Arrests For Selling Poison-Ware In Spain 178
An anonymous reader writes "Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:2, Informative)
That kind of thing has been happening for generations, where have you been?. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence [wikipedia.org]
Not entirely shenanigans! (Score:5, Informative)
[Planned obsolescence] has been happening for generations, where have you been?
It's not always ENTIRELY shenanigans.
For instance: The "design lifetime" in the auto industry is not just about selling another car. It's also about not spending a lot of extra money making, say, the transmission good for 750,000 miles when several other major systems are going to go out at a small fraction of that time. (When you're making several million units a year, saving a nickel each adds up to enough to hire two more full-time engineers to figure out how to do it.)
Making mechanical parts that last can be tough and costly. (And half a century ago it was a lot tougher, without the major advances in materials science since then.) If you design all the parts to last for at least some design lifetime and not much longer you can accumulate a lot of savings. If some major system was going to unavoidably fail shortly after that design lifetime anyhow, having the rest not good for much longer doesn't appreciably affect the utility of the vehicle for the consumer. But the cost savings can be used to lower the price (and grab market share, for a net profit increase) - which DOES help him out significantly.
The ideal in the limit is the "Preacher's marvelous one-horse shay, which lasted a hundred years and all fell apart on the very same day."
some cars have oil change light that only dealer c (Score:3, Informative)
some cars have oil change light that only dealer can trun off. But there are other laws that stop the them going to far.
Just wait for the AIR force to get shut off and then this carp will die fast and some may go hidden jail.
Re:Does anyone know who it is? (Score:4, Informative)
The company is CIPSA, is mentionend on the GDT news: https://www.gdt.guardiacivil.es/webgdt [guardiacivil.es] at the bottom of the page, under "Detenidos los responsables de comercializar software con "bombas lógicas"
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Your lack knowledge of Spanish culture (Score:3, Informative)
First of all: No Spanish worker will call his boss "sir". That's very much anti-Spanish. Just to give you an example: a recent unofficial competition asked Spanish people to come up with lyrics for the Spanish national Anthem (which is lyric-less). One of the candidates had the following text:
"Un jefe muy cabrón / soy un buen español"
Which translates to:
"A very bastard boss / I'm a good Spanish citizen"
Also, we use expletives when giving/receiving bad news. They are solely lacking on your text.
Re:How dare you, my mother is a saint! (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, the one who wrote that. And I don't mean just readability by novices.
*(&z + z) -- unless it's C++, this makes sense only for referring to the zth next variable after z. Like: int z, a, b, c; -- z=1 will select a, z=2 will select b, z=3 will select c. In an old compiler, this will always work. In an optimizing one, it's damn likely to break.
Mixing dec and hex numbers, and writing down constants for bit operations using decimal numbers in general is prone to mistakes.
So is using addition in an expression that consist mostly of bit operations, you want | there instead.
0x8F is a complex mask, it definitely should be a #define with a name. There's nothing wrong with masks like 0x7F or 0x1F, but for 0x8F, it's not obvious enough.
~(~t11) -- uhm, what's the point?
With these issues fixed, though, with a bit of comments such a code isn't that bad.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)
The people were charged because it was a criminal case. Had it been a civil action, they would have gone after the company. Pretty sure it's the same in the US.
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:some cars have oil change light that only deale (Score:3, Informative)