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I'm the author of the original post. Sysadmins don't solve buffer overflows, that's a programmer's job. True, my rant could be takes as a "lazy sysadmin", but

by scumola 17y ago

I'm the author of the original post. Sysadmins don't solve buffer overflows, that's a programmer's job. True, my rant could be takes as a "lazy sysadmin", but I have a CS degree and have a programming background. Personally, I'd prefer to re-write this code myself in C than see this kind of hardware waste. That's not being lazy, it's being respectful of the power at my disposal. Use the machine's power on doing actual work, don't waste the machine's power on programmatic overhead that could be avoided by making a different choice.

vetinari 17y ago
Sorry, I was inprecise. Of course sysadmins do not solve buffer overflows, they solve what happens when someone exploits one. I understand what you are saying, you see that the flight to the moon was done by something equivalent to C64 and today we are allow wasting orders of magnitude more computing power. What I'm trying to tell you, look at the whole picture. There is a cost associated with writing and maintaing software. That hand optimized assembly application is going to be more expensive (and take longer to deliver) than the Java/c#/whatever equivalent. There is another cost associated with purchasing and operating hardware (that includes paying sysadmins, for example). The business has to consider what is more effective, and usually HL language/more HW is the more efficient solution. What, more efficient, you say? We were talking about wasting the computer power. Yes, more efficient overall. We have a method for measuring wasting resources - money. You are going either waste some money on hardware/electricity/floor space/sysadmins, or programmers/time to deliver/managing larger team/managing recruiting and retaining competent programmers. Not only is the former cheaper, it is also easier to quantify and manage. It is no wonder, that you do not see companies taking the later approach. At the end, what most people do not understand (not only technical people, but most people) is that successful enterprise is not a 100% efficient one. There is going to be waste, but it must be in the right spot. Actually, conceptually it is similar to profiling, you don't optimize spots that do not matter in the big picture. And computing power does not matter for most business, it is a cheap resource. People, on the other hand, is not.

by scumola 17y ago

vetinari 17y ago

Sorry, I was inprecise. Of course sysadmins do not solve buffer overflows, they solve what happens when someone exploits one. I understand what you are saying, you see that the flight to the moon was done by something equivalent to C64 and today we are allow wasting orders of magnitude more computing power. What I'm trying to tell you, look at the whole picture. There is a cost associated with writing and maintaing software. That hand optimized assembly application is going to be more expensive (and take longer to deliver) than the Java/c#/whatever equivalent. There is another cost associated with purchasing and operating hardware (that includes paying sysadmins, for example). The business has to consider what is more effective, and usually HL language/more HW is the more efficient solution. What, more efficient, you say? We were talking about wasting the computer power. Yes, more efficient overall. We have a method for measuring wasting resources - money. You are going either waste some money on hardware/electricity/floor space/sysadmins, or programmers/time to deliver/managing larger team/managing recruiting and retaining competent programmers. Not only is the former cheaper, it is also easier to quantify and manage. It is no wonder, that you do not see companies taking the later approach. At the end, what most people do not understand (not only technical people, but most people) is that successful enterprise is not a 100% efficient one. There is going to be waste, but it must be in the right spot. Actually, conceptually it is similar to profiling, you don't optimize spots that do not matter in the big picture. And computing power does not matter for most business, it is a cheap resource. People, on the other hand, is not.