NObody's going to argue the cross-platformability of php. Not even MS.
And despite Mono and so forth, ASP.NET and the rest of the.NET development platform is created by Microsoft for Microsoft so developers can write Microsoft apps for Microsoft servers..NET encompasses windows apps too, not just web apps. The codebase between the two is almost identical - okay, a winForm is stateful and a WebForm is stateless and the UI widgets are different, but the rest of the backend database/XML/IO stuff is the same. I don't think you'll want to use PHP to write a desktop app, or a suite with desktop/web integration. On the flipside, ASP.NET would be complete overkill for a majority of web-apps..NET's main competitor isn't PHP. It's Java. The way the architectures and libraries are set up, the target audience, even the langauge skills requred. Hell, C# and Java resemble each other so much that switching back and forth is a dawdle (well, almost. I just came off a 5-mo C# contract and am now on a java gig and I keep accidentally swapping keywords). I realize PHP5 has added some OO functionality, but I'm doubtful that it's as ground-up OO as either Java or C#/VB.NET etc.
PHP is great, I love it and use it all the time. But for the kind of work where ASP.NET would be an option, PHP wouldn't be. Regular old ASP? Sure, and I'd choose PHP over ASP in a heartbeat. But.NET is a different beast entirely. ASP.NET is as different from ASPclassic as it is from PHP.
Just to be clear, despite the name ASP and ASP.NET have very little in common.
ASP = VBScript or occasionally Jscript-based top-down imperative page-based language. ASP.NET = OO web-app framework, usually event-driven, usually in C# or VB.NET.
It's rather misleading to anecdotally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ASP.NET using ASP programming/programmer examples.
I don't think JMS and trek would be a good combination. One of the things that's hrting trek now is that Berman/Braga and their cabal of writers are locked in and running the whole show. Part of the reason TNG and DS(, and even TOS suceeded is that they had a multitude of writers with different styles.
Meanwhile, JMS wrote nearly all of b5. And that was in fact one of the things that I felt worked to its detriment. The wrtier's flaws quickly become the show's flaws, and that's one of the things killing trek right now....and depsite the holy reverence that many scifi fans place on b5, it was not without its flaws. The overall story arc was very ambitious and well thought-out, but many parts of the story - the dialogue was heavy-handed, foreshadowing (no pun intended) was overused as a plot device and frankly dind't always need a riddle-talking alien to be accomplished, etc. b5 was good TV, and certainly surpasses Voyager and most of TNG in quality, but I can't really see JMS helming a show whose canon, universe, and fanbase he can't entirely control. Nor can I see his particular philosophy working especially well with the established continuity. If JMS were going to "Save" trek he'd have to let go of some of teh creative control to allow people to fill in where he's weak, and his track record on such things isn't the best.
12. Gallifreyans get 12 regens by default. The master used up all his, did all sorts of mojo to stay alive on Gallifrey, stole Councillor Wossisname's body on Traken, and in the 5 docs was offered a full set of regens in exchange for help locating the Doctor.
The Valeyard from Trial of a Time Lord was supposedly the doc's 12th regen. The eeeeeevil one.
It can philosophically resonate just enough for people to shell out $7-9. None of the films really dig into the issues they raise.
Q: What is reality? A: I don't know but it means Keanu Reeves can fly.
Q: What is the nature of personal freedom? A: It means we can have an elderly lady speak in riddles and not tell us what's going on
Q: What is love? A: "Love" is a word that represents what is described by the word "love."
We get hackneyed Wittgenstein, hackneyed neoplatonism, hackneyed buddhism, overused messianism...I mean, come on. I've had deeper conversations about philsophy while drunk on several vodka tonics, and I knew better than to try and base a film trilogy around those.
Basically the whole series philosophical outlook is equivalent to those high-school freshman short stories that end "...and then I woke up. It was all a dream. Or was it?!?"
My problme with the series was their overuse of philoso-babble to make up for plot. In the first movie, it didnt bother me much beacsue there was a central character group and a solid conflict. 2 and 3...well, they use their little commentary on freedom and so forth to try and wrap things up, instead of actually writing an ending. Sure, ambiguity is fine, but this wasn't just ambiguous, it seemed like a cop-out. If you're going to use philosophical ramblings to resolve your films, you'd better be prepared to dig a little deeper than having Morpheus occiasonally say "what is real?" and the Oracle make comments about choice. Yeah, it's deeper than most sci-fi films get, and I'm fine with that, but it's too shallow to use it as a panacea for the trilogy's unanswered questions.
Actually I thought "Pop" was probably the only good song Nsync has done. It's at least different from the majority of their output.
The point is that you've got a major record with HEAVY production that was done on a plane with a laptop instead of a $2000/hr recording studio. The mere fact that a guy like *me* can spend less than two grand and have a pretty decent setup that blows away some of the "state-of-the-art" studios from the 80's...well, that's just cool!
Re:This goes back to the early days of Apple
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 1
MJ owned/owns the rights to Northern Songs, which gives him publishing and distribution rights. I think he owns the rights to some of their recordings, but not all. Apple Corps is the company that, IIRCIANAL, holds the copyrights and performance rights, publicity rights, etc. for everything else
spent years writing and practicing played gigs in inconvenient places accepting any gig that came along (well, except that one in texas we couldn't afford) playing to small audiences, sight-reading with a bunch of strangers...
I love it.
Okay, yeah, it's abused by people who can't sing.
But people who can, can use it subtley and well. And live it can be a godsend to even real musicians who *can* sing. Half the time onstage you're flying blind, since house sound sucks so much you can't hear yourself. In the studio it's no substitute for overdubs, and retakes, but if you waver slightly, it can catch it and fix it and save you having to spend another $300 on studio time while you do 15 more retakes to try and fix that one stupid note out of an otherwise perfectly good performance. If I flub a take or drop a note badly, yeah, I'm gunna rerecord it, but for a teensy error...who's gunna notice? Sometimes, though, you don't even notice that it's out (sometime's it isn't, even) until everything's been well-mixed with the rest of the tracks - at this point, re-recording everything in the studio again just isn't feasible, especially to a band on a razor-thin budget. Have autotune or whatever pitch-shift things by a few cents and you can save your mix.
So before you generalize about the "kind of person who uses an autotuner" be aware that many, many people use it, and you probably never even knew it. Sure, it's not going to find its way into the recording of the London Philharmonic, but these days most pro studios have and use autotune in some form or another, and you probably never even notice the results.
Seriously. Speaking as a live performer, I can address this.
You ever sung live onstage in a sh*tty club? If you're *lucky* and you've got a good soundguy, you can hear most of yourself through the monitors. And if you happen to move around onstage, you can't always guarantee there'll be a monitor close to you. And it's gunna be loud - even if you've got your head in the monitor case you still might not be able to hear everything you need. Plus your monitors are rarely isolated from reflections from front-of-house so you end up with a lot of reverb, delay and a nice chorus effect mixed in with the signal you need to hear whether you want it or not. Basically, as a singer you can't hear at all what you're doing and are relying on instinct and what little sound is filtering through your skull.
You can be offkey and not hear it until it's too late, or just not be able to do anything about it. Or you might not be able to hear it at all becasue you can't hear yourself over the noise of the venue. However, front-of-house as giant stacks pumping you out at greatly amplified volumes, and they don't get the chorusing your monitors do. In a lot of cases, the audience can hear things you can't. Oh, sure, in a good venue you can hear yourself, you're not made deaf by FOH reflections, and you've gone out and bought yourself a nice set of in-ear mons. But there's no guarantee. I've played gigs in venues where there were two monitors for a band with 4 members - not only was I forced to deal with a crapy house sound system, but I had to share my vocal monitoring with my bassist. LUkcily we could turn him down and he didn't care (he's a bassist after all) but still, that's the kind of thing you're up against. It's not like you get up onstage and everything sounds like it does through the vocal headphones in the studio.
I've recently seen a band with a really amazing vocalist. I've heard this guy sing, and he can *sing*. But when they're gigging, there's an autotuner in the mix, just for this reason - to correct his pitch when he can't hear himself.
I can only spot it if it's used badly. I can't always even spot it doing correction in my own music. I know it is, since I can see the graph, but I can't hear the difference. Granted, I keep the attack-time to "slow" and the tolernace pretty wide, but still.
Any engineer who knows what they're doing can use autotune to correct a singer who knows what they're doing without "cheating" or ruining anything. It ends up just being a technological timesaver - why retake the track 5 more times at a studio-time cost of $150/hr for that one time where you were a few cents sharp? For a guy like me, who can't afford to spend $300 extra in the studio without basically spending the rest of my production budget, the thing's a lifesaver.
And before you accuse me of not listening, I've got ears like a...uh, like some animal with really good ears for this sort of thing.
As an effect - that effect is neat *once*. After that, it's played-out. Cher's done it, it doesn't need to be done anymore. It was bordeline annoying on Daft Punk's last record, even though they were using it to deliberately sound cheesy.
I've got the software version, and I can say with some confidence that if you suck as a singer, it's not going to fix it.
What it is helpful for is correcting small errors. It can be used subtley. In fact, it's probably used a lot more than you think. Many, many "great" singers use it live for an extra push. Hey, if you've had a long day, or have a slight head cold, or whatever, there's no way you'll be able to hold that sustain in tune for 4 bars without drifting a little flat. This'll help that a bit. Not everyone who uses it ends up sounding like Cher.
I've heard some absolutely AMAZING vocalists use Autotune live. I don't think less of them. I know they can sing, I've heard them - what's wrong with some technological backup?
(as a side note, I'd *much* rather hear a computer sing than Celine Dion. Her voice is like fingernails on a blackboard to me).
There are a bunch of parameters in autotune (at least, the software version). You can choose your scale, your key, overall detuning (you can offset the scale by a few cents if you want), the speed of recorrection, the tolerance for errors, and whether or not it tires to add vibrato to the signal.
In the software, there's even a graphical mode so you can draw in custom pitch curves.
Okay, the vibrato is essentially useless. And the graphical mode is a pain in the ass.
But used properly, the rest of it can be pretty subtle. A decent tolerance and a slow recorrection time will be fairly subtle, and won't squeeze out all your glissandos and expressions. It's great for those long sustained notes that drift out of pitch after two bars becasue the singer's lungs are collapsing.
Autotune has options for detuning, custom scales, etc.
The software does, anyway. I'm assuming the ahrdware has similar capabilities. I've had my autotuner responding to arabic scales (real maqam ones, not the western "arabic" mode) with the quartertones and everything.
Eh, the AVP-1's compressor and gate are only sort of okayish. The Mic Modeller is a vastly stripped down version of the dedicated unit, the compressor is kinda flat, the EQ isn't all that fancy...but the autotuner is decent.
I did in fact RTFA, but I misspoke. I shoulda said a "one single *working* time server..."
It's another one of those cases where somebody shoulda probably checked - if you're relying on another party's resources, you'd better be sure those resources are still there...
> Why would a code review catch this? The guy at the review may have said "I think that address is time.nist.gov" or something. There may be >100K lines of code in a product like this.
A code review would hopefully catch the "hey, we're only using *one single time server for all our hardware* and the *hey, there's no way of configuring this short of patching the firmware* parts. Maybe the address part was overlookable, but the other bits?
>> Usually, someone should say "hey, are we following the RFC for the protocol here?"
> According to the article the packets were well-formed.
Well-formed, yes. But sending retries every second on failure? I coulda sworn the RFC recommended a poll interval of at least 6sec...(but I could be wrong. might'n't've been the RFC - but somebody somewhere reccommends a much higher number for a retry interval, it even says so in the article). It may follow the letter of the law but not the spirit, if I may borrow a cliche.
> Isn't hardcoding a default address good design rather than leaving an uninitialized variable?
Lesser of two evils? Or possibly greater - if they'd left it unitialized, the damn thing wouldn'ta worked and it wouldn't make it to market before it got checked.
The worst part is the fact that they coded it *hard* - not just default-valued it, they coded it so you couldn't change it, and that's ludicrous for a system that's depending on resources it doesn't have control over.
Really, I think "quality assurance" in business-speak means different things to different orgs. I contracted once at a company that had a multipart QA system - some folks went over design specs, some went over code, some did blackbox testing of product. Granted it didn't work so well because they had idiots running the whole thing, but the point is, this was poor design that made it to market when it shouldn't have. Maybe it wasn't a "QA-department" issue, but it was some quality that wasn't assured.
Becasue it's not just a use of a public service, it's a complete abuse of a public service. It'd be like you damming up the colorado river for your own personal use and then telling LA to upgrade their water supply.
This was a big screwup - when an NTP query fails, you don't start retrying every second until it comes back. You don't hardcode a single server address for it. And you don't put this in 700,000 pieces of released hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Really an apples/oranges kind of comparison.
.NET development platform is created by Microsoft for Microsoft so developers can write Microsoft apps for Microsoft servers. .NET encompasses windows apps too, not just web apps. The codebase between the two is almost identical - okay, a winForm is stateful and a WebForm is stateless and the UI widgets are different, but the rest of the backend database/XML/IO stuff is the same. I don't think you'll want to use PHP to write a desktop app, or a suite with desktop/web integration. On the flipside, ASP.NET would be complete overkill for a majority of web-apps. .NET's main competitor isn't PHP. It's Java. The way the architectures and libraries are set up, the target audience, even the langauge skills requred. Hell, C# and Java resemble each other so much that switching back and forth is a dawdle (well, almost. I just came off a 5-mo C# contract and am now on a java gig and I keep accidentally swapping keywords). I realize PHP5 has added some OO functionality, but I'm doubtful that it's as ground-up OO as either Java or C#/VB.NET etc.
.NET is a different beast entirely. ASP.NET is as different from ASPclassic as it is from PHP.
NObody's going to argue the cross-platformability of php. Not even MS.
And despite Mono and so forth, ASP.NET and the rest of the
PHP is great, I love it and use it all the time. But for the kind of work where ASP.NET would be an option, PHP wouldn't be. Regular old ASP? Sure, and I'd choose PHP over ASP in a heartbeat. But
Just to be clear, despite the name ASP and ASP.NET have very little in common.
ASP = VBScript or occasionally Jscript-based top-down imperative page-based language.
ASP.NET = OO web-app framework, usually event-driven, usually in C# or VB.NET.
It's rather misleading to anecdotally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ASP.NET using ASP programming/programmer examples.
I don't think JMS and trek would be a good combination. One of the things that's hrting trek now is that Berman/Braga and their cabal of writers are locked in and running the whole show. Part of the reason TNG and DS(, and even TOS suceeded is that they had a multitude of writers with different styles.
...and depsite the holy reverence that many scifi fans place on b5, it was not without its flaws. The overall story arc was very ambitious and well thought-out, but many parts of the story - the dialogue was heavy-handed, foreshadowing (no pun intended) was overused as a plot device and frankly dind't always need a riddle-talking alien to be accomplished, etc. b5 was good TV, and certainly surpasses Voyager and most of TNG in quality, but I can't really see JMS helming a show whose canon, universe, and fanbase he can't entirely control. Nor can I see his particular philosophy working especially well with the established continuity. If JMS were going to "Save" trek he'd have to let go of some of teh creative control to allow people to fill in where he's weak, and his track record on such things isn't the best.
Meanwhile, JMS wrote nearly all of b5. And that was in fact one of the things that I felt worked to its detriment. The wrtier's flaws quickly become the show's flaws, and that's one of the things killing trek right now.
Oh that's funny! And fresh and topical too! Perhaps next time you can work a Monica Lewinsky joke in too, just to stay current.
Bruce Vilanch writes your material, doesn't he?
12. Gallifreyans get 12 regens by default. The master used up all his, did all sorts of mojo to stay alive on Gallifrey, stole Councillor Wossisname's body on Traken, and in the 5 docs was offered a full set of regens in exchange for help locating the Doctor.
The Valeyard from Trial of a Time Lord was supposedly the doc's 12th regen. The eeeeeevil one.
Oh my god. I'm a huge nerd.
Damn right.
It can philosophically resonate just enough for people to shell out $7-9. None of the films really dig into the issues they raise.
Q: What is reality?
A: I don't know but it means Keanu Reeves can fly.
Q: What is the nature of personal freedom?
A: It means we can have an elderly lady speak in riddles and not tell us what's going on
Q: What is love?
A: "Love" is a word that represents what is described by the word "love."
We get hackneyed Wittgenstein, hackneyed neoplatonism, hackneyed buddhism, overused messianism...I mean, come on. I've had deeper conversations about philsophy while drunk on several vodka tonics, and I knew better than to try and base a film trilogy around those.
Basically the whole series philosophical outlook is equivalent to those high-school freshman short stories that end "...and then I woke up. It was all a dream. Or was it?!?"
I understood the ending just fine.
I just thought it was stupid.
My problme with the series was their overuse of philoso-babble to make up for plot. In the first movie, it didnt bother me much beacsue there was a central character group and a solid conflict. 2 and 3...well, they use their little commentary on freedom and so forth to try and wrap things up, instead of actually writing an ending. Sure, ambiguity is fine, but this wasn't just ambiguous, it seemed like a cop-out. If you're going to use philosophical ramblings to resolve your films, you'd better be prepared to dig a little deeper than having Morpheus occiasonally say "what is real?" and the Oracle make comments about choice. Yeah, it's deeper than most sci-fi films get, and I'm fine with that, but it's too shallow to use it as a panacea for the trilogy's unanswered questions.
Actually I thought "Pop" was probably the only good song Nsync has done. It's at least different from the majority of their output.
The point is that you've got a major record with HEAVY production that was done on a plane with a laptop instead of a $2000/hr recording studio. The mere fact that a guy like *me* can spend less than two grand and have a pretty decent setup that blows away some of the "state-of-the-art" studios from the 80's...well, that's just cool!
MJ owned/owns the rights to Northern Songs, which gives him publishing and distribution rights. I think he owns the rights to some of their recordings, but not all. Apple Corps is the company that, IIRCIANAL, holds the copyrights and performance rights, publicity rights, etc. for everything else
Er...the majority of bands probably *do* already use it, and you can get the software version for $99.
> Oh, and if you're going to Britney Spears
> concerts because you enjoy the quality of the
> music...you're missing the point.
Both of them, actually.
I think you mean "cents" not "semitones." If it's swinging you up or down by more than a semitone, it's adjustin you by a second or a third. Yikes! :)
Speaking as a real musican who has:
spent years writing and practicing
played gigs in inconvenient places
accepting any gig that came along (well, except that one in texas we couldn't afford)
playing to small audiences,
sight-reading with a bunch of strangers...
I love it.
Okay, yeah, it's abused by people who can't sing.
But people who can, can use it subtley and well. And live it can be a godsend to even real musicians who *can* sing. Half the time onstage you're flying blind, since house sound sucks so much you can't hear yourself. In the studio it's no substitute for overdubs, and retakes, but if you waver slightly, it can catch it and fix it and save you having to spend another $300 on studio time while you do 15 more retakes to try and fix that one stupid note out of an otherwise perfectly good performance. If I flub a take or drop a note badly, yeah, I'm gunna rerecord it, but for a teensy error...who's gunna notice? Sometimes, though, you don't even notice that it's out (sometime's it isn't, even) until everything's been well-mixed with the rest of the tracks - at this point, re-recording everything in the studio again just isn't feasible, especially to a band on a razor-thin budget. Have autotune or whatever pitch-shift things by a few cents and you can save your mix.
So before you generalize about the "kind of person who uses an autotuner" be aware that many, many people use it, and you probably never even knew it. Sure, it's not going to find its way into the recording of the London Philharmonic, but these days most pro studios have and use autotune in some form or another, and you probably never even notice the results.
No, there's nothing wrong with this picture.
Seriously. Speaking as a live performer, I can address this.
You ever sung live onstage in a sh*tty club? If you're *lucky* and you've got a good soundguy, you can hear most of yourself through the monitors. And if you happen to move around onstage, you can't always guarantee there'll be a monitor close to you. And it's gunna be loud - even if you've got your head in the monitor case you still might not be able to hear everything you need. Plus your monitors are rarely isolated from reflections from front-of-house so you end up with a lot of reverb, delay and a nice chorus effect mixed in with the signal you need to hear whether you want it or not. Basically, as a singer you can't hear at all what you're doing and are relying on instinct and what little sound is filtering through your skull.
You can be offkey and not hear it until it's too late, or just not be able to do anything about it. Or you might not be able to hear it at all becasue you can't hear yourself over the noise of the venue. However, front-of-house as giant stacks pumping you out at greatly amplified volumes, and they don't get the chorusing your monitors do. In a lot of cases, the audience can hear things you can't. Oh, sure, in a good venue you can hear yourself, you're not made deaf by FOH reflections, and you've gone out and bought yourself a nice set of in-ear mons. But there's no guarantee. I've played gigs in venues where there were two monitors for a band with 4 members - not only was I forced to deal with a crapy house sound system, but I had to share my vocal monitoring with my bassist. LUkcily we could turn him down and he didn't care (he's a bassist after all) but still, that's the kind of thing you're up against. It's not like you get up onstage and everything sounds like it does through the vocal headphones in the studio.
I've recently seen a band with a really amazing vocalist. I've heard this guy sing, and he can *sing*. But when they're gigging, there's an autotuner in the mix, just for this reason - to correct his pitch when he can't hear himself.
I can only spot it if it's used badly. I can't always even spot it doing correction in my own music. I know it is, since I can see the graph, but I can't hear the difference. Granted, I keep the attack-time to "slow" and the tolernace pretty wide, but still.
Any engineer who knows what they're doing can use autotune to correct a singer who knows what they're doing without "cheating" or ruining anything. It ends up just being a technological timesaver - why retake the track 5 more times at a studio-time cost of $150/hr for that one time where you were a few cents sharp? For a guy like me, who can't afford to spend $300 extra in the studio without basically spending the rest of my production budget, the thing's a lifesaver.
And before you accuse me of not listening, I've got ears like a...uh, like some animal with really good ears for this sort of thing.
As an effect - that effect is neat *once*. After that, it's played-out. Cher's done it, it doesn't need to be done anymore. It was bordeline annoying on Daft Punk's last record, even though they were using it to deliberately sound cheesy.
The tool is not a panacea.
I've got the software version, and I can say with some confidence that if you suck as a singer, it's not going to fix it.
What it is helpful for is correcting small errors. It can be used subtley. In fact, it's probably used a lot more than you think. Many, many "great" singers use it live for an extra push. Hey, if you've had a long day, or have a slight head cold, or whatever, there's no way you'll be able to hold that sustain in tune for 4 bars without drifting a little flat. This'll help that a bit. Not everyone who uses it ends up sounding like Cher.
I've heard some absolutely AMAZING vocalists use Autotune live. I don't think less of them. I know they can sing, I've heard them - what's wrong with some technological backup?
(as a side note, I'd *much* rather hear a computer sing than Celine Dion. Her voice is like fingernails on a blackboard to me).
There are a bunch of parameters in autotune (at least, the software version). You can choose your scale, your key, overall detuning (you can offset the scale by a few cents if you want), the speed of recorrection, the tolerance for errors, and whether or not it tires to add vibrato to the signal.
In the software, there's even a graphical mode so you can draw in custom pitch curves.
Okay, the vibrato is essentially useless. And the graphical mode is a pain in the ass.
But used properly, the rest of it can be pretty subtle. A decent tolerance and a slow recorrection time will be fairly subtle, and won't squeeze out all your glissandos and expressions. It's great for those long sustained notes that drift out of pitch after two bars becasue the singer's lungs are collapsing.
Autotune has options for detuning, custom scales, etc.
The software does, anyway. I'm assuming the ahrdware has similar capabilities. I've had my autotuner responding to arabic scales (real maqam ones, not the western "arabic" mode) with the quartertones and everything.
Eh, the AVP-1's compressor and gate are only sort of okayish. The Mic Modeller is a vastly stripped down version of the dedicated unit, the compressor is kinda flat, the EQ isn't all that fancy...but the autotuner is decent.
But then, just buy an autotuner hardware package.
I did in fact RTFA, but I misspoke. I shoulda said a "one single *working* time server..."
It's another one of those cases where somebody shoulda probably checked - if you're relying on another party's resources, you'd better be sure those resources are still there...
> Why would a code review catch this? The guy at the review may have said "I think that address is time.nist.gov" or something. There may be >100K lines of code in a product like this.
A code review would hopefully catch the "hey, we're only using *one single time server for all our hardware* and the *hey, there's no way of configuring this short of patching the firmware* parts. Maybe the address part was overlookable, but the other bits?
>> Usually, someone should say "hey, are we following the RFC for the protocol here?"
> According to the article the packets were well-formed.
Well-formed, yes. But sending retries every second on failure? I coulda sworn the RFC recommended a poll interval of at least 6sec...(but I could be wrong. might'n't've been the RFC - but somebody somewhere reccommends a much higher number for a retry interval, it even says so in the article). It may follow the letter of the law but not the spirit, if I may borrow a cliche.
> Isn't hardcoding a default address good design rather than leaving an uninitialized variable?
Lesser of two evils? Or possibly greater - if they'd left it unitialized, the damn thing wouldn'ta worked and it wouldn't make it to market before it got checked.
The worst part is the fact that they coded it *hard* - not just default-valued it, they coded it so you couldn't change it, and that's ludicrous for a system that's depending on resources it doesn't have control over.
Really, I think "quality assurance" in business-speak means different things to different orgs. I contracted once at a company that had a multipart QA system - some folks went over design specs, some went over code, some did blackbox testing of product. Granted it didn't work so well because they had idiots running the whole thing, but the point is, this was poor design that made it to market when it shouldn't have. Maybe it wasn't a "QA-department" issue, but it was some quality that wasn't assured.
UW-Stout, easy way out?
UW-Platteville, where the men are men, the women are men, and the sheep are scared?
You should see how the UW sysadmins drink. That explains a lot about the ranking.
To mkae matters even more fun, NACHI (or however that's spelled) ran rampant on campus today and crippled a few major subnets by DOS'ing the routers.
Damn grad students with their infected laptops.
Becasue it's not just a use of a public service, it's a complete abuse of a public service. It'd be like you damming up the colorado river for your own personal use and then telling LA to upgrade their water supply.
This was a big screwup - when an NTP query fails, you don't start retrying every second until it comes back. You don't hardcode a single server address for it. And you don't put this in 700,000 pieces of released hardware.