Information You Won't Find Useful
Information You Won't Find Useful, Vol. 1
07/15/09 09:42 PM Filed in: Technology
Kylee reprimanded me
for not blogging enough. While this is a very valid
accusation, I’ve decided to oblige her in only the
most annoying sort of way. So here you go, Kylee. A
blog post just for you. Enjoy.
To Visa’s credit, they quickly admitted that it was a “temporary programming error ... [which] caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted.” They say some transactions. Roughly 13,000 transactions, actually. Well, at least they caught it, right? But isn’t it scary to think that a programming error could cause such a huge mishap? And more importantly, what the heck did the programmer do to cause such an error.
Well, for those of you familiar with C++, it doesn’t take too long to figure it out. The error was in the amount of 2314885530818450000 (we multiplied by 100 to get rid of the nasty change). If we convert that number to hexadecimal, it comes out to be 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 00. 20 in hexadecimal is a whitespace character, so it’s likely that a conversion was never made and the customers really made purchases for $46.08.
The Google Chrome OS has led to talk of booting Google’s CEO off of Apple’s board. After all, that would just be a nasty conflict of interest, what with Apple being a major OS distributor as well.
Google claims that the new OS will be written from the ground up (like they did when the “reinvented” the browser with Chrome), will be a system built atop the Linux kernel, and will boot and “get users onto the web in seconds.”
Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has laughed at the new OS. I don’t know if he thinks it’s a joke or if he was scoffing at the reality of it, but I seem to recall him laughing at the iPhone a year before it’s release as well and, well, making some rather audacious (and now embarassing) statements about it in this video. Based upon that evidence, and how successful the iPhone has become today, I’d say the new Google Chrome OS is going to be revolutionary, to say the least.
At the beginning of the summer, I cleaned my room. This is a regular occurrence for me, but in this particular cleaning I came across my 2.5 gallon fish tank which was empty. I thought to myself, “The tank and filter are the expensive parts ... Fishes are cheap!” I quickly drove to PetSmart and purchased two little fish: a Platy and a Molly. One was red, the other black. The black one I named Bruno, and the red one was called Demetrius (names compliments of an afternoon of boredom for Evan and me).
After these three months of summer, Demetrius and Bruno are still kickin’! I’m now getting slightly worried about the eight hour trip back to school. I’m really hoping they can survive it so we can see how much longer these guys will keep on sticking with us. If you have any good ideas for safely transporting said fishes from Iowa to Ohio, drop me a line.
I can’t say that I blame the world. I mean, he was a legendary artist, and I don’t think there will ever be another musician that will be able to attain the caliber of Jackson. Despite his social record, he holds the spot as one of my all-time favorite performers, and within two days after his passing, I listened through his entire discography as a tribute. Yes, I do own his entire discography ...
Frequently I stumble upon tutorials, and as I’m reading through them I think, “Wait, that can’t work. Will that really compile? I thought ‘Class’ was lowercase in C++ ... And why isn’t there a semicolon at the end of this line? Shouldn’t they have included this library?” Out of curiosity, I grab the code and try to compile it myself and, sure enough, it craps out on me. The common misconception is that, “Well, this code is never meant to be compiled, it’s just an example.” But that’s just the point! It’s supposed to be an example ... And it’s wrong!!
Nine times out of ten this is a trivial issue, but I’ve run into instances where the broken code is what I’m trying to interpret, and it’s really hard to interpret something when you’re first trying to figure out if it’s right in the first place. How do you expect me to know if it’s right or not if you’re supposed to be teaching it to me?
Sometimes the errors are just syntactical. Those are bad enough. The worst is when you try to compile a tutorial’s example code and it causes something catastrophic, like a segfault. Please, for the sake of those you’re trying to teach, make sure what you’re teaching is accurate!
There are already two excellent and free alternatives to the Symantec and McAfee subscription services out there made by Avast and AVG. Microsoft’s Morro soon to be the third free alternative, both Symantec and McAfee are saying that they aren’t worried about their sales being effected by these free products, even with Morro bundled with the Microsoft OS. According to the CEOs of the Big Boy companies, a free alternative just can’t guarantee the security that users need while browsing today’s malicious internet; you need more than just anti-virus support, and that’s what the Premium services give you. While I agree that you need more than just anti-virus support, there are many other prevention companies out there that offer the same services for free that the Big Boys offer at a hefty price.
Whether you’re interested in paying for Symantec’s services or you’re willing to settle for the free Morro that will soon come with your Windows operating system, it’s good for the Big Boy’s to have some healthy competition to keep their products quality and their prices low. Though I can’t say that security competition from Microsoft is any incentive for Symantec and McAfee to keep their quality high ... But we can hope.
That’s all I’ve got for now. We’ll see how long it takes me to come up with more Information You Won’t Find Useful.
Visa Overcharges Customers
There’s no way this can work out in a positive manner for Visa’s reputation. I mean, they overcharged individual customers to the amount of $23 quadrillion (each), according to CNN. That’s right, some Visa cardholder’s received their monthly statement and had the heart attack of the century upon seeing certain “purchases of goods” to the dollar amount of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.To Visa’s credit, they quickly admitted that it was a “temporary programming error ... [which] caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted.” They say some transactions. Roughly 13,000 transactions, actually. Well, at least they caught it, right? But isn’t it scary to think that a programming error could cause such a huge mishap? And more importantly, what the heck did the programmer do to cause such an error.
Well, for those of you familiar with C++, it doesn’t take too long to figure it out. The error was in the amount of 2314885530818450000 (we multiplied by 100 to get rid of the nasty change). If we convert that number to hexadecimal, it comes out to be 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 00. 20 in hexadecimal is a whitespace character, so it’s likely that a conversion was never made and the customers really made purchases for $46.08.
An Online Operating System?
That’s what Google says, anyway. Better yet, they claim they can have it ready for delivery by the end of next year! Microsoft, of course, is in shock, but this isn’t all that surprising considering their OS turn around is something under five years ... If they work really fast.The Google Chrome OS has led to talk of booting Google’s CEO off of Apple’s board. After all, that would just be a nasty conflict of interest, what with Apple being a major OS distributor as well.
Google claims that the new OS will be written from the ground up (like they did when the “reinvented” the browser with Chrome), will be a system built atop the Linux kernel, and will boot and “get users onto the web in seconds.”
Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has laughed at the new OS. I don’t know if he thinks it’s a joke or if he was scoffing at the reality of it, but I seem to recall him laughing at the iPhone a year before it’s release as well and, well, making some rather audacious (and now embarassing) statements about it in this video. Based upon that evidence, and how successful the iPhone has become today, I’d say the new Google Chrome OS is going to be revolutionary, to say the least.
Demetrius and Bruno Live
Near the end of our semester at Cedarville, there was an unfortunate accident involving cold-blooded animals and hot water coming out of the faucet. Now I’m not going to point any fingers, but Dave was the one changing the water in the tank ... Needless to say, there was a seizure and the fishes died. There was much mourning and sorrow.At the beginning of the summer, I cleaned my room. This is a regular occurrence for me, but in this particular cleaning I came across my 2.5 gallon fish tank which was empty. I thought to myself, “The tank and filter are the expensive parts ... Fishes are cheap!” I quickly drove to PetSmart and purchased two little fish: a Platy and a Molly. One was red, the other black. The black one I named Bruno, and the red one was called Demetrius (names compliments of an afternoon of boredom for Evan and me).
After these three months of summer, Demetrius and Bruno are still kickin’! I’m now getting slightly worried about the eight hour trip back to school. I’m really hoping they can survive it so we can see how much longer these guys will keep on sticking with us. If you have any good ideas for safely transporting said fishes from Iowa to Ohio, drop me a line.
So, Michael Jackson is Dead
That’s the rumor, anyway, though there are still those that believe it’s all a marketing ploy. And, you know, that’d be a pretty good idea considering sales have never been better for him, especially on iTunes. After Jackson’s death, six of the top ten songs sold on iTunes were Michael Jackson’s hits. More significantly, nine out of the top ten albums also belonged to Jackson! Nineteen out of the top twenty-five music videos had Michael Jackson in them as well.I can’t say that I blame the world. I mean, he was a legendary artist, and I don’t think there will ever be another musician that will be able to attain the caliber of Jackson. Despite his social record, he holds the spot as one of my all-time favorite performers, and within two days after his passing, I listened through his entire discography as a tribute. Yes, I do own his entire discography ...
Please Try to Compile Your Code ... Seriously
I’ve been running into this annoyance a lot lately, especially at work. Honestly, how hard is it to just make sure the code in your tutorial actually compiles before you submit it, huh? I’ll tell you: it’s not that hard. Dropping it into UltraEdit and running GCC on it is about the most complicated way to do it, but you could obviously just paste it in an IDE and check it that way as well. I don’t care if it runs, necessarily, just make sure it compiles. You’re trying to teach people with your code, for goodness sake. What kind of an example are you setting if the code you’re “teaching” them with sucks?Frequently I stumble upon tutorials, and as I’m reading through them I think, “Wait, that can’t work. Will that really compile? I thought ‘Class’ was lowercase in C++ ... And why isn’t there a semicolon at the end of this line? Shouldn’t they have included this library?” Out of curiosity, I grab the code and try to compile it myself and, sure enough, it craps out on me. The common misconception is that, “Well, this code is never meant to be compiled, it’s just an example.” But that’s just the point! It’s supposed to be an example ... And it’s wrong!!
Nine times out of ten this is a trivial issue, but I’ve run into instances where the broken code is what I’m trying to interpret, and it’s really hard to interpret something when you’re first trying to figure out if it’s right in the first place. How do you expect me to know if it’s right or not if you’re supposed to be teaching it to me?
Sometimes the errors are just syntactical. Those are bad enough. The worst is when you try to compile a tutorial’s example code and it causes something catastrophic, like a segfault. Please, for the sake of those you’re trying to teach, make sure what you’re teaching is accurate!
Microsot Wants to Give You Anti-Virus Support for FREE
After Microsoft OneCare failed worse than Windows Vista and the Zune combined, Microsoft took some well deserved time off from the Security Protection field of computing. They needed to rethink things. In steps code name “Morro.” What is Morro? Well, it’s pretty much Microsoft OneCare ... But for free ... And apparently better. And it’s supposedly going to be bundled with Windows 7. OneCare failed because it was accused, numerous times, of being “unable to detect a significant number of threats.” I guess Morro plans to be better?There are already two excellent and free alternatives to the Symantec and McAfee subscription services out there made by Avast and AVG. Microsoft’s Morro soon to be the third free alternative, both Symantec and McAfee are saying that they aren’t worried about their sales being effected by these free products, even with Morro bundled with the Microsoft OS. According to the CEOs of the Big Boy companies, a free alternative just can’t guarantee the security that users need while browsing today’s malicious internet; you need more than just anti-virus support, and that’s what the Premium services give you. While I agree that you need more than just anti-virus support, there are many other prevention companies out there that offer the same services for free that the Big Boys offer at a hefty price.
Whether you’re interested in paying for Symantec’s services or you’re willing to settle for the free Morro that will soon come with your Windows operating system, it’s good for the Big Boy’s to have some healthy competition to keep their products quality and their prices low. Though I can’t say that security competition from Microsoft is any incentive for Symantec and McAfee to keep their quality high ... But we can hope.
That’s all I’ve got for now. We’ll see how long it takes me to come up with more Information You Won’t Find Useful.
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