A lot of terrible code is a result of management forcing unrealistic deadlines on developers, or refusing to slip a deadline to accommodate some unforeseen problem.
I worked on a large data visualisation application with an unrealistic deadline, which our department was writing for another department, on their budget. In order to prevent it from eating into our budget money, it had to be released by a certain date. It needed several months more than that to be even nearly ready, but when the deadline came the managers announced that it was finished and released on time. Management high-fives all round. Then it immediately announced that the customers couldn't use it yet because there were some minor bugs which had suddenly been discovered (i.e. all the missing features which would make it any use at all).
I also had a boss who would give you something to do, make changes to the design on a daily basis while you were doing it, then before it was anywhere near ready demand that you stop work on it immediately, check the (unfinished, untested, part built) code in and start work on something completely different. He did this to all the developers, and the code was riddled with overlapping #ifdefs around chunks of unfinished code just so the build didn't break. Then of course he announced "Good news, everybody! We're going live in three weeks!" when the cobbled-together mess was at least six months from being usable. Cue more panic-coding just to make things work, and then the deadline came and went because he'd thought up yet more wacky features to add, starting the cycle all over again. Bug database? Change requests? Unit tests? Peer reviews? Documentation? No such luck. Even the features he wanted weren't clearly defined, you just got a two-hour rambling phone call which contained about five minute's worth of useful information (but it didn't matter, because he'd change his mind when you half-done developing it, or forget how he wanted it doing and yell because you doing it how he originally asked).
It's like those sci-fi films where the ship breaks down. Captain: How long will it take to fix the engines? Engineer: At least 24 hours, sir. Captain: You've got 8, now get to it. Engineer: No sir, really. 24 hours minimum if nothing else goes wrong. Captain: We take off in 8! You have your orders. Engineer: But seriously, we can't... Captain: La-la-la-la I can't hear you!
Sky customer services are shockingly incompetent. I've to deal with them plenty of times (due to the shoddy nature of the set-top boxes mainly) and it is hard to believe that they are simply useless and not actually malicious. I'd like to get a HD box, but I don't think I could face the weeks of soul-destroying hassle it would involve for them to get it installed and working correctly. The engineers they send out are generally great, but actually getting them to send the right engineer, with the right gear, to the right address, at the time they said they would is almost not worth the effort.
This may be a silly question, but apart from causing a nuisance, what would be the point of doing this? Hacker 1: Hey, watch this! I'm sending messages to let me control a million iPhones. Hacker 2: Cool, it worked. What now? Hacker 1: Um... I could, like, turn their cameras on or something...
From an evil hacker point of view, aren't PC botnets much more useful to control than mobile phones (which will have less power, less bandwidth, less memory and be connected to the net less often)?
I agree it's a vulnerability that clearly needs to be patched quickly, but who would bother exploiting it on a large scale (knowing it will probably get patched soon anyway)?
I played it at launch, and stuck through many of the patch cycles hoping it would get better. It looks *great*, and the first 20 levels (through Tortage) are indeed good fun, but after that it went downhill very quickly.
Each patch fixed one problem and introduced half a dozen new problems. PvP was horribly unbalanced - it was common to be one-or-two-shotted by players several levels *below* you without you being able to do anything about it at all. Players could evade PvP by simply running into water. Major changes were introduced to classes, changes that should have been decided upon well before launch. Elite "grey" mobs would kill you in seconds (this was one of the "improvements" they added). The whole thing seriously felt it was launched a good six months early and we were just paying to beta-test it for them. I didn't play of the siege matches, but all reports at the time were that it was horribly broken (as was crafting). People would engage in PvP just to get killed so they could respawn at a graveyard the other side of the zone, using PvP simply as a convenient method for travel.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that all of those issues were fixed. It's a shame, as I went into it expecting great things and thought that the Conan universe had enormous potential for a great game, but Funcom completely wrecked it. If you look at the stock value graph for the time after launch, you can almost see the little spikes where big patches were added, and then see the value drop as people realised how much they had broken at the same time, until it took a nose-dive into penny stocks as players quit en masse.
Had potential, fun for twenty levels, sucked after that when all the terrible problems became evident. Have they managed to turn it into a decent game yet?
2) In natural law, the purpose of sex is procreation. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as masturbation or birth control.
The purpose of eating is to gain energy from food. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as food fights, diets, giving up chocolate for Lent, and pictures made from pasta shapes.
Ah, but I forget, religious logic only applies to those things they decide it should apply to, right?
It's a shame that in the ten hours you were waiting for it to patch you didn't spend two minutes discovering that there's a lot more to combat than "click once and wait", which is the almost useless whack-it-with-your-crappy-weapon autoattack.
"How about this for a compromise: You teach what you want to in church, or a class on religion/philosophy, and scientists will teach what they want to in science class."
Part of the problem is that scientists don't teach in the classroom. Teachers do, and science teachers are generally not scientists and may not have a good grasp of the evidence supporting things like evoluition. When the teacher believes that the science conflicts with his religion, he's not going to be too interested in what the big journals have to say on the matter.
Sounds more like Hippy Evolution to me. That's all lovely and warm and fuzzy, but such baseless nonsense has nothing at all to do with the matter at hand.
If I'm going to be taxed on the assumption that I'm illegally downloading stuff, then I guess I might as well go ahead and start getting pirated versions instead.
If you punish people for things they haven't actually done, expect them to go off and start doing it.
One way to combat this stupid idea is to increase the amount of spam-mails on the net, filling their uber-database with endless crap. Have an email client which silently replies to each and every spam you receive, while also junking it so that you never see it. When every computer is sending out hundreds of replies to spam every day the surveillance database will have to handle billions of messages.
Apart from the internet melting under the load, what could go wrong?
I had a fault with my Chrysler PT Cruiser a while back (fixed with a firmware upgrade). Occasionally it would feel like it was misfiring, and then the engine would simply cut out and the engine warning light came on. Unfortunately, it could do this at any time, and it happened several times while I was doing 70mph on the motorway.
Having the car effectively switch off at 70 is a bit disconcerting, especially as I lost power steering as well. Luckily I always managed to pull over safely and it would restart after a minute, but deliberately switching your engine off to save fuel is a terrible idea especially if things like power steering depend on it.
In the case of iframes abuse, wouldn't it make sense for browsers to refuse to allow iframes to show pages which include some sort of "no_remote_display" tag? So if your page has a form which could potentially be abused, add the tag and browsers which recognise it will only show the page in it's entirety, and not as part of another page or from another domain?
I realise that this may well be far too simplistic and people will probably point out a dozen reasons why it won't work and would break all sorts of things.:)
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A lot of terrible code is a result of management forcing unrealistic deadlines on developers, or refusing to slip a deadline to accommodate some unforeseen problem.
I worked on a large data visualisation application with an unrealistic deadline, which our department was writing for another department, on their budget. In order to prevent it from eating into our budget money, it had to be released by a certain date. It needed several months more than that to be even nearly ready, but when the deadline came the managers announced that it was finished and released on time. Management high-fives all round. Then it immediately announced that the customers couldn't use it yet because there were some minor bugs which had suddenly been discovered (i.e. all the missing features which would make it any use at all).
I also had a boss who would give you something to do, make changes to the design on a daily basis while you were doing it, then before it was anywhere near ready demand that you stop work on it immediately, check the (unfinished, untested, part built) code in and start work on something completely different. He did this to all the developers, and the code was riddled with overlapping #ifdefs around chunks of unfinished code just so the build didn't break. Then of course he announced "Good news, everybody! We're going live in three weeks!" when the cobbled-together mess was at least six months from being usable. Cue more panic-coding just to make things work, and then the deadline came and went because he'd thought up yet more wacky features to add, starting the cycle all over again. Bug database? Change requests? Unit tests? Peer reviews? Documentation? No such luck. Even the features he wanted weren't clearly defined, you just got a two-hour rambling phone call which contained about five minute's worth of useful information (but it didn't matter, because he'd change his mind when you half-done developing it, or forget how he wanted it doing and yell because you doing it how he originally asked).
It's like those sci-fi films where the ship breaks down.
Captain: How long will it take to fix the engines?
Engineer: At least 24 hours, sir.
Captain: You've got 8, now get to it.
Engineer: No sir, really. 24 hours minimum if nothing else goes wrong.
Captain: We take off in 8! You have your orders.
Engineer: But seriously, we can't...
Captain: La-la-la-la I can't hear you!
Shouldn't they, like, fix all the massive problems in the current game before introducing a thousand new massive problems with an expansion?
Sky customer services are shockingly incompetent. I've to deal with them plenty of times (due to the shoddy nature of the set-top boxes mainly) and it is hard to believe that they are simply useless and not actually malicious. I'd like to get a HD box, but I don't think I could face the weeks of soul-destroying hassle it would involve for them to get it installed and working correctly. The engineers they send out are generally great, but actually getting them to send the right engineer, with the right gear, to the right address, at the time they said they would is almost not worth the effort.
This may be a silly question, but apart from causing a nuisance, what would be the point of doing this?
Hacker 1: Hey, watch this! I'm sending messages to let me control a million iPhones.
Hacker 2: Cool, it worked. What now?
Hacker 1: Um... I could, like, turn their cameras on or something...
From an evil hacker point of view, aren't PC botnets much more useful to control than mobile phones (which will have less power, less bandwidth, less memory and be connected to the net less often)?
I agree it's a vulnerability that clearly needs to be patched quickly, but who would bother exploiting it on a large scale (knowing it will probably get patched soon anyway)?
I played it at launch, and stuck through many of the patch cycles hoping it would get better.
It looks *great*, and the first 20 levels (through Tortage) are indeed good fun, but after that it went downhill very quickly.
Each patch fixed one problem and introduced half a dozen new problems. PvP was horribly unbalanced - it was common to be one-or-two-shotted by players several levels *below* you without you being able to do anything about it at all. Players could evade PvP by simply running into water. Major changes were introduced to classes, changes that should have been decided upon well before launch. Elite "grey" mobs would kill you in seconds (this was one of the "improvements" they added). The whole thing seriously felt it was launched a good six months early and we were just paying to beta-test it for them. I didn't play of the siege matches, but all reports at the time were that it was horribly broken (as was crafting). People would engage in PvP just to get killed so they could respawn at a graveyard the other side of the zone, using PvP simply as a convenient method for travel.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that all of those issues were fixed. It's a shame, as I went into it expecting great things and thought that the Conan universe had enormous potential for a great game, but Funcom completely wrecked it. If you look at the stock value graph for the time after launch, you can almost see the little spikes where big patches were added, and then see the value drop as people realised how much they had broken at the same time, until it took a nose-dive into penny stocks as players quit en masse.
Had potential, fun for twenty levels, sucked after that when all the terrible problems became evident. Have they managed to turn it into a decent game yet?
Clearly, you simply need to connect the red wire to th
+++NO CARRIER+++
The purpose of eating is to gain energy from food. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as food fights, diets, giving up chocolate for Lent, and pictures made from pasta shapes.
Ah, but I forget, religious logic only applies to those things they decide it should apply to, right?
I'm Hyper-Orthodox, and we all think that the super-ultra-orthodox are the real loonies.
It's a shame that in the ten hours you were waiting for it to patch you didn't spend two minutes discovering that there's a lot more to combat than "click once and wait", which is the almost useless whack-it-with-your-crappy-weapon autoattack.
> Religion will only end with the dying breath of the second-to-last human.
More like, "The final thing the second-to-last human hears will be 'Die, unbeliever!'"
Part of the problem is that scientists don't teach in the classroom. Teachers do, and science teachers are generally not scientists and may not have a good grasp of the evidence supporting things like evoluition. When the teacher believes that the science conflicts with his religion, he's not going to be too interested in what the big journals have to say on the matter.
Please learn to use apostrophes, capital letters and the difference between "there" and "their" (and probably "they're" as well).
> for example you can only update via a Windows application
There's a MacOSX TomTom application as well.
Not that it was FICTIONAL!!!?
You never played Age Of Conan, did you?
Just combine the two by rolling a female blood-elf paladin. Problem solved!
Sounds more like Hippy Evolution to me.
That's all lovely and warm and fuzzy, but such baseless nonsense has nothing at all to do with the matter at hand.
I acquire all my music/films/software legally.
If I'm going to be taxed on the assumption that I'm illegally downloading stuff, then I guess I might as well go ahead and start getting pirated versions instead.
If you punish people for things they haven't actually done, expect them to go off and start doing it.
One way to combat this stupid idea is to increase the amount of spam-mails on the net, filling their uber-database with endless crap.
Have an email client which silently replies to each and every spam you receive, while also junking it so that you never see it. When every computer is sending out hundreds of replies to spam every day the surveillance database will have to handle billions of messages.
Apart from the internet melting under the load, what could go wrong?
Users will always find a way to thwart your plans.
I had a fault with my Chrysler PT Cruiser a while back (fixed with a firmware upgrade).
Occasionally it would feel like it was misfiring, and then the engine would simply cut out and the engine warning light came on. Unfortunately, it could do this at any time, and it happened several times while I was doing 70mph on the motorway.
Having the car effectively switch off at 70 is a bit disconcerting, especially as I lost power steering as well. Luckily I always managed to pull over safely and it would restart after a minute, but deliberately switching your engine off to save fuel is a terrible idea especially if things like power steering depend on it.
Sorry, but I have to kill you now.
In the case of iframes abuse, wouldn't it make sense for browsers to refuse to allow iframes to show pages which include some sort of "no_remote_display" tag? So if your page has a form which could potentially be abused, add the tag and browsers which recognise it will only show the page in it's entirety, and not as part of another page or from another domain?
I realise that this may well be far too simplistic and people will probably point out a dozen reasons why it won't work and would break all sorts of things. :)
You know too much! Better start running.
Such a telescope would prove very useful to the Whalers on the Moon when seeking out new hunting-grounds.