Invisible wrote:
> Did somebody fail basic software engineering? 

Yes.

> How difficult would it be to detect, 

More difficult than the guy writing the software for free felt like writing. 
That's one fundamental problem with FOSS. (Altho that might start changing 
given the number of people now being paid to write FOSS is outweighing the 
number of people not paid to write FOSS.)

> Additionally: Maybe I'm just going soft in my old age. But does anybody 
> else here remember a time when the most touted advantage of Linux was 
> "it's much less of a resource hog than Windows"? I realise that RAM is 
> cheap these days, but a distro that won't even install unless you have 
> ONE GIGABYTE of RAM?? What the hell does the installer need a gig for?!

Don't confuse the distro with the OS. Linux installs happily in <32M (at 
least on my set-top box). That a distro takes more isn't a problem, any more 
than Win7 taking more memory than WinCE is.

> Services and applications can be restarted, but the kernel really, really can't.] 

This is misleading too. If you're running a web server or a DB server, the 
difference between restarting the services and restarting the kernel is 
minimal. You're still not running while it's happening. And depending on 
what component you've replaced, you very well may not have updated 
everything you think you have. E.g., if you replace the PHP interpreter with 
one that has security bugs fixed, you now have to restart every service 
written in PHP to ensure that fix is in place. Which services are they? You 
can't tell. At least with Windows locking executables that are running, you 
can tell if an executable is in use when you update it and figure out which 
service is using it.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

Post a reply to this message