Interesting News Article

** Why software is so bad **
For years weve tolerated buggy, bloated, badly organized computer programs. But soon, well innovate, litigate and regulate them into reliability.

[edit]fixed link[/edit]
http://www.msnbc.com/modules/export...news/768401.asp


Thanks for the showing the corrected link. I copied the link, but it didn't copy correctly.

I've been reading it like for 5 minutes now and here you're suggesting to read it let me finish it first and then we'll discuss.

BTW, the link is http://www.msnbc.com/news/768401.asp -> it got eaten in Onslaught's post.

That article is a good summary of commercial software, but it in no way touches open source world, and I think this is a major mistake from author's side.

Open source people do not make (direct) profit from producing new version, and they are not all that anxious to put in mass production something without first testing it. And procedure of testing itself is very interesting - thousands of developers all over the world have access to new product and they use it on their own risk knowing that there are bugs and something will go wrong. Microsoft and so many others support open source, but they still do not get the idea of sharing information, they dont get that for every programmer Billy has there are literally hundreds of hackers/developers out there who wouldn't mind finding bugs. And they will find them, the question is will microsft feel like they just peed on themselfvs when that happens, or will they just say "look, we're testing it so don't get mad".

On a different note, I'd like to point out another interesting article from IBM -> http://www.zurich.ibm.com/st/storage/millipede.html

I will have to say that I agree with your statements. It would appear that the majority of problems addressed in that article dealt with proprietary software. One of the biggest benifits of open-source is the fact that you have so many people looking at the code you will widely reduce the amount of errors produced in the final release. This is a major benifit that cannot be overlooked. I guess that is why, in the long run, open-source programs are usually more relaible.

Now to check out that link you posted.

Now that AFM model really has potential to blow away the current standards for data storage. It really isn't suprising that IBM is behind this, they have a way of pioneering things.

Speaking of open source. Ouch, that hurts. Can't believe I missed that yesterday, will have to do some research and see whats up with that.


edit: Yep, ibm seems to have that covered. I still can't believe what memory capcities they are promising. 80+ gigs.

edit2: nevermind, its only for apache on windows, so I can sleep like a baby this night.

I do like this part of that message:
I also remember somewhere reading that there was a way to hack the apache webserver if the ftproot was inside of the wwwroot. The apache site was hacked this way and sent a notice on how this was done. But this wasn't a code flaw, just a configuration flaw.

[edit]gotta love windoze [/edit]

I didn't like that 'unlikely' too, so I checked with apache's bulleting

Two rules from this advisory - dont run apache on windows and dont run apache on 64 bit cpus, and you'll be aight

Nuff said.