Uhh...those come after beta and would be more polished. Alpha and prealpha are the least polished stages of dev.

Heh. This guy gets it

This is super obvious...how did this paper get published?

Don't you mean fusible relays?

Uhhhh Win7 is widely regarded as the one they DIDNY screw up

Fuses? Is it 1985?

"Im gonna weld stuff onto these minivans so that they look like a gokart"

I'm agreeing with APK...the new owners of slashdot are! already making things weird.

Oh my..an SEO company..if we thought Dice was bad..

There ARE some good ones just not many...Zimbardo's comes to mind

If you can't provide an alternative advocacy yor entire rant is moot.

So you're saying his brain is an ASM stack?

There are a couple possibilities I can think of.
A) Maybe there is a risk that the PNG you used would already be encrypted, so it says to use an external source.
B) Malware tends to hook common system functions, such as those used to generate data for testing, and the malware author gives his solution just in case. This is particularly true with .net assemblies, as the entire set of addresses for the method table is readily available.
C) Some combination of the 2.

Test network? Restarting the application? Pfft my patches get injected at runtime, and are 100% reflection. Thats how you out-elite the elitists!

Actually I once had to patch a mission-critical piece of software with a java agent at runtime. Waiting to see if loadAgent() failed was a real nailbiter.

I smell an elitist application dev (webdevs are scrubs)...but you're not wrong.