When you update the code that the comment references, you usually have to update the comment as well.

If your comments are that detailed, you're doing it wrong.

If you're writing in C, do yourself a favour and check out this editor: http://www.geany.org/

It's the slickest C editor that I've ever had the pleasure of using. It seems little-known, though, and I don't know why.

(It handles other stuff than C too, but I haven't used it for any of those yet.)

Christ, I know everyone has their own personal style and everything, but this is just pernicious. In any case, the author gives the game away: when he thinks code is overcommented, he can ask Emacs to hide the comments. So far as I know there's no automatic system that will generate the comments that the author failed to put in because the code was "self-documenting". This is particularly important when you're working with anything other than standard libraries --- you might know what "libfzp_inc_param_count_fast", but your reader probably won't.

Right now I'm working on a crypto library that incorporates a lot of very specific elliptic curve operations. My technique is to comment the hell out of every damned interesting piece of code on the assumption that a picky reader can turn off the damned comments if they get in his way. In fact, there are various places where I've actually scaffolded all of the comments before writing a line of code. Doing otherwise would have been an enormous headache and made bugs a whole lot more likely. And this way even a non-expert should be able to understand the entire program flow.

Unfortunately, one of the previous pieces of software in this area followed the poster's "self documenting code" style (very nice, clean, well written code with no comments), and even I find it difficult to piece together what's going on in places --- not because all of the code is crypto-specific, but because the author has thrown so much effort into writing "clean, pretty" code that it's actually hard to know where the crucial pieces are. I can't quite explain why I find this so irritating, but perhaps some of you will know what I mean.

Make user an admin on their own machine if you want to increase the IT staff. Lock down group policies if you are overworked.

That's easy: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win31

Does anyone else get queasy looking at Windows 3.1?

Just check out the differences between say, x264 and apples encoder...

Aren't you comparing x264 to oranges?

With no connection between the tails of WK2, it looks like it wants to twist apart. Wouldn't that stress the wing unnecessarily? Obviously the folks at Scaled Composites know a bit than me about building airplanes, but it doesn't look right.

Personally, I want my DNS server to serve the address of the host I asked for.

Yes, if you want straight-up results, I agree.

But the filtering is great if you want it. DynDNS offers (in ascending order by restrictiveness) phishing/malware safe, work-safe & child safe options. If the broad categories do not suit, you have dozens of yes/no options for granular control.

The Google is not providing malware & phishing blocks and parental/SFW controls.
DynDNS's redirects are honest searches, not ad-choked.
https://www.dyndns.com/services/dynguide/
http://www.opendns.com/

I have a set of 4 spotlights in my kitchen which I have 1 "40 LED" spot, 1 "Halogen" spot and 2 "Energy saving" spots. The Halogens last 2 months, the LEDs last 4 months and the Energy savers haven't been replaced in over a year. Halogens are much cheaper and brighter than LED and Energy savers. LEDs are expensive and need additional lighting for colour balance. Energy savers take 5 minutes to achieve full brightness. For this reason, I have the mixture in my kitchen. Halogen £0.79 Energy Saver £1.99 LED £4.99 I wont buy any more LED until the price is under £1.50

>You: Computers have made my life much easier.
>Harvard study: Computers don't save hospitals money.

>Note the slight difference there?

yes - but you missed the bit about efficiency. "Computers have made my life much easier." is usually how we express efficiency.

Over a decade ago I did a stint at a hospital looking after the pathology database. When it was down and paper records were required then lives were at risk due to the lack of efficiency (time spent accessing paper). It honestly scared me!

  I'm sure things are much much more reliant on computers now. Computers are not just for the hospital admins.

The worst month for the Flu is February.

What exactly would you do to secure those sort of apps into a "sensible implementation" that allows me to limit write access to the home folder?

This seems like a job for virtual machines. Run each one in a separate instance, and that instance is for all intents and purposes their "home directory". Something goes wrong, simply reset the machine's disk image and restore user data from a backup.

And, of course, once you're running apps in a VM, the host can use Linux and get all the security/stability/efficiency advantages of that on top of Window's app support.

Actually in the UK you have zero rights to create archive or backup copies of copyrighted media, at least you used to, this may have changed. There was actually a push by music companies to give you the right for a backup copy ( on the basis that a single company suing for a tape/mp3 copy to play in a car stereo would make them all look incredibly bad and force a much more liberal fair use law).

I believe UK law permits one workable version of anything you've a licence for (you can copy a SNES cart but you have to destroy the original and you can't circumvent copy protection measures). Also allows for recordings of broadcasts, provided you delete them after viewing or a reasonable time period.

Last.fm has streamed 275,000 years of audio around the world.

I'd love to know how much of that was stuff like Britney Spears

56,904,147 plays (1,246,583 listeners)