Soaring malware levels hint at criminal activity

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Managing change

"Ancient Egypt was a barter economy, and the people who built
the pyramids were paid in food during their agricultural off-
season. The pyramids would be a reproach if built with slave
labor, or even volunteer labor without recompense."

Whilst it is popular for scholars to believe that the pyramids
where built using paid labour, it would be foolish to believe that
slave labour wasn't used in their construction. The ownership
and use of slaves was very common during that period.

Note that I wouldn't equate the ownership of slaves to
volunteers that work on a variety of IT and non-IT project. Whilst
they might not get a financial reward, they believe they get some
non-financial benefit.

"The people who first built major systems never thought they
would have to last 30 or 40 years; that's why they were
comfortable with a 2 digit date field. (Though it's one of the
great examples of foolish economy.)"

Two digit dates were a programming necessity brought about by
the exorbitant cost of storage, and difficult to change even into
the 90s because the testing and cost of changes to date
algorithms. It is still a topic of some discussion as to whether
the cost of the y2k conversion was less than the savings made
over the preceding 50 years of 2-digit date usage.

A similar "bomb" (and I'd guess with as little impact despite the
alarmists) exists with *nix time calculated from epoch in a fix
size value (often 32-bits).

"Good systems must be based on software that will continue
with backward compatibility for a very long time."

No, not when this compatibility has a critical security problem. It
simply can't be afforded.

IT is all about managing change, the change is constant and
rapid!

Posted by: Richard Flude   Posted on: 07/05/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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