OK. So the reasoning boils down to: "We're thin-skinned." It is kinda funny, though.

My life-long passion has always been playing and singing "classical" music (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.) When I was 18, my teachers (big names in their own right) told me that although I would never be a Horowitz or a Van Cliburn, I would be easily accepted into any conservatory I wanted to attend, and after many years I would eventually become a successful second-tier virtuoso keyboardist (I studied piano, organ, oboe, and voice). Unfortunately, I also wanted to have a family, and you don't pay family bills playing classical music. So my plan was to be an engineer (software, as it turned out) while being an amateur musician. This worked nicely for many adults I knew back in the 70's and early 80's, and still seems to work just fine over in Europe. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work out in the U.S.A of today, however. Our experimentation with Voodoo Economics has resulted in a "new normal" of 70-hour work weeks, hellish multi-hour commutes because of ridiculous real-estate prices, and an overall economic reality of a middle class that is running scared. So now here I sit, straddled with bills I can only just barely pay even with my big salary--including a massive student loan I took to get the career I wanted. I have no complaints with software engineering. It pays well, and at times it is even enjoyable. But I miss my music a lot. I guess there's always retirement.

My degrees are a B.A. in Urban Studies and an M.Arch (a professional Master's Degree in Architecture). In grad school I learned C++ in order to write plugins for 3DStudio. I found I liked programming better than I did doing menial space-planning work until 4:00AM every day for the equivalent of minimum wage for some famous architect (and thanking him for such an unearned privilege). Well aware of my academic shortcomings, I have made a large effort over the past 11 years to teach myself more than just how to drag and drop widgets onto forms from some toolbox. For example, I own the Knuth trilogy, and have read the first book of it, following along with the exercises for most of it. I have also also dipped into the second book on those rare occasions when the built-in container library of the platform I'm being forced to use somehow didn't meet my needs. If you're a C++, Java, or .Net programmer, you won't really need to know the details of how to implement that sort of low-level stuff yourself. But it can be helpful. A truck driver might not need to understand thermodynamics in order to start his or her engine, but such an understanding might enable him or her to drive a truck in a slightly more optimal way to improve fuel efficiency or engine wear--especially when extenuating circumstances arise. I have talked with a number of people studying computer science, and I have noticed the disconnect between what they are studying and what would be more immediately applicable in the real world. I think it's very important to get a theoretical background, but I also think it would be helpful if the schools would teach their students how to do useful work in programming languages and on platforms that are currently in widespread use. I don't see these two goals as being orthogonal. Whatever the combination of theory and practice is that is being taught, it doesn't seem to be getting the job done very well. From what I've seen of code "in the field" in corporate America, I'd say a good 90% of it is just absolutely awful. My head spins to think of how much money is being wasted by the extra work required to use, support, and work around badly broken software. If the amount of time I spend changing digital diapers is any indication, it's probably a third of all IT budgets combined. I've noticed that degree-holding computer scientists tend to do a better job than the rest, but by no means in all cases, and many of the best programmers I've ever met got their degrees in the Liberal Arts. So it is possib

When I'm forced to use VSS, I always create a scheduled task to back up the database each night so that I don't lose more than a day of work. I was always amazed at how buggy VSS is and always has been. It really is one of the most half-baked of all of Microsoft's products--and that's from a pretty crowded lineup of half-baked products. That from a company sitting on $40-$50B in cash. Amazing.

FP doesn't mess up your HTML?? Hmmm...that's news to me. I don't touch FrontPage with a ten-foot pole precisely because it refuses to let me be the boss. In typical Microsoft fashion, it assumes that you're just some know-nothing schmuck who needs to be saved from his own ignorance, when it would appear that I actually know a lot more about presentation-layer coding for the Web than the developers of FrontPage. So far, I haven't found a WYSIWYG html editor whose WYSIWYG features I actually use. The code-assist features in Dreamweaver and the Eclipse plugin for HTML editing are about all the automation I'm willing to accept. Attempting to use HTML, CSS, and ECMAScript as if they constituted a windowing toolkit is a miserable enough struggle as it is without the intrusion of any "help" from the likes of FrontPage. It never ceases to amaze me how much effort people are willing to expend in order to avoid doing something the right way.

Hmmm...so I take it you've never had a U.S. postal address or telephone then. It's nowhere near as bad today as it used to be, but fifteen years ago my mailbox would fill up every day with today's equivalent of spam, complete with the customary poor spelling, grammar, and diction. I'd also get phone calls from people with "unbelievable" offers that I alone among millions had somehow been chosen to receive. It was all the usual lineup of bogus weight-loss programs, get-rich-quick scams, and penile enhancement products--always "for a limited time only"--invariably sent and phoned in from the boiler rooms down in various warm, sunny locations where a larger than usual percentage of the population seems to be severely allergic to doing any actual work for a living. So if these operators have moved out of the U.S., I suppose it's because they found that there was a better free ride to be had a little further south.

Yes, when it comes to boiler-room operations, Scottsdale seems to be the new Tampa these days.

Tee-hee-hee. Hey, it's Javascript. You weren't expecting software engineering, were you?

I've done maybe a dozen OS installs in the past three years or so. About half of them were Windows re-installs or upgrades of Win2K and XP, and half were fresh installs of Linux of one distro or another (Red Hat, SuSE, and Ubuntu). The hardware was all over the map, but mostly reasonably new stuff, not much older than a year or two at the time. Sorry, no laptops, and I've never even seen Vista in use, much less installed it. So that doesn't make me an expert on this topic, but from my limited experience, I can say that Linux seems to beat out Windows by a pretty good margin in terms of how quick and easy it is to get up and running with a productive workstation--at least on desktop hardware. A typical Windows installation took a couple of hours just to get a bare-bones, non-patched OS on it, starting from one or more CD's. Then you'll spend at least two or three more hours downloading and applying all the "Service Packs" and other patches so that your machine doesn't get "0wn3d". Has anyone ever counted the number of reboots you have to do through all that? Heaven help you if you're on a slow Internet connection. And I've been pretty surprised at the lack of out-of-box support for things like graphics cards, sound cards, and even network cards. It's a pain to have to download and install those drivers yourself. So five hours later, you're done. Oh, wait...you mean you wanted some software to run, too? Oh. Well, there goes the rest of your day. Office alone is going to take a couple of hours. On the Linux side, the bulk of the time is spent checking off what software you would like included in the install. The install itself is maybe a half hour, give or take a few minutes. So it's more or less up to you to decide how long the install is going to take. The faster you decide/check off the options, the faster the install. OK, you might spend a few hours downloading and burning CD images before you start. I don't include that in the time you spend installing because doing that isn't even an option in the Windows world. If you're willing to part with $80 or so, you can go buy a nice boxed set--the way you are required to do for Windows except at four times the price. Another thing I thought I'd point out is that, if you have some old "mystery box" that you've inherited and you want to find out all the details of exactly what's inside that box, grab a notepad and do a Linux install (especially SuSE or Ubuntu). During the hardware detection phase, most Linux installers will happily tell y

What language are you coding in? In VB, just make sure you set all of the objects you create to Nothing as soon as you're done with them: Set MyLibraryInterface = Nothing Set MyBusinessObject = Nothing In many situations, you don't really need to do this unless you're creating a lot of objects that don't fall out of scope right away In C++, you just call ->Release() on your interface pointer. MyComObject* pMyComObject = NULL; (send the pointer into your class factory CreateInstance call here) (do your business logic here) pMyComObject->Release(); // All done Hope this helps.

Holy mackerel. That's eerie. The number of ways in which we are experiencing "dejà vu all over again" is getting really alarming. -- modified at 18:13 Wednesday 20th June, 2007

H.U.A. I just wanted to make sure the point was made that "free markets" aren't actually "free" or even really all that "natural", the way many people who rail against "leftists" seem to believe. They are governed by complex bodies of law, and those who write those laws become surrogates for direct manipulators. Many of the laws that govern commerce in America today are practically written by lobbyists on behalf of powerful corporations that have purchased access to the legislative process. So on the one side, we have a few people who want government to directly intervene and say that certain things such as, for example, the rampant despoiling of our natural resources is not OK. But what we currently have in America is a bit more like the fox guarding the hen-house, as companies that are allowed to "self-regulate" rarely fail to take advantage of this trust and make profits by doing things that have negative externalities. The classic example of this was Enron and the whole California electric supply deregulation mess that resulted in the brown-outs a few years ago. But I think you and I aren't really all that widely in disagreement. Maybe I'm not as much of a lefty as I think.

The government prevented ExMob from setting up new oil refineries? Do tell. Where? In Yellowstone National Park? Or was it the tree-huggers who did that? Never can tell those two groups apart, you know...

I agree that ham-fisted tinkering with the markets by government can be a bad thing--especially if their application is inconsistent or even capricious. One recent example would the the sudden rewriting of the tax laws on Canadian oil trusts that gave those investors a 50% haircut and sent investors of oil sands development running for the exits. But if you really want to see economic instability, just take your hands completely off the wheel. Economic depressions in industrialized countries were far worse before governments started asserting control through policy and controlling money supply through central banks. Even just having a society where a "free" market can exist requires some sort of centralized organization of authority. Anyone who owns a patent or even physical property only "owns" those assets because governmental forces (i.e. the police) will assert that person's ownership rights. In Burundi, if someone steals your idea and beats you to market with it, your only recourse is to hire a private militia.

Sorry. No sale. Oil refinery capacity has been "scaled back" for decades. The last major oil refinery construction in the U.S. was sometime in the 1970's. So our current squeeze has nothing to do with any government programs to promote ethanol, but rather those market forces you worship. For almost 20 years after the early 1980's, there was little profit to be made churning out gasoline, and so nobody invested. Now we're caught with our pants down, because you can't just wave a suitcase full of money and have an oil refinery magically appear. It takes years to bring one on line, and private investors can't know what gasoline prices will be years from now. As for the other nefarious side-effects of government tinkering in industry, you can thank the U.S. and Swiss governments for the fact that we can post on forums on the Web. Without NASA, the Navy, and CERN, we would have no mini/microcomputers, no networks, and no network protocols to go web surfing with. Governments provide the infrastructure and often do the basic research (the expensive stuff that you never hear too much about), and then private profiteers move in to reap the rewards of the taxpayer's investments by bringing the stuff the final leg of the trip to market. If everything were left to private enterprise with little to no government intervention, the result would be anarchy and a lack of progress in fundamental advance of the sciences. We tried it before prior to the first World War, and people starved to death in our streets. The best is somewhere in the middle. Communism didn't work where it was tried, and dog-eat-dog capitalism only served to make a few robber barons filthy rich while most other people worked 16 hour days and often starved even then. The places where life is the best for the average person are all places that have "moderated capitalism": the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia. To the extent that the laissez-faire or the communist extremists take control, the average citizen ends up suffering.

That's got to be Photoshopped/Gimped. Please don't tell us that's for real.

It's what I call the "Albatross Effect". You release it, and from that day forward you spend most of your time wishing it would leave you alone. Once the problems begin, you end up working so hard to support your customers that you have no time left to do the ground-up rewrite that would fix the underlying problems. I've seen this happen again and again--at the same company, even--and software producers just never seem to learn. The old saying about how anything that is worth doing is worth doing well applies doubly to software development.

I was assuming that he may have been getting a compiler error and not known why. Probably we should ask him what sort compiler message or other symptom of a problem he is seeing.

I believe you should use a lower-case "D" in "Data". C is a case-sensitive language. For example, use memcpy(&i,&data[3],2); instead of memcpy(&i,&Data[3],2); As others have noted, there could be other problems because you're reading from an array of unsigned chars into a short. -- modified at 14:06 Wednesday 20th June, 2007