can see that it's safe. The user's rights include the right to use safe code, and free programs (in either sense) don't relieve the programmer of the responsibility to write safe code.
And that's not just the average BBC columnist. How many people who run Linux have read through the entire kernel? How many people who install a GNU system, or KDE, or Mozilla, or whatever, on top of it, also read through the source code of those? I'm guessing zero. For that matter, I doubt Bill Gates has read through Windows' source code, although he certainly is capable of reading it and he has access to the whole thing. It's just that nobody has the time to read large software.
I think the solution is a security auditing OSS group. A few respected members of the community - and a few regular volunteers - should get together and read through at least the important parts of important existing software (e.g., Firefox, not xeyes, and the SSL code, not the about dialog), and verify those. With enough approval, the group says that the code is safe. This takes advantage of the open nature, but makes the concept practical.
I'm disinclined to get excited about Star Wars anymore.
...whoops, wrong genre, sorry.
You're disinclined to acquiesce to their franchise?
That's actually the right idea.
1. Take an old 486 and install Weatherbug on it.
2. Sniff the network connection to the 486.
3. Extract the weather data and send it to your program.
4. Remove the 486, now that you've reverse-engineered Weatherbug.
5. ???
6. Weather!
There's no need to generate your own data if equivalent data already exists.
The secret police are there to protect you from the "bad people". ..do they only hire suicidal people, then?
So really, anything particularly special that Bittorrent manages to do, can't anyone else just copy it?
Kinda hard to copy brand recognition and marketing efforts using the MIT license. Whatever they're doing will be relating to business, not to programming. If anything, they'll just pay Mr. Cohen so that he can develop BitTorrent as a more viable platform for them to contract to other companies.
What benefits are there, and what things do we lose? What problems will occur?"
.NET compilers (CSC, VBC, etc.) and the regular compilers (CL, etc.). CL compiles both normal C++ (I've used it on the same code I gave to g++) and Managed (Embraces and) Extensions for C++.
If you're looking mainly at upgrading the compiler, you can download the command-line compilers for free and you can see if it compiles well or not, or if language features you wanted to use are there. These are both the
Otherwise you're looking at upgrading the IDE, which is motivated by how much your programmers like or dislike the 6.0 IDE. And if you buy 2005, you're probably going to be upgrading both, so you need to make sure that both will work better (or one better, one as well) as those in 6.0.
Are you guys *trying* to put yourselves out of business?
Yes.
Because if the industry's failing, it's a lot easier to blame it on copyright infringement than poor business decisions, because copyright infringement is defined and illegal but poor business decisions are just poor decision, and it's difficult to prove either bad faith by the execs or that copyright infringement has no effect. And you can get a lot more money by suing people than by playing with a fair market (especially one with IP, which has zero marginal cost and the customers realize it).
I know you're joking, but you're actually right on the spot about intelligent design. These items were intelligently designed by someone who knew what designs humans would like. They didn't just combine e.g. some transistors, an antenna, and a speaker; or a display, a microchip, and a control device, stick them in a random box, and see what designs people bought (which is more or less a genetic algorithm). Granted, they did a little bit of market research, but a large part of it was brainstorming "this looks good, let's write it down, that looks bad, let's throw it away, that's a great idea, let's build it".
And the wheel interface wasn't designed for humans, it's designed for the variable capacitor in the TR-I and other radios. By the time the iPod started, the need for the wheel was just that humans had become used to wheels in audio devices. Remember that most other audio devices have buttons, not wheels, so the iPod couldn't've easily "evolved" on its own. It's possible - but then why did the iPod arrive at virtually the same time as other music players?
(I'm not making a statement regarding the truth of biological intelligent design here, just defending its claim to validity. Just as bad as those who would censor evolutionism are those who would censor creationism or intelligent design. Evolution is incomplete, because every scientifically-testable theory must be incomplete. Intelligent design is incomplete, because it depends on faith as much as proof.)
How will they differentiate between The Hunchback of Notre Dame and something that is not public domain and restrictive?
The Hunchback of Notre Dame has fallen into the public domain by an oversight in the DMCA. It was never licensed, so its not proper to distribute it. Victor Hugo's publisher's great-grandchildren are starving because you aren't paying $50/copy for the book. Won't anyone please think of the great-grandchildren? </sarcasm>
In all seriousness, public domain should trigger when the public benefit of a work outweighs the artist's benefit, and also the incentive for the artist to create new works - which is the rationale for copyright. Then you can put any (non-collateral-damaging) restriction on copyrighted stuff, because it'll reach PD in a proper timeframe.
You know, I'm sure I remember some of these fictional, made-up terrorists flying aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon....
Actually no. The government flew those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon. The Illuminati wanted the US economy to suffer for a few days. Also, it was good national security strategy to attack the Department of Defense's main building.
The USS Cole was actually attacked by aliens from Area 51 using secret German submarines. And they invented the bombing to cover it up.
The embassies aren't actually embassies, they're secret nuclear laboratories so that we can blow up other countries. A few of them melted down. And they invented the terrorists to cover it up.
And just for those who missed the sarcasm so far...the prior bombing of the WTC in 1993 was a staging run while the elder Bush was president.
Meanwhile the Majestic Twelve is having fun wasting money on having random wars in random places instead of keeping themselves rich.
- You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have? ...Right.
- Dolphins.
-
- They're US Navy dolphins.
- Do they have frickin' dart guns attached to their heads?
- Absolutely.
- Oh well, that's a start.
Yes, that's exactly how PS-HTTPD does it - it requires (x)inetd to run it.
Why even bother with word processors these days when LaTeX is more than capable of the vast majority of document typesetting needs?
You answered your own question. They want a word processor to process words easily, not a typesetter to set type professionally. Call me when LaTeX (or a LaTeX editor) has built-in spelling and grammar check, summarizing and wort count, changes tracking (CVS and SVN don't count), WYSIWYG mouse-based graphics tools, a clipart library, WordArt, etc.
LyX's home page agrees with me. "LyX...encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software."
In governments often the appearance is as important as the content. With a word processor they can standardize appearance however they want. With LyX it's certainly possible, but someone has to write a lot of LaTeX code and make a package, and possibly modify LyX's interface itself. Moreover, a) people are familiar with the Word/WordPerfect/Claris/etc. interface, and b) they want a WYSIWYG editor.
WYSIWYG is important. I had to print some text on a preprinted form; I did that by scanning it as a JPEG, typing over the picture in Word, deleting the picture, and printing. There's no way I could've done that in even one day had I been using LaTeX. No offense, but their margin system is impossible to use if you don't like the defaults (which are better, so they say, but sometimes you want different margins or positioning). Even CSS/positioning would work better.
I guess since we've won the "war on terror"
We did? I thought terror meant being scared, so winning the war on it would mean no longer being scared of whatever other country or entity.
I'm inclined to think that the more we fight, the more we lose.
Indeed. Think about non-computer works from the ages.
Take Shakespeare - the standard editions have their spelling fixed, and there are many editions paraphrased into modern English.
Take Dante - the Italian he used, though it practically created the language, is most definitely not the common modern vernacular. Or as another example, I know modern, standard French pretty well. With some effort I can read Le Petit Prince (1943), but it's not enjoyable. I can kinda get the gist of Les Miserables (1862). I looked at the original Song of Roland (11th century) once and the only words I recognized were stupid stuff like "le" and "est" (and I think even those weren't in their modern forms) - the vocabulary looked very different. But these works are still read today; they aren't lost.
Take Beowulf, which was written in English. I'm assuming everyone here knows English. But "Beowulf is min nama" (Beowulf is my name) may be the limit for modern English speakers trying to read it. Can you understand (without cheating) the meaning of "his modsefa manegum gecyðed, wig ond wisdom"? And even though there's only one manuscript, and that bound, burned, rebound, and now missing letters, we still have modern versions, and the manuscript remains as intact as possible in the British Museum.
What about The Epic of Gilgamesh? The thing is carved in a Sumerian stone tablet, yet there are translations today.
If words on stone tablets from three or four millennia ago by people who didn't even suspect forward-compatibility problems is still readable as an e-text, I'm fairly sure there will be a mechanism to get important files back in 50 years. There will be some important material that will be continually transfered to more modern materials - think of the US Constitution, which was written on sheepskin, afterwards published in books of the period, and now available on the Internet. Of course, not everything will be saved, just as Shakespeare's doodles from age eight haven't been recovered. But just as we can analyze parchment and stone tablets, people will analyze CDs - even deteriorated ones - so long as the content is sufficiently important. Just as always.
Log in to your Yahoo! Mail account and click What's New. From there you can sign up for the Beta, and they'll eventually upgrade your client. It's a random beta.
This is a degeneration? We've always had eminent domain in the US. The fact that it applies to IP is a direct, expected, and logical consequence of the concept of "intellectual property". Whether IP exists or is valid is debatable, and may be a degeneration, but eminent domain must necessarily apply to IP if IP is indeed property.
Frankie of Bungie.net fame praised the controller in his Weekly Update last week, which covered his visit to the Tokyo Game Show.
"Oh. And I know what the Revolution controller is. You will too soon enough. I am not going to enrage our friends at Nintendo by revealing that here. But it is gonna be a big talking point." Again, this is from Frankie, of Bungie, owned by Microsoft, who admits earlier in the story that he'll be pushing the MS stuff.
Offtopic: For all the defense of Microsoft that Slashdot does whenever someone attacks them without reason (e.g., here), we sure do a lot of attacking them without reason....
When that Kayne West rapper or whatever his name is
It's Kanye, as in "Ye Kanye change the laws of physics!"
Or the laws of free speech, as the case may be.
setting environment variables to allow Terminal.app to interact with the X server.
.*rc? defaults on Terminal.app? set in an RC when the OS runs? Getting X11 to somehow hook all the running apps and add the variables when it starts and take them out when it quits? This is just an example -- there's plenty of places to do things, but only one is right.
.xinitrc, which seems to be a more popular solution, but a lot of people said that creating a ~/.xinitrc overrides the standard file, so that's not a good suggestion either. So what's the right way to do stuff?
Do it. Don't put down documentation on any process that others might not have done
Even though I know a way to do this, what's the best way to? set in
For example, there was a recent discussion on macosxhints wherein some people suggested replacing the xterm executable with a small shell script to launch Terminal.app (for whatever reason). Of course, replacing major executables is a Bad Idea. There was another suggestion to edit
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, at least not for real work (but maybe when I'm amusing myself by stress-testing the compiler). Why would you do this? A long isn't a pointer type. Just use a void*. Why would you need a long? To pass it in a badly-defined callback? Windows' callbacks, for example, use LPARAM, HRESULT, etc. as macros, so they should recompile nicely on 64-bit machines.
Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out?
Uh, no. Can't you keep the pointers somewhere and the window references somewhere else? If you need a variable to store something, why don't you declare it as the right type?
This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code.
Why, for the love of God (oops, can't use His name, Moses and Slashdot will both get on my case), why do you need this? It's just an office suite. It doesn't even do enough graphics or math to have those crazy optimizations. It needs to handle input, display, and output of several types, and that's it. OOo is writable in Java or VB (emphasis on the -able; it'd probably take a few years to do so). So why is it doing crazy C nonportable nonstandard pointer arithmetic?
Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long.
You should be using C++, or checking your C code better. Reinterpret casts are evil and nonportable. Casts between number types are acceptable as long as you have a routine to handle overflows (if it's a downcast). Casts between pointer types are rarely acceptable, except in malloc() and other generic pointer functions. Casts that use operator type() in C++ are quite acceptable, because you define the cast function. If at all you have to turn a pointer into a non-pointer type, turn it into a class that encapsulates a pointer. If it can't have a pointer as a member, it should have a char[sizeof(void*]] member.
Pretty much every phone has blue tooth OR an IR POrt. Just get a receiver.
Pretty much every? Pretty much every phone created in the last couple of months. This penalizes not only students without cell phones but also those who (like me) got a cheap cell phone 2 years ago that does what they need and haven't upgraded it.
I could suggest using SMS instead of BT/IR, but that still requires a cell phone.