It's public domain for starters, and Vista has existed in some form or another since the late 1960's. And how the Veterans Department releases it isn't actually in a functioning form.
I did some investigation into it a few months back as one of my customers is a small rural hospital who is shelling out a large sum of money to both IBM and a small software vendor for their management software/hardware.
The biggest knock on Vista is that its written in MUMPS, a rather obscure programming language dating to the late 60's. It's a really interesting language, but altogether it's something of a pain to deal with, and the only two open source implementations of it are the Sanchez GT/M stuff that WorldVista uses (which I'm not even sure *IS* open source, the licensing isn't very clear on it, further, alot of it is written in assembler which means its effectively non-portable), and another MUMPS->C translator developed by a guy at the University of Northern Iowa.
http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/cgi-bin/newpres/ m.compiler/compiler/index.cgi
It's an interesting (and really very solid) system, but unless the MUMPS language it's written in gets some serious support behind it, it's lack of portability and available toolkits will doom it to further oblivion.
now...they go along with this..the disk slices for each of the virtual machines are sitting on the platform, i'm assuming that at least. Is there not a chance of someone/thing copying those slices off, and loading them up in vmware on a seperate machine and then have access directly to the very "sensitive" material that they're trying to project? The thought really isnt much different than say, the cia director who kept classified info on a non classified computer, this just isnt copying the individual files, this is copying the whole disk slice.
Slashdot Mirror
It's public domain for starters, and Vista has existed in some form or another since the late 1960's. And how the Veterans Department releases it isn't actually in a functioning form./ m.compiler/compiler/index.cgi
It's an interesting (and really very solid) system, but unless the MUMPS language it's written in gets some serious support behind it, it's lack of portability and available toolkits will doom it to further oblivion.
I did some investigation into it a few months back as one of my customers is a small rural hospital who is shelling out a large sum of money to both IBM and a small software vendor for their management software/hardware.
The biggest knock on Vista is that its written in MUMPS, a rather obscure programming language dating to the late 60's. It's a really interesting language, but altogether it's something of a pain to deal with, and the only two open source implementations of it are the Sanchez GT/M stuff that WorldVista uses (which I'm not even sure *IS* open source, the licensing isn't very clear on it, further, alot of it is written in assembler which means its effectively non-portable), and another MUMPS->C translator developed by a guy at the University of Northern Iowa. http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/cgi-bin/newpres
now...they go along with this..the disk slices for each of the virtual machines are sitting on the platform, i'm assuming that at least. Is there not a chance of someone/thing copying those slices off, and loading them up in vmware on a seperate machine and then have access directly to the very "sensitive" material that they're trying to project? The thought really isnt much different than say, the cia director who kept classified info on a non classified computer, this just isnt copying the individual files, this is copying the whole disk slice.
Taking a look at NASA's leading mathematician's success rates....is anyone other than myself a smidge worried about this?