Posts by Spin

Top Italian OPERA boffin steps down after faster-than-light mistake

Why step down? They all acted with appropriate scientific integrity.

British Gas sues Accenture

Who else is going to hire these clowns?

Back when I was a consultant, these guys had a horrible reputation. So bad, in fact, they changed their name 10 or 15 years ago (I've forgotten their previous name).

So with a horrible track record, and public statements like "Accenture will vigorously defend the High Court proceedings" - who would want to hire these clowns? You know the delivered system will suck, and you know you'll end up in court when you can prove it sucks.

There can be only once answer that anyone hires them - follow the money in the 'hiring' organization - there's gotta be graft here somewhere!

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

Spewing pre-fab words of no substance

"A spokesman at the firm told El Reg: “Microsoft wants to ensure customers have the best possible experience ..."

Ya know, when an MS spokesperson's sentence contains "wants to ensure" and "best possible experience", you might as well not even print it. It sure doesn't communicate anything useful. About all it tells me is that another Vole's hole is spewing pre-fab words of no substance.

AJAX patent threat to giants under the hammer

Old as Dirt

That fact that the patent examiner doesn't know what async communications are, as evidenced by the fact this patent was granted in the first place, should worry us all.

Software patents have to go. Or at least suspend them until we get some competent software engineers in the patent office.

Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic

Oops, we let our trade secrets out of the barn!

They also released documentation on a whole bunch of products the other day. Perhaps some enterprising hacker found a hole into Hotmail?

http://computers452.blogspot.com/

Bloody code!

Programming in Assembler

25 years ago I believed in the single point of exit thing. But we were programming in assembler on a 6800 using a very primitive debugger. Trying to find out what value a subroutine was returning required looking on the stack just before the final "return" statement was hit. So setting such a breakpoint was easy if subroutines had but one return statement, and progressively more leg-work as more exit points were added.

Fortunately we're not programming with sticks and stones and 300 baud modems any more, so I've thrown off such shackles and now litter return statements wildly where ever they make sense.

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