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Comment Re:Apples to Oranges? (Score 1) 436

by descil (#28520769) Attached to: Does the 'Hacker Ethic' Harm Today's Developers?
Mostly I agree but I would say that the professional way (especially in school) is not always the right way. Sometimes hacks ARE the right way... so long as you clean them up, later. I became a programmer first, then went to school for it, then learned that they were teaching me to be stupid, and left. Professional all the way, but a bit hackish too.

Comment Re:Hackers vs Designers - Hackers Loose every time (Score 1) 436

by descil (#28520397) Attached to: Does the 'Hacker Ethic' Harm Today's Developers?
Thank you!

The original article is so annoying. Nasty nationalized stereotypes trying to make people think you have to either be sloppy or conformist. My designs are beautiful, elegant creations. They rarely follow any kind of "organizational development process" (except that I do MAKE a plan, though it only loosely gets followed: that's the idea) or "coding standards" (except in security, readability, and maintenance). I'm definitely not a hacker, but I'm not some half-dead brainwashed programming drone, either. Thank God.

Your writeup provides nice simple dichotomy with direct correlations and some minor humor, no hacking or cowboy shooting needed. And you don't seem terribly at risk for being accused of conforming to organizational development processes and coding standards, either. Cheers to you, particularly for the typos!

(ftr, it's true that I'm unemployable by most of the nasty corporations, being self-educated and kicked out of school for my non-cowboy, non-indian points of view. I don't really mind, as I still get paid enough by my lovely corporation to live by. At least til the project's done...)

-another american designer

Comment Re:Come to the USA! (Score 1) 1359

by descil (#28492217) Attached to: Emigrating To a Freer Country?
> You think the weapons that civilians have on hand can take on the best-funded military the world has ever seen?

Yes. Isn't it obvious?

> I don't think you've thought about this very seriously.

I think you're a coward.

> How many civilians have access to Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters?

I'm not sure what the answer to that is, although I guarantee you it's more than you're thinking.
But here are some better questions: How many Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters will fire at US soil? How many will fire at the other tanks and helicopters?

> "well, I WANT to do X, but since the citizens have so many guns, maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."

Hmmm. I don't see CCTV on MY streets. I get to smoke all I want and never have any trouble. In front of the police station, they sniff the air and then smile and wave. And yes, they're MY streets. You want to come take 'em? I don't care who you are, there's no way to do it. You gonna point a tank at every civilian? Sorry, the military's just not that well funded. the USA is BIG, dude.

> It is a right to defend yourself from the government, not an establishment of the power to overthrow the government.

Nobody wants to overthrow the government. That'd be stupid - next thing you know, all the rich people lose all their money. Yeah, that's gonna happen. But we can defend ourselves, in a billion different ways, with guns made of paper and ink and money, mostly. So yeah, we may very well STILL BE THE FREEST NATION IN THE WORLD. go us. f* you.

Comment Re:offtopic - font (Score 1) 188

by descil (#27987899) Attached to: Letting Time Solve the Online News Dilemma
The technical cause:

1. I think you have to be logged in.
2. Go to write a comment.
3. Click "Customize Posting Preferences".
4. Scroll to the last page of settings and there's a "Comment Post Mode." Mine is set to "Code" for terminal text.

The real cause: I'm a coder and this is the only font I read all day every day day in day out sun up sun down, so I think that the impact on my personality should be represented by my font as well as my grammar/sentence structure/etc.. kinda like wearing professional vs relaxed clothes I guess.

Comment Re:News is now entertainment. (Score 1) 188

by descil (#27987285) Attached to: Letting Time Solve the Online News Dilemma
Every company (news outlets just get the attention) has to deal with a delicate set of balancing acts like this. Running a business is equivalent to the "balance ten stacks of 30 dishes on various parts of your anatomy" trick.

Unfortunately for most managers the first priority has to be to keep the business running. That is what fuels everything else, and it's really a bad way of thinking about your motivations. A better way is, "I need to keep my employees and customers happy and well-fed." But that's not how they think, "What is the bottom line?" is how they think.

It wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't for the agreeable nature of most American decision making teams. CEO says, "here's my idea, what do you guys think?" and the "guys" don't think, they just say "oooh that's your best idea yet! I could never have thought of anything that good or better" which is probably true... but they could be saying "er, boss, that's a great product idea, but won't it create 50 billion tonnes of untreatable radioactive waste and alienate our customer base ten years from now?" Such decisions are hard to make and even harder by committee.

And even harder to change once a precedence is set. If a company decides to never compromise their bottom line for customer or employee, they will fail and very quickly too. The same is far more true of news agencies which are so publicly scrutinized.

Furthermore, Fox is for entertainment, BBC is for fear. Which do you think I prefer to watch? Haha, sorry, but I'd rather be having fun watching some bouncy broad jog on Fox news and ignorant of the fear mongering that the world corporations want me to watch. I'll get my fear mongering by text where it isn't surrounded by creepy music and disturbing visuals. Desensitization or ignorance are the only possible sane response to the world we live in these days.

Comment Re:Silly and useless (Score 1) 486

by descil (#27973983) Attached to: Microsoft To Banish Memcpy()
It's NOT that hard to sanitize input and keep your mind on your user's flow options. Parametrized SQL? Don't know anything about it: must be proprietary fud.

It is MUCH HARDER to make and keep a program secure if it's written in a "secure language." These languages don't have as many pitfalls, so the programmer is not as aware and on the lookout for potential intrusions. If it's already all taken care of by the compiler, what need has the programmer to know about security? What need have they to know AES or DES, buffer overflow or multithreaded resource sharing?

Comment Re:Silly and useless (Score 1) 486

by descil (#27973929) Attached to: Microsoft To Banish Memcpy()
I'd rather use "1 or 1" if someone let me put spaces and letters into their numerical inputs -- no nasty giveaway ' character -- but your point is taken, although you're ignoring mine.

My point is you can't make sprintf or memcpy or anything in that language "safe." It's why all the idiots who would want a safe programming language now write buggy crashy slow Java programs. Thank god, nobody has managed to "fix" C yet.

For the record, I don't generally use sprintf, I use myformat, a custom solution.

Comment Re:Silly and useless (Score 1) 486

by descil (#27968479) Attached to: Microsoft To Banish Memcpy()
If you're using the sprintf family you should definitely be making use of the size modifiers or at least checking your buffers before using any %s type escapes.

If you just use snprintf you've not protected yourself against buffer underruns. Consider:

void getUser(const char *uid)
{
  char buf[52];
  snprintf(buf, 51, "select * from tbl where userid=%s and active=1", uid);
}

Here, if you have a userid that is padded with a few spaces, it doesn't matter if you're active or not.

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