look this is ridiculous. you've insulted my intelligence now on two occasions.
I pointed out what is a factual misunderstanding of basic firearms terminology, and then what i thought was a politically loaded grammatical curiosity.
if you think there should be massive legal controls on firearms, thats fine, but your opinions are not self evident facts, much less the basis for any kind of legislative action, and thats where i'm coming from.
underage is either redundant in the context of mentioning that this is a male who is not yet a man (a boy)
or
underage implies that there is some accepted age (regardless of gender) which is a turning point. prior to that age, nobody "should have guns", and after that age, people are magically allowed to have them.
i know of no such "age" set forth in any US law, and i certainly don't see an argument/defense of the idea in the post.
i suspect the poster is leaning towards the latter meaning.
here's a clue people - 16 year old boys are allowed to drive 5,000 lb SUVs. Those have a lot more KE, a lot more area, and most people are much better at aiming a gun than aiming a truck.
why dont you suggest regulations on having underage boys then, as clearly taking away fire arms from them wont change the fact that they're stupid. the problem here isn't that two teens got a hold of a gun, the problem is that there were two teens with poor judgement skills.
stupid people are the root of the problem. you cant legislate away stupidity. the world will continue to build a better idiot.
my wife worked at one of the most expensive daycare...erm.. "preschools" in the seattle area.
it was a joke. you or your wife should quit so you can raise your own children, as opposed to having some white trash single mom thats herself too poor to afford daycare not paying attention to your kids so she can get enough money to cover the part of her rent that isn't subsidized already, and get free daycare for her kid(s) at the same time.
you're a lawyer - you probably make enough money to get by on a single income. consider what you're offering your children by letting random people raise them for you.
seriously - check into how many of the "teachers" at your child care provider are young single moms -- simply because its a convenient arrangement for them to get paid and get free daycare out of the deal
if i were paying 1k or more per month per child (the rates at this place in seattle) id be furious to know what went on at this place...
anyway, all that aside - just because you and many other parents have shifted the responsibility for raising their children onto others doesn't mean that you should work on shoring up the legal system to compensate. just because industry and the business world has been moving to the "outsource and sue for breach of conract" model for a long time doesn't mean that parenting should have an appropriate analog. most children don't care what kind of SUV's mommy and daddy drive, but do care when mommy and daddy only see them/each other for 3 hrs a day and its all fighting.
you and others may not live up to the "ideal" family, but that doesn't change the fact that its still the ideal arrangement.
incidentally, none of this is the governments problem. government!= parents. I wish people would stop trying to make it the governments problem. you of course have (and excercize) to use an altnerate family configuration, complete with outsourced parenting. don't legislate the country into making sure that thats the only possibility, and that parents that actually want an active role in their childs upbringing cant have that (and instead get to choose from government schools, government labelled music, government approved video games, etc)
what i find bothersome is that you know so little about firearms that you suggest a shotgun is a sniper weapon - or that 14 and 16 year olds are "underage boys". what does that even mean ?
re: 3 if you efficiently suck that energy out using photolovaics, you'll not be heating up rocks etc, causing in effect less injection of heat into the ecosystem.
sure, if you use it to do something, you'll cause heat elsewhere, but now you're smuggling energy away from one system and into another:)
re 4: i think i agree with you, at least on any relevant, measurable scale, but - prove it.
lets say for a moment that the sun is pushing particles away from it self. the rate at which the particles are expelled is determined by the sum of the forces on those particles, right ? Lets say a force is introduced which opposes the direction of travel of said particles. Now they're slowing down, lingering closer to the sun longer. This increases over all gravitation, heat, etc etc. IOW, it might very well change the fusion process.
Now lets say that the "default" state of the sun-earth system is that there has been this resistive factor on the sun's emissions all along. If we remove it, does that not change the suns environment ?:)
they didn't have grates on fans. you just expcted people to be smart enough to not shove hands into rapidly spinning metal blades.
Ahh, progress.
I'll tell you the reason not to put big cages around giant fans. It costs money, it would be unsightly as hell, and then the birds would just run into the cages and clog it up. It'd make the problem worse:)
if you're absorbing that solar energy for evil, greedy, human consumption, then you're using energy that could have been doing something else.
Plants need the photon energy of sunlight in order to make food for themselves. When you install solar panels you're STEALING FROM PLANTS.
Furthermore, you're sucking heat energy and turning it into electricity. widespread use of efficient solar panels could cause local cooling to the detriment of local ecosystems. YOUR FREEZING THE BABY ANIMALS.
All of you freaking solar energy pundits are SUCKING THE SUN DRY. OUR SUN WILL RUN OUT SOMEDAY - WHY SPEED THAT UP?
Both of my cars dont have airbags, don't have integrated phones, dont have cup holders, don't have automatic transmissions, and don't have day time annoyance lights.
Hell, one of them even has rear windows that go down all the way:)
Both have ABS, but one has a switch on the dashboard to turn it off (the other is easy to turn off, but not THAT easy:)
Both are fuel injected, both are performant, both are a blast to drive.
oh, and "Beamer" means a BMW motorcycle. The word for BMW cars, unfortuneately, is "bimmer"
(i never liked the word, but it's the convention)
it really doesnt matter how fast the SRT-4 is, it's still wrong wheel drive:) i do not look forward to the outrageous torque steer of a >200hp FWD turbo..
I'll continue to take my old, slow, 15 year old BMW 6 cylinder, thanks:)
read up on the architecture of NT.. things like DACLS, ACE, SIDs, two-factor auth, etc etc.
NT was designed with a solid security _architecture_, built with many cool security features. I handily admit that there was lots of bad code implementing those (and other) features, and some poor configuration decisions..
but the internals of the OS have always have an advanced security model as an instrinsic part since the beginning. Earlier, nobody cared (at MS at least) and the focus was on bringing forward dos/win3.1/win95 customers with as little pain as possible. that meant "ignore the stuff NT has built in, just get it working smoothly". The recent security work has been cleaning up bad coding, bad app-layer decisions, and learning how to take advantage of the fine grained security mechanisms NT has had all along.
i'd be pretty wary of making native tongue arguments. shooting from the hip, they seem reasonable, because we all had that foreign grad student acting as TA for one of our college classes that was totally unintelliglbe and made the class suck.
On the other hand, I would postulate that the average Indian involved in contractual software development speaks and writes english better than the average American. Especially if you want to talk about concise or technical writing. Think about all of the people that couldn't write a one page paper about their dog that still "graduated" from high school. Are these the expert communicators that will lead the bright future of US software development ?
Now, generally I agree with you about outsourcing. Having brilliant people working on all of the diverse problems and inefficiencies in an organization is pretty handy. But not every organization can attract top talent, and not every business leader can see or feel comfortable with the the long term approach.
The summary is that programming is no longer a darling industry - it IS commodity work and while there may be quality / user experience differences between local vs exported labor, alot of people are willing to make whatever tradeoffs exist in the name of cost savings (just like they do in other areas, i.e. texttiles or auto manufacturing)
so your first impulse upon readin this was to think i was trolling ? why, because i have an uncommon point of view ? do you disagree with my argument, my conclusion, or my employer ?
Yeah, I _could_ have mentioned that, but it should be obvious from my posting history and my user page that im certainly not hiding it. I wasn't aware that slashdot required a disclosure statement of employment for dissecting a poorly made "argument"
my post was to point out that this was hardly an article at all, and basically some free advertising for this gagne fellow. It had NOTHING to do with linux security in 2003, over half of it was a rant on how shoddy microsoft is.
I've pondered the value proposition of open source before.
I'm sure since you value open source so highly, instead of being dependant on whatever is given to you, that you also sew your own clothes and grow your own food:)
The article i responded to was not an article at all - it was an anti-MS rant and i was irate that something with an interesting title claiming to be about linux security in 2003 - was nothing more than someone pushing their ideaology.
Also - i really dislike the use of the term astroturfing. I'm _not_ being paid by MS to post to slashdot, especially the day after christmas.
I'm not blindly supportive of everything MS does - but unlike alot of people, I'm also not blindly critical. When someone has something interesting or objective to say about MS, I listen, because thats how we get better. When someone is just ranting off and sounding uninformed, occasionally I let them have it (I say occasionally because responding to each instance of this would be a 24/7 endeavour for multiple people:)
M$ developers are usually money-driven and thus focus more on how fast they can get a product on the shelves than how rock-solid they can make it
do you have any substantiation of this ?
You may have heard something about software engineering, but if not, i'll tell you. The later you discover a bug, the more expensive it is.
Lets take some examples.
Developer writes code with bug. Next day, tester finds bug and tells developers. Cost to fix ? - low, because code is fresh in developers mind, and the impact is roughly 1 tester and 1 developer.
Developer writes code with bug. Bug isn't found because tests dont cover it yet. Developers code lives on for weeks. Other code is written which uses that code. Dependant behaviors make their way into other parts of system. Finally, test is written and run which finds bug. Now we've got a problem. Developer has to figure out where the hell the bug is. Then developer has to figure out what the cause is. Then developer has to consider the impact to any code which has been written since the bug was introduced. Developer has to come up with a fix that fixes the original bug but doesn't introduce a new bug.
developer writes a bug. This but isn't caught until Beta 1. Bug prevents product from installing on 1/8th of real-world customer machines. 1/8th of most important customers have worst possible product experience - they cant install product. All existing CD's with this build need to be destroyed (they're garbage). developer needs to drop everything they're doing (the're working on beta 2 by now), crack open the beta 1 code (it was forked off for stabilization and may already have been removed from beta 2 tree), and propose a fix. developer thinks about everything that might possibly depend on code with bug. developer has to come up with a fix that unbreaks 1/8th of users, but doesn't break any other users.
bug makes it into shipping product. userbase is now entire planet. bug prevents product from installing on 1/8th of computers. sales expectations are missed by at least 12.5%. Customer satisfaction is down by at least 12.5%. Developer stops working on version n+1, cracks open the code for the shipped product, and begins investigating a fix for SP1. Customers with support contracts are going insane because their business is down. single-customer fixes (QFEs) must be prepared on 24hr schedule to unblock customers. these patches are customer specific and are separate from what gets rolled into SP (the minimum amount of code change to unblock a customer is what we're talking about - not generally suitable for wide deployment). The developer may need to do one QFE for each major customer (they may have slightly different failure modes ?)
I think you get the idea. If a bug makes it out into the public, it will cost microsoft at least $100,000, at a minimum.
So, do you think bugs make it into the code because the emphasis is on cranking out software quickly, without caring about the quality ?
Oh boy! An article which takes 1 authors clearly subjective feelings, piles on the anecdotes, and pronounces evidentiary conclusions!
From reading this, it would appear that Gagne is pretty much what happens when you give a linux zealot some airtime. I'll comment on just a few things i got a kick out of:
At some point, I expect users to upgrade to newer releases or take some responsibility for patching their own systems. What's a reasonable period of time? I'd say 34 to 36 months. At some point, any reasonable users should understand that the best way to ensure continued support is to upgrade to something more recent."
but then we have
The beauty of the open source model is that an opportunity exists for creating fixes for old releases. Not so for the users of Windows 95 or 98 who have no source code to go back to when the next critical flaw is uncovered.
So which is it ? Do we expect people to upgrade after 36 months, or do we take any opportunity to mention that we think Microsoft sucks (of which everyone in the audience is perfectly aware)
"Frankly, it seems incredible that this is even open to debate.
There's that objective analysis shining through. Definitely not the words of someone pushing a beleif as opposed to an argument:)
One need only read the newspapers, listen to the radio, watch television or work in an office where Windows is widely used
Which papers would those be ? The ones that manage to not mention that FSF, Debian, and Gentoo all had their Root file distribution servers OWNED in the same year ?
has nothing to do with Microsoft's market penetration.
riiiiiiiight. Let me tell you what. if windows update gets owned, you will hear about it in the papers, and on the news, etc. And it wont be because of the magnitude of the issue - because it happend to the FSF, Debian, _and_ Gentoo _first_. When something goes wrong with microsoft software, it hits the whole internet. It's a market share issue.
It doesn't hurt that at its very core, Linux is designed with security in mind.
What do the original UNIX authors have to say about designing UNIX from the ground up with security in mind ? A history of linux will show a few things, I think.
UNIX evolved over time. almost no attention was paid to security initially - was it even multi-user initially?!
linux wasn't designed with security in mind - it was cloned from a system which had security evolved and grafted onto it (unix). secutiy is about trying to get perfect code out of imperfect people, and moreover, trying to get perfect designs out of imperfect people. NT _Was_ designed from the ground up with security in mind. The security training happening recently at MS had a lot more to do with sloppy coding and thinking about security at every layer of the platform then it did with redesigning NT's security features (which are actually quite advanced)
remember when anyone could remotely kill a linux box with the right udp packets ? was that security by design ?
No need here for launching a security initiative after years of neglect."
Or, said another way - "not too much new ground to cover making a freeware clone of 25 years of operating system research!"
Despite the fact that I do not run a Microsoft computer in this office,
why am i listening to your opinion of MS software again ?
costs in terms of data loss, damage, and lost productivity in the last three years alone runs into the billions of dollars. This is documented fact
Really ? which documents ? Where are the documents that talk about how much money business MAKE by leveraging software - Microsoft software. If, overall, MS software is hurting business financially, why dont they go back to notebook paper ? Why not use linux ?
This comes up time and time again. There is an underlying assumption which is often voiced that there is a substantial quality difference between US code and Indian code.
This is usually bolstered with stuff like "art" and "quality", and "design".
Do you know what the difference between the illegal immigrant house painter that does cash-only jobs and the US programmer that holds your view point is ?
One of them is a pretentious asshole, and may have invested more heavily in formal education.
If people wanted "design" and "quality" and "art", nobody would buy Kia's. South Korea and Taiwan wouldn't have booming economies, and 95% of the clothes you wear wouldn't be made by children in malaysia.
But, as it turns out, by and large nobody gives a crap about those, or, they've made the determination that outsourced ultra cheap labour does the job acceptably well given the cost incurred.
Programming is no different. It's not like 50 years of American software engineering has produced an obelisk of invincible bug free code. No, we had Y2k, Windows 95, and a US vs Metric bug in a satellite.
Coding for Coding's sake is not a national treasure, it is not an art form, and really, it has nothing tod o with making money. IS/IT are a COST CENTER. Hiring programmers does NOT SELL SHOES. It does NOT SAVE LIVES. Everybody should be looking to save money on software development unlesss their business is software development! Otherwise it is an expense and subject to the inhouse vs outsourced discussion, just like any other expense!
Now, if your point had been "it's a shortsighted view to think you'll come out financially ahead by outsourcing software development to indian labor instead of using off the shelf stuff or using US based consultants", then you'd have an argument. But instead it smacks of idolization of the US intellect and the programmers-guild mentality so prevalent in the US/unix world.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
on
Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 4, Interesting
How many business run on linux now compared to 1 year ago. 5 years ago. 10 years ago.
It seems like a binary proposition to me: You either beleive linux and open source are having no effect whatsoever on the computing industry, or you beleive that Microsoft marketing is having trouble dealing with linux/OSS
Let me assure you. MS is losing sales to OSS software. They take it so seriously that there are direct channels of communication within the comapany that go very high in order to attempt a mitigation of any technical (or other) blockers in an OSS vs Microsoft competitive situation.
It is my understanding that it is possible for a leaf-node sales person to have director/VP level ears, in a matter of hours, if necessary, when linux is involved.
Incidentally, this is what lots of people have been asking for, I think. MS is competing on technical merit, on management, on features, on security, and even on cost.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
on
Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 1
You think marketing is the only reason MS doesn't want their sources released ?
Let me tell you what. Microsoft sales / marketing is getting a BEATING re: the whole Open Source vs Closed Source issue. Open Source for better or worse is a giant buzz and people that have no idea why they do or dont want it are asking about it all the time.
If opening the source to all of MS's products boiled down to a bullet point on a marketing brochure, don't you think they'd have done that by now ?
Your assertion about Microsoft is pretty far fetched. Your position in the first paragraph isn't self evident, either.
I think the agreements we're talking about here are going to be along the lines of "customer X makes a product or runs it's business on vendor Y's software". As customer X is dependant on the technology in Y, expect everyone at X to be familiar, if not intimately so, with what Y does, at least from an operational and user perspective.
case in point - the secretary that uses MS word can probably tell me very accurately and concisely what word does. And if someone else wrote their own clone of word, i bet she'd find the differences. The secretary isn't a programmer. She's the customer - the end user.
In the case, the secretary, who isn't in any sort of community, knows exactly what the software needs to do. There's your QA - the user. If you get _any_ developer - even a contract programmer, the source to word, as long as the secretary gets to review builds before they're approved, you've got what you need to keep the secretary in business. No community, no open source, no nothing.
At least they mentioned documents and manuals related to the code. However, even with that, one thing that's over looked is the build system / environment. For any project interesting enough to put in code escrow, the build/cms system used is probably necessary.
Also, i wonder if these agreements are just the tip revisions of a bunch of files ? If so, you'd lose the incredible documentation provided by SCM changelogs. And if the SCM database is held in escrow, what if the software licensee doesn't have a valid license for the SCM system the code was developed with ? What if the SCM / build tools provider goes under, or has some problem ?
It'd be interesting to actually read one of the documents. The legal nonsense just to buy a house is absurd enough.. imagine trying to write a legal document that basically gives you a guarantee that you can survive without some random software company in India.
actually, the disk defragmenter is 100% MS code now. The old one was outsourced to Executive Software, a bunch of scientologists. I think we had to do the defragmenter in house to get the scientologist bits out of it for certain governments to approve XP. (or it might have been because the code wasn't fully disclosed to us, or something along those lines).
In any case, the defragger is no longer outsourced code:)
this is horse shit. linux has been working to get 64 bit clean for almost its entire existance. dont pretend that AMD releases a chip and that over nite, linux is magically 64 bit clean and running error free on it. surely you remember the 64 bit alpha ? the majority of 32->64 issues were hashed out on that architecture..
IRIX was 64 bit clean before linux was. And Windows was running 64bit native on AMD64 before you knew there was an AMD64.
Slashdot Mirror
look this is ridiculous. you've insulted my intelligence now on two occasions.
I pointed out what is a factual misunderstanding of basic firearms terminology, and then what i thought was a politically loaded grammatical curiosity.
if you think there should be massive legal controls on firearms, thats fine, but your opinions are not self evident facts, much less the basis for any kind of legislative action, and thats where i'm coming from.
a boy is already a young male.
underage is either redundant in the context of mentioning that this is a male who is not yet a man (a boy)
or
underage implies that there is some accepted age (regardless of gender) which is a turning point. prior to that age, nobody "should have guns", and after that age, people are magically allowed to have them.
i know of no such "age" set forth in any US law, and i certainly don't see an argument/defense of the idea in the post.
i suspect the poster is leaning towards the latter meaning.
here's a clue people - 16 year old boys are allowed to drive 5,000 lb SUVs. Those have a lot more KE, a lot more area, and most people are much better at aiming a gun than aiming a truck.
why do you feel qualified in general to tell tom, dick, or harry what they can do ?
why dont you suggest regulations on having underage boys then, as clearly taking away fire arms from them wont change the fact that they're stupid. the problem here isn't that two teens got a hold of a gun, the problem is that there were two teens with poor judgement skills.
stupid people are the root of the problem. you cant legislate away stupidity. the world will continue to build a better idiot.
you appear to know nothing about firearms but seem to think certain people shouldn' have them.
:)
it's fine if you're not familiar with firearms - just dont go around telling other people what to do with them -- you're not qualified to do so.
wait a minute - are you a politician?
my wife worked at one of the most expensive daycare...erm.. "preschools" in the seattle area.
it was a joke. you or your wife should quit so you can raise your own children, as opposed to having some white trash single mom thats herself too poor to afford daycare not paying attention to your kids so she can get enough money to cover the part of her rent that isn't subsidized already, and get free daycare for her kid(s) at the same time.
you're a lawyer - you probably make enough money to get by on a single income. consider what you're offering your children by letting random people raise them for you.
seriously - check into how many of the "teachers" at your child care provider are young single moms -- simply because its a convenient arrangement for them to get paid and get free daycare out of the deal
if i were paying 1k or more per month per child (the rates at this place in seattle) id be furious to know what went on at this place...
anyway, all that aside - just because you and many other parents have shifted the responsibility for raising their children onto others doesn't mean that you should work on shoring up the legal system to compensate. just because industry and the business world has been moving to the "outsource and sue for breach of conract" model for a long time doesn't mean that parenting should have an appropriate analog. most children don't care what kind of SUV's mommy and daddy drive, but do care when mommy and daddy only see them/each other for 3 hrs a day and its all fighting.
you and others may not live up to the "ideal" family, but that doesn't change the fact that its still the ideal arrangement.
incidentally, none of this is the governments problem. government!= parents. I wish people would stop trying to make it the governments problem. you of course have (and excercize) to use an altnerate family configuration, complete with outsourced parenting. don't legislate the country into making sure that thats the only possibility, and that parents that actually want an active role in their childs upbringing cant have that (and instead get to choose from government schools, government labelled music, government approved video games, etc)
what i find bothersome is that you know so little about firearms that you suggest a shotgun is a sniper weapon - or that 14 and 16 year olds are "underage boys". what does that even mean ?
news for nerds. Because its certainly not stuff that matters ;)
re: 3
:)
:)
if you efficiently suck that energy out using photolovaics, you'll not be heating up rocks etc, causing in effect less injection of heat into the ecosystem.
sure, if you use it to do something, you'll cause heat elsewhere, but now you're smuggling energy away from one system and into another
re 4: i think i agree with you, at least on any relevant, measurable scale, but - prove it.
lets say for a moment that the sun is pushing particles away from it self. the rate at which the particles are expelled is determined by the sum of the forces on those particles, right ? Lets say a force is introduced which opposes the direction of travel of said particles. Now they're slowing down, lingering closer to the sun longer. This increases over all gravitation, heat, etc etc. IOW, it might very well change the fusion process.
Now lets say that the "default" state of the sun-earth system is that there has been this resistive factor on the sun's emissions all along. If we remove it, does that not change the suns environment ?
they didn't have grates on fans. you just expcted people to be smart enough to not shove hands into rapidly spinning metal blades.
:)
Ahh, progress.
I'll tell you the reason not to put big cages around giant fans. It costs money, it would be unsightly as hell, and then the birds would just run into the cages and clog it up. It'd make the problem worse
if you're absorbing that solar energy for evil, greedy, human consumption, then you're using energy that could have been doing something else.
Plants need the photon energy of sunlight in order to make food for themselves. When you install solar panels you're STEALING FROM PLANTS.
Furthermore, you're sucking heat energy and turning it into electricity. widespread use of efficient solar panels could cause local cooling to the detriment of local ecosystems. YOUR FREEZING THE BABY ANIMALS.
All of you freaking solar energy pundits are SUCKING THE SUN DRY. OUR SUN WILL RUN OUT SOMEDAY - WHY SPEED THAT UP?
i buy old cars.
:)
:)
Both of my cars dont have airbags, don't have integrated phones, dont have cup holders, don't have automatic transmissions, and don't have day time annoyance lights.
Hell, one of them even has rear windows that go down all the way
Both have ABS, but one has a switch on the dashboard to turn it off (the other is easy to turn off, but not THAT easy
Both are fuel injected, both are performant, both are a blast to drive.
Germany. Home of worthwhile cars.
except the M3, which is a 6 cylinder :)
:) i do not look forward to the outrageous torque steer of a >200hp FWD turbo..
:)
oh, and "Beamer" means a BMW motorcycle. The word for BMW cars, unfortuneately, is "bimmer"
(i never liked the word, but it's the convention)
it really doesnt matter how fast the SRT-4 is, it's still wrong wheel drive
I'll continue to take my old, slow, 15 year old BMW 6 cylinder, thanks
read up on the architecture of NT.. things like DACLS, ACE, SIDs, two-factor auth, etc etc.
NT was designed with a solid security _architecture_, built with many cool security features. I handily admit that there was lots of bad code implementing those (and other) features, and some poor configuration decisions..
but the internals of the OS have always have an advanced security model as an instrinsic part since the beginning. Earlier, nobody cared (at MS at least) and the focus was on bringing forward dos/win3.1/win95 customers with as little pain as possible. that meant "ignore the stuff NT has built in, just get it working smoothly". The recent security work has been cleaning up bad coding, bad app-layer decisions, and learning how to take advantage of the fine grained security mechanisms NT has had all along.
i'd be pretty wary of making native tongue arguments. shooting from the hip, they seem reasonable, because we all had that foreign grad student acting as TA for one of our college classes that was totally unintelliglbe and made the class suck.
On the other hand, I would postulate that the average Indian involved in contractual software development speaks and writes english better than the average American. Especially if you want to talk about concise or technical writing. Think about all of the people that couldn't write a one page paper about their dog that still "graduated" from high school. Are these the expert communicators that will lead the bright future of US software development ?
Now, generally I agree with you about outsourcing. Having brilliant people working on all of the diverse problems and inefficiencies in an organization is pretty handy. But not every organization can attract top talent, and not every business leader can see or feel comfortable with the the long term approach.
The summary is that programming is no longer a darling industry - it IS commodity work and while there may be quality / user experience differences between local vs exported labor, alot of people are willing to make whatever tradeoffs exist in the name of cost savings
(just like they do in other areas, i.e. texttiles or auto manufacturing)
so your first impulse upon readin this was to think i was trolling ? why, because i have an uncommon point of view ? do you disagree with my argument, my conclusion, or my employer ?
:)
:)
Yeah, I _could_ have mentioned that, but it should be obvious from my posting history and my user page that im certainly not hiding it. I wasn't aware that slashdot required a disclosure statement of employment for dissecting a poorly made "argument"
my post was to point out that this was hardly an article at all, and basically some free advertising for this gagne fellow. It had NOTHING to do with linux security in 2003, over half of it was a rant on how shoddy microsoft is.
I've pondered the value proposition of open source before.
I'm sure since you value open source so highly, instead of being dependant on whatever is given to you, that you also sew your own clothes and grow your own food
The article i responded to was not an article at all - it was an anti-MS rant and i was irate that something with an interesting title claiming to be about linux security in 2003 - was nothing more than someone pushing their ideaology.
Also - i really dislike the use of the term astroturfing. I'm _not_ being paid by MS to post to slashdot, especially the day after christmas.
I'm not blindly supportive of everything MS does - but unlike alot of people, I'm also not blindly critical. When someone has something interesting or objective to say about MS, I listen, because thats how we get better. When someone is just ranting off and sounding uninformed, occasionally I let them have it (I say occasionally because responding to each instance of this would be a 24/7 endeavour for multiple people
minor nitpick. if you read the link you posted, you'll see that there's infact no WebDAV code in ntdll.dll (why would there be ?)
:)
WebDAV depends on some code in ntdll.dll, and it looks like you can feed WebDAV goop that it happily uses to exploit the BO in ntdll.dll.
So, webdav is the attack vector to remotely get at a problem in ntdll.dll. it's not substantially different than php triggering a bug in kmalloc()
do you have any substantiation of this ?
You may have heard something about software engineering, but if not, i'll tell you. The later you discover a bug, the more expensive it is.
Lets take some examples.
I think you get the idea. If a bug makes it out into the public, it will cost microsoft at least $100,000, at a minimum.
So, do you think bugs make it into the code because the emphasis is on cranking out software quickly, without caring about the quality ?
Oh boy! An article which takes 1 authors clearly subjective feelings, piles on the anecdotes, and pronounces evidentiary conclusions!
From reading this, it would appear that Gagne is pretty much what happens when you give a linux zealot some airtime. I'll comment on just a few things i got a kick out of:
At some point, I expect users to upgrade to newer releases or take some responsibility for patching their own systems. What's a reasonable period of time? I'd say 34 to 36 months. At some point, any reasonable users should understand that the best way to ensure continued support is to upgrade to something more recent."
but then we have
The beauty of the open source model is that an opportunity exists for creating fixes for old releases. Not so for the users of Windows 95 or 98 who have no source code to go back to when the next critical flaw is uncovered.
So which is it ? Do we expect people to upgrade after 36 months, or do we take any opportunity to mention that we think Microsoft sucks (of which everyone in the audience is perfectly aware)
"Frankly, it seems incredible that this is even open to debate.
There's that objective analysis shining through. Definitely not the words of someone pushing a beleif as opposed to an argument :)
One need only read the newspapers, listen to the radio, watch television or work in an office where Windows is widely used
Which papers would those be ? The ones that manage to not mention that FSF, Debian, and Gentoo all had their Root file distribution servers OWNED in the same year ?
has nothing to do with Microsoft's market penetration.
riiiiiiiight. Let me tell you what. if windows update gets owned, you will hear about it in the papers, and on the news, etc. And it wont be because of the magnitude of the issue - because it happend to the FSF, Debian, _and_ Gentoo _first_. When something goes wrong with microsoft software, it hits the whole internet. It's a market share issue.
It doesn't hurt that at its very core, Linux is designed with security in mind.
What do the original UNIX authors have to say about designing UNIX from the ground up with security in mind ? A history of linux will show a few things, I think.
No need here for launching a security initiative after years of neglect."
Or, said another way - "not too much new ground to cover making a freeware clone of 25 years of operating system research!"
Despite the fact that I do not run a Microsoft computer in this office,
why am i listening to your opinion of MS software again ?
costs in terms of data loss, damage, and lost productivity in the last three years alone runs into the billions of dollars. This is documented fact
Really ? which documents ? Where are the documents that talk about how much money business MAKE by leveraging software - Microsoft software. If, overall, MS software is hurting business financially, why dont they go back to notebook paper ? Why not use linux ?
This article is pretty much a non-article.
This comes up time and time again. There is an underlying assumption which is often voiced that there is a substantial quality difference between US code and Indian code.
This is usually bolstered with stuff like "art" and "quality", and "design".
Do you know what the difference between the illegal immigrant house painter that does cash-only jobs and the US programmer that holds your view point is ?
One of them is a pretentious asshole, and may have invested more heavily in formal education.
If people wanted "design" and "quality" and "art", nobody would buy Kia's. South Korea and Taiwan wouldn't have booming economies, and 95% of the clothes you wear wouldn't be made by children in malaysia.
But, as it turns out, by and large nobody gives a crap about those, or, they've made the determination that outsourced ultra cheap labour does the job acceptably well given the cost incurred.
Programming is no different. It's not like 50 years of American software engineering has produced an obelisk of invincible bug free code. No, we had Y2k, Windows 95, and a US vs Metric bug in a satellite.
Coding for Coding's sake is not a national treasure, it is not an art form, and really, it has nothing tod o with making money. IS/IT are a COST CENTER. Hiring programmers does NOT SELL SHOES. It does NOT SAVE LIVES. Everybody should be looking to save money on software development unlesss their business is software development! Otherwise it is an expense and subject to the inhouse vs outsourced discussion, just like any other expense!
Now, if your point had been "it's a shortsighted view to think you'll come out financially ahead by outsourcing software development to indian labor instead of using off the shelf stuff or using US based consultants", then you'd have an argument. But instead it smacks of idolization of the US intellect and the programmers-guild mentality so prevalent in the US/unix world.
How many business run on linux now compared to 1 year ago. 5 years ago. 10 years ago.
It seems like a binary proposition to me:
You either beleive linux and open source are having no effect whatsoever on the computing industry, or you beleive that Microsoft marketing is having trouble dealing with linux/OSS
Let me assure you. MS is losing sales to OSS software. They take it so seriously that there are direct channels of communication within the comapany that go very high in order to attempt a mitigation of any technical (or other) blockers in an OSS vs Microsoft competitive situation.
It is my understanding that it is possible for a leaf-node sales person to have director/VP level ears, in a matter of hours, if necessary, when linux is involved.
Incidentally, this is what lots of people have been asking for, I think. MS is competing on technical merit, on management, on features, on security, and even on cost.
You think marketing is the only reason MS doesn't want their sources released ?
Let me tell you what. Microsoft sales / marketing is getting a BEATING re: the whole Open Source vs Closed Source issue. Open Source for better or worse is a giant buzz and people that have no idea why they do or dont want it are asking about it all the time.
If opening the source to all of MS's products boiled down to a bullet point on a marketing brochure, don't you think they'd have done that by now ?
Your assertion about Microsoft is pretty far fetched. Your position in the first paragraph isn't self evident, either.
I think the agreements we're talking about here are going to be along the lines of "customer X makes a product or runs it's business on vendor Y's software". As customer X is dependant on the technology in Y, expect everyone at X to be familiar, if not intimately so, with what Y does, at least from an operational and user perspective.
case in point - the secretary that uses MS word can probably tell me very accurately and concisely what word does. And if someone else wrote their own clone of word, i bet she'd find the differences. The secretary isn't a programmer. She's the customer - the end user.
In the case, the secretary, who isn't in any sort of community, knows exactly what the software needs to do. There's your QA - the user. If you get _any_ developer - even a contract programmer, the source to word, as long as the secretary gets to review builds before they're approved, you've got what you need to keep the secretary in business. No community, no open source, no nothing.
At least they mentioned documents and manuals related to the code. However, even with that, one thing that's over looked is the build system / environment. For any project interesting enough to put in code escrow, the build /cms system used is probably necessary.
Also, i wonder if these agreements are just the tip revisions of a bunch of files ? If so, you'd lose the incredible documentation provided by SCM changelogs. And if the SCM database is held in escrow, what if the software licensee doesn't have a valid license for the SCM system the code was developed with ? What if the SCM / build tools provider goes under, or has some problem ?
It'd be interesting to actually read one of the documents. The legal nonsense just to buy a house is absurd enough.. imagine trying to write a legal document that basically gives you a guarantee that you can survive without some random software company in India.
actually, the disk defragmenter is 100% MS code now. The old one was outsourced to Executive Software, a bunch of scientologists. I think we had to do the defragmenter in house to get the scientologist bits out of it for certain governments to approve XP. (or it might have been because the code wasn't fully disclosed to us, or something along those lines).
:)
In any case, the defragger is no longer outsourced code
this is horse shit. linux has been working to get 64 bit clean for almost its entire existance. dont pretend that AMD releases a chip and that over nite, linux is magically 64 bit clean and running error free on it. surely you remember the 64 bit alpha ? the majority of 32->64 issues were hashed out on that architecture..
IRIX was 64 bit clean before linux was. And Windows was running 64bit native on AMD64 before you knew there was an AMD64.
Both of these are closed operating systems.