Gibson isn't talking about this exploit. But you miss an important point - Bruce isn't really sure either, and notes his opinion of two possibilities. He's guessing just as Steve is, based on the code. So at a higher level, Steve's point holds:
Leo: Could there be other backdoors like this?
Steve: Well, yes. I mean, that's the problem with a closed source operating system like..
Charles Petzold, Win 32 guru, and also a teacher, has posted an excellent talk on the difficulties of using an IDE like VS, especially as a tool to use when learning programming. Sure, you could walk through the tutorials, and build "Hello World", but you're not learning how to program, but how to click buttons on the Wizards. Petzold even makes a very good case about why IntelliSense is *not* the best thing since sliced bread. Well worth the read.
Not to knock VS too much, it's a great IDE, which I've used since VS 97, and you can certainly configure it to work as preferable, from just using it as an editor/compiler, to using the excellent debugger, to running lex and yacc. [Well things have changed a while since I used it for this, it is a kick they recommend downloading Cygwin - times change!]
The whole focus is wrong anyways - the Express editions of Visual Studio, which have some killer limitations (e.g. complete lack of optimization), are targetted at dabblers.
Microsoft has historically used it's monopoly to crush rivals. What this illustrates is they don't understand (like Sun, interestingly) how to compete against open source. They are trying, but they still don't get it. No doubt their SQL is limited also. No dice, most people will stick with their MySQL (in fact when I first read the headline I thought it was MYSQL 2005 finall ships!) and PostgreSQL, etc.
Probably one of the big mistakes they made was marginalizing Jim Clark, who founded the company. Michael Lewis's book on Clark, The New New Thing is well worth reading.
Tim Severin, a person who goes to great lengths to achieve historical accuracy, and has built various replicas, from a 6th century Irish curragh to Greek and Arabian vessels. For example, to prove Jason could have sailed from Greece to the Black Sea, he built a Greek ship, and made every effort to build it as authentically as possible. According to The Jason Voyage, this ship used pine, and was covered in pitch. Therefore, it is of great importance, I think, to understand the conditions, not just a subset, and this is exactly where Severin excels. For example, in order to follow the travels of Ulysses, he reads the ancient texts, but also interprets them from the sailor's standpoint. Therefore, I would consider this a rather flawed and limited experiment, and the MIT professor admits as such:
xi) Weren't those ships caulked with pitch, which would increase their flammability?
This is not my area of expertise. [snip]
There have been some great shows on PBS recently, a cut above "MythBusters" it would seem, for example Secrets of Lost Empires. The "Gods from Space" thing is utterly pathetic, especially as it implies the only smart folks were the Euros, if the South Americans did anything spectacular, well they must have had help from outer space. Ridiculous.
PBS: Secrets of Lost Empires - much better show..
on
Archimedes Death Ray
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· Score: 1
Not to argue that the mythbusters are always right, but they've disproved this in one of thier episodes.
Umm, the MITers were disproving the MythBusters, not the other way around. For a show with a little more credibility, check out PBS where they actually get real scientists and engineers to see if they can replicate ancient technological feats on Secrets of Lost Empires. Conclusion: Not so simple.
Her general point was that those who argue that nuclear power is cheap and efficient ignore the overheads and invisible costs.
In the U.S., the industry is heavily subsidized. It is a credit to wind and solar that it has achieved as much as they have, with the negligible subsidies. I've noticed that the portable construction highway signs are now powered by solar. Very cool. Maybe if just a tad bit more of that money went to other, renewable energy sources...
According to a July 2000 report by the Renewable Energy Policy Project, the U.S. government has spent approximately $150 billion on energy subsidies for wind, solar and nuclear power--96.3% of which has gone to nuclear power.
Yes, great comments. I hadn't realized they were standardizing on PDF, excellent choice. Quite a bit of documents on the web are already in PDF format, I think those using postscript switched to PDF. I've used Apache's FOP which can be used to build PDFs using XML and XSL files. And that is just one of many excellent tools both commercial and open-source available for building and manipulating PDFs.
As I was reading the comments it seems this might be Microsoft's Microchannel moment - hopefully other States will be as forward thinking as Massachussetts.
Check the C++ FAQ then post to comp.lang.c++.
I thought this in particular was good:
Do not refer to "C/C++." Some people get testy about that, and will (unfortunately!) ignore everything else you say just to correct you with something like, "There is no such language." It borders on pathetic, but you'll probably be okay if you say "C or C++" instead of "C/C++." Sigh.
Them: --LISTEN! I'M THE BOSS AND I'LL TELL YOU HOW IT IS
Me: Yes sir
That reminds me of a story someone told me about. They worked on a commerce web site for a major retailer trying to figure out the web. They insisted that the customer's order should be submitted, even if they hit the back button, or close button. They wanted the sale. Consultant tells them they can't do that, that's not how it works. Client is adamant. Consultant(s) build site as requested. Entire project is a failure, the above issue being just one of many goofs.
Qt was eliminated right out - my project can't be made GPL (due to a piece of the code that is subject to export restrictions), and I can't afford the license cost for a commercial license (and the educational license was too restrictive: I could only develop on campus on a school owned computer.).
What? You can afford the luxury of grad school, but not even the academic license? Or, did you spend all your money on the Windows Forms.net license?
Not to be too harsh, but give me a break dude, every time I hear the baloney about the Qt license costing too much, that is a clue you are an amateur. Qt is simply a fantastic product. Paying a little extra for a proper tool will make all the difference. I'm not sure who said it, but "If I had 9 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend 6 hours sharpening an axe". Or a little money and buy yourself a proper chainsaw.
Sorry, I don't think a "quick search on google" suffices for real research. I knew this Java Performance Tuninglink would come in handy. Yes, unfortunately it's not just the one Java zealot you point out, but folks who really know what they are doing, and C#/CLR is nowhere near performance of today's Java, it is where Java was 5 years back.
From the article:
And the garbage collection tweaking? They've hardcoded lots of values based on their tests "because for anybody to tweak them manually you would really have to understand the implementation of the garbage collector and what those things do". Everyone out there with production Java systems knows that what the engineers find optimal is almost never optimal in everyone else's systems, and we are grateful to have all those garbage collection parameters exposed in the JVM. Yes, it does require us to have a deeper understanding of what the garbage collector is doing, but that is the only way round, because the VM engineers cannot possibly have a deeper understand of the thousands and thousands of different applications out there. Those engineer-determined optimal values are still there of course, but as defaults in Java, not hard coded unchangeable options.
Good point. His CORBA/COM point was ridiculous. That microsoft standardized on something, but *all* open source projects did not is simply utterly ridiculous. That's not innovation. That's the benefit of being ruled by Bill. Bill says we are using Visual Basic across the board, it happens. Fine.
Besides, KDE standarized on DCOP, GNOME on Bonobo (CORBA?), that blows away his argument that nothing like that exists in the open-source world. Microsoft's advantage is copying an existing standard (CORBA), and embracing/extending it (COM).
Besides, so what? DCOM (distributed version) is a failed standard, and COM is only applicable *within* Microsoft (think intranet vs. internet), that's why they bit the bullet and are pushing web services, having realized having a Microsoft-only standard doesn't do them a bit of good in the real world. Further, let's take CORBA. This is a well-adopted standard, supported by 800 companies, and many great open-source implementations, such as omniORB. With CORBA, or web services, or even REST - interoperability works. .
Though CORBA exists and is unencumbered by any fixed relationship with ideologically impure organizations (read: proprietary companies), you'd have as much a chance of convincing all open source projects to standardize on CORBA for native code interoperability as you would convincing 1000 cats trapped in a room to run in the same direction once you opened the doors.
Well, they ain't using COM either. [Granted, it would be *great* if KDE and GNOME standardized on *something*. There was talk of some sort of Bonobo-DCOP bridge. ]
Hasn't anybody else noticed that the slope of progress on linux is far less than for Mac OS X, or even Windows? Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux. And by that point Apple will be selling something that makes both look like a Speak 'n' Spell.
Slope of progress? Like, do you measure that in utils, or what? Lines of code? Eye-candy? How many OEMs include it? Or do you measure it in reliability, security, standards-adherence?
The underpinnings (openstep, freebsd) have always been there for the taking by anybody in the OSS community yet it took Apple to produce what I think (and many others do, too) is the first decent version of UNIX for the desktop.
Always there for the taking? Nice corporate attitude. Well, that sentence speaks for itself. Apple benefits from the hard work of the folks at Berkeley and KDE, then adds some polish, calls it innovation. 'cepting they wouldn't be where there are now had it not been for open-source. And by the way, if you search the Slash archive, you'll see Apple is not exactly a self-respecting member of the open source community. They see far, by sitting on the shoulders of giants. But don't contribute anything back, unless they get their hands slap. Read up on Safari's roots in KDE's KHTML.
Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux.
NOW you're talking crack. What an inane statement first of all. Still beat linux in what way? Again, what are your criteria? Besides, the Linux development pace has forced Microsoft to entirely revamp their glacial development process to the 'Agile' process of the Linux crew. Read up on the article in WSJ recently about how sloooooow it took to get builds from Microsot.
Just look at GNOME. It's practically got a [bleep] start menu.
The start menu. Oh, thank you very very much Msf. What a wonderful contribution. But they stole the entire user interface for Windows, and Windows 95, from Macintosh, who stole it from Xerox PARC. Xerox Parc built the GUI interface. Msft contributes a button. Thanks.
Heh heh. I'd be curious about Weaver's statements, but the Nessus site is Slashdotted so now way to verify. But either way this Nessus thing seems to have nothing to do with the fact that Tenable didn't make any money off the product (and it seems according to other posts that they do make money, in fact I see from a security listserv they are even hiring people), but rather that now that they've got their product out in front of folks, they are going to yank the GPL and really profit, like McVoy and the whole BitKeeper scandal. Ride the coattails of Linus and open-source, then get greedy, that rivals are stealing their ideas (maybe a GPL issue), and that they aren't making enough as they should.
Thing is, while Nessus seems good, except for the points Weaver mentions about the plugins, they would be __nowhere__ as a product, with competitors like ICE and other professional security products. Think of the importance of placement of your product in a grocery store.
According to this article from Yahoo News, the reporter asks the question, but Schmidt doesn't exactly deny the rumour. Hence the confusion. Microsoft has used this to great effect, to "test the waters", for example when they were going to kill FoxPro. The resulting public outcry from diehard Fox users forced Microsoft to keep enhancing FoxPro. Consider this cheap market research.
Instead of quibbling over nuances, consider this: Is it technically feasible to do this? Would there be any benefit? You betcha. Roger Kay's dinosaur quote below is great. It's funny, whenever you see one of those Microsoft adverts with the dinosaurs, it makes me think what a great OpenOffice add it would be, with Microsoft's Bob being one of the dinos.
"Is this a threat to Microsoft? Not today," said Roger Kay, president of market research firm Endpoint Technology Associates. "But mammals weren't a threat either when dinosaurs were kings of the earth."
[snip]
Google Toolbar is a small header bar that fits within a computer user's Web browser which makes it more convenient for desktop PC users to use Google search and link to other tools with a single mouse click.
Asked whether Google might feature Sun's OpenOffice on the Google Toolbar, Schmidt responded: "That's speculation. We don't pre-announce our products," he said.
Sun declined to comment on whether OpenOffice would become a Web-delivered application
The only way to decide whether he is a whistle blower or a liar that tries to make some cash by blackmailing his former employer and Airbus is to have an independent review of the chip in question.
Actually there's other ways. You could RTFA. I've simplified that by excerting below. Or you could use common sense. Whistleblowing is CLM - career limiting move. You don't do it to make a little cash on the side. This guy is now basically an untouchable. He's in this out of integrity honesty, and now after being fired, to clear his good name. Something few and far between these days.
To help pay living expenses and legal fees, Mangan sold his house in Kansas. With only about $300 left in his bank account, Mangan missed a Sept. 8 deadline to pay his $185,000 fine and faces up to a year in jail. Next month he's likely to be called before a judge on his criminal case.
The family expected to be evicted this month from their apartment, but their church in Vienna took up a collection to pay their rent....
TTTech has offered to drop its legal action against Mangan, court records show, and pay him three months of severance, if he retracts his statements. But Mangan has refused.
Mangan said he was looking for a new job. He has contacted dozens of aerospace firms in the U.S. and Europe, but none have returned his calls. "Nobody wants to touch me," he said."
Right, but are the other systems using the same component? In Mangan's blog, as one of his concerns was redundancy. There are other systems, but they all use the exact same component, and apparently while Airbus requires dissimilar redundancy for safety critical systems, due to negligence it was not required in this case.
Ethics & Technology - Mangan's blog is
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Airbus A380 Under Fire
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· Score: 3, Informative
There seems to be something more at work here. I'll read more about this, but both parties are acting unusual to the point where I am really on neither side, whereas normally I suppose I would be on his side.
Mangan's blog has significant details. It makes quite a bit of sense if this guy, has more integrity than your average person. He's a super smart guy apparently, and he's probably right, firing him was probably not a good idea. Who wouldn't be miffed, and want to restore their good name? For the Austrian company, I'm betting they don't have the time to improve the design, or fix it properly.
I've read the various articles in the LA Times and WSJ, and his blog, and my take is he is an engineer, and he's not going to let politics and bureaucrats cover this flawed design. Any whistleblower faces this - it's what sets them apart from the average person.
The articles are very interesting, he was testing the system and found flaws not only in the functionality but the system design (not redundant). Seems there's politics and big money involved.
I sat in on an ethics class, directed towards engineers, at Stanford once, forgot the name of the class, but the professor posed the question - if you, as an engineer on a major project (whether it be designing a new drug or a spaceship), and discovered an issue, what would you do? Now perhaps the dishonest person, rushing to finish the project and look good, would move on. The average person would write an e-mail perhaps, and then if nothing was done, perhaps at most quit their job. And if you're fired? Anyway, interesting class.
What you're answering is how to operate. What the question was is how exactly does it work. That usually includes how to make it, where the materials come from and what they do. I can use a ballpoint pen, and I have a vague idea of how it gets the ink on the page, but I have no idea how the ink is made that completes the device and makes it work. Without that type of ink the pen doesn't work right, but does that matter to me?
Doesn't, but some people are interested. There was a fascinating program on Nova about engineering feats such as the pyramids, where the methods used to build them have long been lost. In fact it is even a bit embarrassing to discover how hard some of this stuff is. Stealing a bit from the reality shows, they would have a couple of contestants, with various theories of how the darn thing was built, and then they would follow them in their triumphs and travails as they attempted to replicate, on a much smaller scale, what some of the ancients had done a millenium or two before. One of the interesting shows was ideas on how the Romans built an awning across the Coliseum.
Suddenly it strikes me a picture of a friend of mine, top high school student, math club and programming wiz, later to study for a Phd in CS and graphics at Stanford, gazing at an ancient PDP-7, staring down at a roll of punch tape in hand, then at the switches on the command panel, and wondering how in the world the 'grumpy old men' got this thing to run...
Except, of course, that you cant actually fix the *hard* problems with the new stuff unless you know the old stuff.
Excellent point. I was working on a project with a recent college graduate CS, and he ran into a problem with messages sent between C++ and Java. Luckily remembering his Computer Architecture and networking courses, he was able to figure out the translation issue. But I highly doubt your MIS student, packed with knowledge and certifications in JavaScript, would've figured it out. Some might whine about the difficulty of the courses, for example at my school the database course is essentially you building a database manager, but believe me, you will understand how those apps work.
"I'd like to release -mm's more often and I'd like -mm to have less of a wild-and-crappy reputation. Both of these would happen if originators were to test their stuff more carefully."
No, clearly not there yet. Now obviously the Linux Kernel is more complicated than your average project, but it would seem the system Mozilla uses, Tinderbox would be also useful, as it seems the IBM automated test referenced above is not for when code is checked in, but after a release. The other thing with Tinderbox is that folks that check non-unit tested code in that breaks the build don't get to do that at a certain point;)
Essentially, Tinderbox is a detective tool. It allows you to see what is happening in the source tree. It shows you who checked in what (by asking Bonsai); what platforms have built successfully; what platforms are broken and exactly how they are broken (the build logs); and the state of the files that made up the build (cvsblame) so you can figure out who broke the build, so you can do the most important thing, hold them accountable for their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Buyer beware.
Not to knock VS too much, it's a great IDE, which I've used since VS 97, and you can certainly configure it to work as preferable, from just using it as an editor/compiler, to using the excellent debugger, to running lex and yacc. [Well things have changed a while since I used it for this, it is a kick they recommend downloading Cygwin - times change!]
Microsoft has historically used it's monopoly to crush rivals. What this illustrates is they don't understand (like Sun, interestingly) how to compete against open source. They are trying, but they still don't get it. No doubt their SQL is limited also. No dice, most people will stick with their MySQL (in fact when I first read the headline I thought it was MYSQL 2005 finall ships!) and PostgreSQL, etc.
Probably one of the big mistakes they made was marginalizing Jim Clark, who founded the company. Michael Lewis's book on Clark, The New New Thing is well worth reading.
There have been some great shows on PBS recently, a cut above "MythBusters" it would seem, for example Secrets of Lost Empires. The "Gods from Space" thing is utterly pathetic, especially as it implies the only smart folks were the Euros, if the South Americans did anything spectacular, well they must have had help from outer space. Ridiculous.
Umm, the MITers were disproving the MythBusters, not the other way around. For a show with a little more credibility, check out PBS where they actually get real scientists and engineers to see if they can replicate ancient technological feats on Secrets of Lost Empires. Conclusion: Not so simple.
In the U.S., the industry is heavily subsidized. It is a credit to wind and solar that it has achieved as much as they have, with the negligible subsidies. I've noticed that the portable construction highway signs are now powered by solar. Very cool. Maybe if just a tad bit more of that money went to other, renewable energy sources...
As I was reading the comments it seems this might be Microsoft's Microchannel moment - hopefully other States will be as forward thinking as Massachussetts.
Them: --LISTEN! I'M THE BOSS AND I'LL TELL YOU HOW IT IS
Me: Yes sir
That reminds me of a story someone told me about. They worked on a commerce web site for a major retailer trying to figure out the web. They insisted that the customer's order should be submitted, even if they hit the back button, or close button. They wanted the sale. Consultant tells them they can't do that, that's not how it works. Client is adamant. Consultant(s) build site as requested. Entire project is a failure, the above issue being just one of many goofs.
Seriously, you've just summed up the whole 'bait and switch' flaw with mono.
What? You can afford the luxury of grad school, but not even the academic license? Or, did you spend all your money on the Windows Forms .net license?
Not to be too harsh, but give me a break dude, every time I hear the baloney about the Qt license costing too much, that is a clue you are an amateur. Qt is simply a fantastic product. Paying a little extra for a proper tool will make all the difference. I'm not sure who said it, but "If I had 9 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend 6 hours sharpening an axe". Or a little money and buy yourself a proper chainsaw.
From the article:
Besides, KDE standarized on DCOP, GNOME on Bonobo (CORBA?), that blows away his argument that nothing like that exists in the open-source world. Microsoft's advantage is copying an existing standard (CORBA), and embracing/extending it (COM).
Besides, so what? DCOM (distributed version) is a failed standard, and COM is only applicable *within* Microsoft (think intranet vs. internet), that's why they bit the bullet and are pushing web services, having realized having a Microsoft-only standard doesn't do them a bit of good in the real world. Further, let's take CORBA. This is a well-adopted standard, supported by 800 companies, and many great open-source implementations, such as omniORB. With CORBA, or web services, or even REST - interoperability works. .
Well, they ain't using COM either. [Granted, it would be *great* if KDE and GNOME standardized on *something*. There was talk of some sort of Bonobo-DCOP bridge. ]
Slope of progress? Like, do you measure that in utils, or what? Lines of code? Eye-candy? How many OEMs include it? Or do you measure it in reliability, security, standards-adherence? The underpinnings (openstep, freebsd) have always been there for the taking by anybody in the OSS community yet it took Apple to produce what I think (and many others do, too) is the first decent version of UNIX for the desktop.
Always there for the taking? Nice corporate attitude. Well, that sentence speaks for itself. Apple benefits from the hard work of the folks at Berkeley and KDE, then adds some polish, calls it innovation. 'cepting they wouldn't be where there are now had it not been for open-source. And by the way, if you search the Slash archive, you'll see Apple is not exactly a self-respecting member of the open source community. They see far, by sitting on the shoulders of giants. But don't contribute anything back, unless they get their hands slap. Read up on Safari's roots in KDE's KHTML.
Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux.
NOW you're talking crack. What an inane statement first of all. Still beat linux in what way? Again, what are your criteria? Besides, the Linux development pace has forced Microsoft to entirely revamp their glacial development process to the 'Agile' process of the Linux crew. Read up on the article in WSJ recently about how sloooooow it took to get builds from Microsot.
Just look at GNOME. It's practically got a [bleep] start menu.
The start menu. Oh, thank you very very much Msf. What a wonderful contribution. But they stole the entire user interface for Windows, and Windows 95, from Macintosh, who stole it from Xerox PARC. Xerox Parc built the GUI interface. Msft contributes a button. Thanks.
Thing is, while Nessus seems good, except for the points Weaver mentions about the plugins, they would be __nowhere__ as a product, with competitors like ICE and other professional security products. Think of the importance of placement of your product in a grocery store.
Instead of quibbling over nuances, consider this: Is it technically feasible to do this? Would there be any benefit? You betcha. Roger Kay's dinosaur quote below is great. It's funny, whenever you see one of those Microsoft adverts with the dinosaurs, it makes me think what a great OpenOffice add it would be, with Microsoft's Bob being one of the dinos.
All the current suggestions from other posters I would agree with, Dr. Dobbs, ACM, IEEE, CUJ. But probably, like regular media, the smaller players are picking up the slack, even if they are web only. ServerSide, JavaLobby, IBM Systems Journal, Software Development, Artima Developer, JavaWorld, and DeveloperWorks are a few of the excellent ones I regularly read.
Actually there's other ways. You could RTFA. I've simplified that by excerting below. Or you could use common sense. Whistleblowing is CLM - career limiting move. You don't do it to make a little cash on the side. This guy is now basically an untouchable. He's in this out of integrity honesty, and now after being fired, to clear his good name. Something few and far between these days.
Right, but are the other systems using the same component? In Mangan's blog, as one of his concerns was redundancy. There are other systems, but they all use the exact same component, and apparently while Airbus requires dissimilar redundancy for safety critical systems, due to negligence it was not required in this case.
Mangan's blog has significant details. It makes quite a bit of sense if this guy, has more integrity than your average person. He's a super smart guy apparently, and he's probably right, firing him was probably not a good idea. Who wouldn't be miffed, and want to restore their good name? For the Austrian company, I'm betting they don't have the time to improve the design, or fix it properly.
I've read the various articles in the LA Times and WSJ, and his blog, and my take is he is an engineer, and he's not going to let politics and bureaucrats cover this flawed design. Any whistleblower faces this - it's what sets them apart from the average person.
The articles are very interesting, he was testing the system and found flaws not only in the functionality but the system design (not redundant). Seems there's politics and big money involved.
I sat in on an ethics class, directed towards engineers, at Stanford once, forgot the name of the class, but the professor posed the question - if you, as an engineer on a major project (whether it be designing a new drug or a spaceship), and discovered an issue, what would you do? Now perhaps the dishonest person, rushing to finish the project and look good, would move on. The average person would write an e-mail perhaps, and then if nothing was done, perhaps at most quit their job. And if you're fired? Anyway, interesting class.
Doesn't, but some people are interested. There was a fascinating program on Nova about engineering feats such as the pyramids, where the methods used to build them have long been lost. In fact it is even a bit embarrassing to discover how hard some of this stuff is. Stealing a bit from the reality shows, they would have a couple of contestants, with various theories of how the darn thing was built, and then they would follow them in their triumphs and travails as they attempted to replicate, on a much smaller scale, what some of the ancients had done a millenium or two before. One of the interesting shows was ideas on how the Romans built an awning across the Coliseum.
Suddenly it strikes me a picture of a friend of mine, top high school student, math club and programming wiz, later to study for a Phd in CS and graphics at Stanford, gazing at an ancient PDP-7, staring down at a roll of punch tape in hand, then at the switches on the command panel, and wondering how in the world the 'grumpy old men' got this thing to run...
Excellent point. I was working on a project with a recent college graduate CS, and he ran into a problem with messages sent between C++ and Java. Luckily remembering his Computer Architecture and networking courses, he was able to figure out the translation issue. But I highly doubt your MIS student, packed with knowledge and certifications in JavaScript, would've figured it out. Some might whine about the difficulty of the courses, for example at my school the database course is essentially you building a database manager, but believe me, you will understand how those apps work.
No, clearly not there yet. Now obviously the Linux Kernel is more complicated than your average project, but it would seem the system Mozilla uses, Tinderbox would be also useful, as it seems the IBM automated test referenced above is not for when code is checked in, but after a release. The other thing with Tinderbox is that folks that check non-unit tested code in that breaks the build don't get to do that at a certain point ;)