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  • What are the worst examples of moral failure in the history of software engineering?

    - by Amanda S
    Many computer science curricula include a class or at least a lecture on disasters caused by software bugs, such as the Therac-25 incidents or Ariane 5 Flight 501. Indeed, Wikipedia has a list of software bugs with serious consequences, and a question on StackOverflow addresses some of them too. We study the failures of the past so that we don't repeat them, and I believe that rather than ignoring them or excusing them, it's important to look at these failures squarely and remind ourselves exactly how the mistakes made by people in our profession cost real money and real lives. By studying failures caused by uncaught bugs and bad process, we learn certain lessons about rigorous testing and accountability, and we make sure that our innocent mistakes are caught before they cause major problems. There are kinds of less innocent failure in software engineering, however, and I think it's just as important to study the serious consequences caused by programmers motivated by malice, greed, or just plain amorality. Thus we can learn about the ethical questions that arise in our profession, and how to respond when we are faced with them ourselves. Unfortunately, it's much harder to find lists of these failures--the only one I can come up with is that apocryphal "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" story. What are the worst examples of moral failure in the history of software engineering?

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  • Help me understand this C code

    - by Benjamin
    INT GetTree (HWND hWnd, HTREEITEM hItem, HKEY *pRoot, TCHAR *pszKey, INT nMax) { TV_ITEM tvi; TCHAR szName[256]; HTREEITEM hParent; HWND hwndTV = GetDlgItem (hWnd, ID_TREEV); memset (&tvi, 0, sizeof (tvi)); hParent = TreeView_GetParent (hwndTV, hItem); if (hParent) { // Get the parent of the parent of the... GetTree (hWnd, hParent, pRoot, pszKey, nMax); // Get the name of the item. tvi.mask = TVIF_TEXT; tvi.hItem = hItem; tvi.pszText = szName; tvi.cchTextMax = dim(szName); TreeView_GetItem (hwndTV, &tvi); //send the TVM_GETITEM message? lstrcat (pszKey, TEXT ("\\")); lstrcat (pszKey, szName); } else { *pszKey = TEXT ('\0'); szName[0] = TEXT ('\0'); // Get the name of the item. tvi.mask = TVIF_TEXT | TVIF_PARAM; tvi.hItem = hItem; tvi.pszText = szName; tvi.cchTextMax = dim(szName); if (TreeView_GetItem (hwndTV, &tvi)) //*pRoot = (HTREEITEM)tvi.lParam; //original hItem = (HTREEITEM)tvi.lParam; else { INT rc = GetLastError(); } } return 0; } The block of code that begins with the comment "Get the name of the item" does not make sense to me. If you are getting the listview item why does the code set the parameters of the item being retrieved? If you already had the values there would be no need to retrieve them. Secondly near the comment "original" is the original line of code which will compile with a warning under embedded visual c++ 4.0, but if you copy the exact same code into visual studio 2008 it will not compile. Since I did not write any of this code, and am trying to learn, is it possible the original author made a mistake on this line? The *pRoot should point to HKEY type yet he is casting to an HTREEITEM type which should never work since the data types don't match?

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  • Searching for patterns to create a TCP Connection Pool for high performance messaging

    - by JoeGeeky
    I'm creating a new Client / Server application in C# and expect to have a fairly high rate of connections. That made me think of database connection pools which help mitigate the expense of creating and disposing connections between the client and database. I would like to create a similar capability for my application and haven't been able to find any good examples of how to apply this pattern. Do I really need to spin up an instance of a TcpClient every time I want to send a message to the server and receive a receipt message? Each connection is expected to transport between 1-5KB with each receiving a 1KB response message. I realize this question is somewhat vague, but I am starting from scratch so I am open to suggestions. Even if that means my suppositions are all wrong.

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  • How is a referencing environment generally implemented for closures?

    - by Alexandr Kurilin
    Let's say I have a statically/lexically scoped language with deep binding and I create a closure. The closure will consist of the statements I want executed plus the so called referencing environment, or, to quote this post, the collection of variables which can be used. What does this referencing environment actually look like implementation-wise? I was recently reading about ObjectiveC's implementation of blocks, and the author suggests that behind the scenes you get a copy of all of the variables on the stack and also of all the references to heap objects. The explanation claims that you get a "snapshot" of the referencing environment at the point in time of the closure's creation. Is that more or less what happens, or did I misread that? Is anything done to "freeze" a separate copy of the heap objects, or is it safe to assume that if they get modified between closure creation and the closure executing, the closure will no longer be operating on the original version of the object? If indeed there's copying being made, are there memory usage considerations in situations where one might want to create plenty of closures and store them somewhere? I think that misunderstanding of some of these concepts might lead to tricky issues like the ones Eric Lippert mentions in this blog post. It's interesting because you'd think that it wouldn't make sense to keep a reference to a value type that might be gone by the time the closure is called, but I'm guessing that in C# the compiler will figure out that the variable is needed later and put it into the heap instead. It seems that in most memory-managed languages everything is a reference and thus ObjectiveC is a somewhat unique situation with having to deal with copying what's on the stack.

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  • What features of interpreted languages can a compiled one not have?

    - by sub
    Interpreted languages are usually more high-level and therefore have features as dynamic typing (including creating new variables dynamically without declaration), the infamous eval and many many other features that make a programmer's life easier - but why can't compiled languages have these as well? I don't mean languages like Java that run on a VM, but those that compile to binary like C(++). I'm not going to make a list now but if you are going to ask which features I mean, please look into what PHP, Python, Ruby etc. have to offer. Which common features of interpreted languages can't/don't/do exist in compiled languages? Why?

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  • Delete Drag and Drop Behavior of IKImageBrowserView

    - by PF1
    Hi Everyone: By default (it seems), IKImageBrowserView enables drag and drop to locations in the Finder. I would like to turn off this behavior but am unsure of how to do so. I was thinking that perhaps implementing the NSDraggingDestination protocol and overriding it could solve this, but so far it hasn't worked for me. Thanks for any help!

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  • Good language to learn in order to build small websites

    - by mkoryak
    I want to start building websites and charging people for them! My problem is that the stack that know well does not lend itself to quick development, or cheap hosting. I am looking for languages that satisfy the following criteria: Fast to develop in Can find cheap hosting for it Bonus points if it can also be 'enterprisey'

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  • Naming convention in Objective C /C , start with "_"?

    - by Tattat
    Something I see ppl define the variable like this: b2World *_world; b2Body *_body; CCSprite *_ball; instead of b2World *world; b2Body *body; CCSprite *ball; I familiar with the second one, but not the first one. So, I checked the Wikipedia about naming convention: Names beginning with double underscore or an underscore and a capital letter are reserved for implementation (compiler, standard library) and should not be used (e.g. __reserved or _Reserved). So, is that any special meaning which is start with "_"? The wiki page.

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  • Artificially create a connection timeout error

    - by Mark Ingram
    I've had a bug in our software that occurs when I receive a connection timeout. These errors are very rare (usually when my connection gets dropped by our internal network). How can I generate this kind of effect artificially so I can test our software? If it matters the app is written in C++/MFC using CAsyncSocket classes. Edit: I've tried using a non-existant host, and I get the socket error: WSAEINVAL (10022) Invalid argument My next attempt was to use Alexander's suggestion of connecting to a different port, e.g. 81 (on my own server though). That worked great. Exactly the same as a dropped connection (60 second wait, then error). Thank you!

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  • Explain ML type inference to a C++ programmer

    - by Tsubasa Gomamoto
    How does ML perform the type inference in the following function definition: let add a b = a + b Is it like C++ templates where no type-checking is performed until the point of template instantiation after which if the type supports the necessary operations, the function works or else a compilation error is thrown ? i.e. for example, the following function template template <typename NumType> NumType add(NumType a, NumType b) { return a + b; } will work for add<int>(23, 11); but won't work for add<ostream>(cout, fout); Is what I am guessing is correct or ML type inference works differently? PS: Sorry for my poor English; it's not my native language.

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  • Create UML diagrams after or before coding?

    - by ajsie
    I can clearly see the benefits of having UML diagrams showing your infrastructure of the application (class names, their members, how they communicate with each other etc). I'm starting a new project right now and have already structured the database (with visual paradigm). I want to use some design patterns to guide me how to code the classes. I wonder, should I code the classes first before I create UML diagram of it (maybe out of the code... seems possible) or should I first create UML diagram and then code (or generate code from the UML, seems possible that too). What are you experiences telling you is the best way?

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  • my realtime network receiving time differs a lot, anyone can help?

    - by sguox002
    I wrote a program using tcpip sockets to send commands to a device and receive the data from the device. The data size would be around 200kB to 600KB. The computer is directly connected to the device using a 100MB network. I found that the sending packets always arrive at the computer at 100MB/s speed (I have debugging information on the unit and I also verified this using some network monitoring software), but the receiving time differs a lot from 40ms to 250ms, even if the size is the same (I have a receiving buffer about 700K and the receiving window of 8092 bytes and changing the window size does not change anything). The phenomena differs also on different computers, but on the same computer the problem is very stable. For example, receiving 300k bytes on computer a would be 40ms, but it may cost 200ms on another computer. I have disabled firewall, antivirus, all other network protocol except the TCP/IP. Any experts on this can give me some hints?

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  • How to simplify this code or a better design?

    - by Tattat
    I am developing a game, the game have different mode. Easy, Normal, and Difficult. So, I'm thinking about how to store the game mode. My first idea is using number to represent the difficulty. Easy = 0 Normal = 1 Difficult = 2 So, my code will have something like this: switch(gameMode){ case 0: //easy break; case 1: //normal break; case 3: //difficult break; } But I think it have some problems, if I add a new mode, for example, "Extreme", I need to add case 4... ... it seems not a gd design. So, I am thinking making a gameMode object, and different gameMode is sub class of the super class gameMode. The gameMode object is something like this: class GameMode{ int maxEnemyNumber; int maxWeaponNumber; public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = GameMode(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 0; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 0; return gm; } } class EasyMode extends GameMode{ public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = super.init(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 10; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 100; return gm; } } class NormalMode extends GameMode{ public static GameMode init(){ GameMode gm = super.init(); gm.maxEnemyNumber = 20; gm.maxWeaponNumber = 80; return gm; } } But I think it seems too "bulky" to create an object to store gameMode, my "gameMode" only store different variables for game settings.... Is that any simple way to store data only instead of making an Object? thz u.

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  • Discovering a functional algorithm from a mutable one

    - by Garrett Rowe
    This isn't necessarily a Scala question, it's a design question that has to do with avoiding mutable state, functional thinking and that sort. It just happens that I'm using Scala. Given this set of requirements: Input comes from an essentially infinite stream of random numbers between 1 and 10 Final output is either SUCCEED or FAIL There can be multiple objects 'listening' to the stream at any particular time, and they can begin listening at different times so they all may have a different concept of the 'first' number; therefore listeners to the stream need to be decoupled from the stream itself. Pseudocode: if (first number == 1) SUCCEED else if (first number >= 9) FAIL else { first = first number rest = rest of stream for each (n in rest) { if (n == 1) FAIL else if (n == first) SUCCEED else continue } } Here is a possible mutable implementation: sealed trait Result case object Fail extends Result case object Succeed extends Result case object NoResult extends Result class StreamListener { private var target: Option[Int] = None def evaluate(n: Int): Result = target match { case None => if (n == 1) Succeed else if (n >= 9) Fail else { target = Some(n) NoResult } case Some(t) => if (n == t) Succeed else if (n == 1) Fail else NoResult } } This will work but smells to me. StreamListener.evaluate is not referentially transparent. And the use of the NoResult token just doesn't feel right. It does have the advantage though of being clear and easy to use/code. Besides there has to be a functional solution to this right? I've come up with 2 other possible options: Having evaluate return a (possibly new) StreamListener, but this means I would have to make Result a subtype of StreamListener which doesn't feel right. Letting evaluate take a Stream[Int] as a parameter and letting the StreamListener be in charge of consuming as much of the Stream as it needs to determine failure or success. The problem I see with this approach is that the class that registers the listeners should query each listener after each number is generated and take appropriate action immediately upon failure or success. With this approach, I don't see how that could happen since each listener is forcing evaluation of the Stream until it completes evaluation. There is no concept here of a single number generation. Is there any standard scala/fp idiom I'm overlooking here?

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  • The next step & technology towards web services.

    - by webzide
    Hi, My name is Dennis and I am pretty ambitious of creating the next big thing for the web. I have ideas but now I gotta get to work to learn the tools. I am learning Javascript. I don't know if next step for me to take is PHP or some suggests RUBY on Rails. What are the pros and cons. With your experience, I wish you could hint me to the right direction. Thanks. I don't mind working hard. My goal is to create a comprehensive and secure web service platform as well as a fast and user friendly UI.

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  • Object serialization practical uses?

    - by nash
    How many software projects have you worked on used object serialization? I personally never came across a scenario where object serialization was used. One use case i can think of is, a server software storing objects to disk to save memory. Are there other types of software where object serialization is essential or preferred over a database?

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