But a properly written program should never get in a situation of dividing by zero, and this is one of the dumbest "Ask Slashdot" questions in a while. Masking the interrupt makes about as much sense as driving blindfolded so you don't see the people you are running over.
Let's say a business divides the profit among all employees who meet certain conditions, say, a sales quota. If the profit is $1000 and four employees met the condition, their bonus is $250 ($1000/4). Now, what happens if no employees meet the quota? Your formula ends up being $1000/0 and crashes.
Yes, the programmer should have planned for this, but that is the point of the question. The programmer is tired of combing through thousands of lines of code looking for division to see if it's possible to get a divide by zero error, and then having to sanitize is divisor for every one.
So, I respectfully disagree with your reasons calling this a stupid question. He's asking, "Is there a better way of doing this than method X?" and you're saying, "That's a stupid question because if you used method X, you wouldn't have to worry about finding a better way".
Microsoft has always been fairly smart about courting developers with excellent tools and development platforms, and making it quite easy to build applications for Windows
Maybe you don't remember history the way I do.
Remember VB? An excellent toolkit that gained widespread acceptance in the Enterprise world for it's tight IDE, integration environment and easy forms. But then MS came out with VB.net which was about as related to VB 6 as javascript is to java. It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch, oh well, perhaps you shouldn'ta Microsoft, you know?
Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer", it was an excellent toolkit for writing distributed applications quickly. Performance was excellent. Many big names "bet the farm" on it. Until Microsoft walked away from it, too. Netflix will *never again* bank on a MS technology, I'm sure.
But that's not where it ends. Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed. Again.
But that's not where it ends. Why is the XBox 360 not compatible with the original XBox? Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360? With every console generation, MS has been screwing the developers.
And so it goes. Over and over, the devs get the shaft any time they bet on Microsoft's newest, highly promoted technology.
What's next?
Because they can make a keyboard to fit the phones they design. For example, my ancient Note 2 keyboard had a number row because it had plenty of room for one. Since rooting and installing CM, I've had a difficult time finding a keyboard that has a number row and is as capable as the one made by Samsung.
Frankly, I don't see this vulnerability being that big of a deal. The hacker would either need access to the root filesystem of your phone WHILE you are updating and have the perfect timing to insert the file AFTER it downloaded but before the update starts, or he would have to pull off a man in the middle attack, which means hanging out at a Starbucks, setting up the fake network, and waiting for someone to come in with a Samsung phone who just happens to download the update while in Starbucks and on your fake network where you can intercept the correct file and replace it with your own.
Yeah... if I were still running sock, I wouldn't be worried.
France banned hydrogenated vegetable oil and saw something like a 30% or 40% reduction in heart attacks... in just a single year. Just how blatant of a good idea do you need this to be?
I live in Texas. There are several months out of the year where the LOW is still above 90. Good luck sleeping through that without AC. Maybe we should put some light bulbs above our panels so we can run our AC.
You're right! When they "went red" they stopped all racism and are now a paradise of integration. Not that the parties themselves have changed ideologies or anything... Nope.
Gotta love this mass insanity and head burying.
The so-called "STEM shortage" is pretty much bullshit. If you take a look at the degrees that pay the best you find that standard STEM degrees dominate.
No degree is a guarantee of employment. If you can't be bothered to shower and show up, you're going to have a hard time. Degrees merely improve your odds of success significantly.
I like how it's unpopular to point out that some traits of conservatism are undesirable. For example, looking at the map of the laws against interracial marriage and also gay marriage looks pretty similar to the standard red/blue map that seems to dominate politics.
But hey, it's not a "Republican Core Value" or something. Yeah.
You stay anonymous with all that hate, the rest of us will keep civilization afloat.
Seriously, Nancy Kress?
Just to be fair "perfectly secure" is probably overstating things considerably. It would pass "no known exploits" pretty well, certainly "commercially viable".
The only "perfectly secure" computer is off, unplugged from the Internet, and encased in 50 feet of reinforced concrete. And even then, there *are* ways to exploit it using *ahem* brute force...
It's easy to design something that people can do. It's tough to design a system that people can't fail at. And that's where there's a big, soft, squishy line that divides what people can generally keep up with and the things that people have to work at to get wrong.
As a software engineer, I require the first, and aim for the latter. It's tough.
My uncle was an BART engineer. He controlled BART ([San Francisco] Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains in the SF Bay Area for a living. The train had doors on both sides of the train and some stations opened on one side, or the other.
BART trains are frequently "up in the air" as much as 50 feet, where the expectation is that you climb a flight or two of stairs to the BART station and board the train. And, for passengers, the doors automatically opened on the correct side so that nobody got hut.
For passengers. But the engineers were expected to manually open the doors on the appropriate side when leaving their station. Now, it's not particularly difficult to look outside the door and see which side the station is on, and the doors for passengers automatically opened on the correct side.
This is where that big, squishy line starts to rear its ugly head. Because while passengers weren't expected to remember which side to get off, engineers were. And my poor uncle made a mistake one day, and opened the wrong side. It was a fatal mistake.
Answer me this: Why would we expect that passengers would never get it right, but engineers would never get it wrong?
Intelligently designed systems that account for and prevent common human mistakes is a design goal. It's tough to do because you have to predict what the end user will likely get wrong and account for that. Nonetheless, it's a hallmark of engineering advancement that we've designed something so safe and resistant to human error as a car that casually travels 100 MPH with as low a death toll as we see today.
Having never left the RedHat fold, (I'm typing this on a Fedora 21 Laptop) I can't say with any honesty that I've missed them. At all.
Red Hat has been very, very good to me! My business is based on RHEL/CentOS and since Red Hat is quite profitable, I have a simple, economic assurance that my technology base won't disappear.
Feel free to use Ubuntu/Mint/Whatever as your hip distro; but Red Hat has carried a solid, economically potent and robust distro for decades.
It's only bullshit if Chris Roberts was actually lying. And validating it is pretty straightforward: Did the plane yaw, as was claimed? Can Chris' software cause it to happen again?
It's a pretty simple test. And as far as Chris' treatment, if he's been trying to tell people about this vulnerability and getting the cold shoulder, he's as innocent as they get and should be compensated for time served.
(takes out his autonomous, self-contained smartphone to post on Slashdot)
what where you saying about new stuff having more dependencies ?
Oh. Yeah.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.