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Ah yes, since it works on your machine then nobody else has ever had a problem. Therefore, everyone who says they have trouble with Flash on Ubuntu is clearly a sockpuppet paid by M$.

Here's a certification badge for you:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000818.html

No, seriously, Flash on Ubuntu causes a lot of slowdown. Without Flashblock you can't surf because the banner ads kill your load times. If you try to do any Flash (youtube, games, etc), it just doesn't work.

Good point. Here's a funny link on the subject http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html

This doesn't apply to just Windows users. Its referred to as the dancing bunnies problem. It doesn't matter what OS the user is on. If they think they want what the particular malware claims to offer, they'll go through all the administrator prompts you can come up with to get what they want.

All these precautions don't protect you from the dancing bunnies problem.

While I agree that they need to be selling Vista Basic for a low price to move product(I would say $30-40) I honestly am not sure UAC helps anybody. Let us all be honest here. Let us cut the marketing BS and the tech blogger BS and get down to the nitty gritty, okay? UAC will NOT stop the rate of infection of Windows PCs and frankly while it is probably safer than "full on admin mode" I'd like to see some real world tests with users to back that up.

Why am I so skeptical? Because being a PC repairman I have watched dumbasses open password protected zip files just for the carrot that some malware writer has waved in front of their face. There is a GOOD reason why Windows is the biggest pile of bugs and malware, and honestly it ain't because of MSFT. It is because Windows has WAY too many users that I wouldn't trust to walk and chew gum, much less take security into consideration. It all comes down to the dancing bunny problem. You can put up all the UAC roadblocks that you want and if the malware writer waves the right carrot in front of their face a dumbass will be more than happy to give them the passwords so they can have the carrot.

It is like that security test they did awhile back where folks were willing to give their passwords to the office machines for a candy bar. Or that test they did to get into a company that bragged on their security practices. How did they get in? By dropping flash drives in the parking lot which the users happily brought in and plugged into their machines. So trying to blame MSFT for viruses and worms is like blaming the SUV manufacturer because some woman runs over a family of 5 while doing 70 and playing with her cell phone. You will NEVER make Windows secure, simply because there are way too many stupid Windows users. Switch those stupid users to OSX or Linux and watch the infections on those platforms soar. Because all the malware writers have to do is wave the right carrot and all your great security is turned into shit by the user. That is why we PC repairman simply smile and use expressions like PEBKAC and ID10T. Because we know it will NEVER change.

Or you could, oh I don't know, not let morons near your computer? I'm typing this on a Win2K pro machine that has been hooked to the net and running non stop for almost 9 years. In that time I have gotten zero, zip, nada, squat on the virus front. Why? Because I don't let morons on this machine, that's why.

As a PC repairman I have noticed the PEBKAC problems with Windows can nearly always be traced to one of three types. One, the "anything my friend (insert name of girlfriend) sends me has to be okay." Those can usually be dealt with by installing a decent AV and having them use webmail instead of OE. Two, the "I will click on anything that'll get me teh hot lesbos!" guy. You can usually cut down on his rate of pwnage by giving a copy of Firefox loaded with bookmarks for places like Youporn and Redtube. And three, the "I click on everything I loads off the Kazaa!" types. These are usually dumbass teenagers looking for the latest horrible pop drivel and instead clicking on "lousy_tune.mp3.exe" thinking it is their pop drivel. Putting them in a limited user account and putting a good AV to scan whatever folder they are downloading crap to usually does the trick.

The point is blaming Windows for morons is like blaming the SUV manufacturers when some woman plows through a family of five because she ran a redlight while playing with her cell phone. Stupid people will find a way to break stuff, hence why we call them stupid. If you put these types on OSX or Linux they would break just as much as they do on Windows. They would just be loading "Hot_Pron_codec.dmg" or "killer_tune.sh" instead of an .exe. It all comes back to the dancing bunny problem. The best we tech guys can do is educate where we can, and take steps like the ones listed above to minimize the damage they can do. Because I don't care which OS you give them PEBKAC problems will NEVER go away. After all this problem wouldn't exist in the first place if folks had actually bothered applying the patch the MSFT released in OCTOBER. Just further proof that they ain't exactly brain trusts we are talking about here.

Wow, I can't believe it. That number is SO high! It's simply impossible to believe it, the technologies that we came up with in 2007 helped us pirate a huge amount of music in 2008. This is unheard of!!!

So, what's new?

Ah, the environerd. You know, a nerd is the perfect person for that lifestyle.

Only a nerd would take pride in a life of complete social isolation, where the only connection with the outside world is a glowing terminal screen.

Of course, you're not a very good nerd, because you fail at science. A laptop in sleep mode and a laptop turned off completely will burn negligible amounts of energy. If one watt is going to cause you to lose sleep, your power system is badly designed.

This isn't surprising, since you also appear to fail at statistics. lithium batteries DO NOT typically burst into flame. A very small number of them fail due to defects in manufacturing. This is not typical.

Thankfully, I actually just buy renewable power from the hydro company. This means I don't need to stay awake at night worrying about whether I've left enough power in my energy budget to heat my home overnight.

Stack overflow took an interesting approach, and only uses OpenID. They don't even have a non-OpenID option. Proprietor Jeff Atwood discusses some of the tradeoff at his blog.

But they are missing the point. We are talking about BUSINESS here, places with millions and when added together billions of dollars worth of software which they HAVE to have, or they might as well turn off the lights and call it a day. And you are telling me that they should be happy to throw away those millions and billions for the privilege of MSFT doing an OSX style reboot? Why? With OSX they were stuck in a dead end. System 9 had shitty program and memory management and frankly just couldn't be fixed. If MSFT had stuck with the Win9x arch I would agree with you wholeheartedly. But they didn't and frankly there isn't anything wrong with the WinNT arch, especially in Win2K/XP.

Everyone seems to expect MSFT to do the impossible: To take the most clueless user that will click on anything and make an OS that they can't infect. Sorry, but it just can't be done because of dancing bunny problem. So no matter what MSFT does they are NEVER going to make these people safe. They just can't do it short of making a ROM image that they aren't allowed to save or install anything on, and folks won't stand for it.

So here is my suggestion: Give the customer choice. Choice is good,right? We are all about free choice here, correct? Now you can't tell me that MSFT isn't making some serious money off of Win2K/WinXP. Sure they ain't making the insane profit margins that make the day traders rally to their stocks, but good money in a lousy economy none the less. What MSFT should do is to continue to sell Win2K/XP arch to those businesses that need it, as well as the home users that want it, and set up a group of programmers in Redmond. We'll call them the "WinNT arch old" division. And then say to these programmers "As long as we are making say, 15% above your salaries on this arch we need you to provide bugs fixes for it. if you come up with some new feature you want to add fine, we'll give you a website to offer them to the customers, but bug fixing is job #1 here".

And that way those of us who don't want the "bling bling flipping 3d web search 3.0 live enabled" crap can still get what we need to WORK, and those of us that want the pretty and the home centric crap can have what they want. You can even spin it as "stepping forward by looking back" since it would be basically going back to the way it was when we had Win9x and WinNT. Those that wanted the home stuff had an OS just for them, and those that needed a machine for work had a rock solid stripped down OS that just booted and got out of the way, so we could run our apps, the things that PAY our salaries. Because as it is now they are trying to stuff us all in a giant multimedia mess of an OS that is so obviously coded by someone with Apple envy that it hurts. And if they actually go through with killing quicklaunch and the taskbar for Apple's dock I predict we will finally see MSFT drop like a rock, because frankly the users I have spoken to all same the same thing. They say "If I wanted an Apple, I would have bought one. If I am going to have to learn to do everything like an Apple, why shouldn't I just say screw MSFT and buy an Apple which seems to last longer anyway?" And I have to agree. Bring back Allchin, FIRE Ballmer, and make business job #1 again, or in 5 years I predict that MSFT will be where Yahoo is now. Just another used to be trying to recapture past glory.

A total moron can get themselves in trouble in ANY OS, be it Linux, Mac or Windows. I once gave a truly clueless moron a Linux install since he simply refused to listen to me and quit going to sleazy topsites. Did that fix his problem? Nope, he somehow figured out a way to totally bork his dependencies installing crap he found by typing "Linux software" in Google and trying to install stuff from places like Freshmeat without having a fucking clue as to what he was doing. Managed to bork the system up so damned bad it wouldn't even boot.

So now I have him locked down worse than any BOFH has ever been in WinXP and force him to type some incredibly huge password just to get admin access. He brings it once a year or so to clean out the infections he always manages to get and fix the stuff he has completely boned. It all comes down to the dancing bunny problem. If you have a moron who is damned determined to see that dancing bunny no matter how big of a BOFH you are they WILL see the bunny dammit! Thankfully most of my customers would prefer NOT to have to spend money having me constantly clean up their mess and are all too happy to buy what I tell them to and run what I tell them to run. And as I said earlier, despite what many here think about Windows if you remove IE and OE from the equation and keep the machine behind a hardware firewall and use the tiniest bit of common sense you can keep ANY Windows install running safe and bug free almost indefinitely. Well except WinME. I'm not a miracle worker you know.

There's pretty strong evidence that the ability to program is more or less in you or not, and that training won't change that. If we want to start teaching programming to as many people as possible, we should begin with a simple screening test (as in the link) and exempt anyone who doesn't pass. To do otherwise will no doubt result in massively widespread, deep-seated hatred/disdain for programming (and maybe programmers).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html

Give the person who actually wrote the article the ad revenue rather than this bottom feeding scum.

Not sure if this site copied Jeff Atwood's post with permission or not, so I'm posting the original link to Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html

The days of network being faster than disk are over.

Gig-E speed is about 30MB/s in the real world. This is with a crossover cable, machine to machine. I've tested and verified this over a number of platforms, including expensive server systems.

Cheap terabyte single disks these days can do 80MB/s.

The only reason to go with raid is for redundancy, or better handling of simultaneous connections.

Read this for a more in depth analysis: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000339.html

In the late 90s and early part of this decade, disk drive capacities were doubling about every year. Recently, this trend has slowed

So you asked how to handle programmers on a forum where programmers hang out. The answer you got is: GAAAH BLAH BLAH BLAH don't bother me BLAH BLAH I'm the best programmer in the universe leave me alone BLAH BLAH what's that? status reports? I'm waaay too good for status reports BLAH BLAH oh, btw, buy me all this stuff because you should BLAH BLAH BLAH I don't wanna hear about anything that doesn't affect me personally all that "business" mumbo-jumbo bores me to death just sign my fat paycheck already

How unsurprising... And one-sided.

Somehow, I get the feeling that the answers would have been different if you had posted your question on a forum where managers hang out (if there is such a thing).

I'm not a manager myself but knowing that it could happen one day and because I like to read what people have to say about my industry and their ideas on how to make it better, I have read a couple books from Joel's and Jeff's reading lists.

So should you.

Can you imagine getting the average programmer to bang out Fizzbuzz in Haskell or Erlang? These guys are flat out finding the "PrintIfFizzbuzz" method on IntegerWithFizzbuzz class in the .Java IDE. Let alone grappling with functional concepts. I'm just saying ...

Do you spit on the onion rings before you serve the burgers?

I'm going to side with the professionals here (and those are not Microsofties and their stupid flight-sims):
Leave the smart-ass thingies for good code and decent documentation. When the project's done, wrap it up, check the patches in, write documentary and go on to the next project. Don't waste time on funny shit.

Jeff Atwood was right when quoting "the best code is no code at all".

Leave the funny eggs for your MySpace website.

As someone who has spent his days working PC repair for more years than I care to count, I can say that you are wrong. Unless you have some really shitty server somewhere that my customers don't know about, because I haven't actually seen a warez bug cross my desk in years. That is usually FUD put out by software writers. You don't happen to write software for a living, do you?

The vast majority of infections can be traced back nearly every time to the same two sources. Those sources are the pr0ncodec.exe and the hidden file extension music.mp3.wma crap. The guys will run right past every AV warning and flag you put in their way to see the titties, and the girls click on what they think is an .mp3 that is actually an mp3.wma that bites them in the ass. But I don't think I've actually seen a warez bug since the days of repacking games, like taking a razor1911 rip and repacking it with a bug. There are just too many easier avenues of attack. The problem of course comes down to the dancing bunny which no matter how many roadblocks you try to put between them and the bunny they will happily shove you aside and keep right on clicking until they see the bunny. And I don't see ANY way to fix that little problem.

Actually my customers think the FF logo looks like a tadpole. And Seamonkey is the "blue bird" which took me a while to figure out as folks would bring in their machine and ask that I put the blue bird on it too. But I know what you mean, sometimes you just have to trick them for their own good. Otherwise you would go insane after having to fix the same IE driveby download mess for the 400th time because they refuse to listen and keep going back where they shouldn't. You would NOT believe how many of the "porn codec.exe" infections I had to clean up a couple of years back from dumbasses going right back and doing it all over again. It just proves the whole dancing bunny problem is all too real.

What you speak of is known as The Dancing Bunny problem which as someone who has worked nearly 15 years in PC repair I can say is all too true. I had a buddy working corporate when Melissa hit and he said several PHB middle managers got MAD when he told them they couldn't have their attachment from that Melissa girl. He said he finally had to tell them "Go tell the boss you want to run Melissa and see what HE says". So never underestimate the incredible stupidity a user is capable of when they think there is a dancing bunny waiting for them. You should really read the link on the dancing bunnies. It is SO true!

Moryath, I agree with you completely.

I had problems with running a video card correctly in Ubuntu. It's an Radeon 9200, hardly a rare card. The help I got was along the lines of "lol get a new card" or "it runs at 800 x 600. That should be good enough for email."

Riiiight. That's why I reinstalled Win2k. (The problem was resolved in 8.10, which I'm now using at home.)

It is the Linux crowd's fault, and it's the Works on My Machine problem. The people I've seen may be able to program, but their are horrible at fixing problems or relating to the public.

The new thing is Flash. It's slow on Ubuntu. Guess whose problem it is...

Yep, it's Adobe's fault for making a bad version of Flash.

To add to the point above about "knowing when," Jeff Atwood believes that you should write the parts of the system critical to your business and reuse code for the rest. For example, if you are a bank, write your own banking software but reuse code for web front-ends.

I am afraid that you still not see my point: there is nothing you can do with a registry that you cannot do with a filesystem and config files. A registry just adds complexity.

And I have seen multiple ways of storing data in the registry, so there is no convention that is followed, just like there is no convention that is followed on conf files.

It indeed is standardized; very badly. It only add complexity and solves nothing of the problems caused by conf files.
Easily accessible it is not; I would not try to tell my mother to start regedit32. And from a programmer pov: take a look at the Preferences API in Java. That API is simple, straightforward, and allows for multiple implementations.
All in one place: that is actually a very bad thing. Look at all the troubles the registry has caused, and for so many people, just because the registry is in one place. Single point of failure + Microsoft == headaches. Sometimes you need to change things in your registry for a certain application, but Microsoft warns that any changes to the registry can make the whole OS unstable. In no other modern operating system you are confronted with these complexities. Changing a conf file for an application on a *nix machine will not cause the whole OS to become unstable.
Also look at all the crapware that is able to hide in the registry; all possible because there is no rights management; either you can write in the registry, or you cannot. Application A can always read/write settings for application B. That is very, very bad design.

Again: lookup articles about it: the registry is a p.o.s.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000939.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/149951/how_to_clean_your_windows_registry_and_speed_up_your_pc.html
I recon that for every registry-fan you can find at least 10 foes. Go to any programmer convention and ask around. I did.

If you really think that the registry is the answer, you did not understand the question.

Reminds me of this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001125.html

There's a very reassuring article along those lines at Coding Horror - Hardware Assisted Brute Force Attacks: Still For Dummies.

It's for memory-mapped I/O. This page explains it nicely:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

Just require players to solve a captcha every hour or be disconnected, with another required on reconnect after failing. Give them 5 minutes to answer if they are in combat. Problem solved.

most captcha are already broken. Few examples: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001067.html its just a matter of time before a new one is broken.

For anyone curious, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror recently wrote about them in his blog. Included are some additional details and a couple of examples.

At face value it's a somewhat obvious exploit, but still interesting.

It's just not feasible to write software without bugs. In fact, Jeff Atwood would claim you're an amateur developer until you realize that everything you write sucks. Go read his post on the subject: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001020.html

Let's also keep in mind that fewer children get these laptops now due to license fees, and who will make profit out of this? Peru? The children of Peru? The guys behind OLPC?

No--but this guy will.

This site is a joint venture with Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror.

To be fair, Joel had very little to do with the actual implementation or development of the site. The majority of the credit for the idea and actual creation should go to Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror.

Personally I think it's a great idea, if for no other reason than to put the screws to Expert Sexchange. Their stupid referrer sniffing and page layout designed to make people pay to see answers has gone on long enough.

Thank you. This kind of comment is spot on.

While technically all desktop operating systems have technically equivalent security, there are cultural differences. You allude to them yourself: users of other systems are more likely to accept programs that break when upgrading. Windows users, on the other hand, expect backwards compatibility at almost any cost, and in accommodating them, Microsoft has left security holes open. (Also, security patches tend to be pushed when available for other operating systems; Microsoft uses the "Patch Tuesday" system.)

Also, there has been some research into isolating the web browser from the rest of the desktop; I think that approach has some potential even if it doesn't solve the dancing bunnies problem.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000905.html/

Reading through the comic it's pretty obvious what Chrome is about. Google clearly feel that web apps have hit something of a wall running on existing browsers, and that they need to take the drastic action of releasing a new browser with a new architecture to move things on. The V8 javascript engine is clearly to enable larger and more complex applications, and the thread-per-tab architecture means larger and more complex apps can be run without risking the whole browser.

Microsoft either got wind of what Google were planning or came to the same conclusions, thus the new architecture in IE8 (and the IE javascript engine is not as bad as it's made out to be, it just underperforms badly with string processing).

Mozilla (and maybe Opera) may well struggle to compete with Microsoft and Google here. Opera have shown that they do have the resources to develop new rendering and javascript engines, but Mozilla are still using a Gecko that has changed little in years apart from tweaking. It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly.

Windows Hot Dog Stand Theme

It doesn't need to be "screaming fast," but scrap that Pentium and get a modern CPU.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000867.html

...and your point is?

My point is the API and the language are a mess, as evidenced by functions with the same name prepended with 'real', and the function should have been doing that in the first place. Managing this sort of growth and periodic pruning are what allows languages to become more coherent or to dissolve in a confusing morass of similar but deprecated APIs.

The entire API is an organic, messy rag-bag of functions, which makes working with PHP more than a little frustrating and encourages copy and paste coding. I'm fine with using it for small stuff, but there are definitely flaws in PHP which encourage crappy code.

why don't you add "sel" CSS class to the first tab? That should fix the problem without breaking the JavaScript tab system. (It's Method A above.) Note that, as with all Slashdot advice, I haven't actually tested that.

I tested it w/ Firebug (I <3 being able to edit the forms/pages I'm viewing) and verify that it works as advertised.

I was originally going to chime in with the same bug as the P&GP, however I realised that I could
    View > Page Style > No Style
And get to all the content that way.

I do agree that sites should be designed with graceful degradation in mind.
It's the '00s people; either don't expect your site to work for other ppl the way it works on your set-up or get one of these!

Just throwing money at "someone" to develop the apps often isn't enough.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html

Perhaps IBM should start writing these apps themselves instead.

Thank you for the specifics. I'm not surprised that you're seeing such significant performance-enhancements. I'm just glad to see a simple, scalable alternative to the angle tax, and now that I'm back home I'm looking forward to exploring Protocol Buffers. Thanks again!

Some quick Googling found this site, which has a Zenburn scheme for VS2005.

I have no idea whether it works for earlier/later versions of VS though.

Go witness the awesomeness of the "Hot Dog Stand" scheme of Windows 3.1 in all it's glory. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000341.html On windows, I tend set the default background color to a light gray instead of white, gives everything a Unixy feel and is less strain on the eyes, although the effect may be psychological rather than physical since the advent of TFT. Obviously, this only applies to apps, most websites override this (this /. edit window is grey, but the posts are on white Background)

Zenburn is a low-contrast colour scheme for low-light conditions. It is popular color scheme among programmers because it is very easy on the eyes.

Legend says it was used by the ancients when they developed teh internets and our realm.

* http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000682.html
* http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburn/
* http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=415
* http://slinky.imukuppi.org/2006/10/31/just-some-alien-fruit-salad-to-keep-you-i n-the-zone/
* http://termos.vemod.net/zenburn-for-konsole

My current keyboard, and by far my favorite of all that I've used or owned, is the Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000.

I know, I know. It has a hideously long name and it's from Microsoft. Ignore these things as best you can, it's really quite a nice keyboard. Obviously it is a split design, which doesn't work for a lot of people, but it's more friendly than any other split design I've tried. It's got an interesting set of ergonomics which I won't explain here because Microsoft's product page (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productdetails.aspx?pid=043) does a good job of explaining.

For reviews, in case you don't want to bother doing a quick search, there are the following:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,123241-page,1/article.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000400.html
http://reviews.cnet.com/keyboards/microsoft-natural-ergonomic-keyboard/4505-3134_7-31485240.html
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Natural-Ergo-Keyboard-4000/dp/B000A6PPOK

Anyway, just my little bit of input on the topic. It also should be noted that I have no experience in using this keyboard on OS X, so I suppose that this keyboard's usefulness in that context is something that those who use that OS will need to look at a bit more closely, since I can offer no input in that regard; although, it should be compatible in general as it connects via USB.

The good:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
- non-language specific programming musings

http://blog.brokep.com/
- The Pirate Bay's brokep's blog

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/
- interesting furniture hacks

http://www.ladyada.net/rant
- hobby electronics news

http://www.wired.com/rss/commentary/securitymatters.xml
- Bruce Schneier's blog

http://www.thefirsthourblog.com/
- reviewing the first hour of games, handy for people like me who have a 10 minute attention span

http://torrentfreak.com/
- P2P / legal news

The ugly:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/default.stm
http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/
- destroy your faith in humanity, or at least the British

http://seenonslash.com/
- because sometimes -1 is funny

http://icanhascheezburger.com/
http://www.lolcats.com/rss.php
- still funny?

God I wish I knew where they came from, 'cause I'd love to have a copy myself. These used to hang on the wall of the 7th floor at UUNET waaaay back in the day ... where the sysadmins hung out ... at least that's the only place I've ever seen them. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/unix-magic-overacre-poster.jpg the above is just one in a series, there were several others. If you can find them, they'd be great.

Ruby is actually older than Java.

MS might be able to steer Ruby, but that's not really what they're after. They'd be happier with more IronX languages so that they can take mindshare away from Java. I'm not sure how much Sun makes from Java (it seems that so much of what you can do with Java is given away), but I don't think it's anywhere near as much as MS could make from .NET.

I mentioned before that Silverlight will always be 2nd banana as long as it remains Windows only. Flash works well enough on Linux, and Adobe AIR is coming to Linux, too, so what does Silverlight offer besides slightly fewer deployable platforms? Right now only a choice of languages. That might be enough for the Ruby hackers out there whose day jobs require hacking for Windows-only browsers to consider Silverlight. MS isn't going to be able convert OSS hackers en masse, but a little here and there might make a difference.

It will be interesting to see how far the Iron family of languages can work their way into the OSS world. Gates never would've allowed something like this, but he's out of the picture and Ballmer is too obsessed with advertising to pay much attention to Ruby on .NET.