Remember how all the arctic ice was supposed to be gone this year? Turns out its a sensor problem, and has been for a while... The problem was discovered after they received emails from puzzled readers, asking why obviously sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as ice free open ocean.[^]

There is nothing in the world worth dying for. However, sometimes its good to kill other people because they DO think there is something worth dying for. To do so merely satisfies their logic so is actually an act of kindness. Haha - Is that your own work? That'll make a great quote.

I don't understand why one would want to ban them? GPL only "hurts" those who want to blindly copy/use the code in an article. I have used this site for a few good years and I can think of only a few times that I have ever taken any code from here and "just used" it in one of my projects. 99% of the time I read the articles to learn new techniques and approaches, and then use these to solve my problem at hand. The few times I did "just use" the code was because it was available completely free, and there was no point of rewriting it. I still had to take the time to understand it, otherwise I wouldn't add it to my project anyway. If it had a licence that prevented me from using it directly, I still wouldn't lose the understanding part. And once you understand something you can do it yourself. So, in conclusion, I can see how a library that is GPL'd would prevent me from "just using" it in my non GPL projects, but what's the big deal? I just won't use it. I can still look at it and see what approach was taken to solving a given problem.

Al Beback wrote:

My question was, "what religious source discusses the effects of alcohol and drugs on the soul"?

I believe that was (more or less) his question as well.

i'm sorry you feel that way

It's actually better than chance: warning potential spoiler: http://www.msri.org/people/members/sara/articles/hat.html[^]

I was going to write a long complicated reply, but hopefully this example will be easier: What if you were a multi-millionaire and your friends were millionaires too? Then would you trust them? What can they gain / potentially lose (getting caught) by taking the money? I guess when I said "trust people" I should have said "trust people within a given environment". If you set the reward level too high, then even "good" people will do "bad" things.

Wow, great summary! I think I'll make people read your post when trying to explain DRM.

CleaKO wrote:

There are many people that I trust that I wouldnt give the opportunity to steal from me

Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? Either you trust them to not steal from you, or you don't. Maybe you trust them in some ways, but you definitely don't trust them completely. This is fine, and depending on the workplace / people that surround you, this is sometimes necessary. (and unfortunate). But, I have to disagree with you. If you really do trust the people you are with, I don't think that it is ignorant to not think that they will rob you.

I do that all the time, I trust my co-workers. I guess it depends on where you work though.

null pointer or access violation exceptions are not treated as C++ exceptions but as SEH exceptions. You cannot catch SEH exceptions using the try catch block, you need to use a __try, __except block instead. There is away of unifying the two different exception handling mechanisms. Search for SEH on codeproject and you should find an article that describes how to do this.

peterchen wrote:

One thing to be aware is the pattern matching of file search. If you search for "*.zoidfiles", Windows will return all files with the extension ".zoi" as well - because that would be the extension of the 8.3 filename. (that's why, *.html also matches *.htm)

Thanks for the tip, didn't realize that the FindFirstFile Api worked this way.

I know that name length isn't a problem, and there are quite a few examples of applications that do use longer extensions... but, in general most new applications still choose to use 3 character extensions. Especially for files that are used by users. For example vs2005 uses .sln for its solution files. Why not call it .solution ? I'm just curious, there hasn't been any technical limitations since Win98 for sure, and even Win95 (I think -- too long ago, can't remember). The unix world never had this limitation. So why are most file formats still using the 3 letter extension? Is it only tradition? My only other guess is that there might be legacy code sitting deep within some new applications that still expects 3 character exts.

Is there any (compelling) reason to continue using 3 character file extensions? I am in the process of choosing the extensions that my app will use and I am leaning toward using 4 - 6 character extensions. The main reasons are: To avoid colisions with extensions that are used by other apps. The extension names do a better job explaning what kind of data is stored in the file. I am worried however, because it seems almost applications still use 3 letter extensions for their files. Aside from compatibilty issues with old 8.3 format DOS systems which I think for 99% of current applications isn't an issue anymore, why are people avoiding using longer file extensions for new formats?

I don't think any of that is possible, we are supposed to be in the middle of a war with skynet in 2029.

The GIMP can open and save .ico files.

jason_lakewhitney wrote:

Should he be charged for breach of privacy?

Yes.

really? There are many cases where it is a lot more work.. (Very contrived) example: PerformSomeAlgorithm(int* piValue) { for(..) { piValue[i] = piValue[i-1]; if(piValue[i]>someConstant) piValue[i]*=2; : : } } Now lets change the function to PerformSomeAlgorithm(float* pfValue)...

You do it quite often while prototyping / designing a class. As someone pointed out earlier if you choose proper variable names you don't need to indicate their type. "userName" should never be a float. It is obvious that you need to go and inspect the code, but now in addition to inspection you need to perform modification as well.

In my opinion Hungarian notation was a bad idea to begin with. If I have make a class called Address, how do I define a variable of that type? adMyAddress? addrMyAddress? It is totally arbitrary anyway.. For built in types such as int, char, etc. it is annoying to. Suppose you code up your application using a variable "total" and decide to declare it as an int. So you have a variable called iTotal. Suppose later a requirement comes to make it a float. Now every occurance in the code needs to be changed to fTotal. It adds unnecessary overhead in my opinion, and makes your variable names ugly.