your eye can't even tell the difference between light rays entering it from a 3D system vs light rays entering your eyes from the real world, it's the same thing to your eyes.

Apparently you haven't watched any 3D films.

The correct name for what happens in a "3D" cinema or on a "3D" TV is not "3D" - it isn't really significantly more "3D" than a normal perspective image (I'll explain why below). The correct name for the effect is "stereoscopy" and it only reproduces one part, actually a rather unimportant part, of the experience of viewing a true 3-dimensional scene.

In the real world, when you move your gaze from a point at one depth to a point at a different depth, your brain has to cause two changes to take place in your visual system (no doubt amongst many others):

1. 1. Your eyeballs have to be moved so that the point you are looking at is within the most sensitive area of your retina (the fovea). If the new point is further away than the old one, this will require that the eyes move outwards. If closer, they have to move inwards. In addition to keeping the point of interest within both foveas, this alignment is required in order for the brain to "match up" the two images. If the alignment is wrong, the result is that you perceive a double image.
2. 2. The lenses in your eyes have to change shape to bring the new point in focus. The closer a point is to your eyes, the fatter the lens in your eyeball has to be to focus the light onto your retina properly. The lens shape is controlled by tiny muscles called "cilliary muscles". When you look at a real scene, points other than those you are focussing on generally appear blurry.

When looking at a normal perspective image, you don't have to do either of these things. Both pointing and focussing is constant, because as far as the mechanisms for pointing and focussing the eyes are concerned you are simply looking at a coloured rectangle held at a constant distance from the eyes.

With such a perspective image, our brains have absolutely no difficulty reconstructing the full 3-dimensional image purely from the content of the scene. They also have no difficulty keeping this reconstruction separate from the fact that it's really just a flat rectangle. We've been looking at such image for hundreds of years, and moving versions for over a century, and we know it doesn't cause any problems.

With stereoscopy, the brain starts having to do the processing described in point 1. However, point 2 is unchanged. To watch a stereoscopic film involves pointing the eyes, but not focussing them. The lens shapes remain constant, but the eyes now have to point to different depths. This is significantly different both from looking at a normal perspective image and from looking at a real 3-dimensional scene.

Clearly, people can achieve this feat without any great difficulty, or "3D" films would be hard to watch. However, there may indeed be reasons to worry about the early development of the visual system. The trick of pointing and focussing your eyes is not something you are born with. It develops over time, and in a way which crucially depends on the particular input it receives. One extreme way to demonstrate how much visual development depends on input is rather cruel: to rear a cat in total darkness.

Problems with the mechanisms for pointing/focussing the eyes are common - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabismus and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accommodation_(eye)#Disorders_of_accommodation. Can such disorders be caused by presenting stereoscopic images to the eyes for long periods during early development? Nobody knows. Is a warning necessary? I don't know or particularly care - it's just a bit of arse-covering. If I had a small child, would I allow him or her to watch a 3D television for the average 4-5 hours a day? No, though fears of vision abnormalities would only be a small part of the reason.

What most annoys me about "3D" though, is that it adds absolutely nothing to the experience, except perhaps the first few times you see the effect. It carries absolutely no extra information. All the depth information you need is there in the image. The brain does not need different images or even different focussing to determine depth (actually, I think it may even be the opposite - i.e. you use the information in the scene to determine the depth and therefore figure out how to focus/point the eyes).

Stereoscopy adds no extra information and just requires you to keep repointing your eyes. In non-CGI films you generally don't even have full freedom as to where to point them because the focussing has been decided for you - there's not much point looking at a backdrop that's out of focus. It seems to me to be equivalent to putting the watcher on a treadmill so they have to run whenever the protagonist runs - just pointless extra work for the viewer. And it takes a stop of light out of the picture (i.e. halves its brightness) into the bargain.

For the love of God, why?

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution,...

Woah! So you have to be at least 223 years old?

I ended up creating a blog for this: Everything you Never Wanted to Know about WinSxS. It's too long for stackoverflow, but the docforge suggestion sounds interesting...

Perfect. It should be there later today.

Hands up anyone who knows what an "activation context" is! If you don't you have no idea what WinSxS does, how it does it or how to diagnose it when it goes wrong.

In my opinion, WinSxS is a good mechanism, or at least as good as Microsoft could have made it while working within the constraints of history. However, WinSxS cannot be used in the real world without properly understanding it, and achieving that understanding is very painful indeed. The MSDN documentation is piecemeal, appears incomplete and inaccurate in a few places and lacks a proper overview. I think the only reason I properly twigged what activation contexts are about is that I had recently written a mechanism that operated on similar principles (a thread-local stack of context-related information).

I wrote a Wiki page at work describing what (I think) WinSxS's motivation is, how it works and some of the problems it suffers from. I'd like to put it somewhere on the public internet - any suggestions? It should ideally be somewhere wiki-like where people can correct its inevitable inaccuracies without me having to maintain it, but I'm not sure it's appropriate for wikipedia.

Reticent

Reluctant

Get it right, people!

I'm assuming this was due to a typo on the first line (and presumably no code reviews). With memcpy_s and the same development practices, this would most likely become:

char *buffer = malloc(200);
memcpy(buffer,2000,message,2000);
send_message(buffer);
free(buffer);

, which would behave exactly the same and illustrate the point many people here are making about this really not fixing the supposed insecurity. The reason the code you show crashed is not that memcpy takes no destination size parameter. The reason is that the code contained an obvious typo that nobody noticed because there were no formal code reviews.

That's rough, man. I get to go to the toilet whenever I please.

The article is very difficult to read, due to poor English (no offense meant - I don't speak a word of Portuguese!) However, having waded through it, it is clear the parent is correct, and the summary is completely wrong.

The article's author is resigning from the ABNT, specifically because it is not appealing. It is only "protesting", whatever that means. The article claims the failure to appeal is due to Microsoft supporters claiming they did not have enough time to weigh the arguments, which sounds a bit rich in the circumstances.