Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stock Puppy who wrote (54300)	7/7/2006 10:35:22 AM
From: inaflash	Respond to of 213182

...Since MS is "renowned" - no, sorry - "rumored" for not documenting all of the features and consequences in their APIs (and even not documenting some of their APIs) providing an alleged advantage over competitors for those programmers that know about these things. But an application that takes advantage of alleged undocumented things would break under WINE since the feature, consequence or API itself equivalent would be missing. It's not surprising that some "features" aren't documented. Programmers don't always document, and at the same time put lots of extra things in either on purpose (back doors, easter eggs, etc.) or accidentally (bugs, poor programming, carelessness, etc.). That's part of the problem with security and Microsoft has tried to crack down on these problems, but mainly if security is a concern, probably not as hard when it helps them slow down the competition. There will always be some difference between what the documentation says and the code does. Often times, partially working code is easier to leave in, or is left in inadvertantly. Since it isn't documented, it can be removed without harm, or once completed and fixed, the documentation can be written. With the programs growing in size, there's a lot more of this dead code lying around, and some of it comes to life once in a while.