I see that as a side effect of those languages being too hard for the average programmer. And, let's face it, the average programmer is still average.

The more burden you take off the programmer to address their specific issue and not have to deal with crap like, say, date formats, then the higher quality the average program becomes.

Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good For Decades To Come

Well, that's a relief for me! I was getting worried!

This guy seems a little *too* optimistic about his solution. It's a great solution, and if you want to see a good example of its use, check out the K42 operating system. It solves a bunch of the performance problems a naive implementation as the article describes would have.
However, it's not a free lunch. Runtime marshalling and switching between interfaces? Does the author have any idea how hard that is? One tiny mistake and your entire database is full of junk data because you forgot that bit-X means Y, or your regex P had a typo. if you're going to adopt this "Continuous Change" model, you need to do an awful lot of validation testing on all the possible inputs from all the different API versions, and make absolutely sure you get the internal state you intended. Another way to say this, a hidden feature of the discrete approach is that you know the state of your system at all points in time. You're not running a franken-process.
BTW, I'm not trying to dump on the idea, I reckon it's cool, just the article doesn't really represent it accurately.

Came here to say this. Mod parent up.

DNS provides a mechanism to request a mapping from Name -> Numerical IP. Not a lot more, nothing less.

Saying the crap they're pulling with it is "not DNS" is just a lie.

I've used power plugs in a bunch of different countries. Most have their advantages and disadvantages. US is small, Australia it's clear which direction you plug it in, Europe has some good safety features... but the british plug has nothing going for it. It's big and ugly, and when you put two on the wall next to each other, you can't work out which way is up. The authors are retarded.

So they're going to decide, therefore, that the thing to do is hide the information and ban research into it. You know, instead of actually making the systems secure.

Hooray for security for obscurity.

*blink*

What good does your proof do you though? You have no way of being sure it's correct.

Wait, what? What is it you think you do with a proof?

If only there was some way to formally verify the correctness of an OS kernel! :)

It's a lot easier to get the kernel right when it only has twelve entry points...

That's an incredibly good summary of why microkernels such as L4 are good for security. Keep the pieces small and manageable, and you can even formally prove that your components are correct.
Don't be fooled into thinking this makes it a useless toy, however.

But for every-day computing?? On my desktop I have more trouble with Firefox crashing than I do the OS! (Yes I run linux).

... and you know how that 100% these bugs are firefox itself, and not failures in the OS causing it to crash?

I think you're missing the specifics of Haskell. Unlike Python, Perl, or whatever other commodity language, Haskell is designed with a well defined set of mathematical semantics. You're correct that proving a piece of Python code is the same as a pieces of Perl code is useless. But, if I prove Python, C or Perl is the same as (the researchers' subset of) Haskell, I can use this to mathematically reason about properties of the system. Haskell allows you more than just a translation. It means there are things you can know and prove with 100% certainty. Using your example, if you prove a bug does not exist in the Haskell version (which you can), then you've proven it for the other language.

This is something that people who bang on about formal proofs conveniently forget - all it does is move the bugs from the source code to the formal specification.

Correct!

And if the spec is detailed enough to be useful it effectively becomes code anyway so you might just as well write the actual code and debug *that* instead.

Wrong! The whole point of the spec is that it can be formally checked for bugs. You can prove that the spec no longer contains buffer overflow vulnerabilities, and be sure the code matches it. If all you're doing is hacking on code, you can't prove anything.

Reminds me of this funny little piece: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/myspace_outage_leaves_millions

s/myspace/twitter/g

In Vista each application has a separate volume control. So you can mute your browser and turn up the volume on your media player.

And how does this help people using XP, or Linux or OSX? And even if I'm using Vista, I'm often listening to the music through my browser anyway [Pandora, Rhapsody], so this still doesn't help me.

I think you'll find this is the point of putting the audio and video tags in the browser instead of some dumb-arse embedded flash or other annoying extension. Expect the next dot-revision of your browser to have a mute button for each window :)

Ditto that for various elite individuals!

Apparently if you perform psychology tests on world class racing car drivers and top notch fighter pilots, they show indications of psychopathic behviour. It'd be interesting to see if this was a similar but different trait, or the exact same thing which causes extreme criminal behaviour.