A lot of the security issues in Vista today are there because drivers used those holes to work
Well, you are right and you are wrong. Wrong thing is that me and my customers really get advantage of backwards compatibility. If I write my stuff following the rules written in MSDN, my apps work just fine on (almost) any Windows version.
Where you are absolutely right is this driver thing. I've written NDIS intermediate network drivers for Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP and CE. I did everything by the books and the drivers ran perfectly well. Then I faced some serious problems. Some god damn AV software vendors decided to break the rules and do all kinds of nasty things in kernel. My driver crashed and burned it tried to cope with some of the top-of-the-line AV softwares. Coworker of mine managed to fix some crashes by altering the way Windows (or NDIS) loaded the drivers so that my driver was always loaded at first but that wasn't really realiable solution at all.
Now if MS would have changed the NT kernel or NDIS so that AV vendors couldn't have messed with the kernel it would have been a great relief for me! But if they would have break backwards compatibility in user land I would have been infuriated. In the worst that that would have meant rewriting thousands of lines of UI code.
And who wants to risk saying something stupid in front of The Woz and living with jibes from fellow slashdotters for 20 years?
BASIC - A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers.
I don't know if performance problems comes from this but I really hate when OEMs include 32-bit Vista in a setup which has 64-bit processor. Would it be much trouble to include 64-bit version when probably every PC is sold with 64-bit processor now-a-days? (rhetoric question)
The answer is absolutely yes. Here's the rub - you have to be bright/intelligent/good at what you do.
Oh! Thanks for you kind words. You didn't have to. (I'll send that check next week)
I've been working as a programmer for over 8 years now. I have education none what so ever. I started as a row coder hacking together some network drivers with C. After a couple of years I moved higher in the food chain and had the change to design the stuff I had to implement. Now a days I even join in meetings with customers and such and design stuff that other people will have to implement!
My next step is to raise even higher in the corporate byrocrazy and get some subordinates. Those poor souls.
Of course, with a shiny paper from some university, I would have been in this situation way earlier. Oh, how bitter I am:(
Yes but many requirement specs say that software must run on Windows (and IE) and other operating systems (and browsers) are really out of the question. Still these applications are written on ASP.NET with horrible kludge to make them act like a normal Windows Forms application. So what the user really want is rich Windows Forms client but what (s)he gets is total peace of... well, HTML, JavaScript and a heck load of kludge.
So I can really understand Girlintraining's point here. Browser interface adds nothing to the picture except development costs.
It depends. I was once working in a firm which offered licenses which basically said "if we go bankcrupt you get the source code, otherwise it's closed". So if the company goes out of business your point 3 still stands.
Only if you are building muscle mass. If you are trying to get more stronger you don't want pre-weaken your muscles. Also you don't exercise your muscles to the max. Always leave one or two reps in store. This is because of how the nerve system functions but my english isn't so good that I could explain this better.
And even if you are building muscles pre-workout is for filling the muscles with blood. Not to weaken them too much.
Streching is extremely important in muscle building in the middle of the exercise. It's purpose is to stretch the membranes surrounding the muscles (I'm not sure what this is in english, it's "lihaskalvo" in finnish) so that muscle has more space to grow.
I used to lift weight some years like crazy and get all the information of how to build muscle and strenght. But I've finally seen the light: fat lasts longer that muscle;)
Back in the days when i was in school, warm-ups were there to avoid injuries, not to increase your performance.
Warming up and stretching is two different things. The idea of warming up is to warm up your joints and chord and get your heartbeat up. Streching has another function which I explain here with an example of... me!:)
When I used to lift weight I noticed the same thing that streching makes you weak. Let's say I was working my upper back muscles. I warmed up by doing bent-over rows with light weights. Then I strecthed my upper back by hanging from roof or whatever. I felt weak (and bored) when I started to do the actual exercises with heavy weights (well, heavy for me).
Then I changed my program so that I still warmed up with bent-over rows but didn't strectch at all at that point. I moved to rear pulldowns and did that excersice with loooong streches at up position. I felt strong as a bull and could do a full one hour workout. Afterwards I did light streches because muscles tend to shorten when you lift weights so I streched them to their normal length. But don't over-strech your muscles after a full workout when they are filled with blood and lactid acids. Bad things can happen.
I've had only one sport injury in my life and it was when I was, ironically, streching my quadriceps. Something snapped there and my leg hasn't functioned fully since then.
In that sense, the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions.
In fact this all these current issues are pretty meaningles compared to the real issues behind this e-voting stuff. Instructions can be fixed and user interface can be changed. The real problem here is the electronic voting in itself.
E-voting is really undemocratic peace of shit. In old fashioned paper & pencil voting there is no way to scam the election. When votes are count there is numerous people from all the parties watching after their interest. Even if some participant or even a group of them are crooked, others will surely notice the scam and inform the authorities. To fool this system would mean that hundreds of people would have to participate in the scam.
But how about e-voting? There's some piece of code that does the counting. It is really a black box. TietoEnator holds the code in secret and Finnish public doesn't even know a single line of it. So we really don't know what's happening there. And in fact, if I go to paranoid mode, these missing votes aren't necessarily missing. Maybe they were just given to "wrong" people and the system "accidentally" lost or corrected them? Okay, end of paranoid mode.
As I said, the code isn't published. We don't know what it does. Even if they would publish it still we don't know if the code running in the voting system is the same actual code that was published. There's no way to oversee this system. So it is undemocratic and maybe even unconstitutional.
I live in Finland but luckily not in those three municipalities. I had the pleasure to have my votes count in old-school-democratic-fashion. I really hope that our Attorney General Tuija - science fiction - Brax comes to her senses and scraps this whole e-voting disaster! And if not, there's plenty of democratic countries in the world to live in;)
Welcome to Finland! We already have secret filter lists that saves us from all the kiddie porn in the internet.
Hey, wait! It doesn't! It just blocks DNS queries to kiddie porn websites. I'm sure no-one will never ever figure out how to set up DNS server of their own or use P2P networks...
Funny thing about this law is that it is written so that it can only concern foreign websites containing illegal child porn material but actually it is used to block gayporn websites and domestic websites criticizing the law. And because filter lists are kept secret we really don't know what else is blocked. About those two we at least have some evidence. Well, they also managed to block japanese music shop in the process;)
Oh. And did I mention that they are trying to broaden this filterings stuff to concern copyrighted (other than kiddie porn) material also?
So let me tell you again! Welcome to Finland - where Orwell lives and is well!
Well, yes if you have spare time to loose. But if you have family, friends and hobbies then it's a little bit harder. I, for instance, have wife, two kids, two dogs and two cats. I hunt for hobby and one hunting trip takes four to five hours. I really don't feel like learning things at home on my free time on my own account, things which I should be learning on a course paid by my employer.
I know things are different in some firms. They give you couple of days here and there to learn new things and such. But in many firms they don't and it really sucks. This is one real problem in the field (at least here in Finland) which no-one wants to take seriously. Don't know why:/
Well, yes you are right. But I wasn't really thinking from that aspect. I was more along the line that if you do the same stuff year after year you fall from the bleeding edge. Let's take example to clear this out. My english isn't so good that I could explain this clearly:)
I know people who have programmed VB stuff for something like 15 years. One guy has been in the same VB project over 10 years. They are very good VB programmers but they know shit about VB.NET for example. Now when 95% of companies have switched from VB to.NET (VB/C#) or Java where can those guys get new jobs?
First, try to move up in your current job while your foot's in the door.
Three years is the limit. If after three years you haven't managed to get raise or promotion apply for another job. Especially if your professional expertise is falling behind or soon you won't be able to get a job at all...
Now if you manage to get a better job with better salary... well, that's great for you! But remember that expectations rise and you need to show that you are worth it. It can be stressful compared to your old job.
But if you can't get another job then there's some serious consideration to do. Maybe you are not that great worker after all?
Thank the Holy Microsoft for bringin me the UAC prompt dialog! My wife also clicks OK when ever there's a OK button to click. But with UAC prompt you can't just click OK because it wants you to insert admin password. I've managed to educate my wife to the point that if she ever sees UAC prompt she instantly stops fiddiling around with the OK/Cancel/whatever buttons and comes to me with the laptop. Then I, who knows Windows from upside down, diagnose the problem (if my wife gets UAC prompt it most certainly means somekind of problem) and take necessary actions.
Actions can include one or more of the following:
- Cancel the action
- Give my wife a lesson or two about computers
- Spank her so she won't do (or does, it depends) it again
- Scream and shout
I second that and must emphasize the usefulness of MSDN. Everything I've ever needed in my 10 year programming career I've found in MSDN. You just need to have a little patience when using it's search and crawling it's innards. Sometimes the information is hard to find.
Second. I would recommend Google. You can find a huge amount information just googling around a bit. I've found that references are sometimes a bit off and one must stumble through various message boards to find a way around quirks and stuff. Especially if you are writing C++ app for Symbian.
Yes. Are just started a project where we build eight story building out of unemployed people. It's very easy to stack them one on the other but after couple of stories they start to wobble. It seems like they don't have backbone for the job!
You install the driver, then there's a "print manager" that has extra options, ink monitoring
Heh. I bought a printer some year ago and it's been nagging about low ink levels from day one. It still prints fine.
But the fun part is this. It has nice little (read: huge) button that says "order ink". I clicked it one day to just see what happens. It opened up browser to the manufacturer's site but instead of displaying ink order form it spewed out 404 NOT FOUND on my face:)
Guess I keep just printing until the ink runs out some day and buy a whole new printer from different manufacturer.
Hey! You forgot us. That little country between Scandinavian mountain and Russia. It's called Finland.
We have many software companies here and almost everyone I've met in the field have spoken somewhat understandable English. I know a guy who moved from Britain to Finland and I think he gets along well enough. Allthought he did complain about our tea...
But besides language thingy I can't really think any reason why someone would want to work here. We have the highest income taxes in the world. Tax progression is terrible so the more money you earn the more money is shifted from your pocket to the goverment bureaucrazy. And of course our buying power is probably the lowest in the EU. Even I, who earn more money than most of the finns, have troubles at paying my bills from time to time.
And as a second language, Finnish is as useful as Swahili I'd think.
As you can see, I'm very poor at advertising our country...
But the nature is great here! If you are into hunting (I just got home from duck hunt) then there's no better place in the world!
Slashdot Mirror
Bene Gesserit?
Sorry, I'm reading the book Paul of Dune which I just got as a Christmas present. Couldn't help myself... :)
Well, you are right and you are wrong. Wrong thing is that me and my customers really get advantage of backwards compatibility. If I write my stuff following the rules written in MSDN, my apps work just fine on (almost) any Windows version.
Where you are absolutely right is this driver thing. I've written NDIS intermediate network drivers for Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP and CE. I did everything by the books and the drivers ran perfectly well. Then I faced some serious problems. Some god damn AV software vendors decided to break the rules and do all kinds of nasty things in kernel. My driver crashed and burned it tried to cope with some of the top-of-the-line AV softwares. Coworker of mine managed to fix some crashes by altering the way Windows (or NDIS) loaded the drivers so that my driver was always loaded at first but that wasn't really realiable solution at all.
Now if MS would have changed the NT kernel or NDIS so that AV vendors couldn't have messed with the kernel it would have been a great relief for me! But if they would have break backwards compatibility in user land I would have been infuriated. In the worst that that would have meant rewriting thousands of lines of UI code.
So damn if you do, damn if you don't.
BASIC - A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers.
;)
I don't know if performance problems comes from this but I really hate when OEMs include 32-bit Vista in a setup which has 64-bit processor. Would it be much trouble to include 64-bit version when probably every PC is sold with 64-bit processor now-a-days? (rhetoric question)
Oh! Thanks for you kind words. You didn't have to. (I'll send that check next week)
I've been working as a programmer for over 8 years now. I have education none what so ever. I started as a row coder hacking together some network drivers with C. After a couple of years I moved higher in the food chain and had the change to design the stuff I had to implement. Now a days I even join in meetings with customers and such and design stuff that other people will have to implement!
My next step is to raise even higher in the corporate byrocrazy and get some subordinates. Those poor souls.
Of course, with a shiny paper from some university, I would have been in this situation way earlier. Oh, how bitter I am :(
Yes but many requirement specs say that software must run on Windows (and IE) and other operating systems (and browsers) are really out of the question. Still these applications are written on ASP.NET with horrible kludge to make them act like a normal Windows Forms application. So what the user really want is rich Windows Forms client but what (s)he gets is total peace of ... well, HTML, JavaScript and a heck load of kludge.
So I can really understand Girlintraining's point here. Browser interface adds nothing to the picture except development costs.
It depends. I was once working in a firm which offered licenses which basically said "if we go bankcrupt you get the source code, otherwise it's closed". So if the company goes out of business your point 3 still stands.
Only if you are building muscle mass. If you are trying to get more stronger you don't want pre-weaken your muscles. Also you don't exercise your muscles to the max. Always leave one or two reps in store. This is because of how the nerve system functions but my english isn't so good that I could explain this better.
And even if you are building muscles pre-workout is for filling the muscles with blood. Not to weaken them too much.
Streching is extremely important in muscle building in the middle of the exercise. It's purpose is to stretch the membranes surrounding the muscles (I'm not sure what this is in english, it's "lihaskalvo" in finnish) so that muscle has more space to grow.
I used to lift weight some years like crazy and get all the information of how to build muscle and strenght. But I've finally seen the light: fat lasts longer that muscle ;)
Warming up and stretching is two different things. The idea of warming up is to warm up your joints and chord and get your heartbeat up. Streching has another function which I explain here with an example of ... me! :)
When I used to lift weight I noticed the same thing that streching makes you weak. Let's say I was working my upper back muscles. I warmed up by doing bent-over rows with light weights. Then I strecthed my upper back by hanging from roof or whatever. I felt weak (and bored) when I started to do the actual exercises with heavy weights (well, heavy for me).
Then I changed my program so that I still warmed up with bent-over rows but didn't strectch at all at that point. I moved to rear pulldowns and did that excersice with loooong streches at up position. I felt strong as a bull and could do a full one hour workout. Afterwards I did light streches because muscles tend to shorten when you lift weights so I streched them to their normal length. But don't over-strech your muscles after a full workout when they are filled with blood and lactid acids. Bad things can happen.
I've had only one sport injury in my life and it was when I was, ironically, streching my quadriceps. Something snapped there and my leg hasn't functioned fully since then.
In fact this all these current issues are pretty meaningles compared to the real issues behind this e-voting stuff. Instructions can be fixed and user interface can be changed. The real problem here is the electronic voting in itself.
E-voting is really undemocratic peace of shit. In old fashioned paper & pencil voting there is no way to scam the election. When votes are count there is numerous people from all the parties watching after their interest. Even if some participant or even a group of them are crooked, others will surely notice the scam and inform the authorities. To fool this system would mean that hundreds of people would have to participate in the scam.
But how about e-voting? There's some piece of code that does the counting. It is really a black box. TietoEnator holds the code in secret and Finnish public doesn't even know a single line of it. So we really don't know what's happening there. And in fact, if I go to paranoid mode, these missing votes aren't necessarily missing. Maybe they were just given to "wrong" people and the system "accidentally" lost or corrected them? Okay, end of paranoid mode.
As I said, the code isn't published. We don't know what it does. Even if they would publish it still we don't know if the code running in the voting system is the same actual code that was published. There's no way to oversee this system. So it is undemocratic and maybe even unconstitutional.
I live in Finland but luckily not in those three municipalities. I had the pleasure to have my votes count in old-school-democratic-fashion. I really hope that our Attorney General Tuija - science fiction - Brax comes to her senses and scraps this whole e-voting disaster! And if not, there's plenty of democratic countries in the world to live in ;)
Better yet, go to Start -> My Recent Documents or use the application's recent documents listing.
Welcome to Finland! We already have secret filter lists that saves us from all the kiddie porn in the internet.
Hey, wait! It doesn't! It just blocks DNS queries to kiddie porn websites. I'm sure no-one will never ever figure out how to set up DNS server of their own or use P2P networks...
Funny thing about this law is that it is written so that it can only concern foreign websites containing illegal child porn material but actually it is used to block gayporn websites and domestic websites criticizing the law. And because filter lists are kept secret we really don't know what else is blocked. About those two we at least have some evidence. Well, they also managed to block japanese music shop in the process ;)
Oh. And did I mention that they are trying to broaden this filterings stuff to concern copyrighted (other than kiddie porn) material also?
So let me tell you again! Welcome to Finland - where Orwell lives and is well!
Well, yes if you have spare time to loose. But if you have family, friends and hobbies then it's a little bit harder. I, for instance, have wife, two kids, two dogs and two cats. I hunt for hobby and one hunting trip takes four to five hours. I really don't feel like learning things at home on my free time on my own account, things which I should be learning on a course paid by my employer.
I know things are different in some firms. They give you couple of days here and there to learn new things and such. But in many firms they don't and it really sucks. This is one real problem in the field (at least here in Finland) which no-one wants to take seriously. Don't know why :/
Well, yes you are right. But I wasn't really thinking from that aspect. I was more along the line that if you do the same stuff year after year you fall from the bleeding edge. Let's take example to clear this out. My english isn't so good that I could explain this clearly :)
I know people who have programmed VB stuff for something like 15 years. One guy has been in the same VB project over 10 years. They are very good VB programmers but they know shit about VB.NET for example. Now when 95% of companies have switched from VB to .NET (VB/C#) or Java where can those guys get new jobs?
Three years is the limit. If after three years you haven't managed to get raise or promotion apply for another job. Especially if your professional expertise is falling behind or soon you won't be able to get a job at all...
Now if you manage to get a better job with better salary ... well, that's great for you! But remember that expectations rise and you need to show that you are worth it. It can be stressful compared to your old job.
But if you can't get another job then there's some serious consideration to do. Maybe you are not that great worker after all?
Talking about how to take funny out of a comment which contains deliberate errors trying to make it funny ;)
Well, their time slows down because of the massive gravity. So eternity here could be only couple of seconds there :)
[ERROR]: null
All I get out of Apache fop generator :'(
Thank the Holy Microsoft for bringin me the UAC prompt dialog! My wife also clicks OK when ever there's a OK button to click. But with UAC prompt you can't just click OK because it wants you to insert admin password. I've managed to educate my wife to the point that if she ever sees UAC prompt she instantly stops fiddiling around with the OK/Cancel/whatever buttons and comes to me with the laptop. Then I, who knows Windows from upside down, diagnose the problem (if my wife gets UAC prompt it most certainly means somekind of problem) and take necessary actions.
Actions can include one or more of the following:
- Cancel the action
- Give my wife a lesson or two about computers
- Spank her so she won't do (or does, it depends) it again
- Scream and shout
I second that and must emphasize the usefulness of MSDN. Everything I've ever needed in my 10 year programming career I've found in MSDN. You just need to have a little patience when using it's search and crawling it's innards. Sometimes the information is hard to find.
Second. I would recommend Google. You can find a huge amount information just googling around a bit. I've found that references are sometimes a bit off and one must stumble through various message boards to find a way around quirks and stuff. Especially if you are writing C++ app for Symbian.
Yes. Are just started a project where we build eight story building out of unemployed people. It's very easy to stack them one on the other but after couple of stories they start to wobble. It seems like they don't have backbone for the job!
Heh. I bought a printer some year ago and it's been nagging about low ink levels from day one. It still prints fine.
But the fun part is this. It has nice little (read: huge) button that says "order ink". I clicked it one day to just see what happens. It opened up browser to the manufacturer's site but instead of displaying ink order form it spewed out 404 NOT FOUND on my face :)
Guess I keep just printing until the ink runs out some day and buy a whole new printer from different manufacturer.
Well how else you think Schroedinbugs can exist? Microsoft is way ahead of Open Source world on this one.
Hey! You forgot us. That little country between Scandinavian mountain and Russia. It's called Finland.
We have many software companies here and almost everyone I've met in the field have spoken somewhat understandable English. I know a guy who moved from Britain to Finland and I think he gets along well enough. Allthought he did complain about our tea...
But besides language thingy I can't really think any reason why someone would want to work here. We have the highest income taxes in the world. Tax progression is terrible so the more money you earn the more money is shifted from your pocket to the goverment bureaucrazy. And of course our buying power is probably the lowest in the EU. Even I, who earn more money than most of the finns, have troubles at paying my bills from time to time.
And as a second language, Finnish is as useful as Swahili I'd think.
As you can see, I'm very poor at advertising our country...
But the nature is great here! If you are into hunting (I just got home from duck hunt) then there's no better place in the world!
Ooops. Sorry. My copypaste is broken. Here's the link.