Dutch Transport Card Broken

[Dave Korn]

On 30 January 2008 17:03, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> My main point here was, in fact, quite related to yours, and one that
> we make over and over again -- innovation in such systems for its own
> sake is also not economically efficient or engineering smart. 

  Hear hear!  This maxim should be burned into the frontal lobes of every
single member of Microsoft's engineering (and marketing) teams with a red-hot
poker[*].

[  Over-engineered solutions to non-problems and gratuitous marketing-driven
featuritis have been the root cause of almost every windows security disaster
ever - e.g., email featuring 'rich content' such as scripts; web browsers that
download and locally run active-x from random websites; lots of vulnerable RPC
services installed and enabled by default on home user PCs; ... etc etc.;
certainly they have far outnumbered the occasional flaws in core kernel
services.  But - economics again!, and a tip'o the hat to Schneier and his
externalities argument - as long as the extra sales go to Microsoft's coffers,
and the extra costs are all imposed on their victims^Wusers, there's no
incentive for them to do otherwise.  Hence my suggestion that they need a
red-hot one (incentive, that is).  ]

    cheers,
      DaveK

[*] - or red-hot Gutmann soundwave ....
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....

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