Brown fingerprints wanted as Phorm bungles again

Comments In an effort to calm the European Union's anti-trust concerns, Microsoft has released 14,000 pages of coding secrets. The documentation for the first time publicly shows the underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.

It's going to get really fun when the US Supreme Court looks at software patents later this year. The word is out that the Supes are really unhappy with the Federal District Court's abuse of software patents. The Supreme Court may finally rule that you can always use math, even in software.

Scott Dunn

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Last time there was an actual leak of code from MS it was found that the coding itself was mostly of high quality. The reasons for the problems were there in the comments, IIRC - various sometimes quite acerbic and even obscene comments from the programmers about the kludges and hairy workarounds they had to use to get round MS' usual issues - backward compatibility and ease of use, mostly. How many people have got into issues with Vista because they're trying to run some ten-year old app written for NT4?

it's bloated and inefficient not because it's badly coded, but because MS' Men In Suits insist on it doing silly things.

KarlTh

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Like other MS inventions, Hungarian notation started life in Xerox. It was used in BCPL, which has one data type. An extra clue about what a variable is for was useful in BCPL. HN was supposed to give information about a variable's purpose. MS missed the point. Now people think that HN means encoding the data type of a variable in the name. This just repeats the work done by the compiler and adds extra confusion when the encoding gets out of step with the data type.

In some situations, HN done properly can make C source code clearer. If the prefix of a variable and a function name do not match, you may have found a bug.

Fining MS until they produce documentation is not going to achieve anything.

IE was never free. People are forced to pay for it as a part of the purchase of a new computer. The only sensible way to allow competition is to forbid the sale of MS software with a computer. By all means, install a deactivated copy of Vista for free, and let people who want Vista pay a separate activation fee.

Flocke Kroes

A recent study suggests that if you look like a slag, you probably are one. A Durham Uni research team led by Dr Lynda Boothroyd found that people assume that manly-looking men and slutty-looking women are more likely to pass it around, and were generally right. The team proposed, though, that what women are really after is a bloke who can be expected to remain faithful - which means one with softer, more feminine features, apparently.

Now all we need is some kind of facebook add-in thing which will automatically guage and make available ALL individuals 'sluttiness' ratings, list them all in order of sluttiness, then proximity to whoever is searching, and perhaps an instant map print out with directions to their house, providing they've clicked a button and accepted your request for a bit of a beasting. Maybe you could also be matched by the STDs you share too

Rob

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I've just checked the link to Dr. Boothroyd's page and I reckon she might.

Anonymous Coward

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"women don't fancy studs who get lots of sex"

Good news for me then!

Paul Talbot

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Unfortunately, this kind of research often ends up in waffle - eg : women prefer men who look after their children, because that's adaptive. We actually have no idea.

Maybe women prefer to sleep with men who look 'manly' (and thus likely to sleep around) but settle down with men that are nurturing. Maybe men say they like 'easy' women, but when it comes to the crunch, they don't.

As the Reg points out - what this proves is the correlation between faces and what people will admit on a questionnaire, nothing more.

Gilleain Torrance

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One would have thought that the logical conclusion about this is:

1) People who have lots of sex, probably do so because lots of people want to have sex with them.

2) People who have little sex, probably do so because most people don't want to have sex with them.

Taking that as a starting point, I would have thought that much more appropriate sets of conclusions could either be:

1) Men lie more than women about how much they have sex.

or

2) Women lie more than men about who they want to sleep with.

Personally I would probably argue that both are true. Men who aren't getting it are quite likely (especially students) to lie about getting it. And women won't admit to liking the slutty ones because it will increase their chance of being labeled as being easy/slutty themselves.

Anonymous Coward

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It all depends when during the month the women were asked.

We're only interested a few days, any other time we prefer chocolate,

hence why we prefer caring men for a relationship, they buy us chocolate, but manly men for sex, though another woman is better.

Hazel Rees