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  Why do people hate Windows?

Windows brought us into PC era, it becomes the most widely used OS in the past 20 or so years. But unfortunately there are still many people hate Windows. Is it because we may encounter the notorious blue screen issue now and then?  People hate Microsoft Windows for the same reason they hate Comcast, United Airlines, or Paypal.Once Microsoft gained a dominant market position, it completely and utterly took its customers for granted. It became arrogant and complacent, causing customers to fe...

   Windows,Hate     2013-08-02 21:13:53

  An experience on fixing HTTP 406 Not Acceptable error

This post is about an experience of mine on fixing a HTTP 406 Not Acceptable error seen on one of my page. Just got back from a business trip and opened my computer as usual to start to monitor my website statistics. But when I opened the page on showing real time page views, it shows nothing but zero. So I pressed F12 to bring up the developer tool to check on what's going on. The logic of loading the real time page view is backed by AJAX call. In the developer tool console, I see that the rAJA...

   PHP,AJAX,HTML,HTTP 406,CONTENT-TYPE     2019-03-30 04:09:10

  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  Full disk encryption is too good, says US intelligence agency

You might be shocked to learn this, but when a quivering-lipped Chloe from 24 cracks the encryption on a terrorist’s hard drive in 30 seconds, the TV show is faking it. “So what? It’s just a TV show.” Well, yes, but it turns out that real federal intelligence agencies, like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, also have a problem cracking encrypted hard disks — and according to a new research paper, this is a serious risk to national security.The study...

   FDE,Full disk encryption,Crack,Difficulty     2011-11-19 01:55:17

  Bionic Office

Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a replacement for my grandmother's old brownstone where we spent our first few years, working from bedrooms and the garden. Most software managers know what good office space would be like, and they know they don't have it, and can't have it. Office space seems to be the one thing that nobody can get rig...

   Work place,Life,Office,Confortable     2012-01-18 09:00:55

  Can we believe our eyes?

Several days ago, one of our customers submitted a sample (SHA1: fbe71968d4c5399c2906b56d9feadf19a35beb97, detected as TrojanDropper:Win32/Vundo.L). This trojan hijacks  the hosts “vk.com” and “vkontakte.ru” (both social networking sites in Russia)and redirects them to 92.38.209.252, but achieves this in an unusual way. A common  method used to hijack a website and redirect it to a site of the attacker’s choice is to add an entry in the Windows hosts f...

   Window,Software,Eye,Weired     2011-08-22 12:12:16

  User experience : Exception handling

Exception handling is the process of handling emergencies or unpredictable operational errors. The specific time of the occurrence of unexpected events and the actual consequences of the specific situation are difficult to predict. How to handle this unexpected crisis is also related to the user experience of your users. Let's first look at how some famous products deal with unexpected exception encountered by users:1. Goodyear tires can automatically expand when leaking.Tire blast is one of the...

   User experience,Exception handling     2013-04-06 05:05:04

  The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software...

   Software,Design,Business,Software design     2011-10-29 07:22:09

  10 major updates of Windows 8.1

Last night, the 2013 Microsoft Build Developer Conference started in San Francisco. The highlight of the first day is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the release of Windows 8.1 Preview . The final version will be released in November and he also mentioned that there would be over 300 updates on the new OS. Now let's summarize 10 major updates of the new OS. 1. Classical desktop mode After getting a lot of feedback from users, Microsoft adds a new setting. Users can choose to start in clas...

   Windows 8.1,Build     2013-06-27 05:45:02

  The 5 types of programmers

In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan. However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enou...

   Programmer,Type,Anti-Programmer,OCD     2012-01-11 04:40:09

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