8 ms·

thats a pretty good comment actually. there's quite a bit of similarity. we generally tend to jump into these as "omg awesome new tech" with a very narrow view

by zobzu 11y ago

thats a pretty good comment actually. there's quite a bit of similarity. we generally tend to jump into these as "omg awesome new tech" with a very narrow view. But it also helps boosting more though-out techs (even thus it feels less efficient to go through that route first, its perhaps the only route that works with human: try, fail, try again, etc.)

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Yeah we do. My only guess is it's two things: (a) our industry is horrendous at communicating previous generation's wisdom in a usable way; (b) a social phenomenon. Quick example of the first are industry pro's locking up their good advice in obscure, expensive books and cutting edge research silo'd into ACM, IEEE, etc. The other is a social thing that leads to the "network" effect. People flock to something for whatever reason. This builds a community (or network) that entices others to join. That also tend to forget about other things and reinvent the wheel. Example: much of current work in Web applications aims to solve problems already solved in client-server apps with better efficiency, security, reliability, and portability. Even Facebook went back to that model for mobile IIRC. Good luck convincing most Web technologists to switch to client-server, though. Whoever solves both these problems will create ripple effects that grow innovation at a heightened, maybe exponentially better, pace. The reason will be a combination of avoiding wasted effort plus visibility into best efforts. I got ideas on Problem 1 but the best minds need to get on Problem 2: it's a gold mine if it's solved.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  The "whatever reason" tends to be one's resume. Some people think (and I'm not necessarily disagreeing here) the only way to stay employable is to have the absolute "blogging"edge tech on your resume.
- andyidsinga 11y ago
  re (a) : is not just a communication problem. a lot of solutions from previous generation are dramatically less easy than newer offerings. IMHO nosql and cloud compute offerings we're like this. the problem with folks hating on new technology "x" is often failing to see that the new thing might only offer one significant advantage over the prior tech, or they see it, but discount it too heavily to be motivated to try it.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    For (a), it's hard to say where the problem is: is it developers of new solutions who threw the baby out with the bathwater instead of fixing problems of proven methods? Or is it with demand side that's quick to jump on those new thing? Or is it demand side in the sense that they rarely fund solutions to problems with their almost-good-enough software? Hard for me to say.
    - andyidsinga 11y ago
      ha! probably all of the above :)
- marktangotango 11y ago
  I pimp this quote from Alan Kay regularly: "Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture." [1] [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Thanks for that awesome article! Interestingly, he used the same example I've been using in INFOSEC discussions online: Burroughs B5000. It was simply brilliant and still better at the core than anything I use today. Let me explain. There have been countless reliability and security problems that occur due to buffer, pointer, data becomes code, and interface errors. These are about 99% of worst problems. They happen because underlying Intel/IBM/RISC architecture treats all data the same... mostly. Plus, the systems languages (C/C++) are fundamentally broken far as preventing errors. The Burroughs team saw this [in 1961] and solved the problems at their source: CPU protection of pointers; CPU could tell code & data apart for security purposes; hardware-managed stack; CPU bounds-checked arrays; high-level language (Algol) for system code; interface types checked at compile & function-call time; hardware & software isolation of apps from OS. Good luck crashing or hacking that! So, I've read thousands of hardware, firmware, and software solutions to these problems. Yet, very few will straight up fix the problem at its source. That's despite the existence of a proven solution since 1961 that costs a mere two bits of tagging. I'll give up a single-digit percentage of memory with single-digit performance hit to stop 99% of attacks. I'll do it today. Yet, industry's latest solutions are detecting this little tactic, hardware extensions for that, and no solution to the actual problem. The failure of modern industry to do what Burrough's did, fix the underlying problem, is the source of most of our IT headaches. Aside from social reasons, backward compatibility with legacy is a big contributor. It's why heuristic-driven, software transformation systems such as Semantic Design's toolkit or Racket need a huge boost in R&D. Such tech is seeming like our only hope to getting legacy software onto better underlying platforms as nobody will pay for a human to understand and rewrite each codebase line for line, bug for bug.

by zobzu 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Yeah we do. My only guess is it's two things: (a) our industry is horrendous at communicating previous generation's wisdom in a usable way; (b) a social phenomenon. Quick example of the first are industry pro's locking up their good advice in obscure, expensive books and cutting edge research silo'd into ACM, IEEE, etc. The other is a social thing that leads to the "network" effect. People flock to something for whatever reason. This builds a community (or network) that entices others to join. That also tend to forget about other things and reinvent the wheel. Example: much of current work in Web applications aims to solve problems already solved in client-server apps with better efficiency, security, reliability, and portability. Even Facebook went back to that model for mobile IIRC. Good luck convincing most Web technologists to switch to client-server, though. Whoever solves both these problems will create ripple effects that grow innovation at a heightened, maybe exponentially better, pace. The reason will be a combination of avoiding wasted effort plus visibility into best efforts. I got ideas on Problem 1 but the best minds need to get on Problem 2: it's a gold mine if it's solved.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
The "whatever reason" tends to be one's resume. Some people think (and I'm not necessarily disagreeing here) the only way to stay employable is to have the absolute "blogging"edge tech on your resume.
andyidsinga 11y ago
re (a) : is not just a communication problem. a lot of solutions from previous generation are dramatically less easy than newer offerings. IMHO nosql and cloud compute offerings we're like this. the problem with folks hating on new technology "x" is often failing to see that the new thing might only offer one significant advantage over the prior tech, or they see it, but discount it too heavily to be motivated to try it.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  For (a), it's hard to say where the problem is: is it developers of new solutions who threw the baby out with the bathwater instead of fixing problems of proven methods? Or is it with demand side that's quick to jump on those new thing? Or is it demand side in the sense that they rarely fund solutions to problems with their almost-good-enough software? Hard for me to say.
  - andyidsinga 11y ago
    ha! probably all of the above :)
marktangotango 11y ago
I pimp this quote from Alan Kay regularly: "Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture." [1] [1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Thanks for that awesome article! Interestingly, he used the same example I've been using in INFOSEC discussions online: Burroughs B5000. It was simply brilliant and still better at the core than anything I use today. Let me explain. There have been countless reliability and security problems that occur due to buffer, pointer, data becomes code, and interface errors. These are about 99% of worst problems. They happen because underlying Intel/IBM/RISC architecture treats all data the same... mostly. Plus, the systems languages (C/C++) are fundamentally broken far as preventing errors. The Burroughs team saw this [in 1961] and solved the problems at their source: CPU protection of pointers; CPU could tell code & data apart for security purposes; hardware-managed stack; CPU bounds-checked arrays; high-level language (Algol) for system code; interface types checked at compile & function-call time; hardware & software isolation of apps from OS. Good luck crashing or hacking that! So, I've read thousands of hardware, firmware, and software solutions to these problems. Yet, very few will straight up fix the problem at its source. That's despite the existence of a proven solution since 1961 that costs a mere two bits of tagging. I'll give up a single-digit percentage of memory with single-digit performance hit to stop 99% of attacks. I'll do it today. Yet, industry's latest solutions are detecting this little tactic, hardware extensions for that, and no solution to the actual problem. The failure of modern industry to do what Burrough's did, fix the underlying problem, is the source of most of our IT headaches. Aside from social reasons, backward compatibility with legacy is a big contributor. It's why heuristic-driven, software transformation systems such as Semantic Design's toolkit or Racket need a huge boost in R&D. Such tech is seeming like our only hope to getting legacy software onto better underlying platforms as nobody will pay for a human to understand and rewrite each codebase line for line, bug for bug.