Look at Prof. Fenynmann's diagnosis of the first shuttle disaster. One guy cut across hundreds of employees and thousands and thousands of pages of engineering documents. He found the needle in the haystack with a glass of ice water.
As a software person you must be aware that even a single person working alone can find a major exploitable flaw in a complex system.
NHTSA engineers can work with industry to develop standardized tests for cars and subsystems.
Sure they won't be complete, but testing is never complete anyway.
Make the whole testing framework open and easy to work with so the manufacturers will want to take it home, use it for themselves, add to it, share tests (not results!) with competitors, etc.
We all know the concepts behind "many eyes". If everyone is working with the same basic tests then they will of course become more rigorous and more accurate over time.
NHTSA can run their own tests on submitted prototypes and publish the results. If everything is wide open there will be no surprises.
Maybe they do compete, but poor quality will sink all their boats together.
We have been making software for 40 years and we have lots of nice standard test frameworks.
Why is this not true in the auto industry where they have been making product for over 100 years?
Your typical keyboard is quite waterproof. I've spilled coffee on mine several times. Into the dishwasher it goes. I let it dry for about a week and then it's just fine. (Yes I have a backup keyboard). I have done this several times now and the keyboard still works fine.
But you have to look at the big picture. This feature can be combined with one of the other Microsoft "remote access features" that they have been working so hard to remove from their product.
Just buy them a used iPhone identical to the one they lost/broke. Hey that one was used, too. Or just reimburse them the used value. They can buy a used one on ebay and they will be right back where they started: with a used phone.
This is precisely what car insurance companies do, it's nothing new.
If you eliminate the possibility of someone making out on the deal then you will weed out the opportunists.
"If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity"
Really? My employer uses YouTube a lot. We make YouTube videos of customer recommendations. Having an engineer gush about all of the time he saves with our product makes a very effective sales tool.
A lot of companies use YouTube for instructional videos for their products. Why bother with complex printed directions when you can watch a real live human do it?
Really you should not dismiss the value of something just because YOU can't figure out how to do something useful with it.
From what I understand, the choice is that we can either keep flying the Space Shuttle, past its design lifetime and with its two fatal crashes in its history, or we can use someone else's rocket and work on developing a superior replacement. Is this even a choice? Who in their right mind would choose the former?
The false positives will turn into real positives. When a machine gets marked as non-genuine, it stops receiving updates. Which means is WILL get 0wned by the next zero-day attack.
They are basically just manufacturing more spambot machines with this strategy.
Fedora recently added a feature named palimpsest that checks your hard drive. I did an upgrade and all of a sudden I am getting complaints about my hard drive being close to failure. I think "no way, this is a pretty new drive". But I dig deeper and sure enough the drive really is bad.
What about the maintainability of the source? Even free software is "proprietary" if you need a proprietary manual to make heads or tails of the driver code.
Free Software is a good thing, no doubt, but please don't kid yourself into thinking that there is some extra benefit to a machine where you can download the source code to the OS and the drivers. Your computer is STILL VERY PROPRIETARY and there are lots of things going on in there over which you still have no control.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument makes no sense.
Look at Prof. Fenynmann's diagnosis of the first shuttle disaster. One guy cut across hundreds of employees and thousands and thousands of pages of engineering documents. He found the needle in the haystack with a glass of ice water.
As a software person you must be aware that even a single person working alone can find a major exploitable flaw in a complex system.
Come on we are software people.
We all know that it is all about testing.
NHTSA engineers can work with industry to develop standardized tests for cars and subsystems.
Sure they won't be complete, but testing is never complete anyway.
Make the whole testing framework open and easy to work with so the manufacturers will want to take it home, use it for themselves, add to it, share tests (not results!) with competitors, etc.
We all know the concepts behind "many eyes". If everyone is working with the same basic tests then they will of course become more rigorous and more accurate over time.
NHTSA can run their own tests on submitted prototypes and publish the results. If everything is wide open there will be no surprises.
Maybe they do compete, but poor quality will sink all their boats together.
We have been making software for 40 years and we have lots of nice standard test frameworks.
Why is this not true in the auto industry where they have been making product for over 100 years?
I should introduce you to my friends Floyd and Steinberg.
Really what is the problem?
Your typical keyboard is quite waterproof. I've spilled coffee on mine several times. Into the dishwasher it goes. I let it dry for about a week and then it's just fine. (Yes I have a backup keyboard). I have done this several times now and the keyboard still works fine.
And certainly other OS's have this feature too.
But you have to look at the big picture. This feature can be combined with one of the other Microsoft "remote access features" that they have been working so hard to remove from their product.
Nobody working in Blender is likely to be taken seriously about animation work anyway. If someone were serious, they'd invest in serious software.
When I decided I wanted to learn to drive, I decided to be serious about it, so I bought a brand new Mercedes 500SEL for my driving lessons.
And if it is your hobby? Use Maya or Softimage... Hobbies aren't free.
I think you have the concepts of "profession" and "hobby" reversed.
Cover replacement value.
Just buy them a used iPhone identical to the one they lost/broke. Hey that one was used, too. Or just reimburse them the used value. They can buy a used one on ebay and they will be right back where they started: with a used phone.
This is precisely what car insurance companies do, it's nothing new.
If you eliminate the possibility of someone making out on the deal then you will weed out the opportunists.
"If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity"
Really? My employer uses YouTube a lot. We make YouTube videos of customer recommendations. Having an engineer gush about all of the time he saves with our product makes a very effective sales tool.
A lot of companies use YouTube for instructional videos for their products. Why bother with complex printed directions when you can watch a real live human do it?
Really you should not dismiss the value of something just because YOU can't figure out how to do something useful with it.
Thanks for the great post.
I would mod you up if I could.
Very insightful.
From what I understand, the choice is that we can either keep flying the Space Shuttle, past its design lifetime and with its two fatal crashes in its history, or we can use someone else's rocket and work on developing a superior replacement. Is this even a choice? Who in their right mind would choose the former?
If your third party software requires you to have a fully patched machine in order to receive support.
@FranTaylor, lots of people use Windows on a server
You are not refuting what I said.
EVERY attack is a 0-day attack if you are not getting updates.
And this is a nice little wake up call to those folks, telling them to get busy on their Linux port. Again yet more poor strategic planning.
The false positives will turn into real positives. When a machine gets marked as non-genuine, it stops receiving updates. Which means is WILL get 0wned by the next zero-day attack.
They are basically just manufacturing more spambot machines with this strategy.
Who in their right mind would use Windows on a server any more?
Fedora recently added a feature named palimpsest that checks your hard drive. I did an upgrade and all of a sudden I am getting complaints about my hard drive being close to failure. I think "no way, this is a pretty new drive". But I dig deeper and sure enough the drive really is bad.
There are exceptions, but they're becoming fewer and fewer.
That's not necessarily true. As the top end moves up, new opportunities and markets are created that were not there before.
The firmware for wireless cards is a proprietary binary blob for which the source code is not available.
This shoots down the "100% Free Software" concept.
Where is the microcode for the peripherals?
What about the maintainability of the source? Even free software is "proprietary" if you need a proprietary manual to make heads or tails of the driver code.
Free Software is a good thing, no doubt, but please don't kid yourself into thinking that there is some extra benefit to a machine where you can download the source code to the OS and the drivers. Your computer is STILL VERY PROPRIETARY and there are lots of things going on in there over which you still have no control.
VGA sucks if you use an extension cable.
With digital video you can use a nice long extension cable with no loss of quality.
Price? Most everything comes with both connectors nowadays. Even the super cheap video cards. If price mattered they would not use both.
VGA connectors are ENORMOUS. Mini Display port is a nice tiny little connector that fits unobtrusively on a laptop.
My "Display" has a webcam and speakers. It is not some futuristic device.
It would be nice if it only needed one cable instead of three to hook it up to the computer.
You should treat your development machines as "hostile" and put them on their own network.
You should do this regardless of security issues because developers can also do stuff like saturate your network.
And what a great administrator, bashing people over the head because of your own limitations.
I'm glad you don't administer my development systems.
The LCD display.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs.
Everything else is just a bigger or smaller version of stuff we already had.
Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.