It's hard to appreciate, but we are in the middle of a revolution. High-performance, multi-core computing has made significant progress in the last few years and it's causing a lot of headache for software developers who try to exploit the potential power available. Multi-threaded programming does not bring a solution to the masses - understanding and preventing the issues arising from concurrency requires a lot of exposure to it.
The young generation of programmers have the confidence to try out multi-core programming, but only because they yet lack the painful experience of doing it. Whilst hardware is running away towards 100 cores in 5 years time and still keeping up with Moore's "Law", software is sadly lacking such advances.
There's a very good white paper over on the 2 Cubed website about the problem
The Multicore Revolution and a new framework just out called infoQuanta which looks intersting.
Meanwhile, Sun is tackling the problem from within the language. They've got Fortress Fortress which has a certain Java/C syntax about it. I haven't used it but I would say that it doesn't look like the 21st Century solution that's going to advance software development significantly.
Seriously. I live in the UK. I would think twice about coming to the US now. I mean, don't get me wrong, Tony Blair is trying to get some stuff through parliament here which is a blatant violation of civil rights. But the only time I would expect to have my mugshot and fingerprints taken is when I've been convicted of a crime.
These anti-terrorism measures are fast becoming an excuse to rape our rights.
"A secured box is a secured box. If you turn off all non-essential services in Windows and do the same in Linux, keep your users with low privileges etc on both, and keep both systems up-to-date with patches, they're equally secure."
That simply isn't true. Every service is a piece of software with particular vulnerabilities.
Any given service running on Windows and Linux will be implemented by completely different software - each with its own bugs and weaknesses. You cannot saw that by turning off the same services in Windows and Linux that this somehow makes them equally secure.
At least in the Linux world we can choose from a variety of software implementations for a given service.
In Windows you get what you're given by Microsoft. That makes the implementation highly predictable on most Windows machines and hence an easier target.
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It's hard to appreciate, but we are in the middle of a revolution. High-performance, multi-core computing has made significant progress in the last few years and it's causing a lot of headache for software developers who try to exploit the potential power available. Multi-threaded programming does not bring a solution to the masses - understanding and preventing the issues arising from concurrency requires a lot of exposure to it.
The young generation of programmers have the confidence to try out multi-core programming, but only because they yet lack the painful experience of doing it. Whilst hardware is running away towards 100 cores in 5 years time and still keeping up with Moore's "Law", software is sadly lacking such advances. There's a very good white paper over on the 2 Cubed website about the problem The Multicore Revolution and a new framework just out called infoQuanta which looks intersting.
Meanwhile, Sun is tackling the problem from within the language. They've got Fortress Fortress which has a certain Java/C syntax about it. I haven't used it but I would say that it doesn't look like the 21st Century solution that's going to advance software development significantly.
America - The Land of the Free
-ish
Seriously. I live in the UK. I would think twice about coming to the US now. I mean, don't get me wrong, Tony Blair is trying to get some stuff through parliament here which is a blatant violation of civil rights. But the only time I would expect to have my mugshot and fingerprints taken is when I've been convicted of a crime.
These anti-terrorism measures are fast becoming an excuse to rape our rights.
It isn't Linux's fault if there are too many ports open after installation - it's the distro.
Any given service running on Windows and Linux will be implemented by completely different software - each with its own bugs and weaknesses. You cannot saw that by turning off the same services in Windows and Linux that this somehow makes them equally secure.
At least in the Linux world we can choose from a variety of software implementations for a given service.
In Windows you get what you're given by Microsoft. That makes the implementation highly predictable on most Windows machines and hence an easier target.