See, to a C coder, this is non-obvious because both the types would be signed, and if you wanted it unsigned you would have to say so.
It has always diven me nuts how Java forces its own signed-ness on it's primitives. The fact that you can't have an unsigned int in Java 1.5 is a huge pain, because it is not like it is simpler to just use char everywhere, since then you lose all the autoboxing capability of Integer/int. So, you have to deal with it yourself. It's a big mistake IMO.
Even among those who believe in communism in theory, almost every accepted model of a successful communist system has a transition period of hardship before prosperity. A society can't become successfully communist overnight. Therefore, if this country was a democracy, the masses would likely just vote to go back to the old ways rather than stick it through the tough times.
For example, in that article on homeostasis, "stasis" is erroneously implied to be a prefix, which it is not.
Could you specify where? I don't see anywhere in the article where it is even *used* as a prefix.
About the closest thing to this would be where they explain the etymology of the word, but even there they clearly explain its roots, and nowhere do they infer that stasis is a prefix, suffix, or any other modifier..
Yeah, IIRC the prize was like a flight or vacation to some remote country.. PBS doesn't have much money for that sort of thing, so I imagine they made it very difficult:P
Just yesterday Iw as reading an article on homeostasis, and ran into some obviously erronious material. The article had been defaced (one point even had "ALEX IS GAY" in huge letters"). So, I went in to edit the article, but the copy in the edit tab did not have the errors. At first I thought it was some kind of bug, so I refreshed the article to try to edit it again. To my surprise, it had already been fixed.
Now, I can not say for sure how long it had been defaced before I got there, but that experience left me with the impression that, while you do need to be careful, there are lots of people looking after Wikipedia.
And just to be frank... when you say but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times, I hope you realize that that should be true with *any* source of information. A critical reader should never trust any one source. Every source has bias, and even if it is 100% factual, every source presents the material with its own slant on the facts.
Of course wikipedia sould neve rbe your sole source, but neither should Britannica, or any other single source.
If the sysadmin sends out an email to development@somecompany.com saying "The main server will be going offline from 2am to 8am for maintenence, please ensure any applications are not scheduled for this time.", imagine how pissed off he would be if he got back 500 emails saying nothing but "ok".
The way email is used in a modern company, there is often no need or desire to reply. I would say a good 75% of the emails I recieve fall into this bucket.
While both involve analyzing glyphs, one involves extracting a glyph from an interpolated image (a scanned document or simmilar), while the other has the benefit of having direct digital input.
The prior is a different problem to solve. The hardest problem with OCR is reliably differentiating between a letter and a non-letter pixel on the page. Once you have the pixels that are just the letter, it is usually simple to figure out what letter it is. This is the idea behind Captchas, to make it as hard as possible to figure out those pixels.
Handwriting recognition is a different problem. You know the input exactly, but it is harder to figure out what letter it belongs to.
Of course, the corss between the two is OCR'ing handwriting, which I have never seen done in any kind of reliable fashion.
Can someone tell me when the change came about that if you are unhappy with your purchase, you can no longer just return it?
Seriously, if I bought a Nano and it scratched unusually, I would return it in a second.
If the store would not take it back, then I would go to my credit card company and have the charge reversed under my buyer protection plan. Then it is them vs. the manufacturer, not me.
There is no need for a lawsuit here... this is foolish.
Most other free software licenses also have something similar:
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
And believe it or not, the majority of iPod owners are PC users.
Maybe, instead of griping about apple dropping a seldom-used port on their iPod in order to make it smaller (a logical idea), you should be asking why a Mac can't boot off of a USB device, even though it has the ports (which is not logical at all) ?
I know what it is trying* to say, what I am saying is it is overly vague.
What does "...distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders" mean? If I am dsitributing the software from my own website, is it not obvious that no matter what the software says, it is not the Original Work? What about if I label the software the same but change the colors on the logo?
I don't think this license was ran by a lawyer. YOu can't use a vague word like "obvious" in a legal document and expect it to stand up to challenges in court. What is obvious to one person is not to another.
Or no one is asking? It is pretty obvious to me that this license is not GPL compatable, and I am no lawyer. All you have to do is read it. These two provisions make it impossible:
Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.
Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders.
A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work. SO this makes it non-compatable.
As for the second clause, it i so vague I don't even know how it could be enforced.
When Nintendo had their NES system, if you wanted the "Gold Sticker" of quality, you had to go through Nintendo's process and give them a cut for the licensing. Which forged a company that is profitable even today.
There's a big difference between charging a manufacturur to sell an official" accessory, and trying to force manufacturers into it.
I don't see how they have any legal groupd to stand on here, there are decades of third-party video game accessory makers, cell phone accessory makers, etc.
The only reason you percieve it being better on the desktop is because Ruby and Python use bindings to an already native GUI library, while Java has it's own which is not native, so of course it will seem slower.
This is not an obstcale on mobile platforms since MIDP defines standard GUI objects which are implimented in native code.
Java actually runs faster than Ruby or Python in the back-end because it is compiled code, whereas Ruby and Python are interpreted (notwithstanding JIT compilers). On a mobile platform though, there would be no benefit to any of them, except that Java already has a huge developer and application base in the mobile arena, so it would win out.
very one of the 5,000 or so pieces of computer equipment I have unpacked over the last 10 years has had the serial number barcoded on the outside of the shipping carton.
Tak eoff your tinfoil hat. That is *not* the barcode scanned when you check out the item at your local PC superstore. They scan the UPC code, not the serial number code.
And yes, stores can be required to scan those S/Ns if the feds so desire, and it can be made to stick.
Sure, the feds can do anything they want... *if* they can get it through the lobbiests. Big retal has deep pockets, and they would push back hard against this sort of thing...
And *YES* I have worked in big retail, and I know for a fact that they do not track this kind of stuff currently. In an industry where they lose whole crates of merchandise daily during shipments, you think they can actually correlate a given serial number to a given consumer? Give me a break. They can't even keep track of what is on the shelf vs. what is in the warehouse. (Oh, the website says it is in stock, but we are actually sold out. Sorry, it must not have been updated).
Don't you think that a company that had such an advanced product tracking system would be using it to drive more business?
Conspiracy buts have way too much confidence in big business and the govenment. They aren't as bright and all-powerful as you think they are. Just like any other enterprise, the overwhelming majority of the people running thw show are idiots.
Seems shortsighted to me to go to all that trouble and expense of installing tens of thousands of 802.11 hotsponts, so DS owners can play a few games.
Why wouldn't they also enable the hotspots for regular internet browsing? They could give a token for a half hour of access with the purchase of an extra value meal or something. It would be trivial to impliment, and would encourage lots of new traffic.
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If you want to use an unsigned short in Java, you need to use a char.
Which is a PITA since Java 1.5 autoboxing is useless now, you need to cast all over the place again just like in Java 1.4.
Which is why it is retarded. Why can't Java just have an "unsigned" keyword like in C++ and let the developer do what he/she wants?
It is to expose a flaw in the language.
Why should a primitive byte be signed, but not a primitive char?
And why can't I have an unsigned int primitive in Java?
Primitives in Java are a real pain to work with compared to most languages.
See, to a C coder, this is non-obvious because both the types would be signed, and if you wanted it unsigned you would have to say so.
It has always diven me nuts how Java forces its own signed-ness on it's primitives. The fact that you can't have an unsigned int in Java 1.5 is a huge pain, because it is not like it is simpler to just use char everywhere, since then you lose all the autoboxing capability of Integer/int. So, you have to deal with it yourself. It's a big mistake IMO.
.. you could skip all that, and build a barn for 1/10 the price of the anklets alone.
Even among those who believe in communism in theory, almost every accepted model of a successful communist system has a transition period of hardship before prosperity. A society can't become successfully communist overnight. Therefore, if this country was a democracy, the masses would likely just vote to go back to the old ways rather than stick it through the tough times.
They probably want the thing as far away from man-made light as possible. The two best spots for this are at the poles - and Canada owns one of them.
For example, in that article on homeostasis, "stasis" is erroneously implied to be a prefix, which it is not.
Could you specify where? I don't see anywhere in the article where it is even *used* as a prefix.
About the closest thing to this would be where they explain the etymology of the word, but even there they clearly explain its roots, and nowhere do they infer that stasis is a prefix, suffix, or any other modifier..
Yeah, IIRC the prize was like a flight or vacation to some remote country.. PBS doesn't have much money for that sort of thing, so I imagine they made it very difficult :P
Now, I can not say for sure how long it had been defaced before I got there, but that experience left me with the impression that, while you do need to be careful, there are lots of people looking after Wikipedia.
And just to be frank... when you say but it usually ends up being a good idea to double check the information presented there some times, I hope you realize that that should be true with *any* source of information. A critical reader should never trust any one source. Every source has bias, and even if it is 100% factual, every source presents the material with its own slant on the facts.
Of course wikipedia sould neve rbe your sole source, but neither should Britannica, or any other single source.
Of course I also remember the PC game, which the TV show was a spin-off of.
If the sysadmin sends out an email to development@somecompany.com saying "The main server will be going offline from 2am to 8am for maintenence, please ensure any applications are not scheduled for this time.", imagine how pissed off he would be if he got back 500 emails saying nothing but "ok".
The way email is used in a modern company, there is often no need or desire to reply. I would say a good 75% of the emails I recieve fall into this bucket.
While both involve analyzing glyphs, one involves extracting a glyph from an interpolated image (a scanned document or simmilar), while the other has the benefit of having direct digital input.
The prior is a different problem to solve. The hardest problem with OCR is reliably differentiating between a letter and a non-letter pixel on the page. Once you have the pixels that are just the letter, it is usually simple to figure out what letter it is. This is the idea behind Captchas, to make it as hard as possible to figure out those pixels.
Handwriting recognition is a different problem. You know the input exactly, but it is harder to figure out what letter it belongs to.
Of course, the corss between the two is OCR'ing handwriting, which I have never seen done in any kind of reliable fashion.
Imagine you're at the nerd table in high school, and people are continually coming up to the table peddling their wares or ideas.
I think you are getting the nerd table in high school confused with a VC's office. What you mean here was pummelling you beyond recognition.
Handwriting recognition != OCR, since there are no optics involved.
Seriously, if I bought a Nano and it scratched unusually, I would return it in a second.
If the store would not take it back, then I would go to my credit card company and have the charge reversed under my buyer protection plan. Then it is them vs. the manufacturer, not me.
There is no need for a lawsuit here... this is foolish.
Most other free software licenses also have something similar:
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY
FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN
OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES
PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS
TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE
PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING,
REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING
WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR
REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES,
INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING
OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED
TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY
YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER
PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Maybe not, but a PC can.
And believe it or not, the majority of iPod owners are PC users.
Maybe, instead of griping about apple dropping a seldom-used port on their iPod in order to make it smaller (a logical idea), you should be asking why a Mac can't boot off of a USB device, even though it has the ports (which is not logical at all) ?
Every cell phone is required by law to be allowed to call 911, even while locked, even if it is not a subscriber to the local network.
If it can get a signal, it has to be able to reach 911.
611 usually also always works, where you could get an operator at least.
What does "...distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders" mean? If I am dsitributing the software from my own website, is it not obvious that no matter what the software says, it is not the Original Work? What about if I label the software the same but change the colors on the logo?
I don't think this license was ran by a lawyer. YOu can't use a vague word like "obvious" in a legal document and expect it to stand up to challenges in court. What is obvious to one person is not to another.
Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.
Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders.
A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work. SO this makes it non-compatable.
As for the second clause, it i so vague I don't even know how it could be enforced.
When Nintendo had their NES system, if you wanted the "Gold Sticker" of quality, you had to go through Nintendo's process and give them a cut for the licensing. Which forged a company that is profitable even today.
There's a big difference between charging a manufacturur to sell an official" accessory, and trying to force manufacturers into it.
I don't see how they have any legal groupd to stand on here, there are decades of third-party video game accessory makers, cell phone accessory makers, etc.
The only reason you percieve it being better on the desktop is because Ruby and Python use bindings to an already native GUI library, while Java has it's own which is not native, so of course it will seem slower.
This is not an obstcale on mobile platforms since MIDP defines standard GUI objects which are implimented in native code.
Java actually runs faster than Ruby or Python in the back-end because it is compiled code, whereas Ruby and Python are interpreted (notwithstanding JIT compilers). On a mobile platform though, there would be no benefit to any of them, except that Java already has a huge developer and application base in the mobile arena, so it would win out.
There is a big difference between a high-end color copier, and a $49 dollar best-buy special.
The latter case is what everyone in this article is carrying on foolishly about.
very one of the 5,000 or so pieces of computer equipment I have unpacked over the last 10 years has had the serial number barcoded on the outside of the shipping carton.
Tak eoff your tinfoil hat. That is *not* the barcode scanned when you check out the item at your local PC superstore. They scan the UPC code, not the serial number code.
And yes, stores can be required to scan those S/Ns if the feds so desire, and it can be made to stick.
Sure, the feds can do anything they want... *if* they can get it through the lobbiests. Big retal has deep pockets, and they would push back hard against this sort of thing...
And *YES* I have worked in big retail, and I know for a fact that they do not track this kind of stuff currently. In an industry where they lose whole crates of merchandise daily during shipments, you think they can actually correlate a given serial number to a given consumer? Give me a break. They can't even keep track of what is on the shelf vs. what is in the warehouse. (Oh, the website says it is in stock, but we are actually sold out. Sorry, it must not have been updated).
Don't you think that a company that had such an advanced product tracking system would be using it to drive more business?
Conspiracy buts have way too much confidence in big business and the govenment. They aren't as bright and all-powerful as you think they are. Just like any other enterprise, the overwhelming majority of the people running thw show are idiots.
Seems shortsighted to me to go to all that trouble and expense of installing tens of thousands of 802.11 hotsponts, so DS owners can play a few games.
Why wouldn't they also enable the hotspots for regular internet browsing? They could give a token for a half hour of access with the purchase of an extra value meal or something. It would be trivial to impliment, and would encourage lots of new traffic.