1) Just because you put a bullet in a person doesn't mean that they drop dead instantly, despite what the movies show.
2) Bullets tend to pierce the skin of the airplane, depressurizing the airplane, making it very hard to fly, and increasing the risk of damage to the structure of the plane.
3) Concern for life - once people know that you are going to turn the airplane into a bomb and that they are going to die anyway, but if they don't try something then more people will die, the concern for self disappears.
(Personally, I have never even been in a schoolyard fistfight, I seek non-violent resolution to conflict, however if I am on an airplane that is hi-jacked and I believe that the hi-jackers intent to use the airplane as a weapon, even if I believe that I alone have zero chance of success and nobody else is stepping up to help, I *WILL* do everything in my power that I can think of to help regain control including gouging eyes out of their sockets and getting myself killed and because I am not in great physical shape, I'm sure that this action will get me killed.)
4) Many vs few - How fast can you reload? Can you take out 40 people? 100? If they all rush you at once from multiple directions?
Remember the people on the fourth plane, the one that didn't hit a building. It didn't hit anything because the passengers didn't let them.
I've had it with all of this paranoia, I am just not going to fly ever again!
With this much harassment, is it any wonder why fewer people want to travel and why the already failing airlines are asking for bailouts?
If I didn't need to arrive 2 hours early to be scanned, searched, remove my shoes, wait in line, wait in line, and wait in line, then be searched, searched, and searched again, it might be faster and easier to go home to visit the family by airplane, but as it is now it is easier and cheaper to spend the extra 4 hours and DRIVE!
The passengers will never again allow terrorists to crash an airplane into something, so terrorists have nothing to gain in trying the same scenario again. Let's get over the paranoia, take some personal responsibility and use common sense for our own security, and understand that if we want freedom we need to accept a certain amount of risk!
Not that I am aware of, like every other business, individual managers determine prioritization, but if standards are not adhered to it is probably just an accidental omission of the individual tester responsible for that feature area or a mistake in the design process.
Like it or not, many people doing software testing come from math, engineering, or science fields and are not aware of IETF RFCs or other standards. I have pointed these documents out to other testers on a few occasions.
Many people here seem to assume that everyone has used Linux and that Unix is a fact of life for everyone...sorry to tell you this, but neither assumption is true. Sometimes a math major is handed a visual basic-like testing tool and let loose to figure out how to test something like Event Viewer.
And Windows Server 2003 was out for at least 3 months before the first security bug was found in it.
When Oracle introduced their Unbreakable campaign, it was only a week or two before quite a few large security bugs were found in it.
Maybe you haven't heard of the package, but it usually is included in a few distributions, so if we are comparing apples to apples, it should be included.
And Microsoft products get more scrutiny because they are used by more people, they have a history of visible problems, it popular to bash microsoft, and Microsoft acknowledges problems when researchers find them.
And for the record, I used to be rabidly anti-Microsoft, now I use both Windows and various unices including linux.
Honestly, In the last 4-5 years, the testing has greatly improved. Prior to two years ago, most people didn't understand enough about security testing.
Additionally, the code for the products are very complex in an attempt to automatically do the right thing for the user and make the system easier for them to use and we do not have infinite time.
It is a free world. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to run Windows.
I'm sorry that you are so pissed off at Microsoft. In some situations (not all) they have better solutions. I would prefer a friendlier EULA too, but other companies are much worse.
Microsoft doesn't insist on Winmodems - the cheap modem manufacturers do.
Don't believe everything you read in The Register (and yes, I had previously read that Hotmail case, attended a couple talks on it, read a few internal reports, and watched the team I work in make improvements based on suggestions provided by the Hotmail team.
There are thousands of people at Microsoft who are passionate and personally dedicated to improving their software.
If you want to talk about quality problems, subscribe to bugtraq and watch the linux security problem annoucements come in, usually 10+ per day!
If you want Microsoft to leave you alone, that's fine too. I used to be rabidly anti-microsoft like you are, but then I actually talked to a few people that worked there and found out that it is a really nice place to work where almost everyone is very interested in producing a quality product.
And for the record, I still use linux every day and have a variety of unix boxen on my home network.
Regressions - Make sure that previous bugs don't pop up again. Integration - Make sure that all the pieces work when you put them together. Globalization - Make sure that none of the user messages / interfaces are hard coded. Localization - Make sure that it is translated into other languages correctly. Accessiblity - Make sure that handicapped users (blind / deaf / etc.) can use the product. (Can you use the program without a mouse? Does it work with large fonts, high contrast, etc?) Scalability - Large numbers of records, large amounts of data. Performance - Is it sufficiently fast? Reliability / Memory leaks - Can the system stay up for multiple months without hint of reliability problems? Security - Do we verify the data before we use it? Do we protect sensitive data? Update testing - Does data persist and functionality work correctly after upgrades?
Dogfood deployments - run the business on alpha and beta releases to make sure we find problems before the customers do.
etc...
There are hundreds of criteria for each item on this list and there are a number of other major quality areas that most test teams attempt to cover in their test passes.
You would probably be surprised at how much testing actually happens at Microsoft.
Not at all, I have a full-blown dedicated linux box for interoperability testing. My manager knows about it, as does most of my team. I know of at least four other linux boxes on the same floor of the building that I work in.
In fact the manager that interviewed me in 1999, and still works at MS, asked for help with a linux configuration problem as part of the interview.
The server team took Hotmail's complaints, fixed them, and I believe that Hotmail has not had any non-MS servers in over a year. I could be wrong.
Regardless of what Hotmail is running, the server team is VERY interested in what users think, and even though your are rabidly anti-MS they would even be interested in what problems *YOU* have with Windows.
If you want to post some legitimate complaints, I'd be happy to take them to the appropriate people.
My experience (only three years) is that it is equal parts academia, small business, and big business with a mixture of ultra-geeky, ultra-savvy, and very smart people.
I just laugh everytime people view Microsoft as the BORG. I used to think that way, hence my handle, but Microsoft is actually filled with unique and interesting people that most of the slashdot readers would love to have as co-workers.
I have had to explain simple network concepts to co-workers, and I have had co-workers that sit around until 11pm on a friday discussing operating system internals. People take a lot of ownership in the components that they work on. Frequently I interact with fewer than a dozen people. Some groups are made from only three people, other groups are composed of thousands of smaller groups.
I can take an hour in the middle of the day to play soccer or baseball with other people in the company, or watch university level research lectures every day over the corporate network, or walk across the campus and attend the lecture in-person.
I have a co-worker who was tossing a football in the hall, knock off a sprinklerhead, flood a lab of computers, and the only result is that the VP asked the team to stop playing football in the hallway!
As for linux, I have been running a linux box for interop tests for a couple years, I just run the binaries and avoid downloading the sources.
How many slashdotters would be surprised to hear that the Microsoft "campus" is like a business park or a college campus? There are no "walls" surrounding the campus.
Don't believe the propoganda (in either direction), the truth is somewhere in the middle. Microsoft is a very nice place to work. It isn't a utopia of super-intelligent people, and it isn't an oppressive slave-driving monolith either.
Since Microsoft products are all closed source, who the hell would ever find out if Microsoft was using GPLed code in any of their products?
AFAIK, there's really no way to tell... for all I know, they could have been using GPL code for quite a while and no one would ever notice.
Well, to help answer your question:
1) Microsoft has over 54000 employees. Around 10% of which are temporary contractors whose contracts can't go over a year. That's quite a few people who could snitch.
2) As long as you sign a NDA, you too can see the source code for Windows NT for academic purposes.
3) Source code is regularly licensed to other companies and governments.
4) The embedded products are compiled by the customer!
5) Microsoft is very visible, people reverse engineer parts of Microsoft software all the time.
6) The legal liability scares Microsoft to death! A couple years ago they went so far as to decree that no Microsoft programmer is allowed to even look at GPL code, let alone contribute to a GPL project on personal time. One programmer I know had to have his manager hire a contractor to reverse engineer sample code for a netscape plug-in because the sample code was GPLed and he wasn't allowed to look at it!
They are setting up a test lab to deploy OSS software in, so they can measure it, find out what works well, what doesn't work, how it interoperates with other software, how it performs, and how hard it is for normal users to use. Then they are going to take that data and use it to improve their products and marketing.
I think that the assembly-line philosophy of the current education system is largely to blame for students becoming dissolusioned and hating to go to school.
How can students be safe from gangs when you have 5000+ people roaming the halls between classes?
How can students get individual attention when classes have 80+ students and a single teacher might only see a single student for 1 hour a day?
Adding more assembly-line technology isn't going to solve the problems. Learning is an individual process and should be treated as such.
(I for one learned on my own and hate the system that wasted my time attempting to brainwash me with the curriculum that they were pushing.)
Hmm, seems like other companies like HP have been doing this for decades - they just call them "Maintainance Contracts".
Or worse, companies like Sun have forced enterprise customers to sign a NDA and wait 6 months to fix a known problem causing crashes in multi-million dollar enterprise servers.
And no, speaking from experience, I can assure you that not all bugs are found w/in 4 months. Subtle timing or edge-case bugs can lurk for years before leaping out to destroy someone's critical data. (And this is true with both proprietary and libre software.)
I'll second that! I have been responsible for, and paid to test a reasonably large administration tool for the last three years. This product was developed and tested for at least 4 years prior to my employment. Even after 4 years of someone else actively testing it, and another 3 years of active testing, I am *STILL* finding new bugs in scenarios that I hadn't previously considered.
I have been noticing a rather disturbing trend: First, a new feature or large code change is introduced. Second, I spend at least as much time developing a test plan and doing an initial test pass as the developer spent coding the change, and frequently up to 5 times as long. I probably find 40 percent of the bugs in this pass, and when I am finished, all of the major scenarios that I can initially think about work correctly. Third, I spend another block of time writing automated tests while the developer fixes some of the lower priority bugs. I might find another 5 percent of the bugs in this stage. Fourth, I work on some other area of testing for a while, and then I hit this feature again looking for test holes and I find another 5 percent. Fifth, I repeat this loop of looking for test holes and discuss the features with other testers, do testcase reviews, etc. and find another 20 percent of the bugs over a period of months. Sixth, sometime later the developer mentions what seems to be an innocuous little bit of information, that turns out to be a critical omission in the spec and I find another 15 percent of the bugs.
At this point, it is several months later and we have only found 85 percent of the bugs.
Ten percent of the remaining bugs will be found by co-workers, beta testers and customers.
The final five percent, might not be found for a number of years even with heavy testing.
Even with years of time, every possible combination of inputs in every possible configuration and every possible usage scenario is not possible to test. For the program that I happen to test, this works out to be in the range of 10^85 unique tests. In order to test every possible input, I'd be testing until after the sun burns out and this program isn't that big.
Fortunately, equivalence classes bring this down very significantly, and I can complete a test pass in about 40 days. The danger is in incorrently assuming that a set of values all belong to an equivalence class.
I only have three years of professional software testing experience, and the company that I work for seems to be good about running regression tests every week, sometimes every day and even though there are deadline pressures they do let testing drive the release schedule.
I have chatted with testers at other companies who have disasterous process and for which testing isn't taken seriously, so it isn't universal.
I would venture to say that software quality is only as good as the people in charge of it's development and their commitment to quality.
Although that doesn't give much space for growing food.
The United States covers 3618770 square miles...
That puts us at 1741.6 people per square mile, or give each person a measly 16007 square feet. Anyone think that they could be entirely self-sustaining inside of a box 400 feet by 400 feet? Including food production and sewer? That isn't much larger than the average city block.
Now, this is assuming that the entire world is stuffed into the area of the united states, and all of the area, including Alaska is used, so much of that area is not very habitable.
Saying that everyone can FIT into a place is much different from saying that we have too large a population for the natural resources to sustain. And the sustainability all depends on how we use those resources....do we buy computers that use 9 square meters of raw materials per ounce of silicon wafer (if I remember right), or do we use products that can be produced with minimal environmental impact?
Most of the "linux problems" are application problems and not the linux kernel. I mean anyone can write shitty code and release it as their new open source project.
Yeah, and when was the last time a Windows security bug was found in the kernel? I can't remember ever seeing one.
Nope, academia is not where the "l33t coders" are, it is where students have tons of free time on their hands, where people actually study how vulerabilities work, where people know how to write the exploits instead of grabbing "l33t" scripts off the web, and where if the grad student can't demonstrate their vulnerability then they can't defend their thesis and don't graduate.
I haven't looked recently, but as of 5 years ago, you could get the source for NT 4.0 (at the time, their latest and greatest)...I'm guessing that at least the source for w2k if not w2k3 is available now. There is some sort of NDA, but I'm not sure if there are other restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you WERE infringing, so you have already had the benefit of their illegally obtained IP so you still need to pay!
Although, maybe only $16 in that case.
A couple thoughts:
1) Just because you put a bullet in a person doesn't mean that they drop dead instantly, despite what the movies show.
2) Bullets tend to pierce the skin of the airplane, depressurizing the airplane, making it very hard to fly, and increasing the risk of damage to the structure of the plane.
3) Concern for life - once people know that you are going to turn the airplane into a bomb and that they are going to die anyway, but if they don't try something then more people will die, the concern for self disappears.
(Personally, I have never even been in a schoolyard fistfight, I seek non-violent resolution to conflict, however if I am on an airplane that is hi-jacked and I believe that the hi-jackers intent to use the airplane as a weapon, even if I believe that I alone have zero chance of success and nobody else is stepping up to help, I *WILL* do everything in my power that I can think of to help regain control including gouging eyes out of their sockets and getting myself killed and because I am not in great physical shape, I'm sure that this action will get me killed.)
4) Many vs few - How fast can you reload? Can you take out 40 people? 100? If they all rush you at once from multiple directions?
Remember the people on the fourth plane, the one that didn't hit a building. It didn't hit anything because the passengers didn't let them.
I've had it with all of this paranoia, I am just not going to fly ever again!
With this much harassment, is it any wonder why fewer people want to travel and why the already failing airlines are asking for bailouts?
If I didn't need to arrive 2 hours early to be scanned, searched, remove my shoes, wait in line, wait in line, and wait in line, then be searched, searched, and searched again, it might be faster and easier to go home to visit the family by airplane, but as it is now it is easier and cheaper to spend the extra 4 hours and DRIVE!
The passengers will never again allow terrorists to crash an airplane into something, so terrorists have nothing to gain in trying the same scenario again. Let's get over the paranoia, take some personal responsibility and use common sense for our own security, and understand that if we want freedom we need to accept a certain amount of risk!
Not that I am aware of, like every other business, individual managers determine prioritization, but if standards are not adhered to it is probably just an accidental omission of the individual tester responsible for that feature area or a mistake in the design process.
Like it or not, many people doing software testing come from math, engineering, or science fields and are not aware of IETF RFCs or other standards. I have pointed these documents out to other testers on a few occasions.
Many people here seem to assume that everyone has used Linux and that Unix is a fact of life for everyone...sorry to tell you this, but neither assumption is true. Sometimes a math major is handed a visual basic-like testing tool and let loose to figure out how to test something like Event Viewer.
And Windows Server 2003 was out for at least 3 months before the first security bug was found in it.
When Oracle introduced their Unbreakable campaign, it was only a week or two before quite a few large security bugs were found in it.
Maybe you haven't heard of the package, but it usually is included in a few distributions, so if we are comparing apples to apples, it should be included.
And Microsoft products get more scrutiny because they are used by more people, they have a history of visible problems, it popular to bash microsoft, and Microsoft acknowledges problems when researchers find them.
And for the record, I used to be rabidly anti-Microsoft, now I use both Windows and various unices including linux.
Honestly,
In the last 4-5 years, the testing has greatly improved. Prior to two years ago, most people didn't understand enough about security testing.
Additionally, the code for the products are very complex in an attempt to automatically do the right thing for the user and make the system easier for them to use and we do not have infinite time.
An in general, testing is a hard problem.
It is a free world. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to run Windows.
I'm sorry that you are so pissed off at Microsoft. In some situations (not all) they have better solutions. I would prefer a friendlier EULA too, but other companies are much worse.
Microsoft doesn't insist on Winmodems - the cheap modem manufacturers do.
Don't believe everything you read in The Register (and yes, I had previously read that Hotmail case, attended a couple talks on it, read a few internal reports, and watched the team I work in make improvements based on suggestions provided by the Hotmail team.
There are thousands of people at Microsoft who are passionate and personally dedicated to improving their software.
If you want to talk about quality problems, subscribe to bugtraq and watch the linux security problem annoucements come in, usually 10+ per day!
If you want Microsoft to leave you alone, that's fine too. I used to be rabidly anti-microsoft like you are, but then I actually talked to a few people that worked there and found out that it is a really nice place to work where almost everyone is very interested in producing a quality product.
And for the record, I still use linux every day and have a variety of unix boxen on my home network.
Yes, I also do testing for:
Regressions - Make sure that previous bugs don't pop up again.
Integration - Make sure that all the pieces work when you put them together.
Globalization - Make sure that none of the user messages / interfaces are hard coded.
Localization - Make sure that it is translated into other languages correctly.
Accessiblity - Make sure that handicapped users (blind / deaf / etc.) can use the product. (Can you use the program without a mouse? Does it work with large fonts, high contrast, etc?)
Scalability - Large numbers of records, large amounts of data.
Performance - Is it sufficiently fast?
Reliability / Memory leaks - Can the system stay up for multiple months without hint of reliability problems?
Security - Do we verify the data before we use it? Do we protect sensitive data?
Update testing - Does data persist and functionality work correctly after upgrades?
Dogfood deployments - run the business on alpha and beta releases to make sure we find problems before the customers do.
etc...
There are hundreds of criteria for each item on this list and there are a number of other major quality areas that most test teams attempt to cover in their test passes.
You would probably be surprised at how much testing actually happens at Microsoft.
Not at all, I have a full-blown dedicated linux box for interoperability testing. My manager knows about it, as does most of my team. I know of at least four other linux boxes on the same floor of the building that I work in.
In fact the manager that interviewed me in 1999, and still works at MS, asked for help with a linux configuration problem as part of the interview.
What are *you* smoking?
The server team took Hotmail's complaints, fixed them, and I believe that Hotmail has not had any non-MS servers in over a year. I could be wrong.
Regardless of what Hotmail is running, the server team is VERY interested in what users think, and even though your are rabidly anti-MS they would even be interested in what problems *YOU* have with Windows.
If you want to post some legitimate complaints, I'd be happy to take them to the appropriate people.
I believe that this already exists.
The Samba TNG team has created some of this functionality.
Microsoft's Services for Unix might provide other functionality that you are looking for.
My experience (only three years) is that it is equal parts academia, small business, and big business with a mixture of ultra-geeky, ultra-savvy, and very smart people.
I just laugh everytime people view Microsoft as the BORG. I used to think that way, hence my handle, but Microsoft is actually filled with unique and interesting people that most of the slashdot readers would love to have as co-workers.
I have had to explain simple network concepts to co-workers, and I have had co-workers that sit around until 11pm on a friday discussing operating system internals. People take a lot of ownership in the components that they work on. Frequently I interact with fewer than a dozen people. Some groups are made from only three people, other groups are composed of thousands of smaller groups.
I can take an hour in the middle of the day to play soccer or baseball with other people in the company, or watch university level research lectures every day over the corporate network, or walk across the campus and attend the lecture in-person.
I have a co-worker who was tossing a football in the hall, knock off a sprinklerhead, flood a lab of computers, and the only result is that the VP asked the team to stop playing football in the hallway!
As for linux, I have been running a linux box for interop tests for a couple years, I just run the binaries and avoid downloading the sources.
How many slashdotters would be surprised to hear that the Microsoft "campus" is like a business park or a college campus? There are no "walls" surrounding the campus.
Don't believe the propoganda (in either direction), the truth is somewhere in the middle. Microsoft is a very nice place to work. It isn't a utopia of super-intelligent people, and it isn't an oppressive slave-driving monolith either.
Since Microsoft products are all closed source, who the hell would ever find out if Microsoft was using GPLed code in any of their products?
AFAIK, there's really no way to tell... for all I know, they could have been using GPL code for quite a while and no one would ever notice.
Well, to help answer your question:
1) Microsoft has over 54000 employees. Around 10% of which are temporary contractors whose contracts can't go over a year. That's quite a few people who could snitch.
2) As long as you sign a NDA, you too can see the source code for Windows NT for academic purposes.
3) Source code is regularly licensed to other companies and governments.
4) The embedded products are compiled by the customer!
5) Microsoft is very visible, people reverse engineer parts of Microsoft software all the time.
6) The legal liability scares Microsoft to death! A couple years ago they went so far as to decree that no Microsoft programmer is allowed to even look at GPL code, let alone contribute to a GPL project on personal time. One programmer I know had to have his manager hire a contractor to reverse engineer sample code for a netscape plug-in because the sample code was GPLed and he wasn't allowed to look at it!
Exactly.
They are setting up a test lab to deploy OSS software in, so they can measure it, find out what works well, what doesn't work, how it interoperates with other software, how it performs, and how hard it is for normal users to use. Then they are going to take that data and use it to improve their products and marketing.
All smart companies do this...why is this news?
I think that the assembly-line philosophy of the current education system is largely to blame for students becoming dissolusioned and hating to go to school.
How can students be safe from gangs when you have 5000+ people roaming the halls between classes?
How can students get individual attention when classes have 80+ students and a single teacher might only see a single student for 1 hour a day?
Adding more assembly-line technology isn't going to solve the problems. Learning is an individual process and should be treated as such.
(I for one learned on my own and hate the system that wasted my time attempting to brainwash me with the curriculum that they were pushing.)
Forget about the equipment, what are they going to do about their software?!?
Every bit of network interface code needs to be updated.
This could be as much of a pain as Y2k was.
Hmm, seems like other companies like HP have been doing this for decades - they just call them "Maintainance Contracts".
Or worse, companies like Sun have forced enterprise customers to sign a NDA and wait 6 months to fix a known problem causing crashes in multi-million dollar enterprise servers.
This story on flash mobs reminds me of Santarchy.
Flash mobs, meet lots of Santas informally gathering at the same place and time.
www.santarchy.com
We are geeks, we sit in front of the computer all day and don't know what "outside" or "sunshine" is. Why ask us?
I think that the splatter is still on the canyon wall right where the local physics class predicted that it would be. ;)
I'm only partly insane, but I only went to school in Twin Falls. It is funny, this is at least the second slashdot thread talking about Twin Falls.
And no, speaking from experience, I can assure you that not all bugs are found w/in 4 months. Subtle timing or edge-case bugs can lurk for years before leaping out to destroy someone's critical data. (And this is true with both proprietary and libre software.)
I'll second that! I have been responsible for, and paid to test a reasonably large administration tool for the last three years. This product was developed and tested for at least 4 years prior to my employment. Even after 4 years of someone else actively testing it, and another 3 years of active testing, I am *STILL* finding new bugs in scenarios that I hadn't previously considered.
I have been noticing a rather disturbing trend:
First, a new feature or large code change is introduced.
Second, I spend at least as much time developing a test plan and doing an initial test pass as the developer spent coding the change, and frequently up to 5 times as long. I probably find 40 percent of the bugs in this pass, and when I am finished, all of the major scenarios that I can initially think about work correctly.
Third, I spend another block of time writing automated tests while the developer fixes some of the lower priority bugs. I might find another 5 percent of the bugs in this stage.
Fourth, I work on some other area of testing for a while, and then I hit this feature again looking for test holes and I find another 5 percent.
Fifth, I repeat this loop of looking for test holes and discuss the features with other testers, do testcase reviews, etc. and find another 20 percent of the bugs over a period of months.
Sixth, sometime later the developer mentions what seems to be an innocuous little bit of information, that turns out to be a critical omission in the spec and I find another 15 percent of the bugs.
At this point, it is several months later and we have only found 85 percent of the bugs.
Ten percent of the remaining bugs will be found by co-workers, beta testers and customers.
The final five percent, might not be found for a number of years even with heavy testing.
Even with years of time, every possible combination of inputs in every possible configuration and every possible usage scenario is not possible to test. For the program that I happen to test, this works out to be in the range of 10^85 unique tests. In order to test every possible input, I'd be testing until after the sun burns out and this program isn't that big.
Fortunately, equivalence classes bring this down very significantly, and I can complete a test pass in about 40 days. The danger is in incorrently assuming that a set of values all belong to an equivalence class.
I only have three years of professional software testing experience, and the company that I work for seems to be good about running regression tests every week, sometimes every day and even though there are deadline pressures they do let testing drive the release schedule.
I have chatted with testers at other companies who have disasterous process and for which testing isn't taken seriously, so it isn't universal.
I would venture to say that software quality is only as good as the people in charge of it's development and their commitment to quality.
If I calculated it right, given 724 square feet each, the current world's population could fit in California.
Let's see, California covers 163707 square miles.
census.gov reports that the world population clock for 7/1/03 is 6302486693
6302486693 / 163707 = 38498.57 people per square mile (of california).
1 mile = 5280 feet
1 square mile = 27878400 square feet.
27878400 / 38498.57 = 724.14 square feet per person.
Although that doesn't give much space for growing food.
The United States covers 3618770 square miles...
That puts us at 1741.6 people per square mile, or give each person a measly 16007 square feet. Anyone think that they could be entirely self-sustaining inside of a box 400 feet by 400 feet? Including food production and sewer? That isn't much larger than the average city block.
Now, this is assuming that the entire world is stuffed into the area of the united states, and all of the area, including Alaska is used, so much of that area is not very habitable.
Saying that everyone can FIT into a place is much different from saying that we have too large a population for the natural resources to sustain. And the sustainability all depends on how we use those resources....do we buy computers that use 9 square meters of raw materials per ounce of silicon wafer (if I remember right), or do we use products that can be produced with minimal environmental impact?
That is like saying that X-Windows is part of the kernel because you can't uninstall it without breaking half of your applications.
Get your terminology straight, talking apples to oranges just feeds the flames.
Most of the "linux problems" are application problems and not the linux kernel. I mean anyone can write shitty code and release it as their new open source project.
Yeah, and when was the last time a Windows security bug was found in the kernel? I can't remember ever seeing one.
Nope, academia is not where the "l33t coders" are, it is where students have tons of free time on their hands, where people actually study how vulerabilities work, where people know how to write the exploits instead of grabbing "l33t" scripts off the web, and where if the grad student can't demonstrate their vulnerability then they can't defend their thesis and don't graduate.
I haven't looked recently, but as of 5 years ago, you could get the source for NT 4.0 (at the time, their latest and greatest)...I'm guessing that at least the source for w2k if not w2k3 is available now. There is some sort of NDA, but I'm not sure if there are other restrictions.