The original name was Lightweight Automated Weaponless Navigation Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, but for some reason they shortened it to DART.
As it happens, the press release from CA has a slight mistake in it. Instead of pledging to "open source patents", CA pledges to "patent open source". We apologize for any inconvenience caused.
Sincerely Yours,
John Swainson
CEO Computer Associates International
The density of primes is well known by the Prime Number Theorem. To find them in practice takes simply lots of tries and probabilistic tests to weed out the composites. The problem with primes is not finding them but finding the prime factors of an arbitrary integer.
Nah, in 1992, I had already been on an HST 14.4 modem for a year (remember HST?) But you're right about the compression. 217k would have seemed enormous back then.
Not really, roughly two minutes worth of downloading.
I mean, we had just been told by the ubergeek (ptui) that we didn't ever need more than 640k...use a third of that for one image? Nah.
"Just"? That was in 1981. You seriously need to retune your memory chip. By 1992 PCs had 8-16 MB of RAM.
There ara probably as many Mersenne primes as regular primes. Thus you could just as well encrypt with Mersenne primes.
Not really. Since there are so few known Mersenne primes, the problem of factoring n to find the prime factors p and q to calculate phi(n) in order to crack RSA for example is greatly simplified if either p or q is a Mersenne prime. Perform 42 divisions and you're done.
Ever had a situation where an SMTP server screws up the mail queue and deletes all the messages? Or the server goes down at the wrong moment and as a result all messages are delivered twice? Or a message gets stuck in a loop and gets sent over and over again, thousands of times until it fills the spool?
If that message happens to trigger a large financial transaction, that would be a bad thing.
My perception of MQ is that we would be better off throwing it away and FTPing files back and forth while using SAP's job control to kick things off.
Good luck with writing ACID transaction support, rerouting in case of failure, dead letter handling and enterprise scalability features. Then get busy convincing dozens of sysadmins to bust their firewalls open to allow the antiquated piece of crap that is the FTP protocol to get further than your office router.
Trying to replicate enterprise functionality with naive hacks makes no sense whatsoever. I pity the fool who gets to administer the kludge you leave behind when you switch jobs.
Your access may be limited from time to time, depending on the service provided by your internet service provider or your financial institution or other third party. You may be billed for these Online Services by your financial institution or other third party, not Intuit, and such financial institution or other third party may have its own service agreement which will govern the Online Services it provides. You agree to be responsible for all telephone charges associated with your Internet and Online Service usage. You may be required to register with Intuit or a third party in order to use Online Services. Your use of Online Services may be subject to additional terms and conditions. All Online Services are subject to change.
What they have done is a bait-and-switch: they sold a perpetual right to use, then yanked that right by remotely disabling features in a product.
If you think you can buy a cheapo-software in 2002 and expect any company to keep adding services and features to it until perpetuity without you ever paying another dime to them, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Like you and all the "OMG its like M$ remotly disbled slotaire cos u didnt pay inuit is teh suck!!!!!1" -crowd missed, the feature being disabled actively depends on Intuit's servers delivering the transactions. I agree their marketing and pricing information definitely needs an overview but I don't think it's meaningful to scream about a company discontinuing support for a feature that you are using for free but which costs them money. It's not much different from discontinuing free phone support for old products.
Remember the mantra: "Don't charge for the software, charge for the service."
Let's see, Quicken 2005 Deluxe goes for $49.95 at their website. If the full Quicken service is available only for two years after this version has come out, that makes it out to roughly $25/year.
Isn't that kind of a cheap price for a software+service that apparently many people need to manage their finances? If the transactions really pass through Quicken's servers then they will incur some costs and will of course want their customers to pay for this service. On the side you get the latest version of their software.
Freedom in software is all fine and good, but I don't think simply being cheap and wanting everything for no cost is a good reason to push OSS solutions to every problem. Financial connections are one aspect of software where free solutions are pretty hard to accomplish since the banks won't co-operate with small players and the overhead of running a large financial software network between banks, insurers, brokers, investment houses etc. will cost real money.
In the ERP/MRP world, there need to be so many customisations and options that just deciding how to map the software onto existing business processes is a major challenge.
I can only speak on the SME level, but I think most of the trouble with finding an ERP/MRP compatible with your business processes comes from not doing things in a way that's easily supported by automated systems, i.e. using the wrong philosophy. Companies that haven't done ERP before have this notion that the way they do things is the only way and there is no way to change. Then when you talk with them, it turns out the reason they do things in this way is because they never had a system that could simplify their business processes so they were forced to do things in a cumbersome and non-standard fashion.
Thankfully many customers realize that opting for an automated ERP system requires changing your business processes to a certain degree, not just screaming at the vendor "You must change this, our business depends on it!". Lack of flexibility carries a large risk of failed project.
I have just advised a small company to use the small software company next door, not to build them a solution but to build them a model of two core business processes (currently on paper) in either Access or Filemaker (Yes, I know. But the ssc knows Access and Filemaker. OK?) The idea is that when they have defined the process and tested it, they can migrate to an MRP system and import the data they have created - because they will know which fields and reports they actually need, and they can more easily have a discussion about a small and flexible database than try and work their way through the options of an MRP system.
This sounds like a good idea, because it will force them to think of their business in logical units that can then be modified and translated into an ERP system.
One horror story about a company that is neck-deep in it but won't realize it until it's too late is a small manufacturer of apparels that sells mostly to government and private healthcare businesses. Because they've never had a proper information system in place, they've been unable to tracks their order chain all the way down. The end result is that any orders they get are always delivered exactly 14 days from the order, even if the products have been sitting pretty in the warehouse next door for the past 6 months!
Now these people are trying to implement an ERP system but are getting stuck on the fact that it doesn't do everything like they're used to ("It's too complicated, it's too slow to enter all this data.") If they'd just step back from their state of denial and look at their business processes for a while, they'd realize that with such awful delivery processes, they're going to be eaten up by competition if they don't change soon.
Having said that, the future may be off-the-shelf open source systems with customisation- provided someone solves the documentation problem.
Application service providers are the solution to this problem, but oddly many companies still want that pile of servers humming in the backroom. "But we can just have the LAN guy fix them if someting goes wrong!" Yeah, sure, whatever. Call us in six months when it all falls to pieces.
The only problem I see with gambling is that is very easy to make everyone loose (everyone but the site/cassino owner). If the game is balanced to take out only the needed money to maintain the infrastructure and give a reasonable profit, I have nothing against it.
Of course this requires that gambling first be legalized and then regulated and monitored by the government. Like in most European countries. Which is impossible, because of the US attitude of "gambling is a sin".
I look at it as a zero sum gain industry. It only re-distributes wealth. It has no wealth creation or real value growth.
Well duh. Most industries today create nothing tangible. Think all of the services you can buy that generate no physical substance. Wash your car for $10, nothing of value is generated. In fact, the act of washing a car consumes large amounts of natural resources in the form of energy consumed and detergents that must be recovered before they are released into the natural water reserves. Does this mean we should abolish all carwashes?
The economy isn't really about creating goods for consumption. Yes, those things are important for sustaining people but in reality as long as there is sufficient natural resources being converted to goods, the rest of the society can just spend their time trading money from one hand to another in exchange for services like gambling. Like it or not, it IS a part of the economy and provides livelyhood for hundreds of thousands.
Many industries such as farming take labor and make a product. Other than entertainment value, gambling has no product.
You can probably come up with a dozen other industries that similarly offer only entertainment.
All gambeling money is re-distributed with no net gain. That's the thing I have against the state lottery or state video poker. The state provides no product and just takes the suckers money.
You can justify all you want, but the truth is that any objection against gambling is purely moral. I'm always amazed at how ass-backward conservative Slashdot is when it comes to things like gambling, but I guess that's the US mentality of "gambling evil" at work.
I would rather see the state earn money by providing services such as affordable broadband such as in Washington State. The state is providing $40/month broadband with telephone and 5 Gig bandwidth. It beats video poker.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the proceeds from the state lottery are used to subsidize such projects? Duh indeed.
Even if I had a SSH/telnet-driven command prompt, I don't think I could kill a process on a remote machine, for example; I can do it only via the GUI. Is it just because I have a lot to learn, or is it a feature I don't have?
rkill, but I think it's an installable service that only comes with Resource Kit.
no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon
It's funny that when scientists warn of impending disasters, they get ridiculed and their motives questioned. But when politicians cook up another external threat as an excuse to spend trillions and send young men to die in a faraway country, the people eat it up.
In fact, currently the top three processes using the most RAM on my machine are all open source products (the top two being Firefox and the enormously memory hungry Thunderbird which is currently using 58mb of RAM). All the commercial software comes later.
You'll get a lot of flames for this, but as a Firefox/Thunderbird user I concur. Something must be done about the ridiculous resource consumption of what is supposed to be a lightweight browser.
More annoying is the fact that creating new tabs seems to leak memory which is not released immediately. Lean on CTRL-T to bring up a bunch of new tabs and watch the memory usage skyrocket to 60 MB+. Then do 'Close other tabs', leaving you with a single tab open. The memory usage will remain static for a good while until you minimize Firefox, at which point Windows caches to disk and when you bring Firefox back up the memory is released. Also I'm not sure all the memory is released since all my Firefox sessions get sluggish after several hours, sometimes up to the point that closing the last Firefox window leaves the process running, but no new Firefox windows can be created before I have shut down the old process.
I do agree that Newton discovered/invented a large part of our mathematics
No he didn't! Elementary calculus may be useful but it's only a teardrop in the ocean of mathematics. Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time and most of which is still relevant, while Newton's formulations have long since been surpassed by more modern constructions.
If Microsoft were to release the project under a OSS license and then nail a competitor that uses it for patent infringement, couldn't the competitor nail them for antitrust violations?
All this blahblah about Microsoft's patent portfolio would be more convincing if we had at least one recent case of them using patents to shut down independent open source development teams. As it is, I get the feeling I'm listening to Chicken Little on the future of celestial disasters.
Personally I wonder how this would affect older devices (like iPods) that might not be able to play the standardized DRM. The article makes no mention of this, and while I can't see Apple in particular (and other digital music player makers) wanting to make their older products incompatible, I really would not be surprised if the studios could care less if that were to occur. If it does there will be quite a few incredibly angry folks out there!
Imagine all the iPod owners having to upgrade their devices, or even buy new ones. I'm sure Apple would be devastated all the way to the bank.
It seems to me that someone who lives in a tightly knit community and only drives a few miles to work and school should invest in a bicycle.
Except if the tightly knit community is located in a geographical area that gets snow for four months of the year, at which point cycling to work/school every day gets to be at best inconvenient if not downright dangerous for a good time of the year.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
You'll have a greater risk of radiation exposure from going outside on a sunny day than from all the iodine-129 in the world. The point about keeping an eye on iodine-129 is because it's found together with the more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances:
From http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/press/2001/011017/ (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute):
Among the radionuclides emitted during a nuclear accident, the Iodine (131I, 133I) isotopes exhibit strong radioactivity that affects the human body but they are difficult to quantify because they have short half-lives and turn quickly into stable, non-radioactive substances. On the other hand, the iodine-129 that is hardly hazardous at all due to its long half-life period is emitted at a certain ratio with respect to iodine-131 and iodine-133. The measurement of iodine-129 makes it possible to estimate the emission of radioactive substances such as iodine-131
Iodine-129 by itself is hazardous for roughly 0 seconds, 0 minutes and 0 years. So which physics course did you take again?
Any exploit that is found by someone malicious will be quickly fixed by the overwhelming majority that belongs to the benevolent OSS community.
A worm; maybe. A custom exploit in the hands of a blackhat, never. At least until someone gets 0wn3d. Need we recall what happened to FSF, Gentoo, Apache Foundation or Debian?
Also, time from patch release to patch application also matters. All widely exploited Microsoft holes were patched in advance - it was the unpatched machines that broke the camels back.
Therefore if I was in charge of MS I would open source every bit of code I had. Then I would liquidate the entire company and find better uses for those hundreds of billions of dollars. Like feeding people with no food. Or curing deadly diseases. I think those things are more important than companies needing an office suite.
Wow. This is one of stupidest comments I've read on/., and that's saying a lot. Why don't you sell all your possessions and send the money to UN so they can use it to feed the hungry and cure diseases. I think those things are more important than your personal well-being.
Slashdot Mirror
The original name was Lightweight Automated Weaponless Navigation Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, but for some reason they shortened it to DART.
As it happens, the press release from CA has a slight mistake in it. Instead of pledging to "open source patents", CA pledges to "patent open source". We apologize for any inconvenience caused.
Sincerely Yours,
John Swainson
CEO Computer Associates International
The density of primes is well known by the Prime Number Theorem. To find them in practice takes simply lots of tries and probabilistic tests to weed out the composites. The problem with primes is not finding them but finding the prime factors of an arbitrary integer.
Nah, in 1992, I had already been on an HST 14.4 modem for a year (remember HST?) But you're right about the compression. 217k would have seemed enormous back then.
Not really, roughly two minutes worth of downloading.
I mean, we had just been told by the ubergeek (ptui) that we didn't ever need more than 640k...use a third of that for one image? Nah.
"Just"? That was in 1981. You seriously need to retune your memory chip. By 1992 PCs had 8-16 MB of RAM.
There ara probably as many Mersenne primes as regular primes. Thus you could just as well encrypt with Mersenne primes.
Not really. Since there are so few known Mersenne primes, the problem of factoring n to find the prime factors p and q to calculate phi(n) in order to crack RSA for example is greatly simplified if either p or q is a Mersenne prime. Perform 42 divisions and you're done.
Surprise, surprise, this sounds just like SMTP.
Ever had a situation where an SMTP server screws up the mail queue and deletes all the messages? Or the server goes down at the wrong moment and as a result all messages are delivered twice? Or a message gets stuck in a loop and gets sent over and over again, thousands of times until it fills the spool?
If that message happens to trigger a large financial transaction, that would be a bad thing.
My perception of MQ is that we would be better off throwing it away and FTPing files back and forth while using SAP's job control to kick things off.
Good luck with writing ACID transaction support, rerouting in case of failure, dead letter handling and enterprise scalability features. Then get busy convincing dozens of sysadmins to bust their firewalls open to allow the antiquated piece of crap that is the FTP protocol to get further than your office router.
Trying to replicate enterprise functionality with naive hacks makes no sense whatsoever. I pity the fool who gets to administer the kludge you leave behind when you switch jobs.
From the Quicken Software License Agreement:
Your access may be limited from time to time, depending on the service provided by your internet service provider or your financial institution or other third party. You may be billed for these Online Services by your financial institution or other third party, not Intuit, and such financial institution or other third party may have its own service agreement which will govern the Online Services it provides. You agree to be responsible for all telephone charges associated with your Internet and Online Service usage. You may be required to register with Intuit or a third party in order to use Online Services. Your use of Online Services may be subject to additional terms and conditions. All Online Services are subject to change.
I see no mention of "perpetual use" there.
What they have done is a bait-and-switch: they sold a perpetual right to use, then yanked that right by remotely disabling features in a product.
If you think you can buy a cheapo-software in 2002 and expect any company to keep adding services and features to it until perpetuity without you ever paying another dime to them, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Like you and all the "OMG its like M$ remotly disbled slotaire cos u didnt pay inuit is teh suck!!!!!1" -crowd missed, the feature being disabled actively depends on Intuit's servers delivering the transactions. I agree their marketing and pricing information definitely needs an overview but I don't think it's meaningful to scream about a company discontinuing support for a feature that you are using for free but which costs them money. It's not much different from discontinuing free phone support for old products.
Remember the mantra: "Don't charge for the software, charge for the service."
Let's see, Quicken 2005 Deluxe goes for $49.95 at their website. If the full Quicken service is available only for two years after this version has come out, that makes it out to roughly $25/year.
Isn't that kind of a cheap price for a software+service that apparently many people need to manage their finances? If the transactions really pass through Quicken's servers then they will incur some costs and will of course want their customers to pay for this service. On the side you get the latest version of their software.
Freedom in software is all fine and good, but I don't think simply being cheap and wanting everything for no cost is a good reason to push OSS solutions to every problem. Financial connections are one aspect of software where free solutions are pretty hard to accomplish since the banks won't co-operate with small players and the overhead of running a large financial software network between banks, insurers, brokers, investment houses etc. will cost real money.
In the ERP/MRP world, there need to be so many customisations and options that just deciding how to map the software onto existing business processes is a major challenge.
I can only speak on the SME level, but I think most of the trouble with finding an ERP/MRP compatible with your business processes comes from not doing things in a way that's easily supported by automated systems, i.e. using the wrong philosophy. Companies that haven't done ERP before have this notion that the way they do things is the only way and there is no way to change. Then when you talk with them, it turns out the reason they do things in this way is because they never had a system that could simplify their business processes so they were forced to do things in a cumbersome and non-standard fashion.
Thankfully many customers realize that opting for an automated ERP system requires changing your business processes to a certain degree, not just screaming at the vendor "You must change this, our business depends on it!". Lack of flexibility carries a large risk of failed project.
I have just advised a small company to use the small software company next door, not to build them a solution but to build them a model of two core business processes (currently on paper) in either Access or Filemaker (Yes, I know. But the ssc knows Access and Filemaker. OK?) The idea is that when they have defined the process and tested it, they can migrate to an MRP system and import the data they have created - because they will know which fields and reports they actually need, and they can more easily have a discussion about a small and flexible database than try and work their way through the options of an MRP system.
This sounds like a good idea, because it will force them to think of their business in logical units that can then be modified and translated into an ERP system.
One horror story about a company that is neck-deep in it but won't realize it until it's too late is a small manufacturer of apparels that sells mostly to government and private healthcare businesses. Because they've never had a proper information system in place, they've been unable to tracks their order chain all the way down. The end result is that any orders they get are always delivered exactly 14 days from the order, even if the products have been sitting pretty in the warehouse next door for the past 6 months!
Now these people are trying to implement an ERP system but are getting stuck on the fact that it doesn't do everything like they're used to ("It's too complicated, it's too slow to enter all this data.") If they'd just step back from their state of denial and look at their business processes for a while, they'd realize that with such awful delivery processes, they're going to be eaten up by competition if they don't change soon.
Having said that, the future may be off-the-shelf open source systems with customisation- provided someone solves the documentation problem.
Application service providers are the solution to this problem, but oddly many companies still want that pile of servers humming in the backroom. "But we can just have the LAN guy fix them if someting goes wrong!" Yeah, sure, whatever. Call us in six months when it all falls to pieces.
The only problem I see with gambling is that is very easy to make everyone loose (everyone but the site/cassino owner). If the game is balanced to take out only the needed money to maintain the infrastructure and give a reasonable profit, I have nothing against it.
Of course this requires that gambling first be legalized and then regulated and monitored by the government. Like in most European countries. Which is impossible, because of the US attitude of "gambling is a sin".
I look at it as a zero sum gain industry. It only re-distributes wealth. It has no wealth creation or real value growth.
Well duh. Most industries today create nothing tangible. Think all of the services you can buy that generate no physical substance. Wash your car for $10, nothing of value is generated. In fact, the act of washing a car consumes large amounts of natural resources in the form of energy consumed and detergents that must be recovered before they are released into the natural water reserves. Does this mean we should abolish all carwashes?
The economy isn't really about creating goods for consumption. Yes, those things are important for sustaining people but in reality as long as there is sufficient natural resources being converted to goods, the rest of the society can just spend their time trading money from one hand to another in exchange for services like gambling. Like it or not, it IS a part of the economy and provides livelyhood for hundreds of thousands.
Many industries such as farming take labor and make a product. Other than entertainment value, gambling has no product.
You can probably come up with a dozen other industries that similarly offer only entertainment.
All gambeling money is re-distributed with no net gain. That's the thing I have against the state lottery or state video poker. The state provides no product and just takes the suckers money.
You can justify all you want, but the truth is that any objection against gambling is purely moral. I'm always amazed at how ass-backward conservative Slashdot is when it comes to things like gambling, but I guess that's the US mentality of "gambling evil" at work.
I would rather see the state earn money by providing services such as affordable broadband such as in Washington State. The state is providing $40/month broadband with telephone and 5 Gig bandwidth. It beats video poker.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the proceeds from the state lottery are used to subsidize such projects? Duh indeed.
Even if I had a SSH/telnet-driven command prompt, I don't think I could kill a process on a remote machine, for example; I can do it only via the GUI. Is it just because I have a lot to learn, or is it a feature I don't have?
rkill, but I think it's an installable service that only comes with Resource Kit.
no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon
It's funny that when scientists warn of impending disasters, they get ridiculed and their motives questioned. But when politicians cook up another external threat as an excuse to spend trillions and send young men to die in a faraway country, the people eat it up.
Constants that change? That's nothing new.
Anyone who's done some programming knows that constants aren't and variables don't.
In fact, currently the top three processes using the most RAM on my machine are all open source products (the top two being Firefox and the enormously memory hungry Thunderbird which is currently using 58mb of RAM). All the commercial software comes later.
You'll get a lot of flames for this, but as a Firefox/Thunderbird user I concur. Something must be done about the ridiculous resource consumption of what is supposed to be a lightweight browser.
More annoying is the fact that creating new tabs seems to leak memory which is not released immediately. Lean on CTRL-T to bring up a bunch of new tabs and watch the memory usage skyrocket to 60 MB+. Then do 'Close other tabs', leaving you with a single tab open. The memory usage will remain static for a good while until you minimize Firefox, at which point Windows caches to disk and when you bring Firefox back up the memory is released. Also I'm not sure all the memory is released since all my Firefox sessions get sluggish after several hours, sometimes up to the point that closing the last Firefox window leaves the process running, but no new Firefox windows can be created before I have shut down the old process.
I do agree that Newton discovered/invented a large part of our mathematics
No he didn't! Elementary calculus may be useful but it's only a teardrop in the ocean of mathematics. Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time and most of which is still relevant, while Newton's formulations have long since been surpassed by more modern constructions.
If Microsoft were to release the project under a OSS license and then nail a competitor that uses it for patent infringement, couldn't the competitor nail them for antitrust violations?
All this blahblah about Microsoft's patent portfolio would be more convincing if we had at least one recent case of them using patents to shut down independent open source development teams. As it is, I get the feeling I'm listening to Chicken Little on the future of celestial disasters.
Personally I wonder how this would affect older devices (like iPods) that might not be able to play the standardized DRM. The article makes no mention of this, and while I can't see Apple in particular (and other digital music player makers) wanting to make their older products incompatible, I really would not be surprised if the studios could care less if that were to occur. If it does there will be quite a few incredibly angry folks out there!
Imagine all the iPod owners having to upgrade their devices, or even buy new ones. I'm sure Apple would be devastated all the way to the bank.
It seems to me that someone who lives in a tightly knit community and only drives a few miles to work and school should invest in a bicycle.
Except if the tightly knit community is located in a geographical area that gets snow for four months of the year, at which point cycling to work/school every day gets to be at best inconvenient if not downright dangerous for a good time of the year.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
You'll have a greater risk of radiation exposure from going outside on a sunny day than from all the iodine-129 in the world. The point about keeping an eye on iodine-129 is because it's found together with the more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances:
From http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/press/2001/011017/ (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute):
Among the radionuclides emitted during a nuclear accident, the Iodine (131I, 133I) isotopes exhibit strong radioactivity that affects the human body but they are difficult to quantify because they have short half-lives and turn quickly into stable, non-radioactive substances. On the other hand, the iodine-129 that is hardly hazardous at all due to its long half-life period is emitted at a certain ratio with respect to iodine-131 and iodine-133. The measurement of iodine-129 makes it possible to estimate the emission of radioactive substances such as iodine-131
Iodine-129 by itself is hazardous for roughly 0 seconds, 0 minutes and 0 years. So which physics course did you take again?
The power-switch on the iMac. How great it is and how you can find it.
Any exploit that is found by someone malicious will be quickly fixed by the overwhelming majority that belongs to the benevolent OSS community.
A worm; maybe. A custom exploit in the hands of a blackhat, never. At least until someone gets 0wn3d. Need we recall what happened to FSF, Gentoo, Apache Foundation or Debian?
Also, time from patch release to patch application also matters. All widely exploited Microsoft holes were patched in advance - it was the unpatched machines that broke the camels back.
Therefore if I was in charge of MS I would open source every bit of code I had. Then I would liquidate the entire company and find better uses for those hundreds of billions of dollars. Like feeding people with no food. Or curing deadly diseases. I think those things are more important than companies needing an office suite.
Wow. This is one of stupidest comments I've read on /., and that's saying a lot. Why don't you sell all your possessions and send the money to UN so they can use it to feed the hungry and cure diseases. I think those things are more important than your personal well-being.