I personally am at my limit of coping with incoming information.
What would be useful is some kind of filter that can filter out the inforrmation that I want and drop other information. The big problem is when information is dropped - was it something there that I could have used anyway...
/. is fairly OK when it comes to the range of nerd information, but I can't get everything here, like the local weather or finding out how to optimize my living quarters...
Some ads are OK, since they are not really intruding much, but some are really annoying. I was on the brink of killing the flash player before I found out about the feature Flashblock for mozilla. The reason was a M$ ad that went outside the allocated ad frame and painted over the text I was reading. If I had a Magnum the world would have been at least one stupid head shorter...:-]
Another annoyance is all ads that plays some kind of sound to irritate the reader. OK, which one of the 17 ads I see right now was doing that noise? Especially if the noise occurs at irregular intervals...
I have actually experienced the opposite when it comes to installation of non-critical patches, namely that a critical patch caused a problem that didn't go away until I instaled an optional software update.
The hardware updates may be a little more problematic, but even they can help sometimes. However updates to WLan cards are not always good to install, since they can break WEP and/or WPA.
The event is fairly rare, and hard to predict. In any case if that is going to happen it's not much we can do about it.
In case this happens the burst is about ten seconds, which means that only half the earth will suffer the direct radiation. The other half will suffer varying grades of radiation depending on the filtering by the earth itself. There will certainly be immediate effects of radiation poisioning, but also secondary effects since the plant life will be highly affected. A drop in oxygen levels will probably occur which will cause additional extinctions of larger animals (including humans).
The only safe place would be to relocate to the Andromeda galaxy.
I'm still missing the more humorous side with the nerdy star Roger Wilco. Too many games of today are only trying to shoot everything else to the next world. Too few really new ideas has surfaced since Wolfenstein (the original game).
OK, the graphics is better and now we can get force feedback, but it's still only polish on the same idea of first person shooters. (OK, there are other games too, but nothing that is "reeeeally new".)
Games that requires more brain and less reaction time are not too common. Some board games are available, but I'm looking for something that is more. The step of Civilization from II to III was no great leap compared to the change from Civ I to Civ II.
It looks to me that what happens today is that a lot of game companies throws in a lot of energy to polish up some old idea with better graphics because it's a safe ground. It's just so booooring...
that the ADTI is actually working in DC and is therefore close to the politicians that institute laws and regulations.
The point is that it's not necessary to have a general impact on people, but an impact on the legal system. This means that anybody with enough money and stamina is likely to get a lever into the legal system and thus creating a bias that is in their favor.
In my opinion, any piece of software used in a governmental institution should be open source, since that code is paid for by the public. Therefore the public shall have access to it.
Only a few components (which mostly is data, not software) that covers personal privacy, intelligence and national security shall be protected, but still accessible on a need to know basis.
What can be done when it comes to organizations like the ADTI is actually to figure out if there are legal handles that can be used. With that I mean that a deep study of these organizations may reveal any tax evictions (no matter size) to be reported to the IRS, bribery and other activities.
No felony may be too small to actually report to our public servants. Even parking tickets in abundance will be annoying. The point is to let the legal system work for you.
OK, this post will probably put my Karma in "Evil" mode...
(REALLY EVIL MODE ON) Anything else that you can find out may also work. All those business reply mail cupons in magazines are also an idea if you run out of ideas. Only check a few (filling in all will raise suspicions) on each cupon and fill in their name and address. The amount of junk mail will be annoying. If enough people does this with everything from toothbrushes to concrete mixers then they will not be doing anything else then sorting mail. (otherwise they will running the risk of losing important messages). It's also important to avoid cupons covering pornographic material, since that can be illegal. Also avoid anything that is cash on delivery, since that may be illegal too...
Telemarketing targeting is also an annoyance that may be applied, but that is probably already taken care of by a do not call registration. Misdirected fax calls could be funny for a while (all restaurants in DC faxing their menu to the voice number).
If you are two persons, you can place calls to them, where the first person calls three times asking for a "Asok Beeblebrox" or something. They will certainly say that that person isn't available, and then the other person calls back saying he is "Asok Beeblebrox" asking if anybody has called and then sounding VERY annoyed when they didn't take a note... (this is probably on the fringe of legality, so don't pull off this too often...) A twisted version is to first ask for a real name and then when you get that person you will run the "Asok Beeblebrox" with him/her. This will move the annoyance from the switchboard to the core of the organization.
Well, that was EVIL... I felt that I had to be a little evil today... (REALLY EVIL MODE OFF)
I'm not worried about giving out my DNA in an investigation, since the only thing that actually can be proven is that I was at a certain location, but not necessarily at the defined time. One reason that is more important is that giving DNA actually can help to exclude you from an investigation.
Unwillingness to provide a DNA can actually increase the suspicions against you.
is necessary. It may be a good idea to first check that the code you have works with the latest versions of the Linux kernels, 2.6 firsthand and possibly 2.4. If there are too much problems supporting both, go for 2.6 and try to avoid pitfalls regarding deprecated functions. (use udev instead of devfs for example)
Include reasonable amount of documentation, like a README and an INSTALL file. Keep both short.
Try to use autoconf scripts, since that may help in the long run when people tries to build it on all kinds of strange platforms. Be clear of which platforms that are supported, and which are not. Be also clear of platforms known not to work.
Set up a bug report tool. Bugzilla is a well-known tool. Bugs will be reported, and you may also get fix feedbacks that way.
A clear versioning strategy is also necessary. Avoid a multitude of branches if possible. The preferred way is to have a public read-only CVS archive. (you can use cvsup to create a mirror of the real archive in case you have a security breach on the public server.)
Have a reasonable licensing for your software, it will pay off in the end. You may want to take a look at MySQL. Try to be flexible and not too complicated.
This seems to be what I could come up with on a short notice.
multithreading hardware will not mean much, but in some cases it may mean a lot for performance. (with most cases I mean users running Word/Excel/Powerpoint/likewise)
The real issue is how large each thread can be (in the matter of memory) before it has to access data that is external to the thread. It may mean a lot for gamers running close to reality games and also for those that are doing massive calculations.
The important thing is that developers has to be aware of the possibilities and limitations around this technology. Otherwise it would be like throwing a V8 into a T-Ford. It is possible, but you would never be able to utilize the full power.
Another thing is that todays programming languages are limited. C (and C++) are advanced macro assemblers (not really bad, but it requires a lot of the programmer). Java has thread support, but it's still the programmer (in most cases) that has to decide. Java is not very efficient either, which of course is depending on which platform it's running on in combination with general optimizations. C# is Microsoft's bastard of Java and C++ with the same drawbacks as Java.
There are other languages, but most of them are either too obscure (like Erlang or Prolog) or too unknown.
The point is that a compiler shall be able to break out separate threads and/or processes whenever possible to improve performance. It is of course necessary for the programmer to hint the compiler where it may do this and where it shouldn't, but in any way try to keep the programmer luckily unknowing about the details. The details may depend on the actual system where the application is running. i.e. if the system is busy with serving a bunch of users then the splitting of the application into a bunch of threads is ot really what you want, but if you are running alone (or almost alone) then the application should be permitted to allocate more resources. The key is that the allocation has to be dynamic.
In theory it's simple, a lot of servers, each serving only a fragment of a file. i.e. anybody serving can't be held responsible for fragments that by themselves are unusable. (something like a world-wide RAID-5 solution, but much more complex)
In practice it's a little more complicated than that since it is necessary to have some kind of dictionary to link all fragments together.
Enough duplicate servers will mean that even if 25% of the servers are going offline nobody should lose any data. This technology is of course applicable to any kind of data.
The problem is that anybody that REALLY is doing something suspicious will of course use encryption or obfuscation when exchanging messages, so the idea of monitoring all communication is as hollow as it can be. The only thing that you may be able to prove is that some communication has occured, but if it was about some criminal activity or exchanging some stupid PowerPoint presentations, that is a completely different matter.
If anyone is suspected of criminal activities then that individual has to be monitored, but there are better ways to do that then to harvest internet traffic. I suspect that the majority of the internet traffic they actually will catch that is readable are spam, porn and/.-traffic.
Anyway, this is an example of a government that has misunderstood it's purpouse - The only reason it really exists is to serve the citizens, everything else is excess.
If you don't feel that the employment meets your personal goals and you have an option to change employment or go for studies it means that it is probably good for both you and for your employer.
It's good for you, since you (hopefully) don't have to do things that you don't like, or worse hate.
It's good for the employer since he will have one dissatisfied employee less to worry about. (if too many employees leave, then the company is probably on the wrong track anyway).
Personally I'm in an employment that I'm not particulary fond of, but it is at least giving me a steady income. Consultancy is a different form of prostitution... I'm planning for other options, but it's also a question of money. (chicken and egg situation.)
I have found out that what really has happened in large organizations talking about Quality is that they actually tends to see Quality as a documentation question. With that I mean that the Quality people are requiring a completely new set of documents that are stating how the work was done, but not really why. On a frequent basis none of the Quality documentation is actually documenting the state of the product itself, but is yet another workspace that actually is there only to produce documents.
The quality of the product is not in focus. If you try talk about things like Lint and Purify with persons representing Quality you will get an answer that that isn't about quality at all...
So the whole Quality business is something that is invented to support itself and not the end customer of the product. In the long run the customer is actually more interested in the quality of the product than any provided documentation that states that this product was created with our Superior Methods and Ultimate Skill. That documentation doesn't help at all if the product crashes twice a day...
Because the threshold level varies from person to person.
In some circles you cant even make a very bleak curse while in some you are completely ignored even if you are expressing yourself that may cause most people to turn their heads.
From my point of view I find the censoring that occurs in some TV shows more indecent than it they had been showing the real thing or broadcasting the real expression instead of a -beep-...
Some examples: The OCC(Orange County Choppers) has a poster on their wall, which is blurred by somebody because it is indecent or something. Same goes with some blurring of soda cans in the Mythbusters series. So what if they are using Pepsi or Coke... I wouldn't care less. The Janet Jackson incident isn't worth more than a yawn from me... So if some kids were watching, well they can probably see more in some magazines. It seems to me that some naked bodyparts are more annoying to some people than cutting someones throat during dinner.
I try to write code that is simple to read and avoid complex statements. This is often easily optimized by the compiler and more important readable for whoever is doing maintenance on the code.
For the rare performance critical parts it is however worth the effort to try various constructions to get the best performance out of the code. The most problematic issue is to identify the hotspots in the code and figure out which variables that should be declared as 'register' and those that shouldn't. Ordering of statements are also important in order to match the various performance improvments the CPU can offer. One very good document on this is actually found at AMD.
One code construct that I am using that I found is very useful is to place the matching '{' and '}' in the same column in the code. This eases the effort trying to find where a block begins.
Example:
if (a == b) {
printf("Hello!\n");
}
In my opinion this produces code that has an improved readability compared to the constructs placing the '{' on the same line as the if-statement where it is much easier to miss.
Everybody else loses in this match, since defending a software patent creates badwill, and will result in stagnation on the area surrounding the patent.
This "new" galaxy, how old is it really? It's hard to tell, but a perfectly valid question, since if it is possible to detect it's age I wouldn't be surprised if it is going to be older than Big Bang.
Why? - Well, if we scale down Big Bang to firework size (Think of those spherical explosions you see in fireorks.) If one explodes before another you will see the stars of the first one first, but even though the stars has stopped glowing, the particles remains. Figure that "our" Big Bang isn't the only one that has occured.
What if this galaxy is the remains of some Big Bang that occured much much earlier than about 13 billion years ago. (give or take a few:-) ) This will put some theories completely upside down. Are we going to have a new Big Bang, and in that case when?
This discovery is at least one example of the situation where reality is stranger than fiction. (I haven't seen any story based on the idea of a galaxy completely of dark matter.)
What I would do is to install empty tubes (conduits) in walls, roof and floor together with some empty electrical boxes. This would allow for ability to insert additional cables afterwards.
Depending on where you live, the availability of some items may vary. Here in Sweden we have SELGA, that has the tubes and the boxes
In the US you have Home Depot that can provide you with boxes and flex conduits. (couldn't find any hard conduits right away on their web site, but I know that they have.)
Considering that you build a house with straw insluation, I actually would go for metal boxes and conduits together with arc-fault breakers to try to keep the risk of fire caused by electricity at a minimum. Even though the metal boxes and conduits themselves are an added risk of shorts, the sparks will be contained better.
The bean looks more like a forgery mishap than something to really consider as art. OK, it may provide a new look for bird droppings, but otherwise it's not very exciting.
If you want some real art, go for Salvador Dali or something. - A true work of art is something that can be studied for a long time, both in detail and as a whole.
Considering that the know-how about nuclear weapons is available to at least some extent in scientific literature. The major problem creating nuclear weapons is to get hands on the components needed, and even that is more a question of money and patience.
Another problem when it comes to making nuclear weapons is not making them, it is making them efficient. An inefficient bomb going of will actually create more radioactive fallout than an efficient bomb, which means that the long-term effects will be worse.
More can be mentioned in this, but I refrain from going further to avoid giving terrorists too much ideas.
This seems to be a shit-throwing contest more than actually trying to figure out means to manage security issues in platforms.
Programs will have bugs, regardless of what programming language that is used, since it always comes down to machine-code or even microcode in the end, and it's not easy to test a large software package for all possible permutations.
The only way around this problem is a layered security approach, which means that breaking one layer will not cause any critical effects. Unfortunately Microsoft has only recently recognized this and are applying patches on and off. Solaris and most *NIX:es are a little better off, but there are a lot of work to do for all operating systems here!
If only more industries realized this and instead found out how to handle new technology instead of trying to suppress it.
Metaphore mode on:
A defensive war will not win any new territory, at best it will keep you from losing your old, at worst it will ruin you. Offensive actions will force others to react.
Sorry for being a moron, but I think that if you are going for a mission critical solution with high availability I would propose an OpenVMS system.
OK, the EULA is probably not permitting it to be used for mission critical solutions either, but in my opinion it's one of the better commercially available OS:es. (There's even a hobbyist license available). (anybody knowing of an OS that has an EULA that actually claims that the OS is intended for mission critical use?)
I think it's about time to require that software companies are responsible for their code. There are too many simple bugs passed through every day that would have been caught if a thorough software testing was done. One tool for doing it is Purify Plus, and another is Splint.
Splint is available to the public, unfortunately it's only checking C and not C++. (anyone in the mood for implementing a C++ version?)
And not even NASA and ESA software are always bug-free, but their software is as close as you can come to mission critical applications. I wouldn't like to have a computer running Windows on a mission to Mars, it isn't stable enough.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be useful is some kind of filter that can filter out the inforrmation that I want and drop other information. The big problem is when information is dropped - was it something there that I could have used anyway...
Another annoyance is all ads that plays some kind of sound to irritate the reader. OK, which one of the 17 ads I see right now was doing that noise? Especially if the noise occurs at irregular intervals...
The hardware updates may be a little more problematic, but even they can help sometimes. However updates to WLan cards are not always good to install, since they can break WEP and/or WPA.
In case this happens the burst is about ten seconds, which means that only half the earth will suffer the direct radiation. The other half will suffer varying grades of radiation depending on the filtering by the earth itself. There will certainly be immediate effects of radiation poisioning, but also secondary effects since the plant life will be highly affected. A drop in oxygen levels will probably occur which will cause additional extinctions of larger animals (including humans).
The only safe place would be to relocate to the Andromeda galaxy.
OK, the graphics is better and now we can get force feedback, but it's still only polish on the same idea of first person shooters. (OK, there are other games too, but nothing that is "reeeeally new".)
Games that requires more brain and less reaction time are not too common. Some board games are available, but I'm looking for something that is more. The step of Civilization from II to III was no great leap compared to the change from Civ I to Civ II.
It looks to me that what happens today is that a lot of game companies throws in a lot of energy to polish up some old idea with better graphics because it's a safe ground. It's just so booooring...
The point is that it's not necessary to have a general impact on people, but an impact on the legal system. This means that anybody with enough money and stamina is likely to get a lever into the legal system and thus creating a bias that is in their favor.
In my opinion, any piece of software used in a governmental institution should be open source, since that code is paid for by the public. Therefore the public shall have access to it.
Only a few components (which mostly is data, not software) that covers personal privacy, intelligence and national security shall be protected, but still accessible on a need to know basis.
What can be done when it comes to organizations like the ADTI is actually to figure out if there are legal handles that can be used. With that I mean that a deep study of these organizations may reveal any tax evictions (no matter size) to be reported to the IRS, bribery and other activities.
No felony may be too small to actually report to our public servants. Even parking tickets in abundance will be annoying. The point is to let the legal system work for you.
OK, this post will probably put my Karma in "Evil" mode...
(REALLY EVIL MODE ON) Anything else that you can find out may also work. All those business reply mail cupons in magazines are also an idea if you run out of ideas. Only check a few (filling in all will raise suspicions) on each cupon and fill in their name and address. The amount of junk mail will be annoying. If enough people does this with everything from toothbrushes to concrete mixers then they will not be doing anything else then sorting mail. (otherwise they will running the risk of losing important messages). It's also important to avoid cupons covering pornographic material, since that can be illegal. Also avoid anything that is cash on delivery, since that may be illegal too...
Telemarketing targeting is also an annoyance that may be applied, but that is probably already taken care of by a do not call registration. Misdirected fax calls could be funny for a while (all restaurants in DC faxing their menu to the voice number).
If you are two persons, you can place calls to them, where the first person calls three times asking for a "Asok Beeblebrox" or something. They will certainly say that that person isn't available, and then the other person calls back saying he is "Asok Beeblebrox" asking if anybody has called and then sounding VERY annoyed when they didn't take a note... (this is probably on the fringe of legality, so don't pull off this too often...) A twisted version is to first ask for a real name and then when you get that person you will run the "Asok Beeblebrox" with him/her. This will move the annoyance from the switchboard to the core of the organization.
Well, that was EVIL... I felt that I had to be a little evil today... (REALLY EVIL MODE OFF)
To everybody else: Have a nice day! :-)
Unwillingness to provide a DNA can actually increase the suspicions against you.
Include reasonable amount of documentation, like a README and an INSTALL file. Keep both short.
Try to use autoconf scripts, since that may help in the long run when people tries to build it on all kinds of strange platforms. Be clear of which platforms that are supported, and which are not. Be also clear of platforms known not to work.
Set up a bug report tool. Bugzilla is a well-known tool. Bugs will be reported, and you may also get fix feedbacks that way.
A clear versioning strategy is also necessary. Avoid a multitude of branches if possible. The preferred way is to have a public read-only CVS archive. (you can use cvsup to create a mirror of the real archive in case you have a security breach on the public server.)
Have a reasonable licensing for your software, it will pay off in the end. You may want to take a look at MySQL. Try to be flexible and not too complicated.
This seems to be what I could come up with on a short notice.
And GOOD LUCK!
(Yes I know - Offtopic to the max!)
The real issue is how large each thread can be (in the matter of memory) before it has to access data that is external to the thread. It may mean a lot for gamers running close to reality games and also for those that are doing massive calculations.
The important thing is that developers has to be aware of the possibilities and limitations around this technology. Otherwise it would be like throwing a V8 into a T-Ford. It is possible, but you would never be able to utilize the full power.
Another thing is that todays programming languages are limited. C (and C++) are advanced macro assemblers (not really bad, but it requires a lot of the programmer). Java has thread support, but it's still the programmer (in most cases) that has to decide. Java is not very efficient either, which of course is depending on which platform it's running on in combination with general optimizations. C# is Microsoft's bastard of Java and C++ with the same drawbacks as Java.
There are other languages, but most of them are either too obscure (like Erlang or Prolog) or too unknown.
The point is that a compiler shall be able to break out separate threads and/or processes whenever possible to improve performance. It is of course necessary for the programmer to hint the compiler where it may do this and where it shouldn't, but in any way try to keep the programmer luckily unknowing about the details. The details may depend on the actual system where the application is running. i.e. if the system is busy with serving a bunch of users then the splitting of the application into a bunch of threads is ot really what you want, but if you are running alone (or almost alone) then the application should be permitted to allocate more resources. The key is that the allocation has to be dynamic.
Anybody knowing of any better languages?
In practice it's a little more complicated than that since it is necessary to have some kind of dictionary to link all fragments together.
Enough duplicate servers will mean that even if 25% of the servers are going offline nobody should lose any data. This technology is of course applicable to any kind of data.
The problem is that anybody that REALLY is doing something suspicious will of course use encryption or obfuscation when exchanging messages, so the idea of monitoring all communication is as hollow as it can be. The only thing that you may be able to prove is that some communication has occured, but if it was about some criminal activity or exchanging some stupid PowerPoint presentations, that is a completely different matter.
If anyone is suspected of criminal activities then that individual has to be monitored, but there are better ways to do that then to harvest internet traffic. I suspect that the majority of the internet traffic they actually will catch that is readable are spam, porn and /.-traffic.
Anyway, this is an example of a government that has misunderstood it's purpouse - The only reason it really exists is to serve the citizens, everything else is excess.
It's good for you, since you (hopefully) don't have to do things that you don't like, or worse hate.
It's good for the employer since he will have one dissatisfied employee less to worry about. (if too many employees leave, then the company is probably on the wrong track anyway).
Personally I'm in an employment that I'm not particulary fond of, but it is at least giving me a steady income. Consultancy is a different form of prostitution... I'm planning for other options, but it's also a question of money. (chicken and egg situation.)
The quality of the product is not in focus. If you try talk about things like Lint and Purify with persons representing Quality you will get an answer that that isn't about quality at all...
So the whole Quality business is something that is invented to support itself and not the end customer of the product. In the long run the customer is actually more interested in the quality of the product than any provided documentation that states that this product was created with our Superior Methods and Ultimate Skill. That documentation doesn't help at all if the product crashes twice a day...
In some circles you cant even make a very bleak curse while in some you are completely ignored even if you are expressing yourself that may cause most people to turn their heads.
From my point of view I find the censoring that occurs in some TV shows more indecent than it they had been showing the real thing or broadcasting the real expression instead of a -beep-...
Some examples: The OCC(Orange County Choppers) has a poster on their wall, which is blurred by somebody because it is indecent or something. Same goes with some blurring of soda cans in the Mythbusters series. So what if they are using Pepsi or Coke... I wouldn't care less. The Janet Jackson incident isn't worth more than a yawn from me... So if some kids were watching, well they can probably see more in some magazines. It seems to me that some naked bodyparts are more annoying to some people than cutting someones throat during dinner.
No alternatives in sight?
For the rare performance critical parts it is however worth the effort to try various constructions to get the best performance out of the code. The most problematic issue is to identify the hotspots in the code and figure out which variables that should be declared as 'register' and those that shouldn't. Ordering of statements are also important in order to match the various performance improvments the CPU can offer. One very good document on this is actually found at AMD.
One code construct that I am using that I found is very useful is to place the matching '{' and '}' in the same column in the code. This eases the effort trying to find where a block begins.
Example:
In my opinion this produces code that has an improved readability compared to the constructs placing the '{' on the same line as the if-statement where it is much easier to miss.Everybody else loses in this match, since defending a software patent creates badwill, and will result in stagnation on the area surrounding the patent.
This "new" galaxy, how old is it really? It's hard to tell, but a perfectly valid question, since if it is possible to detect it's age I wouldn't be surprised if it is going to be older than Big Bang.
Why? - Well, if we scale down Big Bang to firework size (Think of those spherical explosions you see in fireorks.) If one explodes before another you will see the stars of the first one first, but even though the stars has stopped glowing, the particles remains. Figure that "our" Big Bang isn't the only one that has occured.
What if this galaxy is the remains of some Big Bang that occured much much earlier than about 13 billion years ago. (give or take a few :-) ) This will put some theories completely upside down. Are we going to have a new Big Bang, and in that case when?
This discovery is at least one example of the situation where reality is stranger than fiction. (I haven't seen any story based on the idea of a galaxy completely of dark matter.)
Depending on where you live, the availability of some items may vary. Here in Sweden we have SELGA, that has the tubes and the boxes
In the US you have Home Depot that can provide you with boxes and flex conduits. (couldn't find any hard conduits right away on their web site, but I know that they have.)
Considering that you build a house with straw insluation, I actually would go for metal boxes and conduits together with arc-fault breakers to try to keep the risk of fire caused by electricity at a minimum. Even though the metal boxes and conduits themselves are an added risk of shorts, the sparks will be contained better.
If you want some real art, go for Salvador Dali or something. - A true work of art is something that can be studied for a long time, both in detail and as a whole.
Another problem when it comes to making nuclear weapons is not making them, it is making them efficient. An inefficient bomb going of will actually create more radioactive fallout than an efficient bomb, which means that the long-term effects will be worse.
More can be mentioned in this, but I refrain from going further to avoid giving terrorists too much ideas.
Programs will have bugs, regardless of what programming language that is used, since it always comes down to machine-code or even microcode in the end, and it's not easy to test a large software package for all possible permutations.
The only way around this problem is a layered security approach, which means that breaking one layer will not cause any critical effects. Unfortunately Microsoft has only recently recognized this and are applying patches on and off. Solaris and most *NIX:es are a little better off, but there are a lot of work to do for all operating systems here!
- Metaphore mode on:
A defensive war will not win any new territory, at best it will keep you from losing your old, at worst it will ruin you.Offensive actions will force others to react.
OK, the EULA is probably not permitting it to be used for mission critical solutions either, but in my opinion it's one of the better commercially available OS:es. (There's even a hobbyist license available). (anybody knowing of an OS that has an EULA that actually claims that the OS is intended for mission critical use?)
I think it's about time to require that software companies are responsible for their code. There are too many simple bugs passed through every day that would have been caught if a thorough software testing was done. One tool for doing it is Purify Plus, and another is Splint.
Splint is available to the public, unfortunately it's only checking C and not C++. (anyone in the mood for implementing a C++ version?)
And not even NASA and ESA software are always bug-free, but their software is as close as you can come to mission critical applications. I wouldn't like to have a computer running Windows on a mission to Mars, it isn't stable enough.