In formal, established companies this does exist: it's called "decision support analysis (or researcher)." Whether a particular staff person is steeped in academic research, which they should, and whether a particular staff person provides actionable insight and intelligence that big companies often lack is another matter. The problem is discoverability of results (because there is a vast universe of unstructured data and research out there) and applying it to specific needs: academic journal search (LexisNexis) and regular search engines combined with talented staff might work.
Sounds like there's a startup or two in decision support anyhow.
For embedded/industrial applications the future is in domain-specific operating systems that are JEOS by virtue of not compling unneeded syscalls. OSes like Linux have way too many ABIs and internal machinery that just aren't necessary for headless systems and merely opens a huge attack surface by default... Even with make menuconfig stripped .config, there's still a ton of extra bells and whistles.
In a positive direction, it would be nice to be able to be able to strip out more functionality and still produce a functional kernel. Unfortunately, I don't think this is scalable with autotools or any configuration management setups without having more #ifdefs than code. Haskell could be a good candidate for such a kernel framework, but I'm sure there are other functional and imperative languages that have better complex configuration mgmt support with formal verification.
Recently I've been thinking we need a "Device Driver Linux" distribution which can sit off to the side in systems like this or Xen, and just provide access to devices through careful external channels (although there's things like NFS you might want to use...).
The attack surface will still be huge, but perhaps by such hiding you can make it too hard for an attacker to actually get to it.
Does "ultimatum" and "raft of complicated last-minute changes" not raise anyone else's tinfoil paranoia alarms?
Those commits should get significant scrutiny, because it sounds like US/CA govt were given an indirect opportunity to push whatever changes it wanted AND rushed code isn't necessarily the best either.
I read that part as the approval process required X changes that the OpenSSL team had to implement themselves. I don't believe the approving party was asking the OpenSSL team to commit code they were supplying.
- Deploying a financial app through 4 bastion hosts by keeping Russian doll ssh tunnels up (clients outsource IT bouncing across the world to get to the right boxes)
- porting a 8 MLoC fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to windows
- generating PowerShell on Linux to be run on a windows box by reverse engineering the MS Api.
- silencing dialog boxes by DLLs which patch and proxy system DLLs
- making Java JRE run from a CD-ROM with the right JNI dll/so and a custom installer I wrote, before the advent of installanywhere (talking Java 1.1 days)
>- generating PowerShell on Linux to be run on a windows box by reverse engineering the MS Api.
Sorry but my god, WHY? was it morbid curiosity, because I can see why you would like to do it then or do you actually prefer the power shell syntax? (sorry if this comes off as biased, and it may very well be but I haven't actually heard of many people that can stand powershell)
I'm definitely a *nix guy (run Linux and OS X, only, for the last 5 years or so) nowadays, but I've had to use PowerShell to do some admin stuff at work... and it's not that bad. Sure beats the crap out of Batch files anyway, though it's IMO not as good at gluing disperate processes together as Sh is. That however seemed more like a function of Windows' apps themselves more than PowerShell, though.
> better than bash in terms of functionality and elegance.
How so? I haven't used it much, but I've not noticed any elegance to it? is it like lisp and if I use it for a while it will hit me what the power of it is?
Much of the functionality stems from being able to use .NET objects in the scripts, and that the result of commands are objects rather than text. For example you can pass the output of ls to a foreach loop that outputs either the absolute or relative path of each file, or various other file properties like size or modification date.
You do have to be careful in some cases because UNIX style syntax is supported but the result may be different because of the underlying implementation. Like if you output text to a file using redirection, by default the output is UTF-16. It can make you crazy if you're not aware of things like that.
They're not, never will be. Especially if there were a concerted effort to put together a GNU/Linux like open source hardware stack to get rid of the fear, uncertainty and doubt of what's inside commercial processors and chipsets. Also there needs to be more decapping of commercial chips to see what's actually in them.
