In a recent podcast Steve Gibson of grc.com has drawn attention to a detailed report [.pdf] by engineers at Symantec who demonstrate that Windows Vista contains a completely virgin network stack that has been programmed from the ground up. The Symantec software engineers have monitored the behaviour of the new stack through a series of beta releases and have documented that it contains most of the basic bugs and security holes that have long since been fixed in other stacks - even the Windows 95 stack. Since it has not had a chance to mature and develop in the wild, the likelihood that it contains new, uncharted holes and errors is very high. Some have already been found. Gibson stresses that the ramifications for the security of the new stack are disastrous.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Yes, because a participation in a programming contest really means something.
I don't see why this is so hard for people to accept. America is the center of the programming world. That doesn't mean that other people don't do anything, or that we have to be snooty about it, it just means what it means. If you take a look at the advancements that have taken place in the world of computers, most of it happened in the United States. Furthermore, America is still at the forefront of academic research into computer science. There is a reason why so many talented people from India, China, and Russia come to the United States to attend university.
So what? Is it wrong to acknowledge that the United States is better at some things than other countries? Does anybody get hissy when somebody says that Japan is at the forefront of consumer electronics? Or that the Europeans are at the forefront of particle physics? Do people get angry when somebody lauds Germany's or Britain's philosophical traditions, France's culinary tradition, or pre-communist Russia's literary tradition? So why is it so hard to believe that the US hasn't completely squandered its immense wealth, but has invested at least some small portion of it becoming the best in some specific things?
Member since:
2005-11-15
Most of the academic work originally done on computers and programming languages was done in the United States. Who invented FORTRAN? Lisp? C? Americans. Who derived lambda calculus? A pair of Americans. Why is it any surprise that Americans have a stronger pool of programming talent?
Are you from Texas? ;-)
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/0418218