As we've seen with past colonization efforts, laws are not exactly "laws". Atleast with the mexicans they aren't coming here to 'take our land' or 'kill/displace the existing populace'. They're just looking to escape poverty and build a better life for themselves. Its only the most natural evolution-driven thing to want to do that.

Hmm.. but can't all of those be jammed too? Or is there some kind of reliable indicator?

That is the way /YOU/ see tests. Most people use them to verify that very rule that you're talking about. Testing is not some random code that people throw together. It can be just as carefully written and as planned, if not more, than the actual software being tested.

The development of tests can be done with multiple smart people. They can divide up the program however they want and implement tests for it. This is impossible with formal proof. Without a several iterations you will be unable to even divide up the code the be formally analyzed in parallel. Tests will always be a faster and commercially more superior solution.

Then that means those people sucks at writing tests.

Depends on what you're doing. For a large softwares like Windows there are thousands of outstanding bugs and 90% of the users would not even recognize those bugs. Software will still be shipped and the bugs can be addressed in future updates. If you want a zero bug criteria then no software will ever ship on time. And all the companies will go bankrupt because there is no supply of software developers who are able to write that kind of software.

This will never happen. Currently majority of software developers are employed by commercial companies. Their aim is to improve profit, not to make their employees better developer. Sometimes those two things can align because higher quality code means more profit, but that happens only a minority of the time. The other large section of software developers will be in academia. They have no clue about software development. They have never shipped anything robust because they have such low number of users that every code path is never tested in their code.

So basically you want people to improve the quality of their code base, without actually giving them any concrete and practical way to measure the quality? Also why, are you ranting? No-one in this thread has claimed that tests are some kind of silver bullet. They are an important indicator - as objective as humanly possible - within reasonable constraints of day-to-day software development (we are not talking about NASA level quality and formal proofs and all that crap) - that can be useful in enforcing that software is designed & implemented to be robust, and relatively bug-free.

Also you are wrong that tests cannot guarantee anything. When a human guarantees something to another human it is assumed to not be some kind of absolute statement. This *is* the common use (legal and general) of the term. Because otherwise you need some kind of perfect god like being which can evaluate products/services.

What are you disagreeing with?

That is such a meaningless statement. Thats like saying programming is the process of introducing bugs in the codebase. Only after you write tests can you claim any such quality of code base. If quality does not come from testing then it does not exist other than in a programmers subjective opinions.

Although I'm not particularly a fan of Test Driven Development, you could have created some sort of 'debug flag disabled in release build' test the moment you decided to log passwords in clear text. You can even create a general rule like "Everytime you decided to weaken security for debugging purposes you should create a test that confirms this code will not be included in the release build". But yeah, without knowing much about their build process, its just pure speculation at this point and anyone can tell you how this problem can be avoided in hindsight.

But regarding tests, there are various useful tests that can test previously unknown program states. Especially stuff like fault injection testing is incredibly useful. In fact many security researchers find tons of tricky bugs using these techniques. for e.g. send randomized input strings to test for reliability of API interfaces which accept arbitrary strings, or you can use a test suite that 'randomly' makes the system go Out Of Memory to see how different services deal with it reliably, etc.

Well, believe it or not, there is actually a valid reason for the reboot. Any executable code running in memory is typically not patched by most operating systems. They will update the file stored in the filesystem but not the executable code already loaded in memory. For e.g. Shared libraries loaded in memory with ASLR and other OS protections will be untouched. (And no, KSplice is not even remotely relevant here). This means that you are at a risk of running a vulnerable piece of code. Real bad news if you're a server process that has to handle a ton of potentially unsafe external data.

Even otherwise, I wish MS would create some general infrastructure that software developers could plug into to update their software. They already have an OS component that is capable of dependency checks and other stuff, but they only use it for their OS updates and service packs. It will be used by small dev shops that will find it easy to let someone else manage updates, but a lot of big companies would not use it. So many of them use their shitty updaters to show advertisements for new products and as a way to bundle some toolbar or other unwanted crap. Oh .. and thats not even taking into account the shit tray apps and other BS they install during the first install. Sigh.. the windows world is a mess, its too late to fix it now IMO.

dammit ! my firstname@yahoo account which I created in 1996 just became un-cool :P

Well, that pretty much failed. Most PC games target Windows XP. Sure you can find a handful that use the newer DX features and wont work on XP, but AFAICT they are not statistically relevant.

Yes and no. I do not think anyone will doubt that Apple has been ahead in the material sciences part of the design phase. Manufacturing the iDevices they way they do is definitely not easy - sure *now* it may be trivial for others to make something similar (material compound wise) but when Apple first started manufacturing the iPhones/iPods/Macbooks.. it was not easy . I'm not even claiming that everything they did was 100% created by Apple. Often times they buy other companies and gain manufacturing expertise.

Sure if you go by electronics components, they get them from other suppliers and everybody has access to those. That is not anything special.