Fooling Around

Microsoft® VCBuild for Visual Studio® .NET 2003 and stuff. I should have known this long ago already.

There has been an interesting discussion about distribution of a nice book recently. One of the members wanted to share the electronic version of the book between discussion group members and, rather expectedly, it was a beginning of a flame about legel side of the action. Undoubtedly, the book is very well know within professional community as well as the authors, but the price tag is over $100 which is far more hurting for people leaving outside of top 20 of countries, if counted by GNP.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OpenCV/message/36236

Opions are very much different:

Basically, what you did is perfectly all right by all means. I do want to get into legal issues, since what is lawfull on one part of Planet does not have to be on the other. Let’s just look at the bottom line of their concern and that is money. First at all if you really want to make serious money than doing academic research and/or writing books (such as or pattern recognition) for mainly scientific audience is lost cause right from the start. Pattern recognition is not some hollywood or show bussines material and everyone with at least tiny litte bit common sense should not have problem comprehend it, including those holy law upholders. I sincerly doubt that Dudas book have potential to turn into sceanrio for new sequel of Lord of the Rings or new Madonna CD.

In summary, you are saying that it’s in the interests of technical authors to have their books pirated, and anyone who disagrees with you is a hard core hypocrite puritan cheater and liar. Thank you for providing this assistance to the OpenCV community.

The discussion was also fowarded to the authors of the book. I am very intrigued to find out their own points of view and I am really unsure if they sincerely consider this pirating unacceptable.
The book itself: at amazon.com, at one of the co-authors website.

PdhMakeCounterPath is not a new API, however seems to be buggy as it returns wrong value in pcchBufferSize parameter…

PDH is a performance data helper API. Performance counters have indexes and names, the names may be available for several languages. It seems English is always available. The problem is that the indexes are not fixed. Well we can assume some well known indexes to have constant indexes but it’s very difficult to make it sure testing on different versions of Windows. The problem is that it seems to be a robust way to use English names as a primary identifier. Since English names seem to be always available we can lookup index by name. However, PDH API uses localized names, how do I know which locale it uses: GetThreadLocale, GetSystemDefaultLCID or GetUserDefaultLCID?