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....Gordon Freeman's invited.

Seriously though, they'll find another one won't they, so can I theorise that the Higgs Boson is made up of, say Anonymous Coward Bosons? I've always wanted to be famous...

No, No. ACs are made of bogons.

See: flag day. Best avoided. You can't make the change simultaneously on every single computer connected to the Internet, and if you don't you're going to have random breakages from the point where you start until the point where the last computer's been patched. I'd rather not have frequent and unpredictable failures of the global Internet for 3-6 months.

Open source, in of itself, is somewhat agnostic to these quintessentially biblical terms. Open source is neither good nor evil

In a non-biblical sense, open source is decidedly non-evil. Non-rude, too.

Is your argument supposed to mean that *we* should trust is the pin-striped suit wearing Dr. Fred MBogo with the 100 million dollar home, because he makes a lot of money?

Personally, I put my trust in Bernie Madoff. A true professional with years of experience.

Is your argument supposed to mean that *we* should trust is the pin-striped suit wearing Dr. Fred MBogo with the 100 million dollar home, because he makes a lot of money?

Because in my interpretation of your metaphor the only thing that I can think that corresponds to Microsoft's track record would be Dr. Fred MBogo.

I think a more accurate metaphor would be that Open Source corresponds to the FDA where all tests, procedures, and results are publicly reviewable, and that proprietary software like Microsoft's corresponds to superb marketers advertising the latest cancer curing snake oil that must be good because it costs so much and since the manufacturers live in dream mansions they must be legitimate.

Or to put it simply: open source chemistry, proprietary software alchemy. Here's my evidence: from wikipedia, some portions of the definition of the scientific method:

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
....
Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established.

Is your argument supposed to mean that *we* should trust is the pin-striped suit wearing Dr. Fred MBogo with the 100 million dollar home, because he makes a lot of money?

Because in my interpretation of your metaphor the only thing that I can think that corresponds to Microsoft's track record would be Dr. Fred MBogo.

I think a more accurate metaphor would be that Open Source corresponds to the FDA where all tests, procedures, and results are publicly reviewable, and that proprietary software like Microsoft's corresponds to superb marketers advertising the latest cancer curing snake oil that must be good because it costs so much and since the manufacturers live in dream mansions they must be legitimate.

Or to put it simply: open source chemistry, proprietary software alchemy. Here's my evidence: from wikipedia, some portions of the definition of the scientific method:

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
....
Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established.

Not exactly useful, but see http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/K/killer-poke.html

Yep -- run that on your iPhone, and it will totally blow out your iPhone's CRT :^)

Not exactly useful, but see http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/K/killer-poke.html

But in a work environment, that translates to:

If you make your code sufficiently readable, someone else will steal your job.

PHP is "unsurprising" in the sense that it's obsequious; it smiles and agrees when in fact it doesn't understand what you mean. I know it's great when you need to write the drupal plugin (god help you), but I'd never elect to use it over Ruby; it just does too much DWIM.

Q: Is linus Torvalds speaking for Linux anymore? A: Mu.

Got to love old school hacking

Actually, it's both.

That's why you use RetroGuard or some other such product on your application before giving out your JARs anywhere, if you really think that a source leak of this kind would have any real effect.

And a podcast is just a RSS based distribution of sound and video media. But it is a good implementation and use of RSS, and a WikiCalc would be a great use of wiki.

Some of the best most obvious innovations seem rediculously obvious in hindsight, but that doesn't detract from their greatness (in fact, you could just say they were elegant)

I think we're working with slightly different definitions of the word "crash". When I think of a crash, I think of a program that was terminated not of its own volition, but by the operating system in response to, say, a memory segmentation fault.

assert() is (usually) a macro, and you can define it to expand to whatever you want. By default, it usually expands such that if the tested expression is false, then exit() is called after some debug message (like "failure in foo() at line 1234") is sent to stderr.

I *guess* you could refer to the call to exit() as a "crash", but to me it seems like deliberate behavior. In other words, the exit() call itself is not a sudden failure. The failure happened -- silently -- long before we got to the assert(). The call to exit() is done to limit the damage of the failure and to aid the programmer in debugging.

Now, an assertion failure doesn't have to result in a call to exit(). It could result in a cute GUI pop-up window that says, "sorry it didn't work out; please fill out this form that we'll send back to the developers. Try to give as much relevant info as possible." And that could be sent back to the developers along with a core dump. A lot of developers have chosen this route, and it seems like a valid one. In a debug build, an assertion failure could instead result in a call to a function that pauses execution and launches an interactive debugger; this too is valid.

But I think it's unhelpful to try to convince people that "assert will just crash the program" for two reasons: 1) assert() is only a messenger, and the programmer is always in control of how that message is to be delivered, because she always has control over the definition of the macro. 2) you're going against the writings of the experts, and if you don't qualify your meaning very carefully, you'll just end up confusing people.

I think we pretty much agree in principle, but the definitions we're using are at disjoint. (That's a problem, because clear communication is very important in this business.) I think what you *meant* to say is, "don't use the default definition of assert because the default assertion failure action is to halt the program without giving much useful information to the end-user." That's a statement I can much more readily agree with.

thought control would be optimal, but even some gloves one could wear to control things could dramatically increase productivity.

That's true, where "Unix" == "Linux with nscd installed and running". Don't feel bad, these kinds of assumptions aren't new.

Mu covers your answers and all possible ones like it. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions"

exploit, n. An act or deed, especially a brilliant or heroic one.

exploit, n. [originally cracker slang]

1. A vulnerability in
software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise
attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Death is
a famous exploit. 2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an
exploit in sense 1.

I think you're overstating the case. According to the jargon file, vaporware is mere " Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place)", i.e. malicious intent, or even lack of intent to release, is not necessarily implied. Wikipedia elaborates that apart from the cases you describe, it can also be a "test ballon", with the project getting cancelled when there is not enough positive response, or simply the result of too much optimism.

I find the name of that process with HijackThis, which also gives the filename. It'll be in %system32%, and the spyware will be in Program Files.

The directory in Program Files will have a few .dat files which contain the .exe and the .dll in %system32%. Obviously when you delete the reg key loading the dll, or delete the spyware .exe, the process spawned from the .dll will rewrite either.

My strategy is to keep a copy of vi.exe around. I can vi the .dat, dG the file (deleting all the contents), write it, and bingo! done. It appears console apps don't go throught the same permissions layer that Windows Explorer does.

So I:
- kill the spyware process
- vi and delete the contents of the .dat
- kill the process launched from the dll
- let HijackThis delete the registry entry calling the dll
- vi and delete the contents of the .dll
- vi and delete the contents of the spyware .exe
- reboot if necessary.

It's important to note that thesse things hook into Explorer, so opening a new Explorer or IE window starts them again. Don't do that during this process.

I have to say I'm impressed with the watchdog processes. I've always been reminded of this ccool hack when fighting them.

Yes, it's all about laziness. My univ still doesn't use post-it, and they don't intent to, until they run out of their supply of blank 80-column cards. Every office has a box (10,000 or so of them) and they are used instead of post-it notes, actually being way more handy because of stiffness and size.

No, dipshit...it's cracker.

http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/C/cracker.html

Sure, there are plenty of hard workers in government. However, the fact is that a huge percentage are lazy and do very little all day while looking busy to the outside worker. They are heavily protected by unions and it's almost impossible to get fired.

Before you come down too hard on lazy government workers, keep in mind that there's a lot of politics in government workplaces (ya think?). A lot of little people building little empires, then stepping on the wrong person and getting smacked down. And when a petty person comes to power, generally (due to the unions) he can't fire someone, so a common form of revenge is to deny all the person's projects. Take all his work away. Leave him twiddling his thumbs behind a desk all day. CBS News covered an instance of this at the NIH, of a doctor who hasn't done any work for six years for this very reason.

One other thing that must be understood. Often, a government agency exists to protect the status quo -- which in America is mostly a good thing. Before any armchair revolutionaries start posting about class wars, oppression, Iraq, Bush, or social justice, I understand that the status quo isn't perfect and is unlikely to be -- I said mostly. Lights stay on, clean water runs when a tap gets turned on, criminals are usually forced to pay for their crimes if they get caught, kids get reasonably educated year after year, people can't build a firetrap and call it a house, we don't get invaded and pwned by some other country, etc -- YMMV, but as a general rule this is what happens; and this is not necessarily what happens in certain other countries. The government does not exist to expand and make a profit; in most cases it exists to maintain something. Public order, dam operation, roads, forests, public health -- these are all maintainance jobs.

The downside of this is that a maintainance job attracts timeservers who only want to warm a seat until retirement. In many cases it also attracts anal-retentives who are terrified of change or anything outside strict procedure signed in triplicate -- droids, in other words. Plenty of brilliant people get into government -- it's just that it's easy to get worn down, to quit in disgust, or to excel and bubble out of the system, ending up in a managerial desk and never doing what you're good at again.

The other downside is that lack of growth produces stagnation, so a department has a dilemma; expand unecessarily, or continue doing the same old thing, usually getting forgotten by the politicians (who tend to give money to the sexiest things). Generally the former solution is picked, which is why that old saying in government of "spend all your money this year, or we won't get more next year" is 100% true.

Only magic? Not more magic?

Why, sure. But using Forecast Fox is not even close to using like weather.com as a web page, is it? It's more properly described as scraping weather.com to glean the few non-useless bits of information that it does contain.

I scrape weather.com on occassion, as well, if I'm sitting on the couch listening to music with XBMC and feel like checking the forecast. I'm in no way annoyed by this, and it does work rather well.

But you're absolutely kidding yourself if you really think that either of these methods in any way enable you to experience all that is useless about weather.com. For that, you need a web browser, like God intended, and a LINK TO THE PAGE. CLICK HERE NOW! FREE WEATHER INFORMATION. Check out the new 2006 Buick lineup! CONSUME! OBEY!

iTunes Says Moo

I think maybe you meant "mu"?

The developers are just paying proper respect to the ages-old tradition that computers are a black art. Hell, just ask any user, they'll tell you. It's all magical thinking and cargo-cult mumbo-jumbo.

I remeber when my employer had one computer that kept locking up (usually after several hours of unsaved editing). A similar technique was used to get it going again.

It's called File Transfer, son.

On a completely seperate note, anyone notice how programmers write with slightly different grammar? Extra punctuation always goes outside the ", never inside, as above.

I guess you haven't heard of the wheel of reincarnation. GPUs and CPUs have diverged and re-merged many times before.

"moron" : was that word really necessary?
If you can't argue without resorting to insults, perhaps your discourse isn't as solid as you pretend it to be?
Now guess who's the moron?
YHBT. YHL.HAND.

Christ, could this thread get any dumber?

Did you fall off of a turnip truck yesterday?

"Doze" (spelled "dose" here) as in "to sleep" as in "Windows is so slow that it puts you to sleep". It's the most common "joke" misspelling of Windows in the universe.

This is such an old slur, that (A) it is quasi-official by virtue of being in the jargon file; and (B) I don't honestly believe that you've never heard it before.

If you mine enough random sentances, you can get some truly profound stuff. Every geek should spend at least a couple of hours with some source text and a markov chain generator.

But it isn't the random generator that is profound, it is the person doing the selection.

Similarly, while the majority of what the kids say may be worthless, a selection process can make the raw material look more intelligent than it is. You are probably reading more into the sentances than the kids actually meant, because you're only getting the sentances that you can read more into.

Not saying it isn't fake, but it doesn't have to be.

Obfuscation seems to be useful only for client-side Java applications that contains super-secret valuable algorithms. I mean, who cares if somebody decompiles your code to see how you did sortable JTables or whatever?

Obfuscation does also provide a speed bump to those attempting to disassemble your code. Without obfuscation, anybody with a casual interest could just glance at your code using javap, etc. Retroguard fits saemlessly enough into the build process that adding a simple level of protection to the code is usually simple and transparent.

Obfuscation seems to be useful only for client-side Java applications that contains super-secret valuable algorithms. I mean, who cares if somebody decompiles your code to see how you did sortable JTables or whatever?

Obfuscation does also provide a speed bump to those attempting to disassemble your code. Without obfuscation, anybody with a casual interest could just glance at your code using javap, etc. Retroguard fits saemlessly enough into the build process that adding a simple level of protection to the code is usually simple and transparent.

Check out:
Retrologic awarded Java byte code obfucator (Open Source! and free!)
not free but you can try before you buy
ZelixKlassMasterYet Another Java Byte Code Obfuscator (YAJBCO)
But I'm not sure they really work - just provide level of security similar to classical machine code. Btw. the MyDoom virus was BurnEye encrypted - so what?

1. Java can be trivially decompiled, so I don't see how this can be regarded as "closed source" with a straight face.