It's not that my code sucks, it's just that my understanding improved.
I also started coding in 6502, and was seeking perfection at that time. It was not as easy as you may believe.

Recently, I took a look at my old code, and realized how much I was obsessed on performance (it's natural when you have 1 Mhz and 48Kb of RAM), but I was still able to find some tony improvements. At that time, I was so sure it was perfect !

I have 30 years of coding experience.
Even though I believe I'm quite a good coder, when I read code from 5 years ago, I'm always surprised to realize that I can do better and simpler.

Whatever the state of your code is today, it will be a mess in a few years.

While I agree with your point of view, but I will give you an example where it fails.

Let's suppose that the program you are working on leads to the death of a person.
After analysis, you discover that the bug is due to your carelessness ("it happens").
Your self-esteem of "I'm doing the best job I can do" is shattered.
Will you hide the fact that the bug comes from your incompetence ?
Or will you take responsibility, even though you'll probably be fired ?

It depends on the kind of promotion.
Not everybody dreams to become a project manager.

Not really, but if the pay is good and the job is nice, why not ?
Personally, I have a life outside of my work, so I don't really mind.

That's the least of my worries !
Do you think that the guy who will take your place won't hate you, even if your code is beautiful ?
Do you believe that your company will not fire you if there are problems ?
If the company doesn't care about me, why should I be faithful ?

Finally, I have a personal question: why do you work ?
Is it to receive aknowledgment, money, fame, self-esteem, or something else ?

You are thinking like a manager.
As a programmer, I don't want to be replaced easily, and I don't care about my work when I'll die, or even when I quit my company.
I have no problem to share my knowledge with my co-workers, but why should I write code for somebody who'll replace me ?

Also, unless you write frameworks, I doubt very much that your code will be reused.
It will probably be rewritten.

No, this is not called "Freedom", this is called "Money".

The people who buy these kinds of things want to show that they can buy anything, that is the "power" of money.

Funnily, in China, the guys with money avoid buying gaudy objects.
It's not because they are modest, it's because they want to avoid IRS.

Wrong !
Of course, !=0 is fine when you deal with integers.
But when you deal with floating point values, !=0 does not work.
This is because there are rounding errors, the zero that is displayed can be stored internally as 10^-9, and rounded to 0 because the printing function uses 8 decimals.

You have to use:
fabs(value) > delta
where delta corresponds to the rounding error.
If you work with single precision, you can probably use delta=10^-6
For double-precision, you need to verify the accumulated rounding errors.

As I said in another post, it's possible that Duqu was written by the NSA for their ally Israel, or more exactly for the Mossad.

In other words, Duqu would be the second class attack vector, so it doesn't really matter if it gets caught.

About the manipulation skills, I believe that you are biased towards Obama (I'm french and not really interested in politics).
In fact, all political leaders need to develop their charisma and manipulation skills, otherwise they'll never be elected.
At a national level, the manipulation involves mass propaganda.
For me, it's a normal game, I just try to not be abused by it.

It's possible that Duqu was written by the NSA for their ally Israel.
It would explain why the technology is less advanced that Equation Group.

I think that you are right about Kaspersky.
They may have been infected since a few months, but only noticed the attack recently.

However, since they have been attacked, I doubt they'll share the signatures of the attacks to other vendors, so it'll be a huge marketing advantage for their product !

Why did the attacker sacrificed such a nice tool ? And to obtain what kind of information ?

My hypothesis is that the attackers wanted to retrieve all source code from Kaspersky Labs, in order to prepare future attacks.
I have no doubt that they have the resources to analyze the source code and find some ways to evade Kaspersky's detection.
The most wanted target was probably Kaspersky's internal tools, which are not in the final product, like virus analyzers, detection algorithms, and also how they build their virus signatures.

It's probable that the attackers also wanted to confirm the ties between Kaspersky and the Russian government.

You give too much importance to charisma and persuasion, in other words manipulative skills.

Sure, if you need to sell something, it may be useful, but from my experience, I noticed that people having high social skills don't really care about others.
They care about themselves, because they are too focused on their own importance.
And in companies, they tend to become managers, but it's the workers that really produce something.

In France too, we have the "ligne 14" in Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... which was completely automatic from the beginning and the "ligne 1", which has been automated since 2013.

From what I read there: http://photofucket.software.in...

It appears that Photofucket is a backup tool for downloading pictures from your Photobucket account, if you have the login/password.

Otherwise, it will simply bruteforce all urls (probably by using counters with base filenames) in order to grab the pictures.

Unless they collected the passwords entered by their users, I don't see any crime here, except the offensive name for Photobucket.
WTF ?

I exactly do the opposite: I never comment on Slashdot.

I'm not a rockstar, but my daily programming job is boring like hell.
You can imagine how much I'm productive ;-)