Give me a break. REALITY is a scam. REALITY favors the most powerful.
Sure, I'll give you a break. Political systems and social systems are designed to buffer reality so that life for the relatively defenseless becomes easier, sometimes even possible. When systems stumble out of control (or are intentionally driven out of control for any reason) they have failed society and they should be adjusted or replaced.
We have tried - mind you, just tried - to make this country a haven for everyone, not just the most powerful. Insofar as it is a haven for the most powerful and both encompasses and nurtures a stratified environment that gives the powerful advantages that the common person does not have other than the simple purchase of goods, services and property, the system is failing.
Clearly the process itself needs tweaking, but that's a far cry from the conspiratorial claims of a scam that "the man" is using to keep us all down.
It isn't just in need of tweaking. It's broken. Joe Average Inventor is absolutely locked out of the system in favor of BigCo, Inc. and Rich Guy, Esq. No amount of protest to the contrary that you might feel like indulging in can change this; that's one of the symptoms that should serve to wake you up.
If you can't afford it, establish a thinktank, collect donations, and do it that way, then freely license them if you want.
This series of actions supports the system in place. I don't support it. Therefore, I wouldn't pursue this series of actions, nor would I recommend it to anyone. You're simply suggesting the perpetration of the current money and litigation centric system here, not offering solutions.
No amount of patent trolling or shotgun patenting will ever supplant or prohibit a truly novel idea
These are fine sounding words, but they are strictly fantasy. All it takes to destroy a truly novel idea - or steal it - is to tie someone up in court who cannot afford it. Not one thing more. This is because the system is broken at both the court and the legislative levels.
Do some ideas get through? Sure. The system isn't 100% efficient at destroying little people. But it's really, really good at it.
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles.
Without large sums of money, it is difficult to determine if you have a patentable device. Without large sums of money, it is impossible to defend any court action that involves your patent, regardless of if it is brought against you, or by you. So even if, by dint of careful study and diligent application to the system, you manage to get a patent without spending a lot of money, you can't defend it anyway - unless you are well funded.
All this quite aside from the fact that the patent system has mutated enormously from what the founders envisioned; Software patents. Method patents. Patents on the blatantly obvious. Of course, so has most of the rest of our legal system mutated. You know why our system has so mutated? Because our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam.
And strangely enough, the legal system, which lies between the political system and the patent system, is also a classed, stratified scam. Money talks; justice is the last thing on anyone's list; the question of constitutionality rarely comes up, and when it does, it is likely to be abused and misused right up to and including the supreme court.
Oh, I'm living in a tesseract,
a four dimensional box.
It's bigger on the inside,
what why my four-space rocks!
When you get on the inside,
the outside becomes the in,
Dimensionally speaking,
it's all about the spin.
Actually it isn't free. Its developed by both paid and volunteer coders so that Sun can have good PR as well as free developers for their proprietary StarOffice.
Come on. From the perspective of the developer, nothing is free. Time has value, if nothing else. One can spend it in ways other than developing software. But to the user, in this case the software is available at no cost, and that is the sense I was using "free" in, as I think you (and everyone else) know very well. The fact that software costs the developer something, and then is given to the end user, is precisely the reason that any reasonable person would see value in, and be positive about, such a transmission of work product.
Would you think it nice that Microsoft produced a new version of Office?
I certainly would if they gave it to me without charging me money, yes. I might think so anyway, if it saved me more than it cost me.
Heck, I think it is nice when there's a new and/or improved GIMP or Photoshop, and these, each in a different sense, compete for attention with one of my my own sources of income. It isn't all about who makes more money or higher sales / distribution numbers. To a large degree, it is about what benefits the users receive. YMMV, but that's definitely how I see it.
Here's how I see it, as a long time EBay user — almost since day one. EBay has a huge problem: They're a public company, and it is not sufficient for them to simply make profits. They must actually grow those profits. This means that no matter how good a model they have — and make no mistake, initially, they had an excellent model — they have to continue to tweak it and push it in search of new and increased income.
Inevitably, this has lead into areas where the original "goodness" of the model is reduced. As long as profits keep rising, this isn't going to be a sensitive point for EBay, and unfortunately for the current crop of EBay users at any one time, this means that the things they liked about EBay are quite likely to evolve into something else.
A website like EBay will never be well served by the "we must make MORE profit" model. The best (IMHO) model is one of a software package that never removes or changes a previously existing feature, or moves it. Instead, they add new features, and generally speaking, these are added in ways that don't disturb access to the old features. In this way, the comfort zone of the existing user base is maintained, while the product remains able to grow.
EBay violates this process constantly, from changing the actual usability of the site, the features available, the rules that underly the selling and buying process, the operation (and therefore validity) of the reputation system, the ability for, and encouragement of, users to communicate with one another directly (without EBay acting as an intermediary), by acting as a mommy figure for various types of transactions it considers immoral, by moving and essentially hiding functionality, by being subsumed by the IRS into a monitoring venue for taxation (not much choice there, in that case, success brought on the problem and you can always count on our legislators to mine everything they can think of for income), by loading the pages with ads, by implementing no-click / not requested by the user pop-up technologies, by consistently escalating fees, by changing developer API's rather than extending them, and so on and so forth.
From where I sit, EBay was a great idea that has come and gone. When it started, I used it constantly. Today, I rarely buy, and I am even less likely to sell. It isn't a financial issue; I am well able to participate. It is a sense that the site simply isn't what it used to be, a friendly, open confluence of people all over the country. It just feels like a big, cold commercial operation to me. And I can get that feeling at Wal-Mart.
The answer to the question of if EBay is doing "the right thing" with regard to advertising varies in a polar manner depending on what you're looking at. From the stockholder perspective, the question is simply, does it result in increased income, and surely the answer will be yes. From the user perspective, the question is, does it result in increased usability and the ability to get done what one goes to the site to get done — and I think the answer to that is just as surely a resounding no. But EBay is a company; you know as well as I do what drives them, and it isn't the end user's general feelings of disaffection. They have a continuous supply of new users who have no sense of what the site used to be like, who simply want to "sell stuff", and that'll no doubt fill the holes left by those who brought the site its previous success.
No, but it is too bad you have no clue what developing and releasing a project the size of OO involves.
If you had any class whatsoever, you'd be thinking that it is nice that this free project is being improved (not to mention released in the first place), and as such provides you with an opportunity to leverage other people's work to reduce your own workload.
There is a lot of good music in the underground/online that has no major backing.
You know, people keep saying this like ti was a given. I've been haunting the download sites looking for good music from unknowns for some time now, and I've not found any. I always start by looking for people of Satriani's genre - guitar pyrotechnics interest me, as do most music genres other than rap, country and bluegrass.
I have, however, found literally thousands of crappy to really crappy recordings. Very disappointing. I'm sure there are good unsigned bands out there, but finding them has been a lot harder than people seem to imply it should be.
I'm a musician and a recording engineer, among other things. I may be too picky.
Part of the DRM system incorporated into both standards will "bind" the discs to the players and play them at reduced resolution in any other player. What happens when my player wears out? Must I re-purchase my entire movie collection?
Don't know where you got this idea, but the commonly distributed disks for both formats are read-only. There is no way for your standalone Blueray player to know you've played a particular Blueray disk in your PS3, for instance.
There is a mechanism to down-res the playback if the receiving display system does not implement HDCP (typically over HDMI or compliant DVI.) Some players implement the no hi-res w/o HDCP idea as an absolute refusal to output 1080p over component, for instance, which is wrongheaded. And, the copy protection mechanisms can be updated for both HD-DVD and Blueray on a per-release or per-manufacturing run basis; sometimes this may require a player's firmware to be updated, which was the basis for my suggestion that one make sure that the player is able to be updated, preferably online, the easy way (plug in ethernet, wait for update, then watch movie.) Updates also have the potential to be able to address player problems other then copy protection issues.
These are significant and annoying limitations and even outright insults to the consumer of the media, but they don't really relate to the idea of disks being bound to particular players.
Many players are upgradeable. For both HD and Blueray, you should make sure yours has an online upgrade capability. We know they're going to mess with the protection continuously - that was a given when the general public accepted HD-DVD and Blueray as viable formats.
The Fantastic Four Silver Surfer Blueray version of the movie played back fine on my PS3, no delays or other evidence of handling problems. It was fine for a comic adaptation. Don't know what everyone is bitching about as far as the movie itself goes - it isn't like the Fantastic Four was either great art or great writing in the first place. This isn't a McFarlane production (i.e., not Spawn, which was a tour de force.)
I remember giving someone a really blank look when they said that "Dumb and Dumber" was a "dumb movie." Same thing kind of applies here. You don't get a Fantastic Four movie in order to broaden your critical faculties.
We have exactly that code in CDN_SELCHANGE; I just went through it line by line to be certain. The related WM_INITDIALOG code and WM_DESTROY code is there too that deals with the "OFN" property allocation and disposal.
Under Win98, the buffer is improperly truncated and terminated in my test set (a bunch of little jpg thumbnails) at 104 files. Fewer files work fine. I didn't bother testing on any of the other OS's.
Every time I see it fail, I have the urge to disable multiselect. But it does work for small numbers of files, so technically I'd be taking away functionality. Sigh.
Thanks for the pointer, though. Always worth a look just in case.
Now that you have all these libraries have you considered releasing them under an open source license?
They aren't libraries. They're built right into the application. They could be released as libraries with a little work, as they certainly are highly modular, but generally speaking, code that goes into my commercial work stays there. Should I release something, it'd be using public domain, not a restrictive mechanism. Like this.
I believe this started in Win95; it continued through win98. Before XP came out, I'd written the new dialog, and I don't know if XP still did it. It was a documented bug, though, MS would own up to it - they just wouldn't fix the darned thing.
It is easy to reproduce. Get any program that can load multiple files, and feed it, say, 200 small ones. Text files for a text editor, etc. The mechanism was supposed to be, if I recall, a memory allocation that was (where lower case "O" is a NULL) FILENAMEoFILENAMEoFILENAMEoo for a return of three filenames. But there was some kind of arbitrary memory limit or other failure that seemed to occur around 100 files or so, and it broke the termination. Since selecting normally (normal alpha list, select A, then Z) got you a reversed list from the OS, you had to go to the end and then grab the files last to first, list-wise. But the end wasn't there, and that'd break you pretty much right out of the gate.
The software reports max memory use, max pointer use, and can - if compiled in - do this on a pool basis. We don't ship it that way generally (it's slower) but we can hand one out that does it if someone reports a case that seems to need it. In house, we almost always have that stuff on.
I don't mind stepping OT, just be prepared to have the moderators unleash, um... Heck.
Part of it is probably genetic; my mother spoke eleven languages well and a few others conversationally, my father three (English, German, Latin), my sisters both three (both English, French and Spanish.) One sister translated professionally for several years (French.) I grew up with the romance languages babbling around me, and I developed an ear for them. Except Italian, so my Italian friends tell me. Darn it.:-)
For Korean, I spent decades learning martial arts from Koreans, and again, there's an element of immersion there, not as much as if I'd been in Korea, but still, quite a bit - when I made it clear that I actually wanted to learn the language, I got a pretty warm reception, and a lot of help. Didn't hurt my martial arts progress, either.
For Chinese, I bought a lot of books, some recordings, both the classic and modern versions of the same old 3-volume readers pretty much everyone uses, and dug in. I actually found the characters - which are essentially pictures and combinations of pictures, not phonetic symbols - to be fascinating and beautiful, and that helped a lot with reading (I write poorly, as a martial artist who likes to break stuff and a guitarist of 40+ years, the fine motor control in my hands is kind of shot. My hands tremble significantly unless I am driving them fairly hard. My father's hands trembled as well. Thank goodness for modern computer keyboards, Unicode, fonts and publishing software.) For practice, I translated some things, starting with the Dao Te Ching (or Tao, romanization of Chinese is iffy) and a few other well known, widely translated works so I could compare what I'd done, when I was done. The Dao I used was in classical Chinese characters, but modern Chinese uses a "modernized" set, so I've got a lot of characters in my head that aren't really in use. And I mean they're common meanings; they changed "country", for instance. Can't get a lot more common that that for a foreigner! I prefer the classic characters, they're more complex and to me, that pretty much means more beautiful as well. Anyway, it helps to like the language. I do some Chinese martial arts, and I like the food, too, or at least the American version of it; they're pretty good with veggies, which is pretty much what I usually eat.
I spent a lot of time with Japanese speakers as well, but for all the good it did language wise, I might as well not have been there. I know the names of the techniques I learned and a bunch of peripheral martial arts terms and phrases, but I can't speak it or understand it worth foo. The language is well organized, but sometimes my mind... isn't.
Arabic - religion is a strong interest of mine (I'm not religious, though) and I have been told repeatedly that you cannot understand the Qur'an unless you can read it; translations won't do. So I'm working on it.
Generally speaking. I don't have to drive to work, as I own five businesses and I run them from a central office which I decided might as well be located at home. However, I do drive cross country for business meetings, and I take the train as well. I use flash cards a lot for characters in Chinese and vocabulary in whatever; phonetic languages are (relatively) easy to learn to read and type... we're talking about 30 to 60 symbols as compared to thousands upon thousands. Korean throws a twist in there, there's a phonetic script (han gul) which is pretty straightforward, and then there is han ja, which is Chinese characters, except sometimes they mean something else. That causes some headaches.:-)
You might consider the foreign service courses; these are what they lay on diplomats and so forth when they go out of country, and they are very good if you're into highly structured instruction. I'm good at learning on my own in the spaces between one activity and the next, I've always got some darned book tucked under my arm, or some educationa
I'm curious why you think that the destruction of language is a nessecary part of increasing communication, however.
I don't think that at all. I think that languages that are rarely used, either by a very small number of people or a very tight cluster of people are more of a problem than they are a solution. I have no objection whatsoever to linguists poring over them, and in fact I think recording them is prudent. Speaking them to "save" them, however, seems to primarily encourage social isolation and consequent dysfunction (see American Indian reservations (I live right next to one), or areas of US cities steeped in deep ghetto patois) and that - IMHO - is almost always a very bad thing.
You seem to be assuming people can only speak one language?
No. I speak several languages. But I do assume that one or two languages is the norm, and making one of them Linear B or Polynesian isn't a great choice unless you need to utilize it to survive or make a living.
Translation: I'm a lazy cultural bigot, so everyone think and talk like me so I don't have any problems.
Perhaps your translating skills need a little polishing.
I speak Korean, Chinese(mand.), Spanish(cast.), French, English and not very good (yet) Arabic. I speak pitiful Italian. I've written a text on how to read and write Korean. I'm up to about 8,000 wu — Chinese characters, an entirely different proposition than learning to speak — and I can read Chinese about as well as your average Chinese high schooler or early college student. I've done translation work into Korean (Han Gul and Hanja) for Korean websites, and translation into English for Korean software that needed English docs. I teach Chinese, Korean and Okinawan marital arts skills to Americans three nights a week, including language skills. You can begin your Korean with my help by learning how to read Han Gul, as I've put a quick start guide on the net, here (a little ways down the page.) My literary agency translates English works, or has them translated, into (almost) fifty different languages. My ethnic background is Italian and English. Oh, and I've managed to absorb a little Latin. Quantum valeat.
I do confess to a strong bias that favors the literate, eloquently spoken, thoughtful person.
And you, MightyMartian? Can you help me divest myself of the horror of cultural bigotry?
Is it useful information, though? Do we need to know the Gaelic word for the brownie that takes the milk at the kitchen door? Do we need to know why some remote tribe hollowed out the heads of virgins and ate their brains? Do we need to know Linear A for that matter?
It's dead, Jim.
Seriously, information is lost all the time. Did you write down everything you did yesterday? Are you going to? Even if you did, how many other people did? Information loss isn't always a bad thing. That old file format... those files probably contained batch scripts for DOS, primarily. As it happens, I'm the author of a 6809 / Flex emulator that allowed me to recover all my files from the early 1970's. You know what? Aside from nostalgia, of which there was plenty, there was very little of relevance in all that data. Even in my Stylus text editor / word processor's files. Looking at my daily-driver PC today, the machine has more that is relevant, but man, does it ever have a lot of things that I could lose and not give a flying fig about.
The languages being lost here aren't even mainstream languages. Let them go, I say. The harm done by not being able to join your (relatively) local mainstream society seems to me to far outweigh the harm of losing Great-Great Auntie Matilda's recollection of the boat trip off the island.
While we're at it, let's try and lose pathological dialects like deep mumbly southern drawls and ebonics. They aren't doing anyone any good either.
I wrote you a nicely detailed answer using quoting and so forth, but slashdot won't let me post it; claims there are too few characters per line. Very irritating. The general answer is that we support what we need to support; some of what you are asking about isn't relevant for a special purpose dialog that displays thumbnails (detail listings... we do show image properties which are far more extensive and appropriate... screen readers... you can't screen read an image); some of it isn't relevant for a dialog that isn't shared with other developers. We do handle Unicode and left to right languages such as Arabic. In addition to the general functionality, we provide a lot of features that aren't otherwise available, and of course there is the "feature" that our dialog actually works for its intended purpose.
The key thing here is that the dialog meets the needs of our customers; and that, it does very well.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we didn't get rid of the OS dialogs. We just added another. So should the day come where a user needs a feature only available in the OS dialog, it'll be right there for them.
Wow, way to guarantee your software will have terrible usability.
Why would you say that? I didn't remove the OS file dialogs. I just added some that actually worked the way Microsoft said they were supposed to, and had (a lot) more features in addition to the OS's version. If you really want to use a buggy OS dialog that gives you a list of names instead of a properly functioning one that presents thumbnails and names, why, you certainly still can. You can even block select files in the OS dialog. Maybe they'll even fix it some day, you never know.
But until then, when block selects fail, you can find out why in our docs, and then you can learn how to use the image manger dialog instead. Because it, you know, works. And our tree view works just like Microsoft's. Except ours doesn't leak memory, wasn't designed for a C++ interface (we use C) and is a good deal faster than theirs. Other than that, it's just like Microsoft's. We even used their icons.
I know, I know. IHBT. Still, when a troll gets all up in your face, it's fun to poke 'em in in the eye with a stick from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, I'll give you a break. Political systems and social systems are designed to buffer reality so that life for the relatively defenseless becomes easier, sometimes even possible. When systems stumble out of control (or are intentionally driven out of control for any reason) they have failed society and they should be adjusted or replaced. We have tried - mind you, just tried - to make this country a haven for everyone, not just the most powerful. Insofar as it is a haven for the most powerful and both encompasses and nurtures a stratified environment that gives the powerful advantages that the common person does not have other than the simple purchase of goods, services and property, the system is failing.
It isn't just in need of tweaking. It's broken. Joe Average Inventor is absolutely locked out of the system in favor of BigCo, Inc. and Rich Guy, Esq. No amount of protest to the contrary that you might feel like indulging in can change this; that's one of the symptoms that should serve to wake you up.
This series of actions supports the system in place. I don't support it. Therefore, I wouldn't pursue this series of actions, nor would I recommend it to anyone. You're simply suggesting the perpetration of the current money and litigation centric system here, not offering solutions.
These are fine sounding words, but they are strictly fantasy. All it takes to destroy a truly novel idea - or steal it - is to tie someone up in court who cannot afford it. Not one thing more. This is because the system is broken at both the court and the legislative levels.
Do some ideas get through? Sure. The system isn't 100% efficient at destroying little people. But it's really, really good at it.
The main problem with the (US) patent system is that it is a classed, stratified scam. One designed to serve large and/or monied entities, lawyers and their various barnacles.
Without large sums of money, it is difficult to determine if you have a patentable device. Without large sums of money, it is impossible to defend any court action that involves your patent, regardless of if it is brought against you, or by you. So even if, by dint of careful study and diligent application to the system, you manage to get a patent without spending a lot of money, you can't defend it anyway - unless you are well funded.
All this quite aside from the fact that the patent system has mutated enormously from what the founders envisioned; Software patents. Method patents. Patents on the blatantly obvious. Of course, so has most of the rest of our legal system mutated. You know why our system has so mutated? Because our political system, which drives the legal system, is a classed, stratified scam.
And strangely enough, the legal system, which lies between the political system and the patent system, is also a classed, stratified scam. Money talks; justice is the last thing on anyone's list; the question of constitutionality rarely comes up, and when it does, it is likely to be abused and misused right up to and including the supreme court.
No, wouldn't matter. The audience isn't; that limits the material.
M-Theory was the brane child of a bunch of mathematicians
[tips hat]
Oh, I'm living in a tesseract,
a four dimensional box.
It's bigger on the inside,
what why my four-space rocks!
When you get on the inside,
the outside becomes the in,
Dimensionally speaking,
it's all about the spin.
Come on. From the perspective of the developer, nothing is free. Time has value, if nothing else. One can spend it in ways other than developing software. But to the user, in this case the software is available at no cost, and that is the sense I was using "free" in, as I think you (and everyone else) know very well. The fact that software costs the developer something, and then is given to the end user, is precisely the reason that any reasonable person would see value in, and be positive about, such a transmission of work product.
I certainly would if they gave it to me without charging me money, yes. I might think so anyway, if it saved me more than it cost me.
Heck, I think it is nice when there's a new and/or improved GIMP or Photoshop, and these, each in a different sense, compete for attention with one of my my own sources of income. It isn't all about who makes more money or higher sales / distribution numbers. To a large degree, it is about what benefits the users receive. YMMV, but that's definitely how I see it.
Here's how I see it, as a long time EBay user — almost since day one. EBay has a huge problem: They're a public company, and it is not sufficient for them to simply make profits. They must actually grow those profits. This means that no matter how good a model they have — and make no mistake, initially, they had an excellent model — they have to continue to tweak it and push it in search of new and increased income.
Inevitably, this has lead into areas where the original "goodness" of the model is reduced. As long as profits keep rising, this isn't going to be a sensitive point for EBay, and unfortunately for the current crop of EBay users at any one time, this means that the things they liked about EBay are quite likely to evolve into something else.
A website like EBay will never be well served by the "we must make MORE profit" model. The best (IMHO) model is one of a software package that never removes or changes a previously existing feature, or moves it. Instead, they add new features, and generally speaking, these are added in ways that don't disturb access to the old features. In this way, the comfort zone of the existing user base is maintained, while the product remains able to grow.
EBay violates this process constantly, from changing the actual usability of the site, the features available, the rules that underly the selling and buying process, the operation (and therefore validity) of the reputation system, the ability for, and encouragement of, users to communicate with one another directly (without EBay acting as an intermediary), by acting as a mommy figure for various types of transactions it considers immoral, by moving and essentially hiding functionality, by being subsumed by the IRS into a monitoring venue for taxation (not much choice there, in that case, success brought on the problem and you can always count on our legislators to mine everything they can think of for income), by loading the pages with ads, by implementing no-click / not requested by the user pop-up technologies, by consistently escalating fees, by changing developer API's rather than extending them, and so on and so forth.
From where I sit, EBay was a great idea that has come and gone. When it started, I used it constantly. Today, I rarely buy, and I am even less likely to sell. It isn't a financial issue; I am well able to participate. It is a sense that the site simply isn't what it used to be, a friendly, open confluence of people all over the country. It just feels like a big, cold commercial operation to me. And I can get that feeling at Wal-Mart.
The answer to the question of if EBay is doing "the right thing" with regard to advertising varies in a polar manner depending on what you're looking at. From the stockholder perspective, the question is simply, does it result in increased income, and surely the answer will be yes. From the user perspective, the question is, does it result in increased usability and the ability to get done what one goes to the site to get done — and I think the answer to that is just as surely a resounding no. But EBay is a company; you know as well as I do what drives them, and it isn't the end user's general feelings of disaffection. They have a continuous supply of new users who have no sense of what the site used to be like, who simply want to "sell stuff", and that'll no doubt fill the holes left by those who brought the site its previous success.
No, but it is too bad you have no clue what developing and releasing a project the size of OO involves.
If you had any class whatsoever, you'd be thinking that it is nice that this free project is being improved (not to mention released in the first place), and as such provides you with an opportunity to leverage other people's work to reduce your own workload.
You know, people keep saying this like ti was a given. I've been haunting the download sites looking for good music from unknowns for some time now, and I've not found any. I always start by looking for people of Satriani's genre - guitar pyrotechnics interest me, as do most music genres other than rap, country and bluegrass.
I have, however, found literally thousands of crappy to really crappy recordings. Very disappointing. I'm sure there are good unsigned bands out there, but finding them has been a lot harder than people seem to imply it should be.
I'm a musician and a recording engineer, among other things. I may be too picky.
Don't know where you got this idea, but the commonly distributed disks for both formats are read-only. There is no way for your standalone Blueray player to know you've played a particular Blueray disk in your PS3, for instance.
There is a mechanism to down-res the playback if the receiving display system does not implement HDCP (typically over HDMI or compliant DVI.) Some players implement the no hi-res w/o HDCP idea as an absolute refusal to output 1080p over component, for instance, which is wrongheaded. And, the copy protection mechanisms can be updated for both HD-DVD and Blueray on a per-release or per-manufacturing run basis; sometimes this may require a player's firmware to be updated, which was the basis for my suggestion that one make sure that the player is able to be updated, preferably online, the easy way (plug in ethernet, wait for update, then watch movie.) Updates also have the potential to be able to address player problems other then copy protection issues.
These are significant and annoying limitations and even outright insults to the consumer of the media, but they don't really relate to the idea of disks being bound to particular players.
Many players are upgradeable. For both HD and Blueray, you should make sure yours has an online upgrade capability. We know they're going to mess with the protection continuously - that was a given when the general public accepted HD-DVD and Blueray as viable formats.
The Fantastic Four Silver Surfer Blueray version of the movie played back fine on my PS3, no delays or other evidence of handling problems. It was fine for a comic adaptation. Don't know what everyone is bitching about as far as the movie itself goes - it isn't like the Fantastic Four was either great art or great writing in the first place. This isn't a McFarlane production (i.e., not Spawn, which was a tour de force.)
I remember giving someone a really blank look when they said that "Dumb and Dumber" was a "dumb movie." Same thing kind of applies here. You don't get a Fantastic Four movie in order to broaden your critical faculties.
We have exactly that code in CDN_SELCHANGE; I just went through it line by line to be certain. The related WM_INITDIALOG code and WM_DESTROY code is there too that deals with the "OFN" property allocation and disposal.
Under Win98, the buffer is improperly truncated and terminated in my test set (a bunch of little jpg thumbnails) at 104 files. Fewer files work fine. I didn't bother testing on any of the other OS's.
Every time I see it fail, I have the urge to disable multiselect. But it does work for small numbers of files, so technically I'd be taking away functionality. Sigh.
Thanks for the pointer, though. Always worth a look just in case.
They aren't libraries. They're built right into the application. They could be released as libraries with a little work, as they certainly are highly modular, but generally speaking, code that goes into my commercial work stays there. Should I release something, it'd be using public domain, not a restrictive mechanism. Like this.
I believe this started in Win95; it continued through win98. Before XP came out, I'd written the new dialog, and I don't know if XP still did it. It was a documented bug, though, MS would own up to it - they just wouldn't fix the darned thing.
It is easy to reproduce. Get any program that can load multiple files, and feed it, say, 200 small ones. Text files for a text editor, etc. The mechanism was supposed to be, if I recall, a memory allocation that was (where lower case "O" is a NULL) FILENAMEoFILENAMEoFILENAMEoo for a return of three filenames. But there was some kind of arbitrary memory limit or other failure that seemed to occur around 100 files or so, and it broke the termination. Since selecting normally (normal alpha list, select A, then Z) got you a reversed list from the OS, you had to go to the end and then grab the files last to first, list-wise. But the end wasn't there, and that'd break you pretty much right out of the gate.
We use C. Nothing else.
The software reports max memory use, max pointer use, and can - if compiled in - do this on a pool basis. We don't ship it that way generally (it's slower) but we can hand one out that does it if someone reports a case that seems to need it. In house, we almost always have that stuff on.
You're most welcome.
I don't mind stepping OT, just be prepared to have the moderators unleash, um... Heck.
Part of it is probably genetic; my mother spoke eleven languages well and a few others conversationally, my father three (English, German, Latin), my sisters both three (both English, French and Spanish.) One sister translated professionally for several years (French.) I grew up with the romance languages babbling around me, and I developed an ear for them. Except Italian, so my Italian friends tell me. Darn it. :-)
For Korean, I spent decades learning martial arts from Koreans, and again, there's an element of immersion there, not as much as if I'd been in Korea, but still, quite a bit - when I made it clear that I actually wanted to learn the language, I got a pretty warm reception, and a lot of help. Didn't hurt my martial arts progress, either.
For Chinese, I bought a lot of books, some recordings, both the classic and modern versions of the same old 3-volume readers pretty much everyone uses, and dug in. I actually found the characters - which are essentially pictures and combinations of pictures, not phonetic symbols - to be fascinating and beautiful, and that helped a lot with reading (I write poorly, as a martial artist who likes to break stuff and a guitarist of 40+ years, the fine motor control in my hands is kind of shot. My hands tremble significantly unless I am driving them fairly hard. My father's hands trembled as well. Thank goodness for modern computer keyboards, Unicode, fonts and publishing software.) For practice, I translated some things, starting with the Dao Te Ching (or Tao, romanization of Chinese is iffy) and a few other well known, widely translated works so I could compare what I'd done, when I was done. The Dao I used was in classical Chinese characters, but modern Chinese uses a "modernized" set, so I've got a lot of characters in my head that aren't really in use. And I mean they're common meanings; they changed "country", for instance. Can't get a lot more common that that for a foreigner! I prefer the classic characters, they're more complex and to me, that pretty much means more beautiful as well. Anyway, it helps to like the language. I do some Chinese martial arts, and I like the food, too, or at least the American version of it; they're pretty good with veggies, which is pretty much what I usually eat.
I spent a lot of time with Japanese speakers as well, but for all the good it did language wise, I might as well not have been there. I know the names of the techniques I learned and a bunch of peripheral martial arts terms and phrases, but I can't speak it or understand it worth foo. The language is well organized, but sometimes my mind... isn't.
Arabic - religion is a strong interest of mine (I'm not religious, though) and I have been told repeatedly that you cannot understand the Qur'an unless you can read it; translations won't do. So I'm working on it.
Generally speaking. I don't have to drive to work, as I own five businesses and I run them from a central office which I decided might as well be located at home. However, I do drive cross country for business meetings, and I take the train as well. I use flash cards a lot for characters in Chinese and vocabulary in whatever; phonetic languages are (relatively) easy to learn to read and type... we're talking about 30 to 60 symbols as compared to thousands upon thousands. Korean throws a twist in there, there's a phonetic script (han gul) which is pretty straightforward, and then there is han ja, which is Chinese characters, except sometimes they mean something else. That causes some headaches. :-)
You might consider the foreign service courses; these are what they lay on diplomats and so forth when they go out of country, and they are very good if you're into highly structured instruction. I'm good at learning on my own in the spaces between one activity and the next, I've always got some darned book tucked under my arm, or some educationa
I don't think that at all. I think that languages that are rarely used, either by a very small number of people or a very tight cluster of people are more of a problem than they are a solution. I have no objection whatsoever to linguists poring over them, and in fact I think recording them is prudent. Speaking them to "save" them, however, seems to primarily encourage social isolation and consequent dysfunction (see American Indian reservations (I live right next to one), or areas of US cities steeped in deep ghetto patois) and that - IMHO - is almost always a very bad thing.
No. I speak several languages. But I do assume that one or two languages is the norm, and making one of them Linear B or Polynesian isn't a great choice unless you need to utilize it to survive or make a living.
Perhaps your translating skills need a little polishing.
I speak Korean, Chinese(mand.), Spanish(cast.), French, English and not very good (yet) Arabic. I speak pitiful Italian. I've written a text on how to read and write Korean. I'm up to about 8,000 wu — Chinese characters, an entirely different proposition than learning to speak — and I can read Chinese about as well as your average Chinese high schooler or early college student. I've done translation work into Korean (Han Gul and Hanja) for Korean websites, and translation into English for Korean software that needed English docs. I teach Chinese, Korean and Okinawan marital arts skills to Americans three nights a week, including language skills. You can begin your Korean with my help by learning how to read Han Gul, as I've put a quick start guide on the net, here (a little ways down the page.) My literary agency translates English works, or has them translated, into (almost) fifty different languages. My ethnic background is Italian and English. Oh, and I've managed to absorb a little Latin. Quantum valeat.
I do confess to a strong bias that favors the literate, eloquently spoken, thoughtful person.
And you, MightyMartian? Can you help me divest myself of the horror of cultural bigotry?
Is it useful information, though? Do we need to know the Gaelic word for the brownie that takes the milk at the kitchen door? Do we need to know why some remote tribe hollowed out the heads of virgins and ate their brains? Do we need to know Linear A for that matter?
It's dead, Jim.
Seriously, information is lost all the time. Did you write down everything you did yesterday? Are you going to? Even if you did, how many other people did? Information loss isn't always a bad thing. That old file format... those files probably contained batch scripts for DOS, primarily. As it happens, I'm the author of a 6809 / Flex emulator that allowed me to recover all my files from the early 1970's. You know what? Aside from nostalgia, of which there was plenty, there was very little of relevance in all that data. Even in my Stylus text editor / word processor's files. Looking at my daily-driver PC today, the machine has more that is relevant, but man, does it ever have a lot of things that I could lose and not give a flying fig about.
The languages being lost here aren't even mainstream languages. Let them go, I say. The harm done by not being able to join your (relatively) local mainstream society seems to me to far outweigh the harm of losing Great-Great Auntie Matilda's recollection of the boat trip off the island.
While we're at it, let's try and lose pathological dialects like deep mumbly southern drawls and ebonics. They aren't doing anyone any good either.
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
I wrote you a nicely detailed answer using quoting and so forth, but slashdot won't let me post it; claims there are too few characters per line. Very irritating. The general answer is that we support what we need to support; some of what you are asking about isn't relevant for a special purpose dialog that displays thumbnails (detail listings... we do show image properties which are far more extensive and appropriate... screen readers... you can't screen read an image); some of it isn't relevant for a dialog that isn't shared with other developers. We do handle Unicode and left to right languages such as Arabic. In addition to the general functionality, we provide a lot of features that aren't otherwise available, and of course there is the "feature" that our dialog actually works for its intended purpose.
The key thing here is that the dialog meets the needs of our customers; and that, it does very well.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we didn't get rid of the OS dialogs. We just added another. So should the day come where a user needs a feature only available in the OS dialog, it'll be right there for them.
Why would you say that? I didn't remove the OS file dialogs. I just added some that actually worked the way Microsoft said they were supposed to, and had (a lot) more features in addition to the OS's version. If you really want to use a buggy OS dialog that gives you a list of names instead of a properly functioning one that presents thumbnails and names, why, you certainly still can. You can even block select files in the OS dialog. Maybe they'll even fix it some day, you never know.
But until then, when block selects fail, you can find out why in our docs, and then you can learn how to use the image manger dialog instead. Because it, you know, works. And our tree view works just like Microsoft's. Except ours doesn't leak memory, wasn't designed for a C++ interface (we use C) and is a good deal faster than theirs. Other than that, it's just like Microsoft's. We even used their icons.
I know, I know. IHBT. Still, when a troll gets all up in your face, it's fun to poke 'em in in the eye with a stick from time to time.