Well, they get THEIR money from YOU whenever you buy a ticket, so as long as you are willing to pay much higher ticket prices I'm sure they can accomodate your desire for another 0.0001% of safety margin.
The irony of this is that as some folks like you want some sort of ironclad assurance of safety, the majority of people probably don't even take simple safety precautions such as wearing their seat belts as they drive to the airport!
I would prefer that the FAA just require all cell phones to be demonstrably turned off, or have their batteries removed and not reinserted until you've left the plane, or smashed with a hammer, or some other economical measure.
Thanks for your polite observations. My point was in the context of code reuse. In a Windows program, there are many painfully different representations for strings of characters, especially when you're dealing with lots of system functions and interfaces. Classes won't protect you from the subtle differences. If something needs a BSTR and you pass it a WCHAR the compiler can't help you because they both look the same to it. That also makes it difficult to overload useful functions.
You kind of got the point when you observed that only two (three with MFC's TString) are proper classes. But basic COM and Windows APIs don't use classes, that is the point of writing the wrappers. If I choose STL strings for my registry access class but you use CComBSTR strings and want to reuse my code, then you will have to copy and hack it.
Just a simple example: I was looking for a good C++ class that would encapsulate the mess that is the Windows Registry. There are several out there, but they all manage to drag in massive functionality or frameworks that I am not currently using and would prefer to avoid. I am not going to start using MFC just to read a few registry values.
The C++ string mess in Windows makes me cry every time I have to deal with it. I'm sick to death of converting between BSTR, TCHAR, WCHAR, char, CComBSTR, TString, STL string, and several others every time I want to pass a few characters around.
Things are much more reusable in Perl or JavaScript or just about any other language, and there are fewer excuses for avoiding code reuse than in C++.
I think we're at the point where it doesn't matter what a synthetic benchmark says about the performance of a CPU. The top end of today's processors have plenty of power for what 95% of people use them to do. The workloads of the remaining 5% are specialized enough that a synthetic benchmark is unlikely to be a good predictor.
I would rather have a really big and fast RAID array, 2GB of RAM, or a 2Mbps Internet connection than a faster CPU.
Yes, this is an important point. If you take a bug that has catastrophic effects on even just 0.1% of the installed base and multiply it by 100 million Windows users, you get 100,000 dead or compromised systems. Combine this with clueless users that have no idea how to manage their systems (backups?) and it's a nightmare.
But all I saw in that article was whining, no suggestions on how the problem might be solved. All software is going to have bugs and need fixes, how does Microsoft ensure their software is better than 99.9% bug free AND make sure that everyone updates?
Every time/. does a story on spam we have the debate about address verification. There are plenty of existing "challenge-response" spam control services and the reason they're not widely used is because they still require a lot of manual work to control spam.
Mailing lists are a simple example. For every mailing list you legitimately want to be on, you will need to manually set up the address on the whitelist because the mailing list software won't repond to the challenge message.
Now lets say that the mailing list programs make some mods to automatically respond to the message, assuming it has a standard format. Now a spammer can use the mailing list's address as their return address and take advantage of its response to a challenge! Of course, the challenge could contain other validation data such as a reciept number and/or a digital signature but now we're talking about major mods to the Internet's mail infrastructure and mail clients.
Why is this modded funny? It's insightful. Security is hard to measure quantitatively so there will be some degree of judgement involved. Good PR can help to influence your judgement. (Well, not the typical/. judgement of Microsoft but you know what I mean.)
Microsoft (and Intel, and now HP, give them their credit as well) have been pushing and prodding the hardware guys into progress for more than a decade. The problem is that most hardware companies have no vision, no desire to innovate, no sense of design.
I've been to every WinHEC for the last few years and every year Microsoft is urging the hardware vendors to drop the legacy stuff. ISA slots suck and make Plug-and-Play a miserable experience, but we're only now seeing their complete and total death in new products. Microsoft and Intel pushed the standards to get rid of them.
Most PCs are built from standard components with standard dimensions and standard interfaces. Everything is interchangable. That decoupling has made the PC industry great and driven prices way down, but the Apple counterexample shows what tight integration and some design sense can buy you in both hardware and software. Both Microsoft and Intel would like to see a bit more innovation going on, and WinHEC is one place that they try to make their case.
For basic control, you can get X-10 powerline control stuff at x10.com, or worthdist.com, or even your local Radio Shack. The computer-to-powerline interfaces run $10-$50, the most common one is the CM11a. There are also computer-to-wireless interfaces like the MR26 that let you receive keypad presses. The wireless keypads can also control devices directly.
There are plug-in modules to control lamps and appliances, they generally run $5-$15 each. You can also buy wire-in switches and outlets that can be controlled by X-10 signals, cost is $10-$70 each. So you probably don't want to replace every switch in your house.
There's a lot of activity on the comp.home.automation group if you want to learn more.
Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one. Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford.
A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate. Western countries are barely cranking out children at a break-even rate. Only countries where cheap labor is beneficial have a high birth rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it. Many groups can easily see the problems of other groups, and want to do something about it. When they do, it's called "war".:-)
Why should I, the customer have to bear the cost for the creation and destruction (and possible mischief as well) of an RFID tag that serves no useful purpose for me after purchase??
Why not? You bear the cost for advertising and packaging; neither serve any purpose to you after purchase. You also bear the cost for "shrink", a non-contentious euphemism for shoplifting and employee theft that occur before you buy. Are you bothered by that as well? Would you prefer that stores just pass these costs along rather than try to control them?
Yep, if you ignore the people who do engraving for the world's coins and paper money, I'd have to agree. Although I would have to say that money art is highly politicized compared to computer OS icons...
The reason Perl needs taint mode at all is because it does so many things in a blatantly insecure way...In most compiled languages, a taint mode is not necessary because the language and libraries don't do 'useful' things based on magic characters in strings you happen to pass.
Have you ever used a SQL library that lets you build and pass queries to the server? There are plenty of SQLinjectionvulnerabilities that would have been thwarted by taint checking in the language. Applications are filled with lots of other "little languages" that can be made to interpret unchecked input dangerously.
Java and C# are based on a subset of C++. If you know C++ well, you should be going full steam in these languages within 2 weeks.
Shirley, you must be joking. Yes the syntax is similar, but they differ greatly in their class libraries and important issues like memory management. The only way you could be going full steam in two weeks is if you decide to reinvent all the wheels yourself with your own code, rather than taking the time to learn the infrastructure around each language.
Incredible as it sounds, the manager probably didn't want you to buy the product unless you got the extended warranty. Some of the big retail chains had extreme "incentive" programs that pressured the sales people to sell at least X% of their products with extended warranties.
So begins the law of unintended consequences. If the employee can't increase the numerator (number of warranties sold) they figure they need to reduce the denominator (total sales) to make their percentage!
I say "had" because by this point management has figured out that reducing your sales this way is a bad idea...
Amen, brother. I just spent two hours on the phone with a friend who was trying to find the working Windows XP driver for a Linksys 802.11 card. The card was poorly labeled and their list at http://www.linksys.com/download/ is only easy to search if you do a view/source on the HTML.
Finally, I gave up and told him to email tech support. Turns out that particular card shares a plug and play ID with a card that takes totally different drivers. You have to determine the driver you need by looking at markings on the card! For those of you who have dealt with PnP you know this is a horrible sin. The whole idea of PnP was to let the computer figure this stuff out.
Do you think that AudioGalaxy connects to all its partners in real time when it comes to sharing email addresses? If they generate a list for their partners every week, for example, wouldn't it make sense that it also takes at least a week to get off the list? I'm against spam but I'm also for common sense. Which this guy didn't seem to have when he gave permission to be emailed in the first place.
Since XP requires registration, I'd say they know your machine and who paid for XP to go on there.
XP does not require REGISTRATION, the process of giving your name and address to Microsoft. It only requires ACTIVATION, the process of sending a hash of some unique hardware identifiers (with no personal data) to Microsoft.
I recently saw an analysis of the space station that said most of the time spent by the ISS crew was dedicated to station maintenance and NASA's own research (how people work and live in space). Only about 15 man-hours of non-NASA research is conducted each week. Of that, Russia directs half and the US directs the other half.
So let's face it, NASA is unable to do real space exploration and instead is running an unreliable shuttle service to an incredibly expensive 7.5 man-hr/wk research facility. We have to make a choice. We can either continue to pour money down this hole or we can scrap it altogether and reset our priorities to fit whatever money we want to spend on truly worthwhile projects.
Yes, unfortunately, a lot of programmers seem to believe that scratching their own itches is much more important than scratching their customer's itches. If they could enjoy the satisfaction of coding the perfect algorithm AND the satisfaction of making their customers happy, they would be more likely to succeed.
Huh? Intention isn't relevant? In what country do laws not take intentions into effect? If I run over someone who darts out into the road and kill them, is it the same as if I run over my cheating spouse, back up, and hit 'em again for good measure?
Forget the DMCA and just think of the right or wrong of this. The landmark Supreme Court decision of the 1980s that allowed VCRs to survive said their were significant non-infringing uses of the technology. Where are the significant non-infringing uses of this product?
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Well, they get THEIR money from YOU whenever you buy a ticket, so as long as you are willing to pay much higher ticket prices I'm sure they can accomodate your desire for another 0.0001% of safety margin.
The irony of this is that as some folks like you want some sort of ironclad assurance of safety, the majority of people probably don't even take simple safety precautions such as wearing their seat belts as they drive to the airport!
I would prefer that the FAA just require all cell phones to be demonstrably turned off, or have their batteries removed and not reinserted until you've left the plane, or smashed with a hammer, or some other economical measure.
Thanks for your polite observations. My point was in the context of code reuse. In a Windows program, there are many painfully different representations for strings of characters, especially when you're dealing with lots of system functions and interfaces. Classes won't protect you from the subtle differences. If something needs a BSTR and you pass it a WCHAR the compiler can't help you because they both look the same to it. That also makes it difficult to overload useful functions.
You kind of got the point when you observed that only two (three with MFC's TString) are proper classes. But basic COM and Windows APIs don't use classes, that is the point of writing the wrappers. If I choose STL strings for my registry access class but you use CComBSTR strings and want to reuse my code, then you will have to copy and hack it.
Amen, brother!
Just a simple example: I was looking for a good C++ class that would encapsulate the mess that is the Windows Registry. There are several out there, but they all manage to drag in massive functionality or frameworks that I am not currently using and would prefer to avoid. I am not going to start using MFC just to read a few registry values.
The C++ string mess in Windows makes me cry every time I have to deal with it. I'm sick to death of converting between BSTR, TCHAR, WCHAR, char, CComBSTR, TString, STL string, and several others every time I want to pass a few characters around.
Things are much more reusable in Perl or JavaScript or just about any other language, and there are fewer excuses for avoiding code reuse than in C++.
I think we're at the point where it doesn't matter what a synthetic benchmark says about the performance of a CPU. The top end of today's processors have plenty of power for what 95% of people use them to do. The workloads of the remaining 5% are specialized enough that a synthetic benchmark is unlikely to be a good predictor.
I would rather have a really big and fast RAID array, 2GB of RAM, or a 2Mbps Internet connection than a faster CPU.
Yes, this is an important point. If you take a bug that has catastrophic effects on even just 0.1% of the installed base and multiply it by 100 million Windows users, you get 100,000 dead or compromised systems. Combine this with clueless users that have no idea how to manage their systems (backups?) and it's a nightmare.
But all I saw in that article was whining, no suggestions on how the problem might be solved. All software is going to have bugs and need fixes, how does Microsoft ensure their software is better than 99.9% bug free AND make sure that everyone updates?
As the article mentions, the power generation depends on glucose. So if you're not getting enough power, it's just sour grapes.
Every time /. does a story on spam we have the debate about address verification. There are plenty of existing "challenge-response" spam control services and the reason they're not widely used is because they still require a lot of manual work to control spam.
Mailing lists are a simple example. For every mailing list you legitimately want to be on, you will need to manually set up the address on the whitelist because the mailing list software won't repond to the challenge message.
Now lets say that the mailing list programs make some mods to automatically respond to the message, assuming it has a standard format. Now a spammer can use the mailing list's address as their return address and take advantage of its response to a challenge! Of course, the challenge could contain other validation data such as a reciept number and/or a digital signature but now we're talking about major mods to the Internet's mail infrastructure and mail clients.
Why is this modded funny? It's insightful. Security is hard to measure quantitatively so there will be some degree of judgement involved. Good PR can help to influence your judgement. (Well, not the typical /. judgement of Microsoft but you know what I mean.)
Yep, kind of a lame excuse for an item, you would have throught they could just do like they normally do and post dups for all those articles.
Sorry for the clip show...have no fear we've got stories for years...how bout a crazy wedding...or Marge becomes a robot...
Microsoft (and Intel, and now HP, give them their credit as well) have been pushing and prodding the hardware guys into progress for more than a decade. The problem is that most hardware companies have no vision, no desire to innovate, no sense of design.
I've been to every WinHEC for the last few years and every year Microsoft is urging the hardware vendors to drop the legacy stuff. ISA slots suck and make Plug-and-Play a miserable experience, but we're only now seeing their complete and total death in new products. Microsoft and Intel pushed the standards to get rid of them.
Most PCs are built from standard components with standard dimensions and standard interfaces. Everything is interchangable. That decoupling has made the PC industry great and driven prices way down, but the Apple counterexample shows what tight integration and some design sense can buy you in both hardware and software. Both Microsoft and Intel would like to see a bit more innovation going on, and WinHEC is one place that they try to make their case.
For basic control, you can get X-10 powerline control stuff at x10.com, or worthdist.com, or even your local Radio Shack. The computer-to-powerline interfaces run $10-$50, the most common one is the CM11a. There are also computer-to-wireless interfaces like the MR26 that let you receive keypad presses. The wireless keypads can also control devices directly.
There are plug-in modules to control lamps and appliances, they generally run $5-$15 each. You can also buy wire-in switches and outlets that can be controlled by X-10 signals, cost is $10-$70 each. So you probably don't want to replace every switch in your house.
There's a lot of activity on the comp.home.automation group if you want to learn more.
Well, how is Joe User going to install, let alone build, a regexp-based filter on his version of MSIE?
They would probably use Proxomitron, a HTTP proxy that does the same thing.
Take a poll and you will probably find that a majority of people believe the SUVs create a lot of pollution. Yet, everybody and their dog wants one.
:-)
Automakers promote SUVs because they are more profitable than econoboxes. The government cooperates, keeping oil prices low. Individuals buy what they are led to believe they need, and what they can afford.
A majority of people probably think that the world is or is becoming over-populated. Yet we, continue to crank out children at an enourmous rate.
Western countries are barely cranking out children at a break-even rate. Only countries where cheap labor is beneficial have a high birth rate.
As a group, we recognize problems and can even see solutions. But as individuals we are not willing to do anything about it.
Many groups can easily see the problems of other groups, and want to do something about it. When they do, it's called "war".
Why should I, the customer have to bear the cost for the creation and destruction (and possible mischief as well) of an RFID tag that serves no useful purpose for me after purchase??
Why not? You bear the cost for advertising and packaging; neither serve any purpose to you after purchase. You also bear the cost for "shrink", a non-contentious euphemism for shoplifting and employee theft that occur before you buy. Are you bothered by that as well? Would you prefer that stores just pass these costs along rather than try to control them?
Yep, if you ignore the people who do engraving for the world's coins and paper money, I'd have to agree. Although I would have to say that money art is highly politicized compared to computer OS icons...
The reason Perl needs taint mode at all is because it does so many things in a blatantly insecure way...In most compiled languages, a taint mode is not necessary because the language and libraries don't do 'useful' things based on magic characters in strings you happen to pass.
Have you ever used a SQL library that lets you build and pass queries to the server? There are plenty of SQL injection vulnerabilities that would have been thwarted by taint checking in the language. Applications are filled with lots of other "little languages" that can be made to interpret unchecked input dangerously.
Java and C# are based on a subset of C++. If you know C++ well, you should be going full steam in these languages within 2 weeks.
Shirley, you must be joking. Yes the syntax is similar, but they differ greatly in their class libraries and important issues like memory management. The only way you could be going full steam in two weeks is if you decide to reinvent all the wheels yourself with your own code, rather than taking the time to learn the infrastructure around each language.
Incredible as it sounds, the manager probably didn't want you to buy the product unless you got the extended warranty. Some of the big retail chains had extreme "incentive" programs that pressured the sales people to sell at least X% of their products with extended warranties.
So begins the law of unintended consequences. If the employee can't increase the numerator (number of warranties sold) they figure they need to reduce the denominator (total sales) to make their percentage!
I say "had" because by this point management has figured out that reducing your sales this way is a bad idea...
Amen, brother. I just spent two hours on the phone with a friend who was trying to find the working Windows XP driver for a Linksys 802.11 card. The card was poorly labeled and their list at http://www.linksys.com/download/ is only easy to search if you do a view/source on the HTML.
Finally, I gave up and told him to email tech support. Turns out that particular card shares a plug and play ID with a card that takes totally different drivers. You have to determine the driver you need by looking at markings on the card! For those of you who have dealt with PnP you know this is a horrible sin. The whole idea of PnP was to let the computer figure this stuff out.
Do you think that AudioGalaxy connects to all its partners in real time when it comes to sharing email addresses? If they generate a list for their partners every week, for example, wouldn't it make sense that it also takes at least a week to get off the list? I'm against spam but I'm also for common sense. Which this guy didn't seem to have when he gave permission to be emailed in the first place.
Since XP requires registration, I'd say they know your machine and who paid for XP to go on there.
XP does not require REGISTRATION, the process of giving your name and address to Microsoft. It only requires ACTIVATION, the process of sending a hash of some unique hardware identifiers (with no personal data) to Microsoft.
I recently saw an analysis of the space station that said most of the time spent by the ISS crew was dedicated to station maintenance and NASA's own research (how people work and live in space). Only about 15 man-hours of non-NASA research is conducted each week. Of that, Russia directs half and the US directs the other half.
So let's face it, NASA is unable to do real space exploration and instead is running an unreliable shuttle service to an incredibly expensive 7.5 man-hr/wk research facility. We have to make a choice. We can either continue to pour money down this hole or we can scrap it altogether and reset our priorities to fit whatever money we want to spend on truly worthwhile projects.
Yes, unfortunately, a lot of programmers seem to believe that scratching their own itches is much more important than scratching their customer's itches. If they could enjoy the satisfaction of coding the perfect algorithm AND the satisfaction of making their customers happy, they would be more likely to succeed.
Huh? Intention isn't relevant? In what country do laws not take intentions into effect? If I run over someone who darts out into the road and kill them, is it the same as if I run over my cheating spouse, back up, and hit 'em again for good measure?
Forget the DMCA and just think of the right or wrong of this. The landmark Supreme Court decision of the 1980s that allowed VCRs to survive said their were significant non-infringing uses of the technology. Where are the significant non-infringing uses of this product?