It is my believe that most vulnerabilities are 'design issues' and not just "security holes" that can be patched over.

I have been studying OS design now for almost 20 years, I think most of these designs where fine for just trying hack something to work, but now with everything interconnected, they were just never built for that.

I have an OS design I have been working on for the past 10 years Amorphous OS that is intended to solve almost every issue I've seen talked about.

Most come from just having a common File System view for the whole OS. This become a place where malicious code can live and hide and exploit.

But memory could be treated much better and more efficiently. The Stack Also needs to be isolated better and separate data storage, instruction pointers, and code better.

None of this is new, it was talked about in the 60's and 70's then it seems everyone forgot about it. So today it's coming back to bite us.

Way cool. I actually wanted to build and run a cluster with a custom implentation.
Patent and commercialize the output.
I had a few specific things I wanted to go after.

Well with enough input knowledge of molecules. You could also use Neural networks or GA to evolve better models, but I did realize the problem you are referring to.

Again it's not going to be 100%, maybe not even 50% but even 10% would still reduce the search space immensely. The downside is you could easily overlook optimal solutions that don't model correctly.

It's not quite the same as back then they were EPROM's and not EEPROM's or flash. So you'd have to actually pull the chips out, erase them with a UV Lamp and then programming then in a Burner.

It's a long story but after I left high school in New Jersey I had entrusted a friend Mark to ship my possession to California where I had moved to. Instead it stole it all.

After moving I started a large collection of BIOS for XT, AT 80286 motherboards. I had written code that was floating around the BBS's that would harvest the BIOS and dump out ROM images that you could burn on to EPROM and install in to another Motherboard.

So I had made several sets of the latest AMI bios for some friends back home. Well Mark asked a mutual friend to get a copy of the BIOS from me, but not tell me who it was really for.
Well I found out and prepared a special BIOS just for him.

Mark was a big warez guy. He was sharing floppies with everyone.

So I took a copy of the Friday the 13th virus. Also know as Jerusalem B that would slow your PC down to a crawl and every time you ran a program it's file size would grow. It was very easy to detect and clean and mostly harmless. I removed the malicious payload , but made sure it still propagated normally.

The virus was only around 2000 bytes, and ran as a TSR.
I found some empty space in the ROM image, and xor encrypted it and placed it in and added hooks so when you format a floppy (Int 13) it would install the virus TSR.

From there it would then attach itself to any exe file that get's ran.

So I burned the EPROM's and sent them over. I was hearing story's from friends how he was loosing his mind. He'd clean all his disks. Then go to make someone a copy and it would be infected. No one would trade disk with him.

He never did figure out how he kept getting infected.

Revenge is sweet.

I wrote up a plan for something like this about 2 1/2 years ago and posted on my blog about 9 months ago when it became obvious to me that as cool of an idea as it was, it wasn't something I wanted to work on.

The basic idea is to take a computational chemistry package and run it through a genetic algorithm to search for suitable candidates that solve certain problems.
Better solar cells, dielectrics for supercaps, or materials with specific properties.

The physics quickly went over my head and I was never able to get funding or grants for this without a PhD.

I am glad to see this is starting to happen.

Project - Mc Lab / Magic Chemist, in a Box.
  http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/2010/12/project-mc-lab-magic-chemist-in-box.html
  http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2010/12/project-mc-lab-magic-chemist-in-box.html

When I was in ShenZhen last, a few Chinese had iPhone clones that looked a lot like the real deal.

Xvworks and microware, yuck.
I am a video specialist and love doing real time control stuff and embedded systems. I have yet to understand what they are talking about with RTOS. I can do microsecond accurate timing now in vanilla BSD or linux. Yes 1/1,000,000 second timing. Verifiable on an oscilloscope from user space or in drivers.

Overall I think the opensource is the important part of stability. The more eyeballs looking at code the more solid it will be.
This is why new code should be treated with some suspicion till it has been run for so long in so many different condition. Been reviewed and scrutinized over and over. This is what gives stability.

I am http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsokol

http://www.videotechnology.com/
http://churchofbsd.blogspot.com/

By definition a stable system has to be running older code that's been fixed and is well understood rather then "the latest" updated code.

If your constantly churning and updating you can not be stable.

Red Had run's behind the main Linux distribution to get added stability.

But FreeBSD which seems old and stodgy is like that because of the emphasis on stability over features and improvement.
It's also simpler under the hood which is also important for Stability.

But it all depends on what your trying to do. GUI vs. Server.
For Server I'd go with BSD.
For GUI I'd go with Windows, Apple OS-X (BSD variant), maybe Android (haven't developed on it yet) X Windows just sucks.
For Embedded , I'd go with what ever the eval boards ship with. Usually Linux these days. (Certainly not PSOS or QNIX)

At this point I can compile the same code on all of these using GCC and run them equally well. They are all Posix compliant. SDL run's on all of them.
Java also run on them. So does Flash, LLVM, TCL, PERL, RUBY, Python or what ever langue du jour.

Let's end the religious wars on OS's, it's about getting your work done. The OS is just a platform for the language your want your code to run on.

Hello constant updates is not a sign of Stability!
The problem is there isn't much need for commercial support for something that doesn't break all the time.

I have used RedHat in a server farm of over 1000 systems and I have used FreeBSD in servers systems that were a little smaller.

The BSD generally run's behind in code version on the application side, but these are more stable and not constantly pushing the bleeding edge. It's used inside Router and Big server farms and so tends to be better on the network side.

With Red hat we had so many problem with the BNX/BNX2 10 GB ethernet drivers, it was a nightmare scenario with over $500,000K in blade servers constantly crashing, there were the HP vendor drivers, and the RH drivers and the Linux main line drivers, which we ended up building and using till RH caught up.

FreeBSD is hardly dead. Some of the fastest network drivers exist in FreeBSD.
At this point the BSD's are almost a flavor of Linux. There is a Linux compatibility layer also.

I have written drivers for Both BSD and Linux. BSD drivers are generally much clean and more straight forward and it's because of them that many HW vendors bring up a BSD driver first even if they choose never to share it.

I don't have any way to check that, but the visible white component of the sun's light doesn't carry much heat.

They use a Dark Green to radiate heat from Power transformers. This is because of it's high emissivity. The Visible color is irrelivant.
My krylon example is to show that the wrong "White" Paint could be actually worse then no paint at all.

I've done a few blog posts on this, a number of my friends researched the heck out of this issue.

http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-heat-number.html
http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2010/09/notes-on-heat-reduction-on-roof.html

I will post the highlights here:

For most materials absorption and emissivity of IR is usually the same for any given frequency.

Paint: Krylon, flat white #1502 @ 3m wavelenght = 0.992 emissivity
So weirdly enough this one specific "Visibly" white paint has one of the highest emissivities, and would absorb and reflect a lot of heat almost the same as the black paints!!!

What you really need is a Selective Coatings