Discussions

9 hours ago,Adam​Speight2008 wrote

*snip*

The boolean value could be result of a side effecting function. Or the evaluate of each takes a while. Why even evaluate the second argument if you don't need to?

That was my point exactly. By using & instead of &&, either you are wasting time, or your code relies on obscure side-effects. Neither is desirable, unless you are dealing with...

6 hours ago,blowdart wrote

*snip*

Timing attacks on security functions Some functions should never exit early on failure - comparing hash values for example.

This is a legitimate case where short-circuiting is undesirable, and that can also happen elsewhere (for instance, time sensitive code in firmware). Yet, in these cases I prefer not to rely on a subtle difference and express my intent more clearly. Maintenance happens.

12 hours ago,xgamer wrote

@spivonious: That's another area of problem when switching between languages as unlike C# in C/PHP/Python .. "&" operator is bit wise operator ... hence I normally use the generic C like operators in most of the languages following C like syntax viz. Java, PHP,  partly Python ...  here vb.net is easier as the confusion between operator is minimum due to its own unique syntax ...

Actually, for all practical purposes the semantics of & are the same in C and C#.

Not that it matters much; there shouldn't be a good reason to prefer & to the short-circuiting && when dealing with boolean values (and when there is, your code probably contains a problem waiting to happen).

@davewill: after some testing, it seems that all this is caused by the fact that IE treats <br> within a <pre> inconsistently: they get honored for rendering, but ignored when the text content is extracted. This doesn't happen for <br>'s outside a <pre>, nor when the RTF and HTML contents of the clipboard are generated. This explains why this happens for Notepad (that looks at the text content of the clipboard) but not for Wordpad (which prefers RTF).

So, it would seem to be IE's faut... but even the prettifier used by StackOverflow deserves some kicking: it seems it replaces line breaks with <br> and every second blank with &nbsp;. Which makes the <pre> useless and introduces the problem in IE (IE is perfectly happy with line breaks in a <pre>, or <br> outside a <pre> and would work fine with the <pre> block you can see in the page source). A job well done, no doubt.

As to Visual Studio, it's innocent of all this mess. It finds the text content in the clipboard and uses that, period. And it's a good thing it does just that... imagine what would happen if it detected the presence of HTML code in the clipboard and tried to be smart about it: it would probably just fire up MSHTML, convert the HTML to text and paste that. Which would have the only effect of making the other browsers work the same as IE. Oops...

I don't recall, honestly, and I don't have a copy of VB to test it out. Anyway, the only documentation I could find seems to indicate that that was not the intended behavior anyway.

As for C, no, it never behaved that way. C maps the case labels (which must be integer constants) in  jump tables and obviously throws a fit if one of the labels is duplicated.

Just out of curiosity, I cannot figure out the advantage of using that particular artifact. Care to elaborate?

12 hours ago,Bass wrote

@Blue Ink:

Windows XP has been around for how long now (and still the most popular Windows)? It's not updated save for serious security holes these days.

There isn't an exact number as not all the XP users are using the same bits. I'd say that the majority run XP SP3, so that's roughly three years. Much less if you consider security patches which I don't see a good reason to brush off lightly.

As about the rest of your post, I must have misunderstood you somewhere along the lines... it seems you went from claiming that we would get to use Microsoft software for free to some other company maintaining it (for free, of course) to this just being a temporary measure until everybody takes the open platform pill (which is also a painless, quick and inexpensive process).

Unless someone uncovered a technology or a spell that makes huge costs dissolve, that would be a bloodbath, but you know that.

1 hour ago,Bass wrote

*snip*

Incorrect. If Microsoft disappeared you'd still have Microsoft software. You'd just have it without the perceptual license fees on software who's cost of development has been paid for several hundred (thousand?) times over.

Sounds like a win to me.

Not really. If Microsoft disappeared you could keep using its software as it isnow. And it will rot much faster than you can even possibly think about porting your solutions to a different platform. Seriously, would you use today an OS as it was originally developed - say - five years ago (as in no patches nor service packs)? What about developer tools?

Also, I don't know how you calculated that multiple, and I don't have a figure to give. What I know, though, is that supporting and maintaining any non trivial software over its entire lifetime often costs several times the original cost of development; I would be surprised if Windows were any different.

+1 for the Santa Barbara area; aside of the beach, the Los Padres National Forest provides some amazing scenic routes.

Adding components to Windows that are not under the direct control of Microsoft is just asking for trouble...rember Imaging or, more recently, HyperTerminal?

An IQ of 85 is by definition 1 SD below the mean, and only about 16% of a normally distributed population can have a score lower than that.

I was pondering how you could possibly take about 40% of the sample (that's IE market share, according to wikipedia) and still get an "average in the lower 80's" when I happened to read the actual study. Should have read it first, starting from the Conclusions; I would have saved some time.

Actually, it cuts both ways; creating an application that is intuitive and easy to use even for people in the lowest percentiles is not trivial and is the highest accomplishment of any UX designer.

Posted from IE (IE10pp2, just for the heck of it)