« Preliminary Earthquake Report | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | CIA resists request for abuse data »
Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story
[Quote:]
I can make it so secure that it doesn’t work, or I can have 100 percent compatibility.
It’s difficult to describe what’s wrong with this picture. I mean, I could simply say Microsoft is living by the “Tyranny of the ‘or’”. We can have security OR compatability. We can have low prices OR product quality… etc.. which is Bullshit if you have Vision. But then I’d get the comment that with Windows being the way it is, these guys had no other choice, and there would be some truth in that. But Microsoft spent too spent too much time trying to tie-up market-share, instead of architecting and designing their products to help clients. By (inadvertently) harming their clients like that, they’ve built a monster, and now, short of scrapping most of their work, there is no way they will ever deliver anything robust and secure.
And this article, to me, illustrates this will never happen. As I said, it’s difficult to describe why other than just saying “mindset!” and leaving it at that. The article offers an interesting insight into the Microsoft development process.
Oh, and one more thing. I distinctly remember Bill Gates stating “the entire company” was working on security, while this article says SP2 was just 15 guys. Hmm…
Preliminary Earthquake Report
[Quote:]
The devastating megathrust earthquake of December 26th, 2004 occurred on the interface of the India and Burma plates and was cause by the release of stresses that develop as the India plate subducts beneath the overriding Burma plate. The India plate begins its decent into the mantle at the Sunda trench which lies to the west of the earthquake’s epicenter. The trench is the surface expression of the India-Burma plate interface.
The tectonics of the region is complex and involves the interaction of the Australian, Sunda and Eurasian plates in addition to the India and Burma plate. The India and Australia plates move northeastwards at a rate of about 6 cm/year relative to the Burma plate. This results in oblique convergence at the Sunda trench. Some of this oblique motion is accommodated on the right-lateral transform faults and rifts that separate the Burma and Sunda plates.
Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following the megathrust earthquake show that approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake. Aftershocks are distributed along much of the shallow plate interface and primarily extend northwards of the epicenter to the Andaman Islands.
The worlds largest recorded earthquakes were all megathrust events and occur where one tectonic plate subducts beneath another. These include: the magnitude 9.5 1960 Chile earthquake, the magnitude 9.2 1964 Prince William Sound, Alaska earthquake, the magnitude 9.1 1957 Andreanof, Alaska earthquake, and the magnitude 9.0 1952 Kamchatka earthquake. As with the recent event, megathrust earthquakes often generate large tsunamis that can cause damage over a much wider area than is directly effected by ground shaking near the earthquake’s rupture.
With No Alert System, Indian Ocean Nations Were Vulnerable
[Quote:]
Although waves swamped parts of the Sumatran coast and nearby islands within minutes, there would have been time to alert more distant communities if the Indian Ocean had a warning network like that in the Pacific, said Dr. Tad Murty, an expert on the region’s tsunamis who is affiliated with the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, in fact, scientists running the existing tsunami warning system for the Pacific, where such waves are far more common, sent an alert from their Honolulu hub to 26 participating countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, that destructive waves might be generated by the Sumatra tremors.
But there was no way to convey that information speedily to countries or communities an ocean away, said Dr. Laura S. L. Kong, a Commerce Department seismologist and director of the International Tsunami Information Center, an office run under the auspices of the United Nations.
Phone calls were hurriedly made to countries in the Indian Ocean danger zone, she said, but not with the speed that comes from pre-established emergency planning.
Penang
Video grab shows a tidal wave in Penang after tsunami waves hit southern Asia on Sunday in this amateur video footage taken December 26, 2004. REUTERS/Amateur Video Grab
|
Homework
This article says that SP2 was briefly, at the start, about 15 people when they thought they were just going to turn the firewall on and ship an SP1.1. It’s very clear from the article that that quickly changed.
I don’t agree with the rest of your characterization either, and I think it *is* true that MS is in a position where it’s impossible to please everyone or to have both ideals. Look at the stupid stuff they had to do: calling a beta an “RC1″ to get people to take it seriously. This is *Microsoft* having to do something as dumb as that to get people on board.
Thank you for making my point. That’s exactly the mindset I’m talking about – if you think MS cannot win no matter what you do, and believe that as strong as you clearly do, then indeed stand no chance. That will then permeate every single thing you do and try.
I mean, look at what they say – they know they’re going to have to break some applications, and yet they’re also convinced they cannot. It’s the same situation Apple was in when they were developing OS X. They knew they could not get all OS 9 applications to run, but that didn’t stop them. They still decided to ship what they thought was best, counting on their strength as a brand to bring along people. Microsoft is/was in a much better position to “force” people to accept change than Apple was. The mindset at Apple was that the strength of their new product would be what would save them, the mindset at MS was that they would really need to ‘fool’ people with stupid stuff like RC1 and that’s that. The fact that MS was right with their assesment about RC1 doesn’t change that – Apple too had to do some weird stuff. It’s the mindset that I’m talking about.