t(omas)radej's

This blogpost is a response to an article, which is to be found here along with quite long a discussion that ensued: 

http://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/copyright-theft-robin-hood-it-aint/

Hi, Stella,

First of all, I want to say that you can’t really tell how many people who downloaded your book would actually pay for it. Many might, but many might not. That’s the definition of a potential income. It’s like someone shouting whodunit in front of a theatre. He surely damages you, but you can’t really tell how much. Damages from theft are always exactly enumerable.

But let me get to the point: While I do believe that you could be short-term financially better off if the sharing sites didn’t have your books, I also think that they actually do you good. The fact is – people who read books tend to have quite healthy attitude towards how the world works, and if they have an option to buy quality stuff for reasonable money, they will. However, they must be sure it’s worth their money. I wasn’t able to find a decent demo of your books other than Amazon’s Look inside, and I can’t really make an image of a book based on first 10 pages. Make it half the book, and I will know if I like it.

Read More

— Nerd Alert! —

Hi. When updating two packages, I encountered the phenomenon of typecasting generics in Java. As you may or may not know, you really shouldn’t do that. At all. Why, you say?

The answer is actually pretty simple. If you could typecast a collection, for example to a supertype, which would be intuitive, you could do this:

List<Subtype> oldList = new ArrayList<Subtype>();

List<Supertype> newList = oldList;

but, consider this:

newList.add(new Supertype());

Then you get a disaster as oldList (of Subtype objects), which is referenced by newList, contains an object of Supertype, therefore calling a method of Subtype.something() on every element of the list yields an error.

This is why you should never ever typecast generics in Java. Correct me if I am wrong.

Live long and prosper, TR

Hey, people of all nations and religious beliefs! I wanted to stay with Posterous as my blogging platform, but since it (again) lacked some technical features I came to require, I had to switch again. Well, what can you do. The content of this blog will be divided between my personal topics and my work as a Fedora package maintainer because, as it happens, I am one.

Have a nice day, TR