Worse Than Crashing? Easy: Mistaking "MAY" for "SHALL" Near Money

Jeff Atwood wonders "what's worse than crashing?" and gives a general "application causes data loss and/or corruption." Uh huh. Let's fill between the lines on that:

I once worked on a supply chain system where one of the returns of the supplier's Cancel() function was along the lines of …

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Silverlight, Why Do You Taunt Me So?

Silverlight steadfastly refuses to install on my development Tablet PC or in my "Orcas Beta" Virtual PC. Those are the only two machines on which I'll put an under-development CLR, since experience has shown that it can be very difficult to cleanly uninstall anything in Microsoft's browser-CLR-plugin axis. This is …

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Ambler: Agile on a Fixed Budget

Scott Ambler has a great new article on DDJ discussing agile software development on a fixed budget. He discusses the "iron triangle" of time, scope, and resources and gives alternate strategies depending on which "corner" of the triangle is most constrained.

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Rosario, Post-Orcas/2008 Visual Studio Team System Available In CTP

If you're eager to get your first glimpse at Visual Studio X (you heard it here first!), you can download a VPC image Visual Studio

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Huge Uptick in PDF File-Attachment Spam

Is everyone else seeing a sudden increase in spam with PDF attachments? I'm not sure if they are payload-bearing virii or just stock spam (many seem to have "investor alert" nonsense in their title). It's just amazing to me the level of idiot on which these apparently-profitable scams are built …

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Broad Patent on Shared-Memory Parallel Processing Basis for Suit Against Sony (Tip of the Pyramid?)

The owners of Patent 5,056,000 have whacked Sony with a suit, on the basis that the Cell processor in the PS3 is a violator. The claims seem center on the idea of an "interconnection switch" that locks the access of a single processor to a particular bank of …

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"GonnaNeedIt" Annotation

I think programming languages need the complement to "deprecated." It's for those moments when "YAGNI" conflicts with "But I just know I will..." Less imperative than a TODO, but more than a mental note.

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Do Kids Still Build Models?

Revell models. With the plastic trees that you twisted every numbered part out of? Rubber glue, Testor paint? If I were to make a reference to this experience as a metaphor, would anyone under the age of 40 know what I was talking about?

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Virtualized TaskBar: A Utility I'd Like

Is there any utility that displays on your task bar all the applications running within your Virtual PC / VMWare / Remote Desktop Session? I'd really like such a utility. It ought to be possible, at least if the virtual machine is network-reachable. If I felt that I could sell more than …

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Coming To The Big Island This Week? The Helicopter Tour Might Be Worth It

\<a href="http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/archive/2007/Jul/DSCN1003_L.jpg"" target="_blank" atomicselection="true" rel="noopener noreferrer">Since I blogged the pause and restart of Pu'u O'o, for completeness I will report that the eruption on The Big Island of Hawai'i has not only returned …

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