[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 23:47 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> But VERY FEW software projects follow any serious standards.  

Define "serious" and "standard".  The standards for web based (SOA)
development change so often it's next to impossible to keep up.  And
people won't wait as long for software as they do for, say, a
building.  

Standards have worked well for network connectivity and operating
systems.  They aren't working so great (yet) for the web.

> All it  
> takes is subscribing to SANS security warning lists to see that  
> software engineers make the same dumb mistakes (buffer overflow) over  
> and over and over again, and little is demanded of them to not do that.

You only see the desktop.  The rest of the non-desktop software world
has higher standards for development.  Most especially in communications
and military (and NASA) projects.  I've worked on interactive cable
systems, international phone switches, high availability clusters,
supercomputers, and 24/7 data center systems.  You don't get away with
buffer overflows so easily in those environments.  What you're doing is
comparing the breadth of civil engineering to a small section of
software development.  It's not quite apples to apples.  

> Linux seems to meet neither goal, 

Don't lump the OS in with the distributions and desktop.  They are
distinct pieces by design.  Whine about the desktop if you'd like.  The
kernel is not nearly as problematic.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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