I agree that the systems are hopelessly complex. I have observed that the average Windows installation consists of about a million files. With that magnitude of filenames, it is unrealistic to expect anyone to know what each one is and what it does, even of the names are somewhat mnemonic. When you have a million files (1,000,000), each one is approximately 0.000001% of the total. That sort of perfection is difficult to achieve, and it doesn't happen without a NASA-like effort. I have worked for employers that expected me to watch every line of code execute in a debugger before considering it committable. If each file consisted of at least a thousand lines of code, that would mean there are a billion lines of code in the system. Ouch!!

Somewhere around 1984, Intel released their 80286, which had special features for operating system writers, including boundary protection implemented through memory descriptors. It appears that Microsoft made a decision it was too much trouble to use this feature to protect the Windows operating system, and that decision IMHO was the root of the vulnerability troubles that plague Windows today. I realize memory was precious in those days, but given that buffer overruns are the prime cause of malware trouble, just think of the grief and expense that could have been spared.

It is interesting to hear about the lengths people go to protect information about this thing, but what is it?

Not funny Ha Ha, but funny peculiar I guess. If the world's strangeness continues, I expect the day will come that Apple will embrace the trusted computing initiative and their compilers will start generating a new proprietary IL pseudocode. As an independent developer, I have tried to keep my code portable so as to leverage off marketing opportunities that require shifting platforms. Each time I have to play what I call "Engineering Poker" and guess which toolset will benefit me the most, it causes me grief. In my opinion, Apple doesn't need to play lock-in games. Mac OS X (Unix) is a superior platform to Windows, and the Apple hardware has been worth the extra cost for the longevity and stability. I think Apple would win on a totally level playing field.

Now that Microsoft has coerced the majority of keyboard manufacturers to include a button just for Microsoft Windows, they decide to deprecate the feature leaving the distribution channels full of keyboards that have a useless button. I suppose about the time the channels clear of the startbutton'd keyboards, Microsoft will put the feature back in and the manufacturers will be sitting on a ton of keyboards without the revived button. It is clear that modifying the keyboard design of the qwerty keyboard to support a single sourced proprietary operating system was a decision that seemed ok at the time, but now is nothing but trouble. As if supporting nationalized keyboards is not troublesome enough, we now have the permutation with and without the start button.

I have had one each of the last few versions of the kindle, and I am a happy user. Now I have a paper-white unit and I am very content. I have several hundred books comprised of novels, and technical books about software engineering. Sure my iPhone has a kindle app, but the paper-white is so readable and does not suffer from needing to do too many things. As much as I like "rooting", I really don't feel any need to poke around inside the kindle firmware. I have a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, an iPad Air, and an iPhone5. Each has a role in my life. I don't want to program on my ereader. Relating only to it's capability, and not focusing on Amazon's business practices, I highly recommend the Kindle. The 3G wireless networking is free and you can purchase and download books while outside wifi zones. It is an extra bonus that the kindle app is available for most of my other devices. If I really have to, I can reference a technical book on my iPhone. Even if a kindle-killer did come along, I already own quite a vfew kindle books, and would want to stick with that for the time being.

Spreadsheets are great for managing moderate two dimensional tables of data. I sometimes do my monthly budget on one. TFA is about the difference between vertical and horizontal applications. For people that can visualize, the spreadsheet is a powerful tool for managing moderate tables of data, such as my personal monthly budget. But I wouldn't try to use it for my complete yearly financial activity. Vertical applications are for people that benefit from pre-written software whose design embodies the details that help users. You can use spreadsheets for taxes, but knowledge apps for tax prep do a great job.

It is not about a legend. Microsoft did absolutely rig Windows so it wouldn't run on DR-DOS. That has been proven in court. Right down to the code that makes that happen. But the fact is that Microsoft was a ruthless marketing company and IMHO adversely affected the computer software industry by their actions.

Now that we have the words, it is possible to create an application the automatically generates a press release using all of them. There should be thousands of permutations possible. It could even find a home like the fortune cookie on Unix.

I have been wondering for several decades what was going on with Apple because they just do not seem to want to pay fair money for engineers. They know we want our resumes to say we worked for Apple. The thing that gets me the most is that the cost of living in Cupertino and surrounding areas it VERY high, the average commute being 45+ minutes the last time I looked. When I interviewed there years ago, I was astounded at what they wanted to pay. Since about 1999, someone has been draining the money out of the software engineering profession. I just don't see how they expect to get or keep the top talent with a policy like that.

"if that's above the infinite-bug-threshold, then you might as well not bother fixing any particular bug at that level, because the attacker can always just find another one. It doesn't even matter whether you have a prize program or not; the product is in a permanent state of unfixable vulnerability." Ah we are talking about Windows now eh?

Given to me in 1983 by Gary Kildall, this calculator continues to function beautifully although HP no longer sells these. It has perverse rolish and support for binary, octal, decimal, and hex.

do you mean anonymous?

I have to disagree strongly about this. All those rigorous code quality standards and very though code audits haven't done anything to improve the vulnerability situation with Windows. I get the CERT notifications and used to get the Microsoft ones as well, and they all look the same. I vulnerability in the code allows remote code execution and user promotion. The only recommended fix is to turn off some critical feature used by most developers. These bugs always seem to affect all known versions of the operating system, or all known versions of Office. The constant stream of these problems hasn't seemed to slow down at all over the last few decades. It seems to me that there is a major paradigm problem with Microsoft's code concepts, because these problems continue to occur no matter what proprietary development strategy they use. The trusted computing initiative declared all programmers to be untrustworthy and tried to keep them from writing real code. In my opinion all this trouble dates back to the early eighties when Microsoft ignored the boundary protections provided in the protected mode of the 286 and forward. It was just too much trouble for them to manage the descriptor tables and memory regions. Beyond this, Bill Gates opinion that no-one needed more than 640K kept us in tight memory mode too long. Once we got into protected mode and had more memory, it would not have been that much overhead to use the boundary protection. It could have been added to the malloc code and frameworks. Deciding that operating systems should be written in BASIC was another hip Microsoft idea, and Vista proved that one out. Balmer could have been shouting, "marketers, marketers, marketers", and probably was behind closed doors.

The NCSA developed the Mosaic web browser. Mr Andreeson worked on that project and used the code from that as the basis of the first version of Netscape.