I feel a Federal Datacenter Consolidation tax coming on.

I shudder every time I hear about a government I.T. project. Can't wait to see what mess occurs after this and who steps down as a result.

I think defining correctness as "producing the desired results is pretty reasonable. Sure correct doesn't mean robust, but they are different things and this discussion has been about correctness.

Yeah, I looked at the code. He replaces the sort says the bug is gone, must be a bug in how the sort is used. Sure seems likely but where is the actual bug. If we are going to spend the time giving a case study of a bug I think showing exactly there the bug is and why it is matters. But I suppose reasonable people can disagree.

The main thing this discussion has shown is the existence of different metrics for program quality, i.e. an error and a bad design, one is wrong the other is undesirable but correct (at least for the current program). Both are bad but in different ways and need to be handled using different techniques.

If that is your opinion. But I should note that IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc. spend a fair bit of money to sponsor and send people to these things. So someone apparently thinks these proceedings count for a fair bit (and companies that care a lot about building robust systems).

I'll leave my part at that.

I'm referring to "special" folders, like Fonts, Temporary Internet Files, redirection between x32 and x64 folders .
In a way, these folders are subject to special folder policies which are somewhat similar to the way .htaccess operates.

Unfortunately, Microsoft developers love to overcomplicate things (I'm still miffed after all these years at the way you need to alter ACLS for traversing folders, while under Novell Netware it was just a matter of making one change).

Regards,
Ruemere

Two more thingies:
- Vista's administrator actual access rights may differ depending on whether it is Administrator, member of Administrators (local), member of domain group which in turn belongs to Administrators (local).
- several folders (or applications) may be governed by Vista's equivalent of .htaccess and subsequently may be not accessible as per standard security

All of the above may be further complicated by attempting to run a 32bit application to access 64bit content in a system folder (transparent redirection of call may result in serious weirdness).

Regards,
Ruemere

Asteroid collisions can produce big delta-V effects.

Big lumps of rock fall towards sun.

Earth is in the way.

We live on Earth.

HTH.

J.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain

That's fair, because after all we did invent greed and abusing outdated laws.

So? Buy some video games and people will want to play with you again. Or are video games merely the scapegoat here? ;)

Try to make a good copy of the Mona Lisa

Copyright is about making an artificial scarcity, not quality control.

Museums often don't allow you to bring a camera with a tripod to the museum, and for exactly this reason.

Flat out wrong, twice.

Many museums permit camera's, tripod or not. Secondly I can buy Mona Lisa towels, curtains, place-mats, tablecloths and reprints in a copyright-fearing western nation because you are permitted to replicate the image as it's out of copyright.

Now if, I say if a museum did forbid camera's it would not be for "copy protection" it would be so you didn't disturb the other patrons at worse, to make sure you buy the print from the museum gift shop, at the very worse.

Copy protection is for quality control, poppycock. How this tripe gets modded interesting is beyond me.

Indeed. Intel graphics are useless for nearly every use. Even if you don't do 3d - 2d window drawing and other operations seem to cause X to use a lot of CPU for some reason. This only happens with intel.

Separate vlan, virtualized or build with premade images. Contains independent management structure which assumes admin level rights for priviledged users. Remote access via client software (it's pretty easy with virtualized vlan, however for many purposes RDP is sufficient).
The vlan is separate from company environment apart from remote access. Hosts located within VLAN can be reimagined at moment's notice. Snapshots can be taken at developer's request.

It's not that difficult to set up, but you need to do some preparations in order to have fully functional disaster recovery for this vlan, along with snapshot capabilities and consistent monitoring.
You may also want to have update procedure to ensure that development environment (and its base images) is not out of touch with real world.
Also, you need to cover your bases with regard to licensing and activiation (some O/S requires special provisioning).

Regards,
Ruemere