Raymond Chen of Microsoft has often equated an API to a contract. An API has an implementor and a user, just as there are several parties to a contract. Each party expects the other to do certain things (use the API in a certain way) and in return promises other things (to do what the API is specified to do). If one party does not act in accordance with the contract, chaos ensues.
Locksmiths were having this discussion at least as early as the mid-19th century.
"A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the
last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security
or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion
respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a
premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy.
Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more
than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew
a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done.
If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto
been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know
this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to
apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to
give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better
for all parties."
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks,
published around 1850
Amazing how little has changed... you'd think with improved communication and mobility (of goods and people), attitutes would have shifted in favor of disclosure.
In Denmark it is even worse, the Unitary Patent was subject to popular vote, and approved - after lots of lobbying from those who stood to benefit, of course.
A 'softie has posted a reasonable-looking problem analysis here (look for the screenshot) and corroborated later in the thread.
So, it's a problem with shortcuts to OpenType font files... which impacts e.g. Photoshop users. Nice.
This doesn't repro on Vista, so it's been fixed for over 3 years. They didn't allow free upgrades to Vista, true (and according to lots of slashdotters, they wouldn't have taken it if offerred).
They didn't "fix" it by fixing the bug, they fixed it by removing the component (according to other posts, at least; I don't use Windows). So the question is: Does removing a component for entirely unrelated reasons amount to a will to "fix" the bug? In my view, no - it only demonstrates that they were willing to remove the component for unrelated reasons.
The problem as I see it is that the only ones with standing to appeal are the national standards organizations. The same organizations that in many cases overruled the technical committees (sp?). Of course they are not going to appeal their own decision! This makes the appeals process useless... or am I missing something?
That is not a bug, it's a feature. I once helped someone with a problem where Word would crash (segfault) a few seconds after displaying the empty starting page. I tracked the actual faulting to a buggy HP driver that couldn't deal with printers that were connected to a powered off machine on a wireless network. Switching to a different printer fixes it.
Yes, MS Word makes calls to the printer driver while you're working and has its pagination algorithm adapt to its characteristics.
You forget that the ability to document one's changes to the Registry are absolutely atrocious, you have to keep external documentation. With/etc, the documentation is neatly placed alongside the changes themselves.
Bruce Schneier wrote that the worm was starting to retaliate. It was linked to by a poster on this Slashdot story. The guy who posted the analysis you refer to seems to be a lowly sysadmin (He's affiliated with Network Operations at the UCSD - so not a researcher) - I would tend to believe Bruce more, and viewed that analysis with some skepticism, which now appears to have been justified.
Dude, these domains could belong to somebody who had no idea of what they were involved in. There's a recent case in Denmark where an economics student was unknowingly hosting a phishing site on his laptop. The phishers had registered the domain in his name. He did get an invoice, but had just discarded it because he had no clue.
Do you happen to know how ASLR will work together with prebinding?
AFAICT, ASLR would render prebinding moot (Wikipedia says that it has been deprecated since Tiger; nevertheless, I am still seeing noticeably longer load times when first running an app after a system update - I chalk that up to prebinding).
You need to learn the difference between syntax and morphology. Both are included in any reasonable definition of grammar, although many laypeople (like you) only consider the latter to be complexity. In general, the level of complexity of each of these will be inversely proportional to the other: A language with small morphological systems (like English) will tend to have many constraints on things like word order. In Latin (which had a large morphological system), word order was essentially free. In English, it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
One has to be careful with wording. Dextrorotatory ("right-handed") forms of various amino acids do occur in various roles in living organisms, just not commonly in protein synthesis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Raymond Chen of Microsoft has often equated an API to a contract. An API has an implementor and a user, just as there are several parties to a contract. Each party expects the other to do certain things (use the API in a certain way) and in return promises other things (to do what the API is specified to do). If one party does not act in accordance with the contract, chaos ensues.
Amazing how little has changed... you'd think with improved communication and mobility (of goods and people), attitutes would have shifted in favor of disclosure.
In Denmark it is even worse, the Unitary Patent was subject to popular vote, and approved - after lots of lobbying from those who stood to benefit, of course.
A 'softie has posted a reasonable-looking problem analysis here (look for the screenshot) and corroborated later in the thread. So, it's a problem with shortcuts to OpenType font files... which impacts e.g. Photoshop users. Nice.
IEEE compliance doesn't mean what you think it means. Not sure whether Java has changed in this regard since 1998, but it definitely was wrong then
They didn't "fix" it by fixing the bug, they fixed it by removing the component (according to other posts, at least; I don't use Windows). So the question is: Does removing a component for entirely unrelated reasons amount to a will to "fix" the bug? In my view, no - it only demonstrates that they were willing to remove the component for unrelated reasons.
Heroin is diacetylmorphine, not dimethylmorphine. You're probably mixing it up with codeine, which is (mono-)methylmorphine.
And how long will it take before they need to redo their software all over again because Microsoft abandons the platform?
This is not funny. It's called priapism and can result in impotence or worse.
If CIPAV has been so widely deployed, one might wonder if it has not been released to black hats already and analysed to death...
To at least one of...
Well, obviously someone is having his doubts here.
Anyway, it's easy to solder a replacement connector on.
But if you're blind, you had better not try to do that.
Actually you have it mostly right, but slightly off. The GP had it right. Corroborating link
The problem as I see it is that the only ones with standing to appeal are the national standards organizations. The same organizations that in many cases overruled the technical committees (sp?). Of course they are not going to appeal their own decision! This makes the appeals process useless... or am I missing something?
They did not bribe. They stacked the panel.
That is not a bug, it's a feature. I once helped someone with a problem where Word would crash (segfault) a few seconds after displaying the empty starting page. I tracked the actual faulting to a buggy HP driver that couldn't deal with printers that were connected to a powered off machine on a wireless network. Switching to a different printer fixes it.
Yes, MS Word makes calls to the printer driver while you're working and has its pagination algorithm adapt to its characteristics.
You forget that the ability to document one's changes to the Registry are absolutely atrocious, you have to keep external documentation. With /etc, the documentation is neatly placed alongside the changes themselves.
Bruce Schneier wrote that the worm was starting to retaliate. It was linked to by a poster on this Slashdot story. The guy who posted the analysis you refer to seems to be a lowly sysadmin (He's affiliated with Network Operations at the UCSD - so not a researcher) - I would tend to believe Bruce more, and viewed that analysis with some skepticism, which now appears to have been justified.
Dude, these domains could belong to somebody who had no idea of what they were involved in.
There's a recent case in Denmark where an economics student was unknowingly hosting a
phishing site on his laptop. The phishers had registered the domain in his name. He did get
an invoice, but had just discarded it because he had no clue.
Still, they could shut these domains down.
Do you happen to know how ASLR will work together with prebinding?
AFAICT, ASLR would render prebinding moot (Wikipedia says that it has
been deprecated since Tiger; nevertheless, I am still seeing noticeably
longer load times when first running an app after a system update - I
chalk that up to prebinding).
The Jargon File.
You need to learn the difference between syntax and morphology. Both are included in any reasonable definition of grammar, although many laypeople (like you) only consider the latter to be complexity. In general, the level of complexity of each of these will be inversely proportional to the other: A language with small morphological systems (like English) will tend to have many constraints on things like word order. In Latin (which had a large morphological system), word order was essentially free. In English, it is not.