- FrankWilhoitOf course he is right -- on that level it is too obvious to state. I was picking up on the connotations of "birth" and "death", which somehow really itched me. Never mind.
- Now do how water is "born" by evaporation and "dies" by rain.
- The really offensive thing about it is that Russinovich knows better.
- I have seen the Windows source code. This absolutely cannot be done. The output of the first pass will be howling gibberish. They are talking about a million lines per man-month, which assumes that only about 1% of the code will require thoughtful post-editing. Screaming nonsense.
- "Intel x86" means the ISA. They are not talking about the ISA.
They are talking about what might be called the "common-practice" PC platform. They constantly say "overly complex", but without specifying any metric, even a comparative one. What they really mean is "unfit for purpose". Suppose we agree that it is unfit for purpose: the reasons are down to other factors as well as complexity, or even the management of complexity.
Neglecting the fact that any platform that has evolved incrementally through so many generations would necessarily look very, very much like what we find, they make the point that the excessive points of failure and attack are down to the excessive number of handoffs between responsibilities. The list of those responsibilities has grown over time; it already includes irreconcilable responsibilities; it will continue to grow. Which of them would you exclude? Which are excessive? Unnecessary? Illegitimate? Who would say? These are not technical questions and they do not have technical answers.
The point is that the addition of each successive responsibility invalidated the previous architecture. Who was it said that you cannot retrofit security? If security is what you want, then define it -- now, once, for all time -- and get it right, up front. Else your efforts will be wasted. Do you say that no definition can remain valid forever? Very well, when (not if) the definition of security changes, you must (in general) start fresh. An incremental approach would be as if you were trying to retrofit some more security, and that wouldn't work even if "security" were a one-dimensional spectrum, which it isn't.
What they seem to miss is that the number of attack vectors does not scale with the number of implementation components or the number of contributors to the supply chain, or even to the platform definition. It scales with the number of requirements. If you want fewer attack vectors, you must have fewer requirements. And then we see that this applies to all aspects of computing systems, not just security.
- Then everyone will be a moral criminal for not working -- and that is the purpose.
- If the future is unrecognizable, it will be because we have lost the ability to recognize even such continuity as it will retain.
- They will only become all the more determined to vote for the Republican Party, because it is the party that promises them (someday, by and by) a permission structure to take direct revenge against their class enemies -- not the real ones, but the ones that they prefer to imagine.
- The Supreme Court cannot be replaced without replacing the Constitution. This only shows that there are also many other reasons to replace the Constitution. But the level of stress that would be needed to trigger that process would make it impossible.
- The tipping point whether Tolkien's work was to survive occurred in the 1960s, before the emergence of most of the things that the author draws analogies with.
(1970: my high-school English teacher, inevitably asked his opinion of Tolkien, replied, "He's all right, if you like furry toes.")
- To translate is to recompose.
- The message to business is, FOSS is created and maintained by people you wouldn't hire; therefore, urgently, lock yourself into more eight- and nine-figure contracts with the Big Three. They'll give you "discounts"! -- conditional on increasing spend every year.
- The future is accountants with personal brands.
- ...and somebody else's downvote. This is a rough audience.
- Well, in Massachusetts, there ahn't.
- The problem is not that {language} does or does not do or have {thing}. The problem is managers expecting the work product of coders who only half know the language that they are working in to be productionizable.
- Criticism is not dying, it is becoming disseminated. Everyone is a critic; and when all you have are critics, everything looks like literature.
- We could wish!
- Advertising is, quite simply, a form of abuse. It is psychic violence that leaves no outward mark but diminishes its target by attempting to replace their perceptions, judgments, intentions with its own. A society with a pragmatic regard for its own survival would ban it outright.
- The problem is that we see things that do not work, and then imagine that we understand them.