* Posts by Steve

162 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

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Facebook 'friend request' lands UK man in jail

Steve
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@ El reg mods

Seriously, I'm not kidding, name change please ! There are apparently (at least) two people with the name 'Steve', either that, or I am undergoing some kind of weird psychosis, which is always a possibility. One of us is an arrogant, religiously intolerant, opinionated, wine swilling codemonkey fuckwit, the other one is him.

BTW, what's with these icons ?????

The Other Steve

Steve

@Steve - the imposter

Not only are you wrong, see above, but you're wrong with my name on it !

Can I appeal to El Reg mods for a name change ? Henceforth I should like to be known as "The Other Steve"

I am not the same Steve that posted the above comment. This is just to confusing !

Science and religion collide for galactic conference

Steve

RE RE: Christianity by Steve

To be honest Dan, I'm not that fond of most Wiccans either, they have an irritating way of simply replacing christian myths with Wiccan myths and then carrying on as though that's that, job done, when they are, in fact, still caught in the same trap.

They also have an upsetting tendency towards smugness that I find deeply annoying, especially in a religion that was largely made up by uncle Al Crowley and his mates for a laugh.

Steve

@Andy White

"Religion is our aim, science our method" eh ?

Good one. OK, maybe you can open my eyes a bit here, what is the difference between the 'fundamentalism' that you espouse, which allows you to encompass the vastness and enormous age of the universe while not necessarily denying the existence of a 'creator' entity (perfectly sensible, IMHO), and the 'fundamentalism' espoused by people who think the world was created in 4000 BC, or whatever the date was, and decry all science as heresy. (And yes fundys, though you aren't currently using that term in public fora, that is what you are doing)

Clearly there *is* a difference, so perhaps you can enlighten me as to what it is ? I am genuinely curious.

Steve

Still dribbling

And still helping to underline my points about faith and the utter lack of rationality that it represents.

"Or so you state as fact, but should be theory. Hence the problem. Science has no factual proof, just like Christianity"

Again with fundamental misunderstanding of science. Do you know the difference between a scientific theory and something that some bearded twat just made up centuries ago?

It's vast. As vast as the vacant space between your ears.

And in any case, the decay of radio isotopes is measurable. It is a fact.

"it is impossible to STATE 100% this thing is 100 million years old."

Yup, well done genius. There is a margin for error, but since you refuse to educate yourself about what this is, or what measures can be taken to narrow that margin, using factual data that is measurably correct, you once again put your ignorance on clear view for all to see.

I continue to laugh of my ass off. I might even find time to pity you.

If there is a deity, you are going straight to hell, for the entertainment of everyone with a brain that works properly.

"What I'm seeing here is a bunch of atheists as bigoted about their belief system (the absence of any God) as any of the religious fundamentalists they so arrogantly despise."

Then look closer. At no point in any of these comments has anyone stated "There is no God", merely that dribbling fuckwits who think dinosaurs just popped off last Thursday are retards.

"I am not religious, but I do respect my fellow human beings' right to form their own understandings and judgements about the Universe."

That's nice. But most religion has fuck all to do with forming your own judgements, quite the opposite in fact. That's what 'faith' means.

And you are of course right, not ALL christians are total retards. The Gnostics have some cracking insights, for instance.

Shame the rest of the christians persecuted them as heretics, eh ? Same old same old.

Steve

RE: Christianity

Yes, thank you, Anonymous Christian Coward for demonstrating so vividly that fuckwit fundamentalists have absolutely no understanding of how science works.

We can start with "Science assumes to much", that's a giggle, if you weren't such a dribbling, brainwashed fuckwit who believes everything he is told by other dribbling, brainwashed fuckwits with more of the Big G's authority (because they tell you so), you would know that in fact science ASSUMES very little. Science hypothesises about stuff, and then tests it.

That's not like faith, where you assume something is true because some kiddy fiddler in a dress tells you it is so and uses a 16th century translation of a 1400 year old compilation of edited myths that had already, by that time, undergone millennia of Chinese whispers, as supporting 'evidence'.

You also appear to completely lack an understanding of how radio carbon dating works, although I'm not surprised, because although it's possible to develop a sophisticated layman's understanding of why C14 dating is so accurate with an hour's research, this level of independent thought is clearly beyond you.

Congratulations on making yourself look like such a dumbass. If there is an all powerful being who created the entire universe, and she is also omniscient, rest assured she is laughing her tits off at your stupidity.

Proof, if more were needed, that 'of faith', and 'drooling retard' are virtually synonymous in the modern world. Something that was not always true. Issac Newton, for instance was a stonking great scientific genius and a christian, so what's your fucking excuse ?

Data for 800,000 job applicants stolen

Steve

The only thing that really suprises me ...

... is that there are 800,000 people on the planet who want to work for GAP.

NSA writes more potent malware than hacker

Steve

@Dr. Vesselin Bontchev

"Steve: You forget that the AV industry has to make products that are usable by any average Joe out there - not just by you."

I don't concede that point, but even if I did, the one very important thing that I most certainly haven't forgotten is the AV industry is also supposed to make stuff that ACTUALLY WORKS.

Of course, as any fule kno, making an AV product that actually works is not a viable economic model for any company with long term goals, because you only get to sell a couple of versions into your market and then your cash flow dies.

"And Graham's point is that you can test security without doing such unethical things like creating new self-replicating malware."

Exactly, and my point is that this is complete and utter bollocks, and, in fact, is the single misapprehension that makes the AV industry suck.

As you well know, ~90% of the protection offered by the big players is *STILL* based on signature scanning, and most contemporary AV products will *STILL* not alert on 0day stuff, several (going on 10+ by now) years of constant babbling about 'heuristics' and 'behaviour analysis' and the like notwithstanding.

I find your stance that a professional security researcher ought not to engage in the 'unethical' activity of creating self replicating code hard to credit. There is absolutely no reason why this should be harmful to anyone, it's not difficult to maintain a (real or virtual) research network with an air gap for just this purpose.

If a professional security bod doesn't have the demonstrable and practical ability to create a worm or virus of her own, she is clearly not competent to defend against other people's as she is missing some of the knowledge and practice that her 'enemies' have, starting with the ability to locate novel exploitation paths.

I realise that this is an unpopular and widely derided point of view amongst the Girl Guides that populate the AV industry, and that, if you respond at all, you will no doubt wish to inform me that the skillset and the mindset of the attacker and the defender are separate and distinct. This is true to a certain extent, and many examples could be quoted, but a large, and open mind that can encompass both is better prepared.

Much of the rest of the security industry is happy with this, (millions of crap, self proclaimed "penetration testers" could indeed be wrong, but in this case, I don't think they are.), so what's up with you AV bods ?

(P.S, I haven't used F-Prot for at least a decade, so please don't take this personally if it's uber great now :-)

Steve

@Misha

"DISCLAIMER: *I'm* not a conspiracy nut, just following the premise to it's logical conclusion."

Ah, but then, that's what they all say, innit ?

Steve

Proof, if more were needed...

... that Graham Clueless is an utter prat. Sure, I could look at techniques that are in the wild, or I could try and encompass things that never that have never been seen in the wild. Which one is the most effective against 0day ?

Back in the nineties, when the vbscript virus epidemic was on, I spent a day coding an Outlook plug-in that stopped every single one of them from infecting our systems (Yes, I know this isn't the correct way to go about it), including ones that we (and our AV vendor) had never heard of. Most of the time, with new threats the AV on both the gateway and the clients didn't even blink.

Basically, my six hours of research and coding turned out more benefit than the entire AV industry had managed to muster up to that point. Not because my code was especially good, it wasn't, but because the AV industry is run by tossers like Clueless.

The fact that someone who is regarded (presumably by default) as a luminary of the UK "IT security" industry can stand up in the media and say, essentially, that you don't need to do any R&D because VXers are doing it for you, shows that things haven't changed much since then.

Is there ANYONE else in the UK that we point the media to when they need a quote for this kind of story ? I assume not. Perhaps the reason that Mr Clueley is to busy to do any R&D is because he spends his days on the phone to the beeb talking shite ?

Gateway launches iMac-alike all-in-one PC

Steve

RE : @ For the last time.....

Yeah, good call on the virtualisation. You're 100% correct. In fact, any decent PC running windows or linux could run OS X in a VM.

It's just that no one fucking wants to.

So, what's the first rule of Reg Club?

Steve

RE: Set adrift on memory bliss

"The Register has a sense of humour; it is not The Guardian."

What ? The Guardian has no sense of humour ? You mean those people are SERIOUS ?!?!

Steve

@Steve, you imposter !

Hey you, you're not me, don't these names have to be unique ?

The first rule of Reg Club is :

There can be only one Steve!

Steve

The first rule of Reg Club is ...

If you post a comment asking what the IT angle is, without being literate enough for us to recognise it as being sarcasm, you shall be exiled to Rockall for a month. With only copies of Hello magazine for company. And they all feature Paris Hilton. With her clothes on.

Meh!

Verizon lifts pro-abortion text message ban

Steve

@Cameron

"Anyone who uses txt spk in communications other than those involving limited space and a phone keypad should be banned from communicating, or hv thr hnds ct ff."

Sod that, anyone who does so should be banned from communicating AND have their filthy little hands removed.

Pyramid flies white flag in Microsoft grey market row

Steve

Which part of 'free trade' have I misunderstood ?

As far as I can tell, 'free trade' is something of a misnomer, but then I suppose calling it 'The right of EU and US corporations to exploit dirt cheap labour without any form of reciprocity while shafting consumers up the tradesman's in the name of profit, and incidentally ensuring that the labour /remains/ dirt cheap by dint of said exploitation' is a bit of a mouthful.

Level playing field my hairy rear entrance, in this case the playing field is firmly tilted towards Microsoft's trousers.

Fucktards.

BOFH: You think you know a guy...

Steve

BWAHAHAHAHAHHAAAA

Dance monkeys, dance

Jailed worm author offered job by victim

Steve

Fuck the "Security Industry"

""It's important that the IT community does not send out a message that writing viruses or worms is cool, or a fast track into employment," said Graham Cluley"

Personally, I'd rather have someone on my security team that actually knows something practical about security issues than a whining former adventure game writer who gets his jollies getting into flame wars with teenage girls.

And, although it isn't in his specific case (boring twat that he is), it would certainly be hypocrisy for the majority of the self professed "Security Professionals" to make much noise, since all the decent ones started out on the dark side. l0pht, 8lgm and so on come to mind, and most of the rest are just moralising wankers who think running nmap and Nessus is the shiznit.

"I'm a white hat", "I'm a grey hat".

You're an ass hat.

Two US computer engineers charged with espionage

Steve

25 years ? Murder ?

Erm, I hope those aren't the same data sheets that I can download from the Netlogix website by simply providing an email address.

Even if they aren't, twenty five years is way over the top, it's not like they killed anyone.

Jeeez USA, get the fuck over yourself.

TV firm takes £2m hit for competition line scandal

Steve

RE : Peanuts

While I agree that the total fine is insufficiently punitive, I find myself unable to accept any figures produced by that once great current affairs strand that has become little more than a tawdry stimulus for middle class hysteria. They probably just pulled them out of their arse.

And don't even get me started about Horizon, unless you like reading the phrase 'dog fuckers' repeatedly in caps lock.

Ninja she-devils rob Pennsylvania gas station

Steve

@Matthew

Matthew, I so don't even want to know how come you know Lady T's shoe size. That is just so wrong.

BT cranks VoIP & BlackBerry Enigma machine

Steve

A bit sad...

... that BT want to make a song and dance about scoring a rating so low. I'd be gutted.

But hey, maybe THEY want us think that the encryption is rubbish, so we won't use it.

Word to the wise, is all.

Fotango to smother Zimki on Christmas Eve

Steve

Disdain

Well I'd never heard of 'Fotango' or 'Zimki' until I read this article, and I'm a developer, so I should have been in their target demograph. Clearly not so hot at marketing themselves.

Tits to them, then. Last one out of the building switch off the whalesong CD. 'Zimki' my arse.

Why Microsoft vs Mankind still matters

Steve

@Sub geeks

"Last week I spent 4 hours installing an application on a fully patched windows server, including several dips into the windows command line,and several trips to the windows download site to update .dll files that didn't work, reinstall broken support frameworks. (note these are Windows support files, not the application.)"

This has never happened to me. Ever. Not once. The only time I have even heard of anything even remotely similar happening was when one of my neophyte developers shipped half of his %windir% as part of a software update that was subsequently loaded on to 150 machines. This is a big ouch, but it was caused by a simple human incompetence, it isn't the fault of the OS or the manufacturer, but of the idiot who shipped the wrong files and the idiot who installed 150 updates without testing any of them.

If your machine is in such a mess, it is almost certainly going to turn out to be your fault.

"Windows never worked, never works, chance are, never will."

Come now, this is simply bullshit. If it never worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation (again) about MS having a monopoly, because they wouldn't have. Millions of businesses around the globe run windows. Clearly it works well enough.

"And often I (in spite of having used Windows for over a decade and having a Ph.D. in CS) have to give up too because of the arcane ways things work (or not) in Windows."

Then I'm sorry, but you should really take your doctorate back to wherever you got it and demand a refund as you were clearly defrauded.

Windows is by no means perfect, but those of you who have this much difficulty with it can rest assured that the problem is indeed between the chair and the keyboard.

I dread to think how much damage you numpties could do on a linux system.

US teacher fired for non-literal bible reading

Steve

@Christian scum

"Take note of how Mr. Bitterman has twisted the situation and also revealed a condecending attitude towards people of faith (pretty much the same as everybody who has posted comments on this article so far)."

You noticed that huh ? It's funny, isn't it, how educated people talk down to those who believe that the pages in a book of stories that have been rewritten, changed, translated and reinterpreted for the best part of a thousand years and more could be the literal word of the creator of the entire universe.

If you find that, as a 'person of faith', people are patronising you, then consider that it's because you appear to be a retard to any rational person.

"just because you're Contrarian, doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent than a person of faith."

Erm, yes it does, shitwit, because I am able to think for myself. It's like an automatic upgrade. You can't be 'of faith' and still claim to be intelligent in any way because to remain a 'person of faith' after about the age of six, you need to have had many of your critical faculties damaged or suppressed by your parents or teachers. Of course you could be the worst kind of 'born again' scum, in which case you intentionally damaged your brain and/or deluded yourself in order to fit in to a community, and should really be ashamed. It would have been less drastic to get a tattoo. Jesus loves tattoos

I've heard some screaming about religious intolerance, so let me make my own position very clear. As far as I am concerned, all 'people of faith' are mentally ill. I would round all of you up, deprogram as many as possible to remove the poisonous nonsense your cult has planted in your brain, and humanely dispose of anyone who did not respond to treatment.

That goes for all religions, by the way, I'm fully equal opportunities when it comes to ridding humanity of the scum who constantly drag it down in the mud when it should be reaching for the stars.

MIT student walks into airport wearing circuit board and wires

Steve

F**king Space Cadet

I hate small minded over reaction as much the next person, but come on, imagine the scene :

You are working at an airport information desk, you are constantly being reminded that you are operating under conditions of possible attack. Some glassy eyed fuckwit with half of radioshack hanging off her tits and some cryptic message daubed across her back in what rather disturbingly appears as if it could be shit, approaches you while fondling a lump of some kind of plasticised dough like material and asks you where the aeroplanes are at.

Do you :

a) send her on her way, the cheeky scamp.

b) call the cops and tell them that there is a fucking lunatic wandering around the airport unrestrained.

c) do both.

I hope she gets acquitted, but having the charges pressed and having to go through the process will be an apparently much needed reality check for yet another MIT space cadet.

I mean honestly, I'm starting to wonder if you don't so much qualify for MIT as get referred there by a psychiatrist.

In the current climate, with so many itchy trigger fingers, she genuinely IS lucky not have been gunned down on the spot. This really would have been a tragedy, but it's a tragedy that could easily be avoided by not acting like a complete fucking retard.

Not a particularly bright Star, it would appear.

On another note, I wonder if that dead badger she appears to be wearing on her head in the ABC pictures is running Linux ?

Yahoo! In! Ninth! Circle! Of! Security! Hell!

Steve

@Where! are! the!!

If you find punctuation makes sentences hard to read, you may wish wish to consider some remedial English classes.

And yes, I am drunk, thanks for asking :-)

The importance of 'whole journey' email encryption

Steve

Just don't use SMTP

It was never designed to be secure. Try X.500 instead.

PC superstore unhinged by Linux

Steve

@pcscvictim

Family friendly ? Pissflaps.

Enraged bee bursts Taiwanese woman's breast implant

Steve

Whre are the goddamn pictures ?!?!

Another Bulgarian air bag story with no salacious images. WTF ????

:-)

Porn-star cop's job not saved by First Amendment

Steve

RE : Dibble, not Dible

No shit, Sherlock. What, did you leave your sense of humour in your desk drawer today ?

Mystery SNAFU exposes email logins for 100 foreign embassies (and counting)

Steve

RE: Deranged Security site down [...]

Say hi to Bubba for me.

A US CERT reminder: The net is an insecure place

Steve

@ Raheim Sherbedgia

I'm not sure where the fuck you had your buried in 1999/2000 but a modicum of research would reveal that, in fact, critical systems did not fail (to badly), satellites did not fail to earth (although quite a few went off-line for bit of a nap), and (most) nuclear power stations did not go tits up, simply because sufficient preparatory and remedial work had been undertaken.

Without this, and the many people standing by in safety critical installations on the eve of the millennium with their fingers on the off switches, things would have been very different indeed.

In fact, as you will see if you bother to do a reality check, there were rather a lot of nasty incidents, involving comms satellites and indeed nuclear power stations and the like, that simply went under- or unreported in many places.

Without the legions of code monkeys (of which I was one) and engineers who worked so hard in the run up and then stayed awake minding the equipment, lots of things would have broken. Sure it wouldn't have been the nuclear armageddon we were promised by the more hysterical media, but it would have been very unpleasant.

Check your facts.

'Happy slapping' vids prompt Brown to push net filters

Steve

Wankers

The solution to the availability of 'unsuitable' material is extremely simple and widely known, don't allow your children unsupervised access to the internet.

No piece of software can compensate for the absence of parental attention. If you aren't prepared to spend time supervising your children, you have no right to complain about them being exposed to things you'd rather they didn't know about.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. No need for any technological solution.

Bank holiday transport farrago

Steve

@AC

"It costs £4 to go just one stop on the tube"

Who the fuck goes 'one stop' on the tube ? Especially at this time of year when the foetid breeze of a thousand armpits oozes out of the maws of the underground stations.

I haven't been in London for a few months (thank christ), but the last time I was there I saw many people with legs, and the infrastructure (viz pavements, etc) is all there. And that way, you won't have to pay Ken anything.

If this is to difficult for you to figure out, consider moving somewhere with lower carbon monoxide levels. You may find your brain will start to work.

Steve

OMG, it's like, the Dark Ages!

Christ on a bike, before you know it people will be using real money to pay for travel, and having to look at real maps made of paper.

This is truly The End Of The World As We Know It.

Probably terrorists did it. The bastards !!

Channel 4 cans Celebrity Big Brother

Steve

@Ralph B

I hate to be the one to break this to you (no, really, I really really do), but the less than savory Ms Goody famously (well, it was probably in Heat magazine) compared her vagina to said meaty snack.

A wardriving we will go!

Steve

Trespass vs Theft, and the insurance thang.

I like the trespass analogy better than the theft analogy. For a start, (in the UK) trespass is a breach of *civil* law, not criminal, which means that, many signs to the contrary, you can not be prosecuted for trespass. Police can be called to remove you from the place in which you are trespassing, and the landowner (or building, or whatever) is entitled to use "reasonable force" to remove you.

You haven't committed a criminal offence until and unless you start to damage/steal something, (or otherwise do something that would we considered criminal in *any* context).

So, returning to the 'open door' argument, by UK law at least, if you leave your door open, and someone comes into your house, they haven't committed an offence until they nick your stuff and/or trash the place.

If they do nick your stuff, it's a crime, but your insurance company will not pay up as there will be no visible means of entry, indicating that you didn't secure the place properly, like you're supposed to do under the Ts&Cs of your agreement with them.

Seems to me that this would be a more reasonable approach for the law to take.

From a practical 'real world' point of view, if you put up an open AP, people will use it. All APs come with manuals, all these manuals explain how to set up a 'private' network as opposed to an 'open' one, if you can drive a web browser configuring them is not difficult. So if you are stupid enough to put up an open AP *by mistake*, people using your bandwidth is likely to be the least of your many, many other problems.

Comcast throttles BitTorrent users

Steve

@Fred Fnord

Yup, I think you're definitely getting to the heart of my argument there. My requirement to be able to use the bandwidth I'm paying for in a reasonable manner *is* more important than the ability of some greedy pissants to continually stuff their "Fuck the RIAA" sticker clad hard drives with bootleg media.

Much, much more important.

Steve

@Various

@A. Merkin

No, I'm not Brian Roberts, and my haircut so *is* cute :-)

@Mark McGuire

Sorry, which part of my incisive analysis did you imagine means that I don't understand Gamers ? I see you didn't take issue with the piracy or donk3y pr0n.

Frankly I don't really give a toss what people do with their spare time (and the more saddos who are ensconced in WoW or SL, the less of them there are in the pub stinking the place up with their nervous sweat), but I'm not going to lose any sleep if your next WoW update takes an hour to download instead of ten minutes. If you can't hold your wad for that long, that's your problem.

As it happens, I to have occasional need to shift huge amounts of data over my connection, Microsoft SDKs and betas, linux distros and the like. The point being that it *is* occasional. If my bandwidth is contended by a bunch of one handed typists downloading the latest Paris Hilton shagfest and Natalie Portman nip-slip vids all the livelong day (or some gimpy fanboy who feels the need to audition every single linux distro in the world and doesn't know how to use incremental update facilities or FTP properly), I think I have the right to be pissed off, and so does my ISP. In fact I *demand* that they do something about it. That's what I pay them for.

Steve

I mean really, who gives a shit ?

So a few thousand lusers have to wait a bit longer for their pirated music, DVDs, ripped TV shows and donk3y pr0n. Big fucking deal.

And in the future, a few thousand sad fucks who spend all their downtime sodomising elves in WoW will be affected.

My heart fucking bleeds.

Information wants to be expensive. Pay up of piss off. Whining leeches.

Gunplay fingered for internet slowdown

Steve

@David Harper

Perhaps it would be ironic IF IT WERE BASTARD WELL TRUE.

But it isn't.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm

"Why was the ARPAnet started? Most of the early "history" on the subject is wrong. As Director of ARPA at the time, I can tell you our intent. The ARPAnet was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was clearly a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPAnet came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them."

m'kay ?

Steve

@Gleb

"so that in case rusky nuke ussky, DoD can boast that they know all about it"

Jesus, I just can't believe people are *still* spouting this utter shite. that's like the third time this month just in El Reg's comments section.

Repeat x 100 : "The internet is not ARPANET, ARPANET was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, the internet was not designed to survive a nuclear strike, my head is full of foamy nonsense."

Reed seeks project engineer at £2k per hour

Steve

Comrades, this is no accident !

I see this all the time. Recruitment 'consultants' seem incapable of a)distinguishing between contract and perm posts, and b) filling in the details boxes on their automated submission forms properly.

Mind you, they aren't renowned for their intelligence, I can remember back in the good old days (when Computer weekly was about the size of an Argos catalogue) seeing a rash of job ads requiring candidates to have three years of Java development. This was in early 1996. (Java was released in May 23 of 1995)

But hey, I sense I'm about to get on to a rant about the endemic incompetence in the IT recruitment industry and it's negative effects on the industry proper (like manufacturing a 'skills crisis' where none exists), so EOF

Monster Trojan monsters job seekers' records

Steve

Infostealer.Monstres ?

Whoever has the job of naming these things should really get out more.

Could Linux become the dominant OS?

Steve

I wonder

How many of the fanboys will past the "Linux on the desktop, eventually" paragraph *before* they start flaming off ?

NASA: no fix needed for shuttle

Steve

disintegrating spacesuits ?

If I was up there, I;d be more worried about disintegrating astronauts. Fuck NASA's "It will be OK, we've run the numbers", where have we heard that before ? After all, this was suposed to be a 'flawless' lift-off.

Google gags Facebook code leaker

Steve

@Ian

"Good code should be self explanatory.

If you need a comment to explain trickery, remove the trickery."

Well, I could spend all day arguing with you about that, but I'm not going to. OTOH no matter how good and self explanatory a piece of is, one thing it can't explain is the the context of the logic which caused it to exist, e.g the particular piece of business logic it implements, and why that 'logic' must *be* implemented, even if it looks, on first glance, to redundant, pointless, or just insane.

This is especially true if you are unlucky enough to spend a lot of time working with hairy legacy systems. I often leave little humorous/explanatory notes both for myself, and for the next poor sap who comes along and starts digging through the code. It can save hours of head scratching. This is particularly true in situations where coder turnover is high and this kind of contextual knowledge is not retained within the organisation in any meaningful way.

Like most coding style issues, I realise that is an intensely personal issue, but as a snidey aside, I've been unlucky enough to work with a few developers over the years with the "Real Men Don't Write Comments" attitude, and every single one of them has been mediocre at best, and usually, not even that good.

Steve

RE: Swearing in comments is cool

Well then for fucks sake don't read any of my code, it's chock full of colourful Anglo Saxon verbiage, crude, childish toilet humour, shameless nob gags and pop culture references.

At the top of a recent C# class called 'KeyMaster' for instance :

/// <summary>

/// During the rectification of the Vuldrini,

/// the traveller came as a large and moving Torg!

/// Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the

/// McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor!

/// Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor

/// that day, I can tell you!

/// </summary>

If I'd wanted to work in a profession without a sense of humour I'd have been an accountant.

Upskirting Dutch bloggers head for court

Steve

RE: Original Article

But I can't read Dutch (for shame), and anyway there still aren't any pictures !

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