The Old New Thing

A privacy policy that doesn't actively offend me

I've ranted before about privacy policies and how they don't actually protect your privacy. (All they're required to do is disclose the policy; there is no requirement that the policy must be any good.) Today I read MetLife's privacy policy and found to my surprise that it does not actively offend me. It's written in plain English...

The only logical conclusion is that he was cloned

Something is wrong with the world when fark finds something "real" news organizations miss. (When I first learned about fark, I confused it with FARC, a different organization entirely. That's right, a terrorist organization has its own official web site. Gotta love the Internet.)Anyway, fark has pointed out that the guy that ...

Catholic baseball fans want to eat meat on opening day

So it happens that Opening Day of the baseball season coincides with Good Friday, a day of "fasting and abstinence" according to Catholic tradition. (Then again, after Vatican II, the definition of "fasting and abstinence" weakened significantly. All that most people remember any more is "no meat".) Catholics in Boston have applied to ...

The car with no user-serviceable parts inside

For the first time, a team of women is challenged to develop a car, and the car they come up with requires an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and doesn't even have a hood, so you can't poke around the engine. To me, a car has no user-serviceable parts inside. The only times I have opened the hood is when somebody else said, "...

Why is the line terminator CR+LF?

This protocol dates back to the days of teletypewriters. CR stands for "carriage return" - the CR control character returned the print head ("carriage") to column 0 without advancing the paper. LF stands for "linefeed" - the LF control character advanced the paper one line without moving the print head. So if you wanted to return the print ...

On a server, paging = death

Chris Brumme's latest treatise contained the sentence "Servers must not page". That's because on a server, paging = death. I had occasion to meet somebody from another division who told me this little story: They had a server that went into thrashing death every 10 hours, like clockwork, and had to be rebooted. To mask the problem, the server ...

More on the AMD64 calling convention

Josh Williams picks up the 64-bit ball with an even deeper discussion of the AMD64 (aka x64) calling convention and things that go wrong when you misdeclare your function prototypes...

Ännu skriver jag inte bra

I was exchanging e-mail with one of the people I will be visiting while I'm in Uppsala [link repaired 10:43pm]. and we wrote in double-translation, first in Swedish, with English translation beneath it. But eventually he gave up and wrote exclusively in English. I went back to my previous dual-language message and found a few pretty ...

Still more creative uses for CAPTCHA

I want to say up front that I think CAPTCHA is a stupid name. CAPTCHA stands for "Computer-Aided Process for Testing..." something something. Why do people feel the urge the create some strained cutesy acronym for their little invention? Anyway, it has already been noted how spammers are getting around these tests by harvesting a practically-...