Let me get this straight: You've been acquiring personal computers, integrating them into your businesses, and installing on them software products so monumentally shitty that it beggars the imagination that anyone with even the slightest sense of pride would admit to writing them. What's more, you were told by people who actually know what the fsck they're talking about that the products were shitty, both at a superficial and fundamental level -- and you systematically ignored them, and kept throwing bad money after worse money, all the while complaining when your systems crashed, your data was corrupted, and your networks infiltrated...
And you've been doing this for at least the last 30 years...
And NOW you suddenly claim to give a shit about platform integrity?
And I suppose the complete absence of any mention of WinCE or Windows Mobile in the article is sheerest coincidence.
And before you say, "Chrome lets you control JavaScript execution, blah blah blah," yes it does at a very coarse level. NoScript is much more fine-grained, and provides substitute scripts for sites that "need" to run crap from google-analytics et al.
It looks like this functionality may bring NoScript that much closer to Chrome.
Below is a copy of a rant I posted to LJ a while back. In short, Microsoft does not, in any meaningful sense, make it easy to get started hacking on their systems.
______
Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.
One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.
You'd be wrong.
What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications,.NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.
Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."
After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."
Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."
Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."
*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.
So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:
Write native Windows applications and device drivers in C/C++,
Debug said applications and device drivers,
Not give a damn about "wizards" trying to write my code for me,
Not give a damn about database, Web, VisualBASIC, or.NET development.
Forgive my Yankee naïvate, but doesn't the BBC have a mandate to serve the public interest, since they're funded in large part by compulsory license fees charged to all television owners? I'd be interested to know how they're justifying this request to regulators and to the fee-paying public.
That's fine as far as it goes, but it fails to consider that Facebook "apps" are the undisclosed third party in the room, who can abscond with anything and everything on your profile.
You may wisely choose to never be friends with "SociopathicStalker53" and thereby keep your information away from them. But if they write a cutesy "quiz" that one of your friends decides to run, despite your precautions you're fscked anyway.
And this state of affairs is entirely Facebook's fault, because it's baked in to the underlying design.
Is it possible RGBA are using a built-in visualization library, possibly from WMP?
Sheesh. Kids these days...
Go read up on MOD files. (Then go add Scenemusic.eu to your playlist.) Visual synchronization to MOD files has been going on for over 20 years. It's a solved problem.
Honestly, what's the justification for this nonsense? Are the local constabularies that bored? And what the hell was with the SWAT-like response? Do they seriously think Osama bin Laden is going to turn up and spin techno for three hours?
Did the owner of the field give informed consent for the gathering? If so, then the police had no business being there. Apologies are almost certainly in order.
Plato was unquestionably brilliant, but even he thought the sun revolved around the earth. It took Copernicus's work to break out of that error -- and oh by the way all the math suddenly got a hell of a lot simpler.
So Lessig and Obama both have words of effusive praise for the man, and that's all very well, but to this armchair observer, Posner's suggestion is silly on its face for two reasons. First: As I'm sure Posner well knows, all works are copyrighted upon the instant of their creation. Every news article, every photo, every blog post, every tweet (twit?) -- all enjoy the full majesty of the copyright regime. Does that mean that everyone who hopes to publish anything needs to first become conversant in copyright law and the current state of the art in copyright litigation? Am I expected to append to every post, including this one, a hyperlink to a EULA? Absurd.
Even so, Posner's suggestion might have some arguable merit if it weren't for the other fact he appears to have skipped over -- copyrights today last effectively forever. Once you obtain a copyright on Happy Fun Ball, it's yours until well past the day you die. Copyrights throw up obstacles to creative expression. These obstacles are there to afford the artisan some isolation and breathing room to exploit their work exclusively before anyone else can horn in on it. But if copyright terms were more reasonable -- say, 28 years, as they were in the past -- then those obstacles would fall away over time and new creative forces could flow in and find and develop new ideas in the old material. But with eternal copyrights, this never happens. The obtacles that protect the creative artisan also hem him in and prevent him from moving anywhere else. You get gridlock, and once that happens the equation then devolves into who has the most money to fend off litigation when they decide to just go ahead and do what they want, anyway (*cough*Disney*cough*).
I'm not prepared to dismiss Posner entirely, however. I think he may be making the same error that Lawrence Lessig appears to have made (and recently appears to have realized), which is to argue from within the framework of the existing copyright regime ("the sun revolves around the earth"). It's fairly well established at this point that the existing regime doesn't work all that well, and cannot work well unless you want to completely sacrifice the freedom and autonomy people enjoy over their own computers. We need a Copernicus to come in and show us a new way of looking at things. I have a few meager ideas along these lines, which could benefit from spirited debate with the likes of Lessig and Posner, but I'm just a part-time armchair troll on Slashdot, and clearly beneath anyone's notice.
Unless and until the reporters and editors of the Chicago Tribune are prepared to denounce the "reporting" of flagrantly biased "news" organizations, unless they are prepared to say, "We are not like them. We are better than them, and here's how we're going to continue to be better than them..." Then I'm afraid they're going to have to accept the necessity of someone looking over their shoulder, checking their work.
This "review" process is already taking place -- it's why subscriptions are falling off a cliff. The product is crap, the readers know it's crap, which is why they're not buying it. Solution: Stop printing crap.
Clearly, their feedback mechanism has gotten seriously out of tune. I think also that they recognize this, and that the idea of allowing direct reader feedback on stories in the queue was born out of some desperation to correct their editorial priorities.
Here's a hint: Try to keep ideology at bay, and follow the facts wherever they take you. Yes, it's often uncomfortable. I imagine Woodward and Bernstein had many sleepless nights. Yet we are the better for their work. Emulate that. Oh, and spike any "story" about Paris Hilton.
I did some rudimentary research on this question about a year ago, except I was looking for a Bluetooth mouse to use with my ThinkPad. All the reviews I could find for Bluetooth mice seemed to point to a common set of problems:
Battery life is poor,
There is always an annoying wake-up delay,
They average 50-100% more expensive than their non-Bluetooth counterparts.
Based on these findings, and my own experience in the embedded arena, I would hazard a guess that all these Bluetooth mouse vendors are using the same embedded microcontroller, probably with the same embedded firmware. Hence, they all suffer from similar problems.
The only mouse's reviews that didn't seem to mention these issues (at least, not as bad as the others) was Apple's wireless MightyMouse. Of course, the MightyMouse has its own set of issues, such as the pretend secondary button, but if you can work around it, it's kinda sorta not too bad.
Again, this was about a year ago. I don't know if things have improved since then.
Mac OS X long ago learned to cope with mice sporting more than one button. OS X even does The Right Thing (context menus) with the secondary mouse button by default.
And now, with the new touchpads in MacBooks (where the "button" area is also part of the touchpad), you can set it up to pretend it has one button, or two.
Here's another news flash: OS X can handle standard PC keyboards, too! If it generates a standard USB HID code, OS X can deal with it.
After allowing them to breed for a couple of generations, the organisms accused the scientists of being, "big ugly bags of mostly water," and subsequently attempted to destroy the lab before the technicians could shut the lights off.
Since Adobe seems to (incorrectly) think JavaScript inside PDFs is a great idea, how about adding this feature:
When loading a PDF, if Reader sees there's JavaScript that wants to run, Reader pops up a dialog along the lines of, "Hey, this file contains executable code which is, y'know, kind of contrary to the whole concept of a 'document'. Do you want to allow the code to run? [Yes] [[Hell, No]]"
This is the cheesy but mostly effective stopgap solution Microsoft adopted when Word became an infection vector for macro viruses. Unless Microsoft got a patent on it, I don't see any reason why Adobe couldn't also use the same approach.
I have a pair of these things installed as a stopgap measure to get the living room on the LAN. There's a PC, an HD TiVo, and an Xbox-360 in there (the Wii lives off the WiFi).
I would prefer to have genuine Ethernet strung in there, but I rent the place, and I'd have to cut holes in things to get the cables and outlets in place (I know; I crawled around under the house and looked). So until I get the impetus to actually follow through on that, we're living with these HomePlug AV things.
They're still unreliable. That entire branch of the LAN drops out on occasion -- not even pings get through. And since there's no management interface on the bridges, I can't see what they're complaining about. They just mysteriously work, then stop working, then start working again. Perfect for Windows users:-). And, of course, it's my fault when they stop working.
Somewhat better than WiFi, but a weak substitute for genuine Cat 5.
Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"
BOFH: "What the hell is going on is that the message is currently working through our anti-spam measures -- the ones that filter out all the \/!Agr/\ ads because you keep visiting pr0n sites -- and if you really wanted it right now dammit, you would have had him FAX it.
"But, for a modest rise in salary, I can add his domain to our whitelist..."
How is it not intrusive? I browse to a website I haven't been to before - something I do several times daily - and it doesn't work right unless I click that little S and allow it permission to run javascript.
That pretty much defines intruding on my experience.
Uh, no. You have it backwards.
If I browse to a Web site I haven't seen before and suddenly find my desktop (and other programs) covered by a barrage of pop-up ads, that is intruding on my experience. Injecting code into my browser in an attempt to get it to reject right-mouse clicks -- that is intruding on my experience.
The computer is mine, not yours. It obeys my commands, not yours. If you want it to run some of your code, then you're first going to have to convince me to let you. And you do that by earning my trust and not treating my browser and desktop like your own private playground. NoScript lets me enforce this policy, and it clearly exposes the children who won't play by the rules. Google.com has earned my trust (Google-analytics.com, however, has not.)
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter. This is not a secret, and it is not something new. This has always been the case. (AJAX-heavy sites complicate this only slightly -- you should clearly explain what's not working and why (I'm looking at you, OKCupid...).)
And while we're about it -- Have you ever clicked on that little "S" in the corner to reveal a skyscraper of 15 different domains trying to execute JavaScript on your machine? Does this bother you even slightly? Why or why not?
My initial gut reaction was to denounce this guy as a $SCOUNDREL (substitute your preferred profane term). But a little voice told me to go read the article, and now I'm not as sure as I was previously.
Just for fun, consider the following actions a Unitary Programmer might do to your machine. Where would you rate them on the $SCOUNDREL scale, and why?
Deletes viruses from your machine.
Deletes competing adware from your machine.
Rebuffs attempts by competing viruses and adware to be deleted.
Reconfigures IE to be more secure.
Reconfigures Outlook to send plaintext only, fixed-width font, no top-posting, do not load or display remote images.
Disables using MSWord as an email editor.
Deletes IE; replaces it with Firefox, preserving all your bookmarks.
Deletes Outlook; replaces it with Thunderbird, converting all your mail archives.
Deletes all BitTorrent clients; replaces it with a RIAA/MPAA/FBI warning.
Deletes the scary warning about installing device drivers not digitally signed by Microsoft.
Converts HDCP to a system security setting, and flags all unprivileged applications that attempt to mess with it.
Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+Wine.
Deletes Windows; replaces it with Linux+KDE, with a message on the desktop reading, "Learn to use a real computer, kid..."
Playing "CoreWars" is tricky business, and people with even a dim sense of ethics are loathe to try it. But there's one case where none of the above actions are ethically questionable: When the machine's owner does it themselves.
I think the adware author lost sight of that for a while...
We had ClearCase at MOTO. Complete mess. Nobody -- not even the admins -- could explain how it worked or how to use it. It was also supported only on an ancient version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, since it required a binary filesystem blob to support its version-tracking filesystem. If you didn't have exactly the kernel version it was looking for, ClearCase was simply not available to you. (You'd think, given the sums of money involved in procuring and deploying ClearCase, that Rational/IBM would offer a custom build service, where you'd feed them your kernel config and they'd mail you back a filesystem blob compiled for your kernel. But no, that would have made sense...)
Based on my imperfect reading, I can see two main appeals of ClearCase:
Everything is version-tracked, including the tools and environment variables you used to build the project. Thus, you are supposed to be able to roll your entire development environment forward and backward through time, and exactly reconstruct any project at any point in time. If you're working on a government project with a 15-year service life, I can see this as being very useful.
ClearCase appears to let you mechanize local management hierarchy and policy. If your manager -- and only your manager -- is authorized to commit code changes to the shipping base of code, ClearCase will let you describe that workflow and enforce it for you. For large organizations with a management fetish, this too is a "feature".
Slashdot Mirror
You know what else could reduce drunk fatalities? Manual transmissions.
If your car has a stick, you have a built-in hand-eye coordination and competency test. If you fail, the car doesn't move (at least, not very well).
And you've been doing this for at least the last 30 years...
And NOW you suddenly claim to give a shit about platform integrity?
And I suppose the complete absence of any mention of WinCE or Windows Mobile in the article is sheerest coincidence.
What selective, partisan crap.
Incorrect. Chrome can't run NoScript.
And before you say, "Chrome lets you control JavaScript execution, blah blah blah," yes it does at a very coarse level. NoScript is much more fine-grained, and provides substitute scripts for sites that "need" to run crap from google-analytics et al.
It looks like this functionality may bring NoScript that much closer to Chrome.
Schwab
______
Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.
One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.
You'd be wrong.
What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications, .NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.
Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."
After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."
Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."
Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."
*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.
So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:
...Actually, they'd make trivial, incompatible changes to the language and call it Microsoft Loglan.
Schwab
You may wisely choose to never be friends with "SociopathicStalker53" and thereby keep your information away from them. But if they write a cutesy "quiz" that one of your friends decides to run, despite your precautions you're fscked anyway.
And this state of affairs is entirely Facebook's fault, because it's baked in to the underlying design.
Schwab
Schwab
Sheesh. Kids these days...
Go read up on MOD files. (Then go add Scenemusic.eu to your playlist.) Visual synchronization to MOD files has been going on for over 20 years. It's a solved problem.
Schwab
Did the owner of the field give informed consent for the gathering? If so, then the police had no business being there. Apologies are almost certainly in order.
Schwab
So Lessig and Obama both have words of effusive praise for the man, and that's all very well, but to this armchair observer, Posner's suggestion is silly on its face for two reasons. First: As I'm sure Posner well knows, all works are copyrighted upon the instant of their creation. Every news article, every photo, every blog post, every tweet (twit?) -- all enjoy the full majesty of the copyright regime. Does that mean that everyone who hopes to publish anything needs to first become conversant in copyright law and the current state of the art in copyright litigation? Am I expected to append to every post, including this one, a hyperlink to a EULA? Absurd.
Even so, Posner's suggestion might have some arguable merit if it weren't for the other fact he appears to have skipped over -- copyrights today last effectively forever. Once you obtain a copyright on Happy Fun Ball, it's yours until well past the day you die. Copyrights throw up obstacles to creative expression. These obstacles are there to afford the artisan some isolation and breathing room to exploit their work exclusively before anyone else can horn in on it. But if copyright terms were more reasonable -- say, 28 years, as they were in the past -- then those obstacles would fall away over time and new creative forces could flow in and find and develop new ideas in the old material. But with eternal copyrights, this never happens. The obtacles that protect the creative artisan also hem him in and prevent him from moving anywhere else. You get gridlock, and once that happens the equation then devolves into who has the most money to fend off litigation when they decide to just go ahead and do what they want, anyway (*cough*Disney*cough*).
I'm not prepared to dismiss Posner entirely, however. I think he may be making the same error that Lawrence Lessig appears to have made (and recently appears to have realized), which is to argue from within the framework of the existing copyright regime ("the sun revolves around the earth"). It's fairly well established at this point that the existing regime doesn't work all that well, and cannot work well unless you want to completely sacrifice the freedom and autonomy people enjoy over their own computers. We need a Copernicus to come in and show us a new way of looking at things. I have a few meager ideas along these lines, which could benefit from spirited debate with the likes of Lessig and Posner, but I'm just a part-time armchair troll on Slashdot, and clearly beneath anyone's notice.
Schwab
This issue only affects Windows users.
Bah. SharePoint is what you end up with when you don't know about Qtask.
Schwab
Schwab
This "review" process is already taking place -- it's why subscriptions are falling off a cliff. The product is crap, the readers know it's crap, which is why they're not buying it. Solution: Stop printing crap.
Clearly, their feedback mechanism has gotten seriously out of tune. I think also that they recognize this, and that the idea of allowing direct reader feedback on stories in the queue was born out of some desperation to correct their editorial priorities.
Here's a hint: Try to keep ideology at bay, and follow the facts wherever they take you. Yes, it's often uncomfortable. I imagine Woodward and Bernstein had many sleepless nights. Yet we are the better for their work. Emulate that. Oh, and spike any "story" about Paris Hilton.
Schwab
Based on these findings, and my own experience in the embedded arena, I would hazard a guess that all these Bluetooth mouse vendors are using the same embedded microcontroller, probably with the same embedded firmware. Hence, they all suffer from similar problems.
The only mouse's reviews that didn't seem to mention these issues (at least, not as bad as the others) was Apple's wireless MightyMouse. Of course, the MightyMouse has its own set of issues, such as the pretend secondary button, but if you can work around it, it's kinda sorta not too bad.
Again, this was about a year ago. I don't know if things have improved since then.
Schwab
Mac OS X long ago learned to cope with mice sporting more than one button. OS X even does The Right Thing (context menus) with the secondary mouse button by default.
And now, with the new touchpads in MacBooks (where the "button" area is also part of the touchpad), you can set it up to pretend it has one button, or two.
Here's another news flash: OS X can handle standard PC keyboards, too! If it generates a standard USB HID code, OS X can deal with it.
Schwab
Schwab
And, seriously, how does an uninstaller that leaves DLLs behind ever pass a non-corrupt QA process?
Schwab
When loading a PDF, if Reader sees there's JavaScript that wants to run, Reader pops up a dialog along the lines of, "Hey, this file contains executable code which is, y'know, kind of contrary to the whole concept of a 'document'. Do you want to allow the code to run? [Yes] [[Hell, No]]"
This is the cheesy but mostly effective stopgap solution Microsoft adopted when Word became an infection vector for macro viruses. Unless Microsoft got a patent on it, I don't see any reason why Adobe couldn't also use the same approach.
Schwab
I would prefer to have genuine Ethernet strung in there, but I rent the place, and I'd have to cut holes in things to get the cables and outlets in place (I know; I crawled around under the house and looked). So until I get the impetus to actually follow through on that, we're living with these HomePlug AV things.
They're still unreliable. That entire branch of the LAN drops out on occasion -- not even pings get through. And since there's no management interface on the bridges, I can't see what they're complaining about. They just mysteriously work, then stop working, then start working again. Perfect for Windows users :-). And, of course, it's my fault when they stop working.
Somewhat better than WiFi, but a weak substitute for genuine Cat 5.
Schwab
BOFH: "What the hell is going on is that the message is currently working through our anti-spam measures -- the ones that filter out all the \/!Agr/\ ads because you keep visiting pr0n sites -- and if you really wanted it right now dammit, you would have had him FAX it.
"But, for a modest rise in salary, I can add his domain to our whitelist..."
Schwab
Uh, no. You have it backwards.
If I browse to a Web site I haven't seen before and suddenly find my desktop (and other programs) covered by a barrage of pop-up ads, that is intruding on my experience. Injecting code into my browser in an attempt to get it to reject right-mouse clicks -- that is intruding on my experience.
The computer is mine, not yours. It obeys my commands, not yours. If you want it to run some of your code, then you're first going to have to convince me to let you. And you do that by earning my trust and not treating my browser and desktop like your own private playground. NoScript lets me enforce this policy, and it clearly exposes the children who won't play by the rules. Google.com has earned my trust (Google-analytics.com, however, has not.)
If your site doesn't work with JavaScript turned off, your site is broken. Period, end of chapter. This is not a secret, and it is not something new. This has always been the case. (AJAX-heavy sites complicate this only slightly -- you should clearly explain what's not working and why (I'm looking at you, OKCupid...).)
And while we're about it -- Have you ever clicked on that little "S" in the corner to reveal a skyscraper of 15 different domains trying to execute JavaScript on your machine? Does this bother you even slightly? Why or why not?
Schwab
Just for fun, consider the following actions a Unitary Programmer might do to your machine. Where would you rate them on the $SCOUNDREL scale, and why?
Playing "CoreWars" is tricky business, and people with even a dim sense of ethics are loathe to try it. But there's one case where none of the above actions are ethically questionable: When the machine's owner does it themselves.
I think the adware author lost sight of that for a while...
Schwab
Based on my imperfect reading, I can see two main appeals of ClearCase:
Schwab