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Kode Vicious Wants You
I enjoyed the first column by Kode Vicious (October 2004), and especially liked the irreverent remarks to questioners prior to his substantive reply. Good column—keep up the good work!
Charles Kerpelman, Geneva, Switzerland
QUEUE EDITORS RESPOND: Kode Vicious, who’s busy writing next month’s column, truly appreciates your feedback, as do we. It helps us know what we’re doing right, and what we could improve upon. And for that we thank you.
Now—and this goes out to all of our esteemed readers—what do you say we kick it up a notch, eh? That is to say, how about sending us some more krazy koding kwestions for the venerable KV? Just think, sharing with him your koding kunundrums will get you your very own Queue t-shirt. Now that’s proper incentive, innit? Kewl. Now fire away!
Deliman’s da Man
I very much enjoyed your interview with Mike Deliman about MER (Mars Exploration Rover) software development and debugging (October 2004). It’s hard to appreciate the thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours in software development and testing that go into such a project. I encourage you to continue including these practical aspects to help developers compare their project allocations with others. I’ve passed the article to my 14-year-old son. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it (and learn a few things) as much as I did.
Martin Smith, San Jose, California
In Want of Nothing
Thanks for Roy Want’s article, “The Magic of RFID” (October 2004). For me it provided just the right introduction to the topic.
Harry Rudin, Oberrieden, Switzerland
The root of the Problem, Redux
In general I liked Marcus Ranum’s article, “Security—The root of the Problem” (June 2004), and agreed with most of what he wrote. I am somewhat bothered, however, by what I feel is an inconsistency in the article. Figure 1 has an example of default compiler options. Figure 2 shows an example of compilation with full warnings. Later in the article there is a statement (which I strongly agree with!) that a warning should be treated as an error. My question is, why in the example shown in figure 2 is there no use of the -Werror option that would cause GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) to turn all of the warnings into errors?
Yaacov Fenster, Petach Tikvah, Israel
MARCUS RANUM RESPONDS: I selected simple examples that let me illustrate the issue without turning my article into a lesson on the minutiae of GCC options. In fact, GCC’s options have options—which is part of the problem: most programmers will not spend the time to figure out more than the minimum necessary to build their code reliably.
Longhorn and WinFS
In Alexander Wolfe’s Toolkit column on the Microsoft Longhorn operating system, “Longhorn Ties Platform Apps to Core Operating System” (September 2004), he talks about WinFS. I have heard that new file system has been cancelled for Longhorn. Is this true?
Scott Howser, St. Petersburg, Florida
ALEXANDER WOLFE RESPONDS: It’s true. Microsoft recently announced that WinFS (Windows Future Storage) will be delivered separately from Longhorn. This is being done so that Microsoft will be able to meet a 2006 target date for shipment of the client version of Longhorn. (A server release of Longhorn is set to follow in 2007.)
A couple of additional data points: WinFS, which provides advanced data organization and management capabilities, will be in beta testing at the time the Longhorn client becomes available. And the Avalon graphics subsystem and Indigo Web-services subsystem will be made available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, as well as on Longhorn.
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Originally published in Queue vol. 2, no. 9—
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