I got called on my *office* phone number over this.
My conversation with them went something like this:
Me: Who are you? (In the very gruff Steve voice) Them: Auto Warranty company. Me: Why are you calling me? (In a gruffer tone) Them: Because your car warranty is about to expire. Me: That's nice, but I don't own a car. Them: Um, er, does anyone else in your household own a car? Me: No and we don't live in the United States. Them: Um, er, we'll put you on our "Don't Call" list. (hangup)
Of course the source number was caller-id blocked.
A coworker of mine got a half-dozen of those calls.
I have often used memcpy instead of strcpy when I have known the length of the strings, and also known the destination to be large enough.
That's error prone. You have to either guarantee the destination is already zero byte filled, or be sure to copy the sentinel in the source string.
As others have pointed out, if you want to do stuff (reasonably) securely and quickly, you should be using a language like Ada.
My moment of enlightenment came when writing a string copy module in Modula 2. Modula 2 offered the brain damage of accepting both C-style NUL terminated strings and normal bounded arrays of characters.
The summary is incomplete here. They also asked users to request their payment to be reversed as 'false payment', and thats where the extra fees come from
Yeah. Somebody is going to be in a world of pain. Lucky that they're not in the US.
So basically this new thing is useless in that it only gives a poor approximation of how many people go where, and it's of little relevance to virus spreading anyways, the only reason why it's on Slashdot's front page being the "cool" factor of using data mining on a service such as Twitter and using "epidemiology" as a poor excuse. Or am I missing something?
We would have yet another proprietary browser war, with people having to buy browsers on disk and no Web 2.0 revolution.
You say that as if it were a bad thing...
If web pages were written to a true standard, and one has always existed, that would make for the best results. You then select the browser that delivers the feature set you prefer most.
10 or 20 browsers, on top of 10 or 20 O/Ses running on 5 or 10 hardware architectures would make for an extremely hostile (to) web malware environment *and* those who try to buck established standards.
What needs to happen is A) Laws allowing you to return bundled software for free for a refund with no hassle
No, one issue is that by default, the way they have set up OEM licensing, everyone pays for a Microsoft license. Lowering the refund hurdle aside, that's inherently anti-competitive and unrealistic - the vast majority of people are going to use what came with the system, after all, they already paid for it. It works to stifle any competition. Netscape died a painful death.
Another example. Why is there no competition for MS Outlook? It's a mail program that appears designed to make its users look like drooling idiots. I especially like the "<user> would like to withdraw this message" messages I get all the time. "Oh but the calendar feature is wonderful." I also like how it takes at least 3 or 4 reposts to schedule a meeting and by the time that is accomplished, even Outlook can get confused about the results. (And don't get me started about the idiocy that is top-posting).
You kids have no idea what things were like in the 80s when there was competition, variety and innovation. Now, get off my lawn.
Google isn't abusive either, sure they have expanded rapidly, but they haven't been destroying the competition. Now if they redirected all searches of Yahoo to "Did you mean Google?" sure, but not presently.
True. Search for "search engines" on Google. The first link in the results is a news article about the Wolfram Alpha. In results further down, live.com is listed ahead of google.com. When I click on the "list of search engines" link at the top, I get a page that lists yahoo.com, but *does not* list google.com.
Herein lies Apple's advantage over Microsoft. Apple creates it's software to run on the hardware it also creates. They are able to make sure it "just works". MS on the other hand can not control what hardware their software will run on.
That's Just Plain Stupid. Microsoft DOES control what hardware their software runs on. In the US, they've arranged that it runs on everything sold in stores. This monopolistic practice *should* come back to bite them.
Have you forgotten the Microsoft Vista Capable campaign (and lawsuit) so soon?
Sorry, but Debug is one of the dumbest security holes in windows. You don't have to be an admin to run it, and you can use it to wipe a harddrive, or scramble it, in minutes.
I hope you are every bit as idiotic as you sound and that really isn't true.
Does MS-Windows really ignore permissions at the system call level? And I thought one of the big advantages of MS Vista & ++ were that folks no longer ran with admin privileges...
(Bizarrely, the only time I have ever used EDLIN was to administer some dual-boot Linux / Windows NT boxes. I wrote a perl/Expect script
I have a quibble, elder slashdotter. Command line utilities with minimal output are valuable for precisely the reason that you did that - one reason I hate the GNU abomination that they call ed(1).
Expect is perhaps the most underrated tool ever invented and one of the best reasons why a responsible command line (regardless of whether an end-user is ever expected to use it) is required.
Yah. I did something like on the first two "copy protected" games I encountered on MS-DOS (roommate's computer, not mine, proud to say). The first crack involved tracing far enough to NOOP out a critical checksum made over the binary. That one was fun because the programmer inserted several fake "attempts" along the way, which if only the first were bypassed would allow the game to start, but then kill you after a few minutes with the message that the "Software Pirate died".
The other involved a deliberately misformatted disk where the last sector on the disk had a misnumbered sector number in the format part of the disk. Nooping out the read of the misformatted sector (which couldn't be read even on diskcopy'ed disks) did the trick there.
After that, I lost interest and never did it again.
I'm not a Microsoft fan and the only Microsoft (DOS|Windows) license I ever bought intentionally made my wife so angry (at the constant crashing MS Windows XP is prone to) that we gave it to her younger sister and replaced her machine with a Macbook. But I have to say, if there's one piece of Microsoft software I ever found useful and fun, it was debug.exe.
OB: I hope someone has written an msdebug.el for emacs by now.
Geez, I remember my Commodore 64 (heck, or my Atari system) which eventually got the color monitor, printer, had the tape deck, etc. I loved the games I had on that thing and yeah, there's definitely some basis on the games we have now.
I would guess that the number of Commodore 64s that ever made it to the Philippines is quite small (if any other than with children traveling with parents who were sent to the embassy in Manila, I would be surprised) and almost certainly 0 to Mindanao.
Oh and as for history... I love history! It doesn't matter if it's gaming, clothing, how people lived, what they did, geologic, etc. Guess I'm a nerd...?
As do I but I strongly disagree with you on the "nerd" part. An understanding of history is a key aspect of wisdom.
Example (which most people seem not to understand): Albert Gore lost the election in 2000. Period. And the electoral college was not the "problem". The electoral college was an invention, required by the more rural of the original 13 colonies and later incoming new states, so that their voices would not be drowned out by the mobs in big cities like Philadelphia, etc.
They didn't get it quite right unfortunately, as states started to scale up and for rural Californians like me, for example, we are paying the price... big time. I haven't had a voice in electing any major state or federal level representation (including contributing to the electoral college vote) since the days of Ronald Reagan.
That's kind of off-topic, but sort of the point I was trying to make. History is important, but (one of) the least important aspects of history is the history of gaming. Once people understand important things, like WHY it is important that large cities should not have as large of a voice as they have in politics, then you can go on to the more fun stuff.
The reason you can only see 3.2GB or so of RAM in 32 bit versions of Windows is because of hardware I/O reservations.
You left out the part about 32 bit versions of Microsoft Windows not supporting PAE, a feature that has been present in some O/Ses for years. http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450
The amount of dexterity required to select a menu item from a nested menu is frustrating and it's worse trying to work with a touchpad. Lack of multiple desktops. Lack of customizability without a super secret Microsoft decoder ring[1]. To name three.
Vista is susceptable to far fewer viruses and malware (even without anti-virus) than XP.
I'm not comparing it to XP. Stand back from the keyboard a moment, read and think about what you wrote.
Malware was encouraged by really horrible (and previously discredited) design decisions on Microsoft's part. It's never safe to willy-nilly pass executable content around and worse to have it execute by default. Now that enough users have been trained to expect things like that, it's going to be extremely tough to retrain people into safe computing.
Cost? It's basically the same price as XP was, unless you want Ultimate.
Which is per host and apparently more than most people here are willing to pay for it, so they either pirate it, or steal a copy from work.
Never before has a product been successfully marketed such that people pay not to use it. Example: I have two x86 machines at work. Between the two of them, they have *seven* separate Microsoft Windows licenses. The desktop has a Microsoft Windows 2000 preinstall license, plus corporate site licenses for 2k, XP and Vista along the way. The notebook has a Microsoft Windows XP preinstall license, plus corporate site licenses for XP and Vista along the way. Neither of the preinstalls were ever used.
The desktop never got the XP upgrade - I found Microsoft Windows 2000 on it when I inherited it and used it as a footrest until I was allowed to install Linux on it.
And, of course, since both of those machines run Linux the Microsoft site license is wasted on them.
Convenience? I find Vista far more convenient because I can do things (mostly) much faster.
That's nice, I'm very happy for you. I was referring to WGA & activation. Something that many people here actively avoid.
Poor performance happens.
I found on my company-issue Lenovo, that Microsoft Windows XP was far, far slower than RHEL on the same equipment.
I gave Microsoft Windows XP a shot for about six months a couple years ago. The only happy moments I had were when I powered the machine off, and of course, wiping the disk and installing RHEL on it. It's a faster and cooler (XP seems to run very hot) machine now.
[1] One time when I brought up my long-standing gripe about the big key to the left of the "A" key, I was pointed at some microsoft.com webpage. Capslock is useless and some people like Sun know it's supposed to be Control. It's very easy to fix this in KDE & Mac OS X.
The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity.
What part of "garbage" do you not understand? An unusable user interface? Viruses/Malware? Poor performance? Cost? Convenience?
Slashdot Mirror
I got called on my *office* phone number over this.
My conversation with them went something like this:
Me: Who are you? (In the very gruff Steve voice)
Them: Auto Warranty company.
Me: Why are you calling me? (In a gruffer tone)
Them: Because your car warranty is about to expire.
Me: That's nice, but I don't own a car.
Them: Um, er, does anyone else in your household own a car?
Me: No and we don't live in the United States.
Them: Um, er, we'll put you on our "Don't Call" list. (hangup)
Of course the source number was caller-id blocked.
A coworker of mine got a half-dozen of those calls.
if memcpy_s is part of the ANSI/ISO standard for C
It's in an ISO standard - ISO/IEC TR 24731. Of course, the reputation and taste of ISO is kind of in question these days.
Forever. The two are not equivalent and your version will be painfully slow if copying a zeroed block of memory.
Let me go see where that is defined in the C standard.
ISO/IEC TR 24731-1:2007 - http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=38841
I have often used memcpy instead of strcpy when I have known the length of the strings, and also known the destination to be large enough.
That's error prone. You have to either guarantee the destination is already zero byte filled, or be sure to copy the sentinel in the source string.
As others have pointed out, if you want to do stuff (reasonably) securely and quickly, you should be using a language like Ada.
My moment of enlightenment came when writing a string copy module in Modula 2. Modula 2 offered the brain damage of accepting both C-style NUL terminated strings and normal bounded arrays of characters.
Why is there no competition for MS Outlook? It's a mail program that appears designed to make its users look like drooling idiots.
There is competition for Outlook, it's just not good enough.
The prosecution rests, Your Honor.
Just how stupid do you think the law firm and their bank is?
Do you really expect a straight answer to that?
The summary is incomplete here. They also asked users to request their payment to be reversed as 'false payment', and thats where the extra fees come from
Yeah. Somebody is going to be in a world of pain. Lucky that they're not in the US.
Scratch that. I'll volunteer to track those miscreants down if I can work part time for the Swedish tax guys http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/10/163253
So basically this new thing is useless in that it only gives a poor approximation of how many people go where, and it's of little relevance to virus spreading anyways, the only reason why it's on Slashdot's front page being the "cool" factor of using data mining on a service such as Twitter and using "epidemiology" as a poor excuse. Or am I missing something?
Yup. Google "Galton ox weighing". One reference is here http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/07/14/wisdom.crowds/
If the basis is random enough, then the statistical results can be quite good. English is still the most spoken language and Twitter is quite popular.
I don't know whether the principle applies in this case, but I am certainly not going to dismiss it out of hand.
We would have yet another proprietary browser war, with people having to buy browsers on disk and no Web 2.0 revolution.
You say that as if it were a bad thing ...
If web pages were written to a true standard, and one has always existed, that would make for the best results. You then select the browser that delivers the feature set you prefer most.
10 or 20 browsers, on top of 10 or 20 O/Ses running on 5 or 10 hardware architectures would make for an extremely hostile (to) web malware environment *and* those who try to buck established standards.
...And what good would breaking up MS do?
Force them to compete on merit?
What needs to happen is A) Laws allowing you to return bundled software for free for a refund with no hassle
No, one issue is that by default, the way they have set up OEM licensing, everyone pays for a Microsoft license. Lowering the refund hurdle aside, that's inherently anti-competitive and unrealistic - the vast majority of people are going to use what came with the system, after all, they already paid for it. It works to stifle any competition. Netscape died a painful death.
Another example. Why is there no competition for MS Outlook? It's a mail program that appears designed to make its users look like drooling idiots. I especially like the "<user> would like to withdraw this message" messages I get all the time. "Oh but the calendar feature is wonderful." I also like how it takes at least 3 or 4 reposts to schedule a meeting and by the time that is accomplished, even Outlook can get confused about the results. (And don't get me started about the idiocy that is top-posting).
You kids have no idea what things were like in the 80s when there was competition, variety and innovation. Now, get off my lawn.
Heh. I should have continued. A similar search on live.com yields *no* results for Google. None.
Oh really?
Google isn't abusive either, sure they have expanded rapidly, but they haven't been destroying the competition. Now if they redirected all searches of Yahoo to "Did you mean Google?" sure, but not presently.
True. Search for "search engines" on Google. The first link in the results is a news article about the Wolfram Alpha. In results further down, live.com is listed ahead of google.com. When I click on the "list of search engines" link at the top, I get a page that lists yahoo.com, but *does not* list google.com.
Seems reasonable.
Herein lies Apple's advantage over Microsoft. Apple creates it's software to run on the hardware it also creates. They are able to make sure it "just works". MS on the other hand can not control what hardware their software will run on.
That's Just Plain Stupid. Microsoft DOES control what hardware their software runs on. In the US, they've arranged that it runs on everything sold in stores. This monopolistic practice *should* come back to bite them.
Have you forgotten the Microsoft Vista Capable campaign (and lawsuit) so soon?
Hmmm. /. says I'm logged in, I don't have the Post Anonymously button checked, something must be broken again.
Sorry, but Debug is one of the dumbest security holes in windows. You don't have to be an admin to run it, and you can use it to wipe a harddrive, or scramble it, in minutes.
I hope you are every bit as idiotic as you sound and that really isn't true.
Does MS-Windows really ignore permissions at the system call level? And I thought one of the big advantages of MS Vista & ++ were that folks no longer ran with admin privileges ...
Well, at least it wasn't a 6502. . .
Um, hand assembling 6502 assembly isn't particularly difficult. Did you mistype the processor name? Or did something just whooosh over my head?
(Bizarrely, the only time I have ever used EDLIN was to administer some dual-boot Linux / Windows NT boxes. I wrote a perl/Expect script
I have a quibble, elder slashdotter. Command line utilities with minimal output are valuable for precisely the reason that you did that - one reason I hate the GNU abomination that they call ed(1).
Expect is perhaps the most underrated tool ever invented and one of the best reasons why a responsible command line (regardless of whether an end-user is ever expected to use it) is required.
Yah. I did something like on the first two "copy protected" games I encountered on MS-DOS (roommate's computer, not mine, proud to say). The first crack involved tracing far enough to NOOP out a critical checksum made over the binary. That one was fun because the programmer inserted several fake "attempts" along the way, which if only the first were bypassed would allow the game to start, but then kill you after a few minutes with the message that the "Software Pirate died".
The other involved a deliberately misformatted disk where the last sector on the disk had a misnumbered sector number in the format part of the disk. Nooping out the read of the misformatted sector (which couldn't be read even on diskcopy'ed disks) did the trick there.
After that, I lost interest and never did it again.
I'm not a Microsoft fan and the only Microsoft (DOS|Windows) license I ever bought intentionally made my wife so angry (at the constant crashing MS Windows XP is prone to) that we gave it to her younger sister and replaced her machine with a Macbook. But I have to say, if there's one piece of Microsoft software I ever found useful and fun, it was debug.exe.
OB: I hope someone has written an msdebug.el for emacs by now.
So, how many women do know the older games?
Probably some older women do.
Geez, I remember my Commodore 64 (heck, or my Atari system) which eventually got the color monitor, printer, had the tape deck, etc. I loved the games I had on that thing and yeah, there's definitely some basis on the games we have now.
I would guess that the number of Commodore 64s that ever made it to the Philippines is quite small (if any other than with children traveling with parents who were sent to the embassy in Manila, I would be surprised) and almost certainly 0 to Mindanao.
Oh and as for history... I love history! It doesn't matter if it's gaming, clothing, how people lived, what they did, geologic, etc. Guess I'm a nerd...?
As do I but I strongly disagree with you on the "nerd" part. An understanding of history is a key aspect of wisdom.
Example (which most people seem not to understand): Albert Gore lost the election in 2000. Period. And the electoral college was not the "problem". The electoral college was an invention, required by the more rural of the original 13 colonies and later incoming new states, so that their voices would not be drowned out by the mobs in big cities like Philadelphia, etc.
They didn't get it quite right unfortunately, as states started to scale up and for rural Californians like me, for example, we are paying the price ... big time. I haven't had a voice in electing any major state or federal level representation (including contributing to the electoral college vote) since the days of Ronald Reagan.
That's kind of off-topic, but sort of the point I was trying to make. History is important, but (one of) the least important aspects of history is the history of gaming. Once people understand important things, like WHY it is important that large cities should not have as large of a voice as they have in politics, then you can go on to the more fun stuff.
Well, we certainly know who didn't read "Mastering Cat" http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/01/1211240
The reason you can only see 3.2GB or so of RAM in 32 bit versions of Windows is because of hardware I/O reservations.
You left out the part about 32 bit versions of Microsoft Windows not supporting PAE, a feature that has been present in some O/Ses for years. http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450
What's unusable?
The amount of dexterity required to select a menu item from a nested menu is frustrating and it's worse trying to work with a touchpad. Lack of multiple desktops. Lack of customizability without a super secret Microsoft decoder ring[1]. To name three.
Vista is susceptable to far fewer viruses and malware (even without anti-virus) than XP.
I'm not comparing it to XP. Stand back from the keyboard a moment, read and think about what you wrote.
Malware was encouraged by really horrible (and previously discredited) design decisions on Microsoft's part. It's never safe to willy-nilly pass executable content around and worse to have it execute by default. Now that enough users have been trained to expect things like that, it's going to be extremely tough to retrain people into safe computing.
The oldest example I can recall: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1995-10.html
Cost? It's basically the same price as XP was, unless you want Ultimate.
Which is per host and apparently more than most people here are willing to pay for it, so they either pirate it, or steal a copy from work.
Never before has a product been successfully marketed such that people pay not to use it. Example: I have two x86 machines at work. Between the two of them, they have *seven* separate Microsoft Windows licenses. The desktop has a Microsoft Windows 2000 preinstall license, plus corporate site licenses for 2k, XP and Vista along the way. The notebook has a Microsoft Windows XP preinstall license, plus corporate site licenses for XP and Vista along the way. Neither of the preinstalls were ever used.
The desktop never got the XP upgrade - I found Microsoft Windows 2000 on it when I inherited it and used it as a footrest until I was allowed to install Linux on it.
And, of course, since both of those machines run Linux the Microsoft site license is wasted on them.
Convenience? I find Vista far more convenient because I can do things (mostly) much faster.
That's nice, I'm very happy for you. I was referring to WGA & activation. Something that many people here actively avoid.
Poor performance happens.
I found on my company-issue Lenovo, that Microsoft Windows XP was far, far slower than RHEL on the same equipment.
I gave Microsoft Windows XP a shot for about six months a couple years ago. The only happy moments I had were when I powered the machine off, and of course, wiping the disk and installing RHEL on it. It's a faster and cooler (XP seems to run very hot) machine now.
[1] One time when I brought up my long-standing gripe about the big key to the left of the "A" key, I was pointed at some microsoft.com webpage. Capslock is useless and some people like Sun know it's supposed to be Control. It's very easy to fix this in KDE & Mac OS X.
The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity.
What part of "garbage" do you not understand? An unusable user interface? Viruses/Malware? Poor performance? Cost? Convenience?
"Okay Joe, here's your options, you can take this box home for $699, plug it in, turn it on and it will work reasonably well...
Which it would, if Linux were a preinstall. And your point is?