[1] whatever number of machines microsoft uses to "crawl" the "seedier side of the web" , they will NEVER be able to crawl all of it, all the time.
Yes, because they're not set up to crawl some of the seedier IRC channels you see some untrustworthy figures hanging about and linking flamebait in. This must all be part of Microsoft's grand scheme to find a large excuse to download large amounts of porn.
[2] more often than not, the non-reported vulnerabilities ("0day") are NOT used to mass-attack random IP's. they are used in targeted attacks against specific machines.
generic/. anti-M$ comment: In Microsoft's case, I don't think "0day" is a good name for unreported vulns... you know, "1month" sounds a lot better to me.
[3] running VM's does not emulate all hardware of a machine, and therefore cannot accurately represent an end-user's scenario.
So, Microsoft will not, unfortunately, get the opportunity to say... HELP MY MOUSE IS MOVING BY IT SELF
Funny. I thought that in the Industrial Revolution, when unions began, that nearly all factory workers who unionized were blacklisted--nobody would hire them. And for some reason, we now have unions for factory workers. Sure, you, individually, may not work in the industry anymore--up until others follow suit and finally, the industry is forced to hire unionized workers. Bumpy ride, but if it's worth it, take it.
Then again, in this case, perhaps it's not worth it. Others have noted: It's a skilled job. The industry can't necessarily take any twelve year old NES-a-holic off the streets and ask him to code for them--they'd have to teach him first. Ask a thousand people each if they know how to program in a major programming language. If over half of them reply yes--you must live in some comp sci major only dorm...
What's sadder is that they also misspelled successfully.
What's saddest is that we're actually being this anal about spelling. Does the spelling really matter? It's readable, isn't it?
It's the usual release-something-for-free-then-charge-for-it MS strategy... When I made my Hotmail account, they didn't have a space limit... Nowadays, they have the 2mb limit and ask you to pay them for more space--I wonder when they'll ask for money just for the service?
I don't mean to be inflammatory at all, but a few counterpoints:
About the language interpretation bit: Isn't that mainly a problem with audio recognition? If you type in the sentence, it's impossible for the computer to hear your tone of voice, pitch, and the other nuances, isn't it? And if you speak it into a microphone, problems would be found with the fact that the mike input is not necessarily at the level of human's ears, and that it would first need to be able to break the sentence apart into individual words and have the various properties of each one recorded there.
I doubt that *understanding* the sentence would be a problem, with a program that is good enough. The input would be the problem. A deaf person cannot understand a sentence, right?
For audio recognition, we'd first need microphones as good as human ears. Once we can get rid of the various static and stuff, I'm pretty sure that it would be relatively easy to program an interpreter for the noise. Speaking of which, has anyone done extensive work on audio recognition? An idea would be to use a tracker program to create music that isn't flawed by static, compared to most microphones' input, and then work off of that... Purely speculation.
"If it takes 5 minutes to process a box, it does you no good anyways, too much time to be worth it for this use." CPUs keep getting faster, right? In the DOS days, pre-emptive development might have been started on GUIs, even though it might take up to a minute to refresh the screen. It just means the project will be that much farther along when it's actually feasible.
"Computers have trouble with fuzzy and incomplete information that humans are so good with." And at this one, I just ask: Is it the computer that has trouble, or the programmer? Being one myself, I honestly think it's the programmer's problem that he can't help the computer use fuzzy / incomplete information. I haven't taken enough biology to know really how brain cells work, and I doubt that anyone knows for sure, but I believe that the human brain might work much like a computer does--just much, much faster, with lower voltage, and the other goodies natural selections have given us.
The hardware will advance, much like life did, and eventually they may match or even surpass us.
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[1] whatever number of machines microsoft uses to "crawl" the "seedier side of the web" , they will NEVER be able to crawl all of it, all the time.
/. anti-M$ comment: In Microsoft's case, I don't think "0day" is a good name for unreported vulns... you know, "1month" sounds a lot better to me.
Yes, because they're not set up to crawl some of the seedier IRC channels you see some untrustworthy figures hanging about and linking flamebait in. This must all be part of Microsoft's grand scheme to find a large excuse to download large amounts of porn.
[2] more often than not, the non-reported vulnerabilities ("0day") are NOT used to mass-attack random IP's. they are used in targeted attacks against specific machines.
generic
[3] running VM's does not emulate all hardware of a machine, and therefore cannot accurately represent an end-user's scenario.
So, Microsoft will not, unfortunately, get the opportunity to say... HELP MY MOUSE IS MOVING BY IT SELF
Then again, in this case, perhaps it's not worth it. Others have noted: It's a skilled job. The industry can't necessarily take any twelve year old NES-a-holic off the streets and ask him to code for them--they'd have to teach him first. Ask a thousand people each if they know how to program in a major programming language. If over half of them reply yes--you must live in some comp sci major only dorm...
Just in case those pesky Martian nuclear missles hit you?
What's sadder is that they also misspelled successfully. What's saddest is that we're actually being this anal about spelling. Does the spelling really matter? It's readable, isn't it?
It's the usual release-something-for-free-then-charge-for-it MS strategy... When I made my Hotmail account, they didn't have a space limit... Nowadays, they have the 2mb limit and ask you to pay them for more space--I wonder when they'll ask for money just for the service?
I don't mean to be inflammatory at all, but a few counterpoints:
About the language interpretation bit:
Isn't that mainly a problem with audio recognition? If you type in the sentence, it's impossible for the computer to hear your tone of voice, pitch, and the other nuances, isn't it? And if you speak it into a microphone, problems would be found with the fact that the mike input is not necessarily at the level of human's ears, and that it would first need to be able to break the sentence apart into individual words and have the various properties of each one recorded there.
I doubt that *understanding* the sentence would be a problem, with a program that is good enough. The input would be the problem. A deaf person cannot understand a sentence, right?
For audio recognition, we'd first need microphones as good as human ears. Once we can get rid of the various static and stuff, I'm pretty sure that it would be relatively easy to program an interpreter for the noise. Speaking of which, has anyone done extensive work on audio recognition? An idea would be to use a tracker program to create music that isn't flawed by static, compared to most microphones' input, and then work off of that... Purely speculation.
"If it takes 5 minutes to process a box, it does you no good anyways, too much time to be worth it for this use."
CPUs keep getting faster, right? In the DOS days, pre-emptive development might have been started on GUIs, even though it might take up to a minute to refresh the screen. It just means the project will be that much farther along when it's actually feasible.
"Computers have trouble with fuzzy and incomplete information that humans are so good with."
And at this one, I just ask: Is it the computer that has trouble, or the programmer? Being one myself, I honestly think it's the programmer's problem that he can't help the computer use fuzzy / incomplete information. I haven't taken enough biology to know really how brain cells work, and I doubt that anyone knows for sure, but I believe that the human brain might work much like a computer does--just much, much faster, with lower voltage, and the other goodies natural selections have given us.
The hardware will advance, much like life did, and eventually they may match or even surpass us.