Win11 explorer bug?

Dec 09, 2024 Last reply: 1 year ago 46 Replies

There are hundreds of years experience building large physical objects and customers can more or less understand engineering diagrams and now virtual 3D renderings of their new building made possible by software.

It didn't stop someone during build phase connecting a high pressure steam pipe to a stairway handrail on one plant that I know of. Big engineering diagrams can also be confusing when loads of similar diameter pipes (and non-pipes) go through a partition.

Software is still in the medieval cathedral building era but without the make walls thicker just in case strategy. It is still a good heuristic that if it is still standing after 5 years then it was a good 'un.

Ely cathedral on the fens and the crooked spire at Chesterfield are examples that didn't quite fall down but don't quite look as designed.

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It is better if they don't compile at all until they are nearly correct. The more faults that are found at compile time the better. Static code analysis has done a lot to improve software quality in the past decade.

The big problem is that software developers get lumped with last minute changes caused by salesmen promising new features to customers and to hide hardware defects that electronics engineers left in and need to be remediated in software because manufacturing has already started.

Mission creep (or starting out with nothing even resembling a coherent self consistent requirements specification) is a big factor in large scale software failures. We are stuck with the suits saying ship it and be damned we can always update the software later with something that actually works. Hardware tends to be immutable even when there is a significant fault present software is expected to kludge around it.

Unfortunately most projects at universities are sufficiently small that anyone who is even reasonably good at programming can hack a solution out of the solid more quickly and without using the processes needed for large scale software development.

That is the problem. Anything under about 3 man months you can get away with murder (and that means most university teaching projects). Things start to get a bit sticky when you are talking 3 man years and above.

If you so despise software why are you using Spice and why are you not still cutting up bits of red and blue sticky tape? Software mostly works and you have to learn to live with its quirks or write your own.

What fraction of airplanes or bridges or buildings collapse? Estimate that in PPMs.

I often ask programmers how long some chunk of code will take to execute, or how often I can run some ISR. Not as a trick interview question, but because it matters to a product design. They usually don't know and typically guess runtimes at least 10x slower that a reasonable estimate. I buy them an oscilloscope and make them measure it.

Using an oscilloscope actually radically improves their code.

What's interesting is that FPGA code is usually much more reliable, bug-free, compared to procedural code.

I think that's because logic design is centered on state machines, and procedutal programmers usually don't know what a state machine is. Software bugs or often the equivalent of logic races or metastability.

They are all large organizations rather than a single location with a single firewall.

Large organisations don't have a single individual doing firewall configuration and security for the entire organisation.

The ones who have breaches more likely have managers who don't want anything touched if it's working.

So the individual who suggests that changes should be made to restrict database connections to nothing other than known IP addresses or networks, rather than having them open to the entire world, is likely to be ignored. This is, of course, just one of the myriad reasons why breaches occur.

And what fraction of nontrivial programs are bug-free? Also in PPMs.

You must have worked for may different large organizations to know how they all do things.

Did you miss the part where I said I have automated tools (python scripts) to deal with log files?

I maintain a blacklist of 200,000 IPv4 addresses and networks in otherwise friendly countries. Doing that manually would be ridiculous.

Spending less time on cybersecurity will mean lower knowledge and increased risk of compromise.

And it's fun to see where the brute force and other attacks come from.

Knock sequences aren't very useful outbound. The last phishing site I visited (out of curiosity) didn't require one.

Same here. So I must be too.

Huh? Phishing sites run web servers. No-one said that such servers make outbound connections.

I don't use knocking because it's inconvenient and it's debatable whether or not it's any better than a firewall which drops everything which isn't from specific IP addresses or networks. Whether knocking or IP filtering is used in front of a server, the server should still reject anything which doesn't have valid login credentials.

But I don't wish to waste time debating it any further.

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