Poxy old computers (was RE: [extropy-chat] SPACE: Spirit Problems)

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Harvey Newstrom <mail at HarveyNewstrom.com> wrote:
> Adrian Tymes asks,
> > Who's going to QA the beast?  Who's going to
> certify
> > its utility for certain services it's sold to
> perform?
> 
> Putting on cape...  Ta da!  It's
> Security-Auditor-Man!
> 
> There are security methodologies for developing
> secure and safe code.  There
> are design review procedures.  There are development
> procedures.  There are
> beta-testing procedures.  Most of today's code is
> buggy because people are
> too busy/lazy/cheap to spend the time/effort/money
> to make stuff work.

Oh, most certainly, for code that humans write.  I was
talking about code that writes itself.  Any procedures
you put into the auto-developer, can in theory be
overwritten, no?  And there ain't necessarily any
human-readable design documentation.

Now, granted, you can have an auto-QA module that
takes the same constraints the auto-developer was
given and tries to break the code, except the auto-QA
module doesn't get to overwrite itself - including the
"nevers" such as strcpy instead of strncpy (or, at
least, strcpy into a buffer that could be smaller than
necessary).