[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 @ 16:33 -0400, Joshua Boyd said:

> > ...or:
> > 
> >     somefunction(...)
> >     {
> > 	char *buffer;
> > 	buffer = malloc(something);
> > 	/* do some work */
> > 	free(buffer);
> > 	return buffer;
> >     }
> 
> Good God.

Believe me, God had nothing to do with it... :)

> Doing that rarely, well, mistakes do get made sometimes (though code
> reviews should have picked it up).  But to be common?  If that is
> common, that someone seems to need to be fired.

Oh, I agree.  The great irony of it all is that I am out of work and as
far as I know that particular moron still works there.

I am better at debugging malloc() errors than I am at kissing ass.

BTW... the above code, minus the guts of the function, is pretty much
verbatim.  It was in a filter which processed billions of $US in credit
card transactions.

Fortunately, the bank's mainframe operations where master accounts are
handled are not run like that.  

However, with increasing pressure to replace mainframes with more
politicall correct and sexy/interesting/modern/"new" technology,
I wonder how long we can rely on them.

I have to believe that the ranks of people skilled in taking care of
mainframes and the plethora of minicomputers still used these days
is dwindling with each passing year.

I do not believe that lesser machines and people are capable of getting
the job done.

So what happens to core industries like banking when the work is moved
to Windows server on commodity hardware, run by script kiddies?

Are we slowly heading for big trouble?


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." --
Unknown]