Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Stupid GUI designs

« on: September 09, 2011, 12:38:34 pm »

While it is easy to point at GUI's like that and say "Those dummies at Microsoft!  They have no idea what they are doing with this...", making a UI that users intuitively grasp in a productive/useful and discoverable way is much harder than it looks.  Believe it or not, there is a lot of work that goes into the Windows UI design.  The current design works (very well) for a lot of people.  Yes, you can't please everyone simultaneously, but it's certainly possible to come up with a design that works smoothly for the vast majority of persons.

- S (Works at Microsoft, certainly not a UI designer myself though)

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General Discussion / Re: LinkedIn

« on: April 03, 2009, 11:32:04 pm »

I am linked out.

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General Discussion / Re: Slowness

« on: March 30, 2009, 10:16:31 pm »

That's a bit ironic, as I had someone from Ars mail me inquiring about that indirectly for unrelated reasons earlier today.  Seems to be making the rounds.

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Botdev / Re: MCP?

« on: November 26, 2008, 05:27:00 pm »

I'm confused though - if the realm server is rejecting the login because it could not find an associated BNCS connection, then how could such a bug explain that the character login succeeded?

It was more a suggestion on things to poke around with than an explanation.

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Botdev / Re: MCP?

« on: November 25, 2008, 09:52:24 pm »

Does the official client have the same behavior?

I seem to recall that there was, once upon a long time ago, a bug where you could continue to talk to the MCP even after the MCP login request failed.  I'd be surprised if that bug managed to resurface once again.

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General Discussion / Re: Comcast's roumored bandwidth nonsense

« on: November 25, 2008, 02:00:15 pm »

After asking some carefully worded questions, he said that that the backbone of the FiOS network is under very little load compared to its capacity, and that Verizon has no intention of overselling its bandwidth the way cable co's do.

This seems unlikely to me.  $15-$20/megabit for bandwidth commitments in the range you're talking about is not uncommon for well-connected and easily-accessible environments like datacenters.  Even when purchasing bandwidth commits in the 100mbit range, you're probably still looking at something in at least the $10/mbit range.  Verizon also has to field support costs, local loop buildout costs, and other things that are less of an issue in a datacenter-style environment.

Unless you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for that link (+ much more in setup costs), it is being oversubscribed (or has an effective usage cap that prevents you from getting anywhere near 20mbit average bandwidth usage per month).  Otherwise, Verizon would be running themselves into the ground by selling orders of magnitude under cost.

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[x86] Announcements / Re: Spambots

« on: November 17, 2008, 03:19:27 pm »

Can you just enable email validation instead of require approval, or are they actually wiring up enough logic to follow the activation links in the validation emails now?

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General Programming / Re: Range of hardware breakpoints

« on: November 09, 2008, 10:52:08 am »

What are you trying to accomplish?  One thing you could do would be to reprotect pages as noaccess pages (or unset the executable page protection flag, if you have NX enforcement enabled).  However, this gives you page-level granularity, which may be too large to be usable depending on what you're doing.

You are only provided support for up to four instruction fetch breakpoints on x86/x64.

Other than those two options, the other is to replace the first byte of each instruction with an int3, remembering the previous values to restore after the breakpoint exceptions are hit.  If OllyDbg has an extensibility mechanism, perhaps you could do that with a plugin.

(As an aside, I would highly recommend switching to the more full-featured WinDbg, which does absolutely have an extensiblity mechanism capable of writing a plugin to do that, if you really wanted to.)

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General Discussion / Re: Interviewing with Microsoft...

« on: November 01, 2008, 08:19:56 pm »

I'd be careful with those; some of the employee agreements out there in the world are pretty nasty, to the effect of claiming ownership of any ideas you come up with both inside or outside of work.

Heh, definitely.  I'm pretty sure theirs is pretty nasty, but when talking to people, it sounded like it was only to allow them to "cover all their bases".  Regardless, that was definitely one of the things that made me very uncomfortable about working there.  I like owning my ideas.

It was just an internship, though, so now my ideas are mine again!

I was more meaning Lockheed Martin and other companies that do defense-related work.

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General Discussion / Re: Interviewing with Microsoft...

« on: November 01, 2008, 05:14:39 pm »

I think I'll probably apply to Microsoft when they start accepting applications for summer interns (again).  The aforementioned friend who's interviewing this weekend is trying for an internship too, but apparently they accept applications in the fall and in the spring.  I already have three applications into other places (NASA, DoD, Lockheed Martin), and I think I'll probably apply to Google when they open up applications.

What's your reason for being interested in Microsoft, warz?  I mean I've definitely heard great things, but is there something specific that really attracts you to a job there?  I'm still kind of deciding where I want to work this summer  (and I'm by no means assuming I'll be accepted to all the places I apply, lol).

Well, aside from the fact that it's Microsoft, it's probably a more enthusiastic environment because the software you could potentially be working on has the chance to be used by millions of people. Their office is also much closer to where I live, so it'd make commuting a whole lot shorter. Microsoft was also the first place I was in contact with, but I was too late for their first round of application turn-ins. Yeah, they accept applications in the fall and spring, and probably any other time if you match an open position. Besides, Microsoft is one of those career companies if you want it to be. Would I rather work at Google? Ofcourse, their office setup and stuff sounds like a blast but they're impossible to get ahold of. I've sent in several resumes, and have applied to multiple positions over time. I've never received a response about any of them. If I was finished with college I'd probably be applying mainly to gaming companies on the west coast, because I think I'd just enjoy going to work too much.

Ah, cool.  Yeah, those are the answers I kind of expected.  They're definitely awesome reasons -- reasons I'd want to work there as well.  I'm not sure what the deal is with Google.  I've met several people who graduated from here who now work for them.  I'm not sure if it's a matter of getting to know someone in the office where the job you're applying for is or something, but I don't know.  They said they get over 1000 applications for internships a year or something.  It was a little disheartening, lol.

lol, gaming companies would be pretty cool.  I would imagine working on something like WoW would be really fun for a lot of the same reasons you mentioned you'd like to work at MS.

I know several people that work at Lockheed Martin, actually. They say they enjoy it, but most of the stuff they work on they can't talk about. haha.

I worked at LM last summer.  It was pretty awesome.  The office I worked at was really small (200ish people), though, and all of their projects involved logistics, which I didn't find especially interesting (although there were some really cool approaches to some of the hard problems they were faced with).  The one I put as my "first choice" is here in Colorado and is much bigger and I think is involved with what I'd consider more interesting projects.  All my work was "unclassified", but I definitely put my signature at the end of a long NDA, lol.  I think most people who work there get security clearances at some point; it's just not so useful for them to get them for interns (I think they cost the government in excess of $30,000 or something?).  The job I applied for at the DoD requires a security clearance, though, lol.

I'd be careful with those; some of the employee agreements out there in the world are pretty nasty, to the effect of claiming ownership of any ideas you come up with both inside or outside of work.

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General Discussion / Re: Interviewing with Microsoft...

« on: November 01, 2008, 12:23:43 am »

warz: Which team, or do you not know?

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General Discussion / Re: Interviewing with Microsoft...

« on: October 31, 2008, 09:42:04 pm »

For what position are you interviewing for?

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JavaOp Support Archive / Re: JavaOP and Java ME

« on: September 15, 2008, 12:28:05 pm »

SD card interfaces on most phones, in my experience, are rare to do over a couple megabits/sec throughput (say, 4-5mbit/sec).  You really don't want to be doing paging at that rate.

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JavaOp Support Archive / Re: JavaOP and Java ME

« on: September 14, 2008, 11:54:23 pm »

Sure, most mobile platforms that have a lot of development on them have emulators of some sort.  Not a perfect match as you'll be off on actual CPU speed, but you can usually limit RAM on emulators to a realistic value.  There's a nice ARM emulator for Windows Mobile, for instance.

No idea about this particular platform, though, but if it's a major one, I'd imagine that there's probably an emulator somewhere.

You will probably not want to run a battle.net connection from your phone, however.  That is going to wake up your data link frequently, at least for SID_PING/SID_NULL, and that's going to completely hose your battery life.  I'd be surprised if you got even a day between charges like that.  Battery life for a device like a cell phone is dependent on keeping as much of the device powered off for as long as possible, and frequently waking up to perform network tasks does not mesh well with that philosophy.

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General Discussion / Re: Comcast's roumored bandwidth nonsense

« on: September 14, 2008, 10:51:45 am »

The reality is, however, that the dollar per megabit cost, even in large bulk transit pipes, is just so far below what you pay for month for Comcast for the advertised connection that there's no way that ends will meet if you actually consume that much.  This has pretty much always been true.  Residiential ISPs need to oversubscribe to survive, because there are just not enough residiential customers willing to pay the price for dedicated bandwidth and enough overhead to cover the ISP's other support costs (last mile connectivity, plant maintenance), and enough for the ISP to even begin thinking about making any sort of profit at the end of the day.

These ISPs have never really been selling unlimited bandwidth, if only because given how oversubscribed they are, it's just physically not possible for everyone to burst their link at full all day and receive their full throughput.

Now, sure, advertising things as unlimited despite that is at best deceptive, and at worst probably legally questionable, especially given the FCC's recent actions against Comcast.  Comcast has sucky business practices, but any other ISP that you choose is not going to be really selling you "unlimited" bandwidth.  At least, not unless you are buying something like a T-1 or a hard commit at a reputable colo facility, and those are much more expensive (orders of magnitude) than a residential cable hookup in terms of what you would be billed for (and the latter would only help if you lived at a colo facility, something that the building maintainers would likely take exception to).

It's pretty much a fact of life, though, that if you see "unlimited" (most) anywhere, that's not really unlimited, just "more than we think that the average person will use" (at best), or "shady", and with a low limit (at worst, and not too uncommon, actually).

iago: You should perform some research into who provides that company's upstream connection.  I have been reading a lot about small, local Canadian ISPs that lease lines from the big giants (e.g. Rogers) getting hosed and having the ISP they are renting lines from, or their upstream provider, perform their own rate limiting and go back on their commitments to said small ISP.