Well, some are harder than others, certainly, depending on whether it's a simple coding error (just forgetting a delete) or a totally cocked-up design (throwing raw (ie non-smart) pointers around between threads and not having a clue who ends up owning the memory).
But the easiest way to fix memory leaks is... not to write them in the first place! It saves so much trouble. (A bit like other types of bugs, really.)
Personally I gave up writing memory leaks years ago. But, judging from the numbers of other people's memory leaks I get paid to fix, this doesn't (for some reason which I have trouble understanding) appear to be a universally popular approach.
Where in the world can you see the red British ones?
The most exotic location in which I've seen one was Jerusalem (with a metal plate over the slot, leaving only a thin slit through which letters, but not bombs, could be posted)... but there must be others?
... users are running Windows on their desktops, and people like me are making a decent living writing code for it.
(Not that I care about the platform, actually. Before Windows I wrote code for other things, and if it were to disappear I would write code for other things. Really really really not a big deal either way.)
We do have a bit of a problem with that in the UK. (This is a general comment, without reference to the particular case under discussion about which I know nothing other than what has been in the news.)
Once upon a time people who were unable to lead a normal life in society were locked up in mental hospitals. But we've closed all those and replaced them with "care in the community". This policy, which in fact is implemented as "neglect in the community", has a variety of outcomes for the people concerned.
Some do actually cope with life on the outside (maybe they didn't need to be in the mental hospitals in the first place), with or without any extra support that they are lucky enough to receive. Some don't cope, and end up homeless and living on the streets, maybe dying of drug overdoses or exposure in winter. Some cope fine with keeping themselves alive but end up in prison because their behaviour, which they can't do anything about, is unacceptable to society.
Prison is generally reckoned not to be a suitable place to keep these people locked up, as you say... but we no longer have anywhere else.
I'm one of those to whom compatibility, ie the ability to actually get on with my work which earns me my living, is vastly more important than the price of MS Office... but nobody can disagree with "abomination that is Works".
People sure as hell complain when government makes laws or regulations without any basis in research... and here we have people whining when the research is done!
We don't do most of that in the UK - we have what is called a "representative democracy" which means that you elect people to represent you, and they then make the decisions rather than running back to the electorate for each little thing.
As an example, we most certainly do not elect judges! In the UK judges are non political, and we want people who are good at being judges, not people who are good at winning elections. Similarly "city officials" are appointed by normal recruitment processes, with elected local politicians taking part in the process when hiring senior officials.
Re "taxes/bonds/ordinances", referenda in the UK are very rare. We elect the politicians to make these decisions for us. If we don't like how they do it we throw them out. Having said which, as a politician I am involved in endless consultation with my electorate to find out what they think on various issues, but these are not elections.
Are all the candidates listed? Do all the pieces of paper match the candidates? Are all the numbers right? Can someone make dupes and mess this up? Are the right options on the ballot going to the right precincts who are supposed to vote on the issue?
Yes all through (with some concern that I might not be understanding the word "precincts" correctly, as we don't have those in England whatever they are).
Do they just write down a name? First or last or full name? Or do they fill in one of those Scantron bubbles for each? Do they fill in zero, one, two, or all of them? What if they put an "X" in the bubble instead of filling it in? What if a stray pencil mark across the sheet marks one of the ovals? What if the person doesn't make a choice for EVERY race? What if they vote in one that doesn't apply to them?
If there is more than one concurrent election there is a separate paper for each. One election at a time is most common, two at once is not uncommon, more than two at once in any one place is quite rare.
All the candidates' names are on the ballot paper. The punter only gets given ballot papers for elections in which they are entitled to vote. The punter marks an X against the candidate(s) they wish to vote for (more than one in a single election in some cases). The rules about interpreting Xs which cross lines on the ballot paper, and when the punter puts the wrong number of Xs, and if they make tick marks rather than Xs, and so on are quite clear and well understood, and there's an aribtration process in the counting hall, and in the counts I've observed there has been no disagreement about the classification of spoilt ballots.
What if someone messes up in the count? What if they go one two three... 99, 400, one two three... 99... oh crap which hundred was I on? What if someone deliberately screws it up?
You try doing that with several people watching you, including representatives of all the candidates. Yes there are occasional errors, but they're usually pointed out by several people - including those who stand to gain by the errors![#] (Plus it's not the culture.)
How close is "a bit close"? Are you 100% certain that EVERYONE in the room counted right? What if you get a different winner than the first pass/second pass/42nd pass? What if someone/some group of people decides to say "I'm not happy, recount!" until the vote swings the way they want?
"A bit close" is sort-of up to the returning officer, who is non-political. But there are rules and accepted practice too. If I demanded a recount having lost by 200 votes, for example, I'd just be laughed at, but if I appeared to lose by 20 votes I'd demand and get a recount.
Of course not everybody in the room can be guaranteed to have counted 100% right, but with a majority of 600 (say) nobody cares if the count is a vote or three out, do they?? You can't continually demand recounts, the returning officer will tell you to piss off after the same result has been achieved a few times and you've definitely lost. You can challenge this in court afterwards of course, provided you're willing to put up the costs in cash in advance.
A court order in a couple of hours in the middle of the night... right, that happens.
No, it doesn't happen. If there needs to be a court order it happens later. The average number of such court orders in the UK is much closer to zero than it is to one - it almost never happens because there is no need.
[#] Seriously. The "instructions to counting agents" we hand out to our people tell them that they're supposed to be watching for errors that go against us, the idea being that it's the other guy's job to watch for errors in our favour, but in practice we all call out all errors no matter which way they're going. Sure, we'd like to win, but all the politicians round here count a clean election as being much more important than who wins.
... do Americans keep on and on and on doing this??
Here's how to run an election that works:
(1) Ballot papers are just that, pieces of paper.
(2) The voters indicate their vote by writing on the pieces of paper.
(3) The votes are counted by human beings. This takes a couple of hours, and it's a fun night out for people who otherwise might have relatively boring clerking jobs (and for the 85 year olds it's something they look forward to every year).
(4) If the vote's a bit close - you count it again! On the night, using the same human beings, until everyone in the hall is happy. Even on a really bad day you get to the party by 04:00.
(5) On the exceedingly rare occasions when things have gone seriously pear-shaped there's a physical paper audit trail... er, you just get a court order to count the votes again, which takes another couple of hours.
Er, is this supposed to be rocket science, or what?
Perhaps, then, the employee is choosing to disqualify themselves by showing sufficient lack of common sense that they voluntarily live somewhere without a health care system?
Regular expressions (regex to their friends) are an incredibly powerful addition to most programmer's personal toolkit of techniques. Programming using a language that doesn't support them can be frustrating if you need to do any amount of non-trivial string handling.
Er, no. It is only for trivial string handling that the regex approach is useful.
For non-trivial string handling (particularly if you feel like giving the authors of erroneous strings helpful error messages!!) I'll write a proper lexical analyser and a proper parser every time.
Slashdot doesn't render properly in IE6 either. (Well, it does sometimes, must depend on the weather or whether there's an R in the hour or something.)
I have always assumed that breaking IE was a deliberate feature of the slashdot site, done on purpose to wind up IE users.
Other web sites, whose authors are trying to attract visitors not all of whom are religious Microsoft haters, have a different attitude towards getting their sites to work with IE.
Mate of mine was in charge of the resident software in one machine... which had a 256 byte PROM, everything else needed to be loaded from the teletype.
Every now and then he's spot an inefficiency in the software, remove an instruction, save three bytes... and use the freed-up space to add four new features.
Next time you're going for an interview, look up the interviewer.
You might find that the higly professional lady wearing a smart business suit spends her weekends dressed up in strange clothing and hanging around with a motorcycle gang, to pick a real example at random.
... if they chose not to download and install and run them.
Works for me.
That way I also don't have to spend extra money on extra hardware to support buggy bloatware virus checkers. How many times have you seen complaints about systems broken by anti-virus software? More often then never? Riiight... good enough for me.
From what I understand, the police in the U.K. already monitor those cameras with a huge staff.
I don't know about London, but that's not what happens in my city. A handful of local authority staff watch the monitors: the police are allowed in when there are particular ongoing incidents, and they can ask for tapes of particular incidents, but the police may not just sit there and watch in case anything interesting should turn up. (And even if they were allowed to there's no way there would be any spare police to do this job.)
The Code of Practice gives a reasonable overview of how the system works.
From my knowledge of how another UK town's CCTV system works I can see some issues with this experiment.
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
(3) Prejudice to ongoing operations. Actually they've probably thought of this one, so when cameras are being used as part of a current operation the pictures from those cameras will not be broadcast... provided that in the excitement of the chase the operators remember to press the right buttons, of course.
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
And it'll make life just that much more complicated for politicians at election time, whether you think this is a plus or minus is up to you:
(5) No candidate or party can put enough bodies on the street to fight a full election campaign across an entire district. So where you concentrate your effort depends (partly) on knowing where the enemy is concentrating theirs. Once upon a time this was done on maybe a daily basis, as party workers reported back to HQ what they'd seen on the streets; nowadays it's more real time as reporting back is done with mobile phones; with publicly visible CCTV you'll be able to see what the enemy is up to even in areas where you don't have any bodies on the street yourself that day, and the candidate or party which can make the best use of this information will get a slight edge.
Slashdot Mirror
"... & credibility"
Eh?? Where d'you get that from then?? You don't want to believe everything you read in Wikipedia, you know.
(Today's earlier Wikipedia story - some of the stuff there is ripped off from other sites anyway.)
And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
One day that will not be allowed, no.
Memory leaks are however not easy to fix
... not to write them in the first place! It saves so much trouble. (A bit like other types of bugs, really.)
Well, some are harder than others, certainly, depending on whether it's a simple coding error (just forgetting a delete) or a totally cocked-up design (throwing raw (ie non-smart) pointers around between threads and not having a clue who ends up owning the memory).
But the easiest way to fix memory leaks is
Personally I gave up writing memory leaks years ago. But, judging from the numbers of other people's memory leaks I get paid to fix, this doesn't (for some reason which I have trouble understanding) appear to be a universally popular approach.
Where in the world can you see the red British ones?
... but there must be others?
The most exotic location in which I've seen one was Jerusalem (with a metal plate over the slot, leaving only a thin slit through which letters, but not bombs, could be posted)
... users are running Windows on their desktops, and people like me are making a decent living writing code for it.
(Not that I care about the platform, actually. Before Windows I wrote code for other things, and if it were to disappear I would write code for other things. Really really really not a big deal either way.)
We do have a bit of a problem with that in the UK. (This is a general comment, without reference to the particular case under discussion about which I know nothing other than what has been in the news.)
... but we no longer have anywhere else.
Once upon a time people who were unable to lead a normal life in society were locked up in mental hospitals. But we've closed all those and replaced them with "care in the community". This policy, which in fact is implemented as "neglect in the community", has a variety of outcomes for the people concerned.
Some do actually cope with life on the outside (maybe they didn't need to be in the mental hospitals in the first place), with or without any extra support that they are lucky enough to receive. Some don't cope, and end up homeless and living on the streets, maybe dying of drug overdoses or exposure in winter. Some cope fine with keeping themselves alive but end up in prison because their behaviour, which they can't do anything about, is unacceptable to society.
Prison is generally reckoned not to be a suitable place to keep these people locked up, as you say
Absolutely!
... but nobody can disagree with "abomination that is Works".
I'm one of those to whom compatibility, ie the ability to actually get on with my work which earns me my living, is vastly more important than the price of MS Office
People sure as hell complain when government makes laws or regulations without any basis in research ... and here we have people whining when the research is done!
We don't do most of that in the UK - we have what is called a "representative democracy" which means that you elect people to represent you, and they then make the decisions rather than running back to the electorate for each little thing.
As an example, we most certainly do not elect judges! In the UK judges are non political, and we want people who are good at being judges, not people who are good at winning elections. Similarly "city officials" are appointed by normal recruitment processes, with elected local politicians taking part in the process when hiring senior officials.
Re "taxes/bonds/ordinances", referenda in the UK are very rare. We elect the politicians to make these decisions for us. If we don't like how they do it we throw them out. Having said which, as a politician I am involved in endless consultation with my electorate to find out what they think on various issues, but these are not elections.
Are all the candidates listed? Do all the pieces of paper match the candidates? Are all the numbers right? Can someone make dupes and mess this up? Are the right options on the ballot going to the right precincts who are supposed to vote on the issue?
Yes all through (with some concern that I might not be understanding the word "precincts" correctly, as we don't have those in England whatever they are).
Do they just write down a name? First or last or full name? Or do they fill in one of those Scantron bubbles for each? Do they fill in zero, one, two, or all of them? What if they put an "X" in the bubble instead of filling it in? What if a stray pencil mark across the sheet marks one of the ovals? What if the person doesn't make a choice for EVERY race? What if they vote in one that doesn't apply to them?
If there is more than one concurrent election there is a separate paper for each. One election at a time is most common, two at once is not uncommon, more than two at once in any one place is quite rare.
All the candidates' names are on the ballot paper. The punter only gets given ballot papers for elections in which they are entitled to vote. The punter marks an X against the candidate(s) they wish to vote for (more than one in a single election in some cases). The rules about interpreting Xs which cross lines on the ballot paper, and when the punter puts the wrong number of Xs, and if they make tick marks rather than Xs, and so on are quite clear and well understood, and there's an aribtration process in the counting hall, and in the counts I've observed there has been no disagreement about the classification of spoilt ballots.
What if someone messes up in the count? What if they go one two three... 99, 400, one two three... 99... oh crap which hundred was I on? What if someone deliberately screws it up?
You try doing that with several people watching you, including representatives of all the candidates. Yes there are occasional errors, but they're usually pointed out by several people - including those who stand to gain by the errors![#] (Plus it's not the culture.)
How close is "a bit close"? Are you 100% certain that EVERYONE in the room counted right? What if you get a different winner than the first pass/second pass/42nd pass? What if someone/some group of people decides to say "I'm not happy, recount!" until the vote swings the way they want?
"A bit close" is sort-of up to the returning officer, who is non-political. But there are rules and accepted practice too. If I demanded a recount having lost by 200 votes, for example, I'd just be laughed at, but if I appeared to lose by 20 votes I'd demand and get a recount.
Of course not everybody in the room can be guaranteed to have counted 100% right, but with a majority of 600 (say) nobody cares if the count is a vote or three out, do they?? You can't continually demand recounts, the returning officer will tell you to piss off after the same result has been achieved a few times and you've definitely lost. You can challenge this in court afterwards of course, provided you're willing to put up the costs in cash in advance.
A court order in a couple of hours in the middle of the night... right, that happens.
No, it doesn't happen. If there needs to be a court order it happens later. The average number of such court orders in the UK is much closer to zero than it is to one - it almost never happens because there is no need.
[#] Seriously. The "instructions to counting agents" we hand out to our people tell them that they're supposed to be watching for errors that go against us, the idea being that it's the other guy's job to watch for errors in our favour, but in practice we all call out all errors no matter which way they're going. Sure, we'd like to win, but all the politicians round here count a clean election as being much more important than who wins.
... do Americans keep on and on and on doing this??
... er, you just get a court order to count the votes again, which takes another couple of hours.
Here's how to run an election that works:
(1) Ballot papers are just that, pieces of paper.
(2) The voters indicate their vote by writing on the pieces of paper.
(3) The votes are counted by human beings. This takes a couple of hours, and it's a fun night out for people who otherwise might have relatively boring clerking jobs (and for the 85 year olds it's something they look forward to every year).
(4) If the vote's a bit close - you count it again! On the night, using the same human beings, until everyone in the hall is happy. Even on a really bad day you get to the party by 04:00.
(5) On the exceedingly rare occasions when things have gone seriously pear-shaped there's a physical paper audit trail
Er, is this supposed to be rocket science, or what?
Is that really what happens in America??
Perhaps, then, the employee is choosing to disqualify themselves by showing sufficient lack of common sense that they voluntarily live somewhere without a health care system?
ZoneAlarm is itself malware. See the first two questions on this page.
Regular expressions (regex to their friends) are an incredibly powerful addition to most programmer's personal toolkit of techniques. Programming using a language that doesn't support them can be frustrating if you need to do any amount of non-trivial string handling.
Er, no. It is only for trivial string handling that the regex approach is useful.
For non-trivial string handling (particularly if you feel like giving the authors of erroneous strings helpful error messages!!) I'll write a proper lexical analyser and a proper parser every time.
Slashdot doesn't render properly in IE6 either. (Well, it does sometimes, must depend on the weather or whether there's an R in the hour or something.)
I have always assumed that breaking IE was a deliberate feature of the slashdot site, done on purpose to wind up IE users.
Other web sites, whose authors are trying to attract visitors not all of whom are religious Microsoft haters, have a different attitude towards getting their sites to work with IE.
50meg? - give me a break!!!
... which had a 256 byte PROM, everything else needed to be loaded from the teletype.
... and use the freed-up space to add four new features.
Mate of mine was in charge of the resident software in one machine
Every now and then he's spot an inefficiency in the software, remove an instruction, save three bytes
They dont make 'em like that any more.
On this occasion I was told "turn up at reception and ask for Ms --- ----". So I put her name into Google the night before.
I don't recall, I'm afraid, it was years ago.
Next time you're going for an interview, look up the interviewer.
You might find that the higly professional lady wearing a smart business suit spends her weekends dressed up in strange clothing and hanging around with a motorcycle gang, to pick a real example at random.
There's essentially no text - it's just lots of pages of screen shots. (Well, up to page four or five anyway, I got bored and stopped at that point.)
C'mon ... so many to choose from, the Black Watch and the QL just for starters ...
... if they chose not to download and install and run them.
... good enough for me.
Works for me.
That way I also don't have to spend extra money on extra hardware to support buggy bloatware virus checkers. How many times have you seen complaints about systems broken by anti-virus software? More often then never? Riiight
Speed cameras are making driving without getting fined difficult
Try cruise control.
From what I understand, the police in the U.K. already monitor those cameras with a huge staff.
I don't know about London, but that's not what happens in my city. A handful of local authority staff watch the monitors: the police are allowed in when there are particular ongoing incidents, and they can ask for tapes of particular incidents, but the police may not just sit there and watch in case anything interesting should turn up. (And even if they were allowed to there's no way there would be any spare police to do this job.)
The Code of Practice gives a reasonable overview of how the system works.
From my knowledge of how another UK town's CCTV system works I can see some issues with this experiment.
... provided that in the excitement of the chase the operators remember to press the right buttons, of course.
(1) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. This means that they will be able to work out exactly what the cameras cover and exactly what they don't, and will be able to plan their misdeeds accordingly, by doing things somewhere where there are no cameras. (In real life the perps do not know where the cameras are, what they cover, at a range of how many hundreds of metres they can read a newspaper headline, that sort of thing.)
(2) The perps will be able to watch, too, won't they. So they will be able to have accomplices who can see from moment to moment where the cameras are pointing, and phone or text their mates on the street to tell them the coast is clear.
(3) Prejudice to ongoing operations. Actually they've probably thought of this one, so when cameras are being used as part of a current operation the pictures from those cameras will not be broadcast
(4) Innocent victims. You might be doing something which is perfectly legal and of no interest to the police but which you still might not want your friends and relatives and employer to see. OK, so if you're snogging someone else's wife in the park when you're supposed to be home sick from work then maybe you deserve what you get, but I'm sure that if I tried a little harder I'd come up with a more deserving example.
And it'll make life just that much more complicated for politicians at election time, whether you think this is a plus or minus is up to you:
(5) No candidate or party can put enough bodies on the street to fight a full election campaign across an entire district. So where you concentrate your effort depends (partly) on knowing where the enemy is concentrating theirs. Once upon a time this was done on maybe a daily basis, as party workers reported back to HQ what they'd seen on the streets; nowadays it's more real time as reporting back is done with mobile phones; with publicly visible CCTV you'll be able to see what the enemy is up to even in areas where you don't have any bodies on the street yourself that day, and the candidate or party which can make the best use of this information will get a slight edge.