RE: Hypothetical design question

["Dave Paris" <dparis () w3works com>]

Not to wander from the strict topic or be inflamatory but more often than
not it's the marketing department mandating "features".  Not too many
programmers I know are in the position to just add features during their
implementation. (at least in commercial-ware)  Heck, most programmers I know
have sufficient intellectual agility to realize that a lot of features
currently found in common applications are just Really Bad Ideas [tm] from
any number of angles, security ranking at or near the top.

I do believe most programmers are aware of the consequences.  Unfortunately,
they're not the ones steering the boat (toward the rocks).  Most programmers
also have this silly need for food and shelter which tends to conflict with
the act of contradicting the feature list to which they're supposed to code.
:-)

In short, please don't shoot the messenger.

Kind Regards,
-dsp

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of Andreas Saurwein
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 10:21 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [SC-L] Hypothetical design question

[...]
There is always the simple excuse that the OS should do it. So far OS'es
are not intelligent enough to protect users from stupid programmers and
itself from stupid users.

I think its time that we think about how much features we offer to our
users and how they affect the environment they are running in.
We [programmers] are not aware of the consequences of our implementations.

cheers
Andreas