Microsoft Programming Contest Hacked and Defaced 151
davidmwilliams writes "Microsoft followed their major annual Tech-Ed event in Australia with a week-long programming contest called 'DevSta,' to find 'star developers.' While the quantity and quality of submissions suggest a poor turnout, it certainly caught the attention of at least two hackers who left their mark. Here is the low-down on the contest, what happened, by whom, and screen shots for posterity in case it's been fixed by the time you read this. And unless the volume of submissions increase dramatically within the next few hours, someone may be awarded an Xbox for doing nothing more than rewriting the Windows calculator as a .NET app."
Re:Microsoft catching the attention of hackers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Meh, this hack is probably even worse, both for its general stupidity as an idea and its felonious misuse of metric prefixes:
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/metricclock_2853.html?hl=en [google.com]
FFS(aimed at author of linked app, not parent), if you are going to stick it to the man and boldly challenge the stodgy conventions of horology, at least do it the clock mod(10), not 1 through 10. Seriously, you could lose your geek card for that kind of thing.
Re:Google: $10M in prizes, MS: an XBox (Score:5, Interesting)
The Microsoft thing seems to be a week-long "speed hack" aimed at a small audience just for fun. Hardly the same thing. Oh, but this is
Re:Microsoft programmers....stars? Too funny... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure you have other reasons to dislike it - but that sounds like a design mistake that has little to do with the 'registry-like' interface.
I've seen the same 'feature' (commit on-change) on a lot of other naive user interfaces for remote database storage - web forms, spreadsheets, desktop clients... Typically the product of good intentions, and very optimistic assumptions about the usage.
There's nothing magical about a 'registry-like' tree that makes explicit batch updates impossible - or on other interfaces that make them auto-magically implemented.
Unless your 'user interface' is to force the user to type a SQL update statement - then you can't go wrong on that (the user, on the other hand...).