Posts by FIA 1125 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Where the person responsible for this sort of thing at MS is strapped to a chair, and their eye lids taped open, then, on the screen in front of them, the offending UI feature is played back on repeat until said person is a gibbering wreak
Why do i suspect you’ve inadvertently stumbled across the MS standard UX designer recruitment test?
“Are they gibbering yet?”
“Yes.”
“Ship them off to the ‘Teams’ team. Next!”
Probably, yes, at the moment. Economies of scale and all that....
That's not the (overall) point though.
The point is to be able to service the (not insubstantial) Chinese demand with Chinese made kit of similar performance, which they'll probably be able to do in a few years if the current progress is anything to go by.
There's no such thing as "code rot."
It's a generic term I use to describe the effort required to keep software up to date, apologies if that wasn't clear.
As an example, the company I worked at moved from SunOS 5.6 to Solaris 9 (I think, many years ago now...), and part of our software used Xerces and Xalan from Apache to handle some XML.
The interface for Xerces and Xalan had changed between releases, and the release with the interface we'd programmed to wasn't supported on Solaris 9.
We hadn't changed the code, but it still wouldn't build on the new OS. We had to spend engineering effort to update the code as the interface between it and one of it's libraries had diverged.
It can stagnate for a while and then someone else comes along, picks it up and it starts growing again. It's wonderful!
Yes, that's what I meant by: 'someone else will put in the effort to keep it going for me'. ;)
Why pay when you can get something for free?
Because we thought it was a better product.
I liked it enough to buy a personal licence too. (I wish I could remember what it did that NP++ didn't at the time.. but it escapes me).
It's crazy, I know, but I thought 'Someone has put a lot of work into this, maybe they should be rewarded'. The cost wasn't great (I've eaten meals that cost more), so didn't bother me too much.
Also, Notepad++ is open-source which makes it "eternal."
By eternal you mean 'someone else will put in the effort to keep it going for me'?
Being open source doesn't imbue it with resistance to code rot. It may be open source, but you still have to be able to build and compile it, which requires effort as tooling and APIs change over time. None of that happens by magic.
How many people have been burned by software that stopped being supported or the company going bust? Never again for me.
All tools have a lifespan, be that a text editor or a toothbrush. I'm happy to pay for something if I like it, and if it exists for long enough that I feel I got my moneys worth I don't mind.
Companies that make a good product that people are happy to pay for don't tend to go bust as often. Open source software suffers from the same issue too, 'free' is great for the consumer, but unappreciated people tend to suffer burnout, then someone goes and sticks a back door in your compression library.
Windows: Editplus - Bought this years ago as we found something about Notepad++ we didn't like that EP did well. (Can't remember now, it was 20+ years ago), but EP is a decent little text editor
Not windows: micro - Actually made me switch away from vi for terminal stuff. (Disclaimer: when muscle memory doesn't kick in that is...)
However, on Windows, you must pass a single “command line” string, and it seems you always have to go through a shell.
You don't always go through a shell, only if running a batch file. However, Windows may infer the extension if you don't provide one so running a batch file may not be what is intended.
The rules for escaping are different between the c runtime and CMD.exe, so if you expect to be running an exe you may end up passing an incorrectly escaped string to CMD.
It's not really a bug, (although it's a poor design choice) it's just an example of subtle differences between complex systems.
The Register is a red top, it picked the headline most likely to poke the commentards....
The issue is the Win32 API CreateProcess function. This does 2 things:
1. it takes a single string for the programs arguments (rather than an array). The program is called with this single string as it's arguments.
2. It will spawn CMD if you ask it to run a .bat file (either explicitly or because of extension matching with %PATHEXT%).
Because programs need to parse a single argument string the arguments need to be escaped. eg, if you have 2 arguments "Hello world" and "Goodbye", your final string might end up being "Hello\ World Goodbye"
The rules CMD uses to parse arguments are different from those used by the C library when you're calling an EXE. Most languages take an array of arguments (so need to do the escaping on Windows) and only account for the EXE case, so if you pass user supplied input as an argument and can persuade the program to run a .bat file (therefore spawning CMD) you can 'do nasty things'.
If you're this sophisticated (ie a nation state) then you can just get your programmers hired by the closed source software vendors too. They may not be as underfunded, but I suspect time pressures, project deadlines and apathetic staff can hide just as much careless check-ins as underfunded open source software.
Thing is, had this been closed source would the excessive CPU usage have just been put down to 'bad code'? Surely it was being able to work out what was going on that was in a large part responsible for it's discovery.
As ever, it depends on your requirements but right now no one really knows what threshold OSS reaches, and has no way of measuring it.
That's as true of closed source software as it is OSS.
The reality is we have a software industry, not an engineering discipline. (Because 'programming is easy' and you can 'just pick it up').
"He was working on the copy command," explained Plummer, "and he took the opportunity to check in – not a backdoor per se – but a special command line switch."
I'd say 100%.
Also, reading between the lines, there were 2 interns, one was working on disk compression, the other was working on the copy command... I suspect they kept the right one. :)
But the other camp (which may be a minority I don't know but no chance it is zero in number)
'No chance'? There's only 20 of them, they're all under the media spotlight. I suspect there's a very high chance. What would be the point?
As a racing driver you're much more aware of the dangers, not less. Also, you get to drive an F1 car, you don't really need to 'drive fast' on the road.
Max didn't get a car hire because he was too young, and wouldn't've been insured. It's funny because of his profession, but had he had an accident he wouldn't've been covered.
C:\> chkstry /y
Checking story on R:
The type of sory is HISTORIC
CHKSTRY is verifying overall integrity (Stage 1)...
Found basic structure.
Integrity verification complete.
CHKSTRY is verifying details (Stage 2)...
Possible inconsistent use of DELTREE.
Possible inconsistent use of CHKDSK.
CHKSTRY is verifying indexes (Stage 5)...
CHKSTRY has scanned the story and found minor issues.
You may continue to enjoy The Register however you should run
CHKSTRY with the /f option to fix any errors found.
3373 Total characters
625 Total words
21 Total paragraphs
C:\>
It also could be recompiled on .NET 8 or whatever with minimal changes, if I wanted to. Yeah, they don't guarantee the APIs will be identical for decades, but in practice that's very nearly true in most cases.
You can't assume this though, as you'll then end up hitting the case where it isn't.
Our net3 -> 6 migration at work used some of those APIs, and it wasn't a 5 minute job.
6 to 8 was much easier, but there are other teams that have come across issues with that too.
Even when the APIs are unchanged and it does appear to 'just work', there's still a round of testing and validation to go through. Also, with anything above the 'trivial' level you're more than likely to have at least one dependency you need to upgrade as well. That's another source of 'I hope they haven't changed the APIs too much'.
Which makes me wonder, is Rust really that much better, or is it down to the compiler being able to spot a lot more potential problems and warn about them?
Isn't it a combination of that though? You design a language with modern computers, and you can build all the safety checks in from the get go that you couldn't when C was designed. Plus, knowing these checks are now possible you can specify the language to include them.
Plus, I guess, a system that will check memory accesses rather than just blindly reading/writing to whatever the pointer is set to (or however long the array is). I don't know why nobody ever added that to C so it could be made to behave better.
Because then it wouldn't be C, it'd be another (similar) language. (and everyone here would be telling us how if you only wrote good 'C' or 'C++' you wouldn't need <your new language>).
C and C++ aren't going away, but they are old now, it's fine that we're designing something new. If you want to write C and C++ that's okay. If you're a skilled developer you'll probably write C and C++ that is memory safe and less error prone. Not every developer is a good developer though, so in those cases, perhaps tooling that helps them out isn't a bad idea.
Modern industrial machinery is much less maimy than the older stuff, but there are still people happily using a scythe, and long may they continue to do so. Both are fine.
"I wonder if any of this would fall under the auspices of the Computer Misuse Act in the UK."
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a)he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer , or to enable any such access to be secured;
(b)the access he intends to secure or to enable to be secured, is unauthorised; and
(c)he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
I'd guess issuing a SSL certificate pretending to be another company to decrypt their data without their consent would count as 'unauthorised'?
But as you say... it won't matter....
Maybe its just me but as soon as anyone uses a term like "Tiger Team" I know they're full of it!
Or they're good at their job?
There's a massive business speak feedback loop. Most people know it sounds bollocks, but they think they should talk like that, so they do.
Maybe I misunderstood, but the recommendations seem to be 'stop wasting money and create a centralised team to best understand requirements across the org and implement them'. Sounds like sensible (if obvious) advice.
Sometimes also you need someone else to say that, to give the necessary 'Ooomph' to the solution.
One of the best contractors I ever worked with told me that most of his job is listening. He'd go in to a company and listen to the staff there, as they understood the systems and the operational problems with them. He would then end up tidying up and presenting the staffs solution to the people who'd hired him.
He would get listened to when regular staff wouldn't as he was costing a lot of money per day, and as long as he didn't try and take credit for other peoples ideas it worked well, as the problem got solved, but also the existing staff felt like they'd finally been listened to.
It's amazing how many problems in business are human problems, not technological. Sometimes working out how to 'human' someone into doing what you need them to do is the best solution.
This does not include the Starship launches, which are explicitly considered to be disposable prototypes.
Even then, with their third test mission, they manage to do what all other rocket companies routinely do.
i.e. reach a stable insertion orbit with the loss of both stages.
The "waterfall method"?
Trust me, that hasn't gone away. :(
Vector processing?
That's what GPUs do.
RISC?
RISC has pretty much (sort of) won.
Smalltalk?
Which (arguably) beget other OO languages like C# or Java (or the even more similar message passing ObjectiveC).
You seem to be saying because we did a thing once we should never strive to improve?
Is society to be denied the advances since the 60s? Many of which have come about precisely because of the increase in the availability of computing power. We may have put men on the moon back then, but I've got a much better quality of life, and a much better chance of living longer into old age, and doing that whilst being fairly healthy too. This is all thanks to improvements in technology.
It's always worth buying a good quality mechanical item, but I'd say good consumer drives* are as good as enterprise kit. (but without the same warranties).
It doesn't really matter if your HD fails if you have redundancy and good backups too.
TBH I thought that was the point about BackBlaze, they used consumer grade drives, but I suspect I may have made that 'fact' up??
Hmm, no, they do... found this whilst researching...
* I used to really like the IBM/Hitachi stuff, I had one of their consumer drives running 24/7 for over 9 years, which got replaced out of fear, not failure.
Because unlike the 90s, they're have 5% market share, not 95%.
To be fair to MS they're only doing what Google did, we forget it now, but if you go on Sourceforge and download something from the mid 2000s, it's a very good chance the installer will offer to install (and set to default) chrome for you.
Well, it's happened. I've finally lost the plot.
I've just read this article about some man making a dangerous hunting quarry even more dangerous by genetic engineering and breeding simply so idiots can kill things for sport.
However, whenever my brain read whatever animal it's talking about I just saw the word 'sheep'. (You know those little fluffy docile cloud with leg things)...
I'm going to ring the doctors.
Let's recap:
a) Moon landings and space exploration isn't something you get on a budget>
Inflation adjusted the Apollo programme (without ground support and salaries) cost over $200 billion.
NASA paid $118 million for this lander, and it nearly got there on it's first try. They paid $108 million for Astrobotic's failed one.
With rounding that leaves them about $200 billion left to try again.
b) No, the market will not fix it
But market forces will compel investment if it looks likely to return a profit. Hence the current commercial interest in space.
India did it.
..quite famously 'on a budget' too. And arguably partially to get a slice of the lucrative space launch market.
China did it. And they will likely do it again. How you ask? The same way you did in the 60s and 70s, by having an entire nations worth of backing and resources, and making this about national efforts and pride, and not about some companies.
But that's not sustainable long term.
It still a government body i.e. NASA that did all the basic research and development that the private companies are building on.
That's how any nescient industry requiring significant capital investment tends to get going though. The government puts in enough capital to drive the initial adoption, but once done the private sector takes over.
Why should people constantly re-invent things? It always amuses me how people build upon things that their fellow countrypeople have invented, but when it's others it's just 'copying'.
How old is it? How full is it?
If it's a few years old and gets heavy use it could be the flash crapping out. My previous phone was several years old and when nearly full (as in a few gig remaining) would crash randomly. Since being passed on to a family member who runs it much emptier and it's fine.
If it's nearly full try removing some stuff see if that helps, if it does, sounds like your storage is going.
Also fucking :Safari won't always allow me to zoom in on certain websites.
There's a full screen/windowed zoom thingy in the accessibility options, can be enabled/disabled with 3 taps and set to do a region or full screen.
I guess on Monday we are going to have to tell the client who had to do a major upgrade of their previous system last year because they couldn't install the old app on newly purchased iPads that the brand new system that was specifically built to not have that problem has been blocked because apple are having a tantrum after losing a court case...
Could you write a small native app that just exposes a webview? If you're installing it as an enterprise app then you can self cert, so no app store requirement.
There's many in the entertainment industry that could be called 'vapid', not Taylor Swift though.
If you're not a fan of her work (I'm not) that doesn't detract from her obvious creative and business talents. For example, she's a Grammy award winner, including one for directing her own music video. (Becoming the first artist to win one in this category as a sole director). She has the business sense to pretty much own all of her work (she owns the production company that makes all her videos for example).
Even just having the gumption to go 'fuck you' to the recording industry and re-record her early work to regain control of it deserves some respect.
There's many vapid people out there, but she's not one of them.
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