*ouch*. Thanks for the tip. The only other thing I've got (apart from a healthy distrust of any product of the Beast) is an anecdote that Microsoft don't use it themselves. Surely that can't be right?
A highly structured and organized operating system developed under the instruction of a central authority, no doubt?
You know, when I read the article, I was thinking: This sounds almost exactly like how Linux is developed, except that all the authors aren't employed by the same company. Who would have thought that the Open Source development model would be the same as that at Microsoft?
Right, but have you ever noticed how many successful Free / Open Source software projects use modular architecture? Take (from my own area) Nessus, or Snort. Both consist of a core engine and frameworks that accept plug-ins and modules. Actually they both also have a lower level that allows ordinary non-programmer users to contribute signatures (rules) to the project.) This applies also to Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel, and plenty more.
Here's the only solid info I could find in the article about what's actually changed:
By late October, Mr. Srivastava's team was beginning to automate the testing that had historically been done by hand. If a feature had too many bugs, software "gates" rejected it from being used in Longhorn. If engineers had too many outstanding bugs they were tossed in "bug jail" and banned from writing new code. The goal, he says, was to get engineers to "do it right the first time."
So the amazing new innovation that's turned round the entire project is... automated testing? Wow, welcome to the brave new world of the mid 90s! Next up, Microsoft discovers the joy of source control... (incidentally, I need to find some solid info to justify not using SourceSafe - any pointers/links?)
It's interesting to hear how their software development survived in such an anarchistic environment - everyone producing their own code, with ad-hoc integration. It's a good example of how software development methodology can work though, even though the specifics of the specification design weren't discussed in the article - if everyone codes to a documented interface, software development can work on such a grand scale.
The impression I get from the article is that even the documented interfaces (ie, fundamental parts of the design) were being thrown up and torn down, whilst docs and understanding of how to use those interfaces wasn't getting out to developers coding against them fast enough. So by the time an application is building against one release of some core libs, the trunk has moved on to (in effect) a new major version, with incompatible interfaces.
I haven't any inside info, tho', so I could be reading more into TFA than it warrants.
I must say I'm interested to know how much code they claim to have re-designed and re-implemented in the last year. The article talks about "throwing it away and starting again", but you certainly don't build a complete OS plus sync'd up application and server software (the versions of Office and the MS servers (IIS, Exchange and SQL Server in particular) from the ground up in 12 months. Not unless you want Windows 95 type quality control...
In 2001 Microsoft made a documentary film celebrating the creation of Windows XP, which remains the latest full update of Windows. When Mr. Allchin previewed the film, it confirmed some of his misgivings about the Windows culture. He saw the eleventh-hour heroics needed to finish the product and get it to customers. Mr. Allchin ordered the film to be burned.
Man, that's a shame. I'd love to have seen film. Shame on Allchin if he didn't demand an archive copy that be retained, at least, even if it's only released in 20 years' time.
Although I've been an enthusiastic mozilla/firefox user & supporter since the late 90s (yes I was browsing with a 'naked' gecko control, HA!:P) I was surprised to find I'd lost track of development to the extent that I didn't realise the trunk builds have a much more up-to-date gecko engine. The gecko in the 1.0.x series (inc. 1.0.4) are a year old! Those users who prefer livin' on the edge might prefer to get a faster, smaller, much less memory-leaky build from:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nigh tly/latest-trunk/
For that matter, outside of DDoS, connection hijacking, and abusing smtp servers to cover your tracks when spamming, is there ever any need for an application programmer to falsify a source address?
With the current paranoia, lack of decent security awareness (and therefore the lack of ability to evaluate the results), and the ability to impress a PHB by wearing the "right" suit, you could easily charge $50,000 for a Nessus scan. $5,000 would barely pay for an NMap sweep. For Unix servers, also use SARA and TARA for $10,000 apiece.
Speaking as a professional penetration tester: *Bollocks*. Here in the UK, anyway.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
> Fortunately, your own experience, while not measurable by instruments, is at least directly observable.
Oh really?
Surely the only way to measure experience is to examine it's products,- chiefly speech and thought (non-verbal speech) - of course introverting and examining one's own thoughts is a dangerous road to take, but asking others to introvert & describe _their_ experience of existing does allow for quantifying it - "80% of persons describe panels reflecting light at wavelenth x nanometers as being coloured red" for example.
(Yes, I'm a Skinner-worshipping behaviourist, so sue me;p)
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Having read the thread in a bit more detail whilst a bit less drunk:) my desire to find the time to get back to the hobby of reading & thinking about this issue (consciousness) is back... please do make the effort to configure moin moin, I could waste a lot of time trying to follow better informed people than I bouncing diagreements back & forth!
"Okay, now you're a judge, how do you know when someone's guilty? Let's say.. let's have this scenario: You've got a guy there, nineteen year old, driving around in top of the range router with the lights and everything, leather seats, bitches in the front, bitches in the back, sitting on the woofer speakers, gold tooth, UV light underneath, big drum and bass coming out, the guy never done any work in his life. Is he a gamer or is he a dealer? considering he never touched any joystick or held a fire button ever in his life? Are you going to send this man down?"
Why on earth would MS roll BACK their excellent authentication / permissions model, one of the few parts of the NT codebase that is indisputably superior to the Unix alternative?
(Hint to anyone about to fire up the flamethrower: go read up on NTFS or Novell native permissions models. Then have a nice steaming hot cup of clue:)
Want a surefire solution?? I have the answer.
[...]
And it ain't pretty.
Death penalty for virus writers.
What a great idea. I'm sure this will work just as effectively as the USA executing alleged murderers - brutal as it sounds, it has at least reduced the murder rate to one of the lowest in the world.
Perhaps Google are trying to corner the market in pointless "Maybe Company X is going to launch Product Y!" speculation stories on Slashdot. Tough market, if so.
This is no biggy. The BBC has a report today on microbes found 400m below the earth's surface inside solid rock that are at least sixteen million years old. That's right, the same actual cells, not the colony, individual bacteria cells... 'practically immortal', as the article says. The discoverers speculate that life may originally have evolved underfound as the surface was being regularly sterilised by impacts in the early epochs of earth's history. I leave the implications for life on Mars as an exercise for the reader;)
Another data point: Democratic Underground has evidence for a systematic 5% swing from exit polls to the final result, in Bush's favour... only in states using the Diebold tabulators. Pretty horrifying stuff. As Brit I have to offer my sympathy & support for true supporters of democracy in the USA, whoever they voted for.
The Registry certainly is an ugly hack. However, granular
permissions (NOT just 'read/write/execute' - the full NTFS
permissions) can be applied to arbitrary chunks of the Registry
data.
Vulnerable services by default - absolutely true, but have you tried
nmapping a default Linux install? I dunno about Debian et al but it
took me several days of hacking about, reading man pages and
searching to web to turn off everything my Mandrake 10 install had
listening on external interfaces.
"Windows doesn't have the concept of Unix sudo" - this just isn't
true, there's a 'runas' command accessible from the commandline or
the right-click context menu. 'sudo' does have ncie logging but the
fact is that you can configure Windows to log very detailed info on
privileges - not just those using 'runas' but logging any use of
privileges by any process, including system level stuff,
applications etc.
I personally am 100% Microsoft free (this comment is powered by GNU
Emacs:), but we don't do the Free/libre movement any favours by
misrepresenting Windows. Various canards are trotted out every time
the topic comes up, such as the "windows is not properly multi-user",
"windows has no concept of access controls" when in fact the Win32
perms are MUCH more granular than the archaic RWX Unixland
stuff. Hopefully we'll see SELinux stuff incorporated in the kernel
and then (crucially) see programmers actually using those access
controls. When that happens Linux will have better access controls
than win32. Where windows is weak is that (a) application programemrs,
including MS' own, don't use the security features that do exist, and
(b) users, especially home / SoHo / small businesses, don't want to
spend the time neccessary to understand what their machine is actually
doing. Neither factors change according to the OS being used; witness
the steadily rising (but still very small) number of hidously insecure
RH7 / 8 installs which I've come across whilst penetration testing.
What they really want is something like OS X, with safe and
sensible default code and system behaviour, out of the box.
This just goes to show that/. groupthink isn't always on target, and Google isn't the all-spidering oracle we think it is either.
I think the interesting thing about the story was not so much "slashbot gruopthink" as many have said on this story and on the original one. What I found interesting (frightening) was that although the story faileda lot of people's bullshit-o-meters, many slashdotters seemed completely unsurprised by the idea. In fact the idea that the USG might be quietly leaning on media organisations to suppress unwelcome information is not at all far-fetched in the general case. If they had made a USAPATRIOT order, Google would not have been able to discuss it or (I believe) even confirm that it had happened. How, then, would they behave in such a situation? Presumably the only way we'd be able to tell such a rumour is true or not would be to check for Sergy / Chris dBona refutating the story - assuming that they would NOT refute it if it had really happened. I don't doubt the integrity or indeed business sense of the googlers but it's easy to imagine a scenario where they have no choice but to co-operate or go to jail.
Open source government that is. Democracy came before GNU!:)
Anyway personally I wonder what the point is - this election was supposed to show the rise of the bloggers, digerati and all the rest of it. What's the point when Dubya just gets voted back into power?
Slashdot Mirror
*ouch*. Thanks for the tip. The only other thing I've got (apart from a healthy distrust of any product of the Beast) is an anecdote that Microsoft don't use it themselves. Surely that can't be right?
Right, but have you ever noticed how many successful Free / Open Source software projects use modular architecture? Take (from my own area) Nessus, or Snort. Both consist of a core engine and frameworks that accept plug-ins and modules. Actually they both also have a lower level that allows ordinary non-programmer users to contribute signatures (rules) to the project.) This applies also to Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel, and plenty more.
So the amazing new innovation that's turned round the entire project is... automated testing? Wow, welcome to the brave new world of the mid 90s! Next up, Microsoft discovers the joy of source control... (incidentally, I need to find some solid info to justify not using SourceSafe - any pointers/links?)
I haven't any inside info, tho', so I could be reading more into TFA than it warrants.
I must say I'm interested to know how much code they claim to have re-designed and re-implemented in the last year. The article talks about "throwing it away and starting again", but you certainly don't build a complete OS plus sync'd up application and server software (the versions of Office and the MS servers (IIS, Exchange and SQL Server in particular) from the ground up in 12 months. Not unless you want Windows 95 type quality control...
Man, that's a shame. I'd love to have seen film. Shame on Allchin if he didn't demand an archive copy that be retained, at least, even if it's only released in 20 years' time.
Although I've been an enthusiastic mozilla/firefox user & supporter since the late 90s (yes I was browsing with a 'naked' gecko control, HA! :P) I was surprised to find I'd lost track of development to the extent that I didn't realise the trunk builds have a much more up-to-date gecko engine. The gecko in the 1.0.x series (inc. 1.0.4) are a year old! Those users who prefer livin' on the edge might prefer to get a faster, smaller, much less memory-leaky build from:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nigh tly/latest-trunk/
Speaking as a professional penetration tester: *Bollocks*. Here in the UK, anyway.
Oh really?
Surely the only way to measure experience is to examine it's products,- chiefly speech and thought (non-verbal speech) - of course introverting and examining one's own thoughts is a dangerous road to take, but asking others to introvert & describe _their_ experience of existing does allow for quantifying it - "80% of persons describe panels reflecting light at wavelenth x nanometers as being coloured red" for example.
(Yes, I'm a Skinner-worshipping behaviourist, so sue me ;p)
cheers
"Okay, now you're a judge, how do you know when someone's guilty? Let's say.. let's have this scenario: You've got a guy there, nineteen year old, driving around in top of the range router with the lights and everything, leather seats, bitches in the front, bitches in the back, sitting on the woofer speakers, gold tooth, UV light underneath, big drum and bass coming out, the guy never done any work in his life. Is he a gamer or is he a dealer? considering he never touched any joystick or held a fire button ever in his life? Are you going to send this man down?"
(Hint to anyone about to fire up the flamethrower: go read up on NTFS or Novell native permissions models. Then have a nice steaming hot cup of clue :)
What you said.
Stuff that, I want the eBook of Oolon Colluphid's trio of philosophical blockbusters.
I say: "I refer the Hon. Members to the reply I gave some moments ago."
What a great idea. I'm sure this will work just as effectively as the USA executing alleged murderers - brutal as it sounds, it has at least reduced the murder rate to one of the lowest in the world.
...are about as respected as climatologists as the eponymous rapper is as an ambassador of world peace.
Unfortuntately the b0rked Slashdot lameness filter won't allow code to be posted even when 'post as code' is selected :?
This is no biggy. The BBC has a report today on microbes found 400m below the earth's surface inside solid rock that are at least sixteen million years old. That's right, the same actual cells, not the colony, individual bacteria cells... 'practically immortal', as the article says. The discoverers speculate that life may originally have evolved underfound as the surface was being regularly sterilised by impacts in the early epochs of earth's history. I leave the implications for life on Mars as an exercise for the reader ;)
Another data point: Democratic Underground has evidence for a systematic 5% swing from exit polls to the final result, in Bush's favour... only in states using the Diebold tabulators . Pretty horrifying stuff. As Brit I have to offer my sympathy & support for true supporters of democracy in the USA, whoever they voted for.
I personally am 100% Microsoft free (this comment is powered by GNU Emacs :), but we don't do the Free/libre movement any favours by
misrepresenting Windows. Various canards are trotted out every time
the topic comes up, such as the "windows is not properly multi-user",
"windows has no concept of access controls" when in fact the Win32
perms are MUCH more granular than the archaic RWX Unixland
stuff. Hopefully we'll see SELinux stuff incorporated in the kernel
and then (crucially) see programmers actually using those access
controls. When that happens Linux will have better access controls
than win32. Where windows is weak is that (a) application programemrs,
including MS' own, don't use the security features that do exist, and
(b) users, especially home / SoHo / small businesses, don't want to
spend the time neccessary to understand what their machine is actually
doing. Neither factors change according to the OS being used; witness
the steadily rising (but still very small) number of hidously insecure
RH7 / 8 installs which I've come across whilst penetration testing.
What they really want is something like OS X, with safe and sensible default code and system behaviour, out of the box.
cheersAnyway personally I wonder what the point is - this election was supposed to show the rise of the bloggers, digerati and all the rest of it. What's the point when Dubya just gets voted back into power?