Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code 234
shreshtha contributes this snippet from MIT's Technology Review: "Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes." Interestingly, this software doesn't need access to the source code of the target program.
I sure wouldn't (Score:5, Funny)
run this software before running ClearView on it first. Imagine what this could do if it had a bug in its code!
This really deserves (Score:5, Funny)
...an immortal, invulnerable program... (Score:5, Funny)
Has anyone cracked "Hello World" yet?
Re:It's interesting, but software should "expire". (Score:4, Funny)
This doesn't support innovation and improvement, and that's the cornerstone of technology improvement.
Please allow myself to introduce... myself.
If humans did the same..! (Score:5, Funny)
The very first time ClearView encounters an exploit it closes the program and begins analyzing the binary, searching for a patch that could have stopped the error.
Think of how much bullshit would go out of business if people were to do the same thing (i.e. sit down and think it over) when presented with some unusual idea.
Re:...an immortal, invulnerable program... (Score:3, Funny)
It's not immortal. You want:
while 1:
print "Hello World"
Re:I sure wouldn't (Score:3, Funny)
Error - Stack recursion. Head asploding!
Re:clearview (Score:5, Funny)
So run two.
Re:Microsoft will never buy it (Score:1, Funny)
So Microsoft won't be using it then ...
More like...
(user to IT): When I left last night, I had Word open in Windows on this PC... when I came back this morning, the document open in GVim in Linux!
Re:...an immortal, invulnerable program... (Score:3, Funny)
These two posts contain the most robust code I've seen all day. But still,
"A computer's attention span is no longer than it's power cord."
Re:...an immortal, invulnerable program... (Score:2, Funny)
import fusiononachip
reference: http://xkcd.com/353/ [xkcd.com]
Re:MS will probably kill it (Score:5, Funny)
Is this some sort of "out-stereotype the operating system" competition? If so, here is my entry:
If the tool from TFA existed already, Mac users wouldn't notice it until Steve Jobs named it the iPatcher and made some cutesy advertisements with Justin Long wearing an eye patch. At that point they'd proclaim it made their systems invulnerable to bugs in a far superior way than Windows and Linux.
Re:How about (Score:4, Funny)
Bruce Schneier is the general solution.
Re:One might have the question... (Score:1, Funny)