kirby81_it - Slashdot User

Whatever Happened To Programming? 623

Posted by kdawson on Saturday March 06, 2010 @11:26PM from the you-had-zeros? dept.

Mirk writes "In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges." This 3-day-old article has sparked lively discussions at Reddit and at Hacker News, and the author has responded with a followup and summation.

Thanks For the ... Eight-Track, Uncle Alex 633

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 25, 2009 @04:25AM from the redundancy-and-repetition dept.

Uncle Alex writes "My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data — text, video, music files. They came to me (the closest thing to a geek our family has) wondering: what's the best way to save the data to ensure she'll actually be able to see it in 16 years? Software might be out of date, hardware may no longer be used... any suggestions?"

Red Hat Is Now Part of the S&P 500 128

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 18, 2009 @10:26AM from the stock-build dept.

phantomfive writes "Red Hat has made it onto the S&P 500, an important measure of the stock market. It is replacing CIT, which is expected to go bankrupt after the government refused to bail them out. Red Hat is the first Linux company to make it on to the S&P 500. While this means little directly for the company, it is an indication of the importance Linux is taking on in the world."

Classilla, a New Port of Mozilla To Mac OS 9 170

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 09, 2009 @05:31PM from the old-ways-are-best dept.

oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs,' and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."

Comment There's a buffer overflow even in the fix... (Score 2, Informative) 161

by kirby81_it on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @12:45PM (#7736382) Attached to: Mac OS X Buffer Overflow Found

argv[2] gets strcat-ted with DEVICE_PREFIX: DEVICE_PREFIX = "/dev/" strcpy( &myDeviceName[0], DEVICE_PREFIX ); strcat( &myDeviceName[0], argv[2] ); and myDeviceName is declared as a 0..255 array. So the right check should be: myDeviceLength > 250 Even worse, there's the following code after the strcpy-strcat couple: strcpy( &myRawDeviceName[0], RAW_DEVICE_PREFIX ); strcat( &myRawDeviceName[0], argv[2] ); and RAW_DEVICE_PREFIX = "/dev/r" myDeviceLenght should not be more than 249 character long. So the right code should be: myDeviceLength = strlen( argv[2] ); // Added check for lengths of myDeviceName over 255 chars; 16/12/2003 Namu if (( myDeviceLength < 2 ) || (myDeviceLength > 249)) { goto ExitThisRoutine; }

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