SD Times: Editorials & Opinions

Editorials and Opinions
Letters to the Editor:

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

If I were an entry level programmer, after reading the article “C# and VB.NET: What’s the Difference?” [Nov. 15, page 34], I am afraid that I could not make a clearly defined decision about choosing between VB.NET and C# as a primary programming language to concentrate upon. The dilemma continues until you become familiar with both languages.

David Alexander

FEATURES VS. SECURITY

In “The Lessons of Software Monoculture” [Nov. 1, page 28], Jeff Duntemann argues that software monoculture itself is the source of the bad things that happen to it. This, in my opinion, is not the root cause. The root cause is that Microsoft wants to make a whole lot of features available, and does so without thinking about the security implications.

For example, in a Web page context there are still advantages to executing code on the local computer instead of on a remote server machine. The simplest case is “animated gifs”—instead of refreshing the image from the server every one-tenth of a second, you have the local browser update the image.

When Sun encountered this problem, it specified that Java would run in a “sandbox” and would not have access to the full host system. When Microsoft encountered this problem, it invented ActiveX, and this allows almost unlimited access to the whole system.

For a long time, Microsoft has been trying to make things easy for their desktop users. That means that instead of configuring things closed (if you want to allow others to access your hard drive, you have to enable this here), they tend to configure things open (if you don’t want others to access your drive, just click here). This is changing: Indeed, this sharing of disk space is no longer turned on by default. But because they don’t want to break too many things at once, they have to keep some of those “insecure settings.”

Roger Wolff

Jeff Duntemann’s “By Invitation” omitted an important factor: Bugs in open-source software are, in general, discovered faster and fixed faster than in closed-source software. For example, you mentioned the bug in FireFox, but you neglected to mention that the problem was fixed, and a patch was available for download on the same day the problem was discovered. Microsoft takes a bit longer.

Bill Pringle

CORRECTIONS

The current version of Mac OS X is 10.3; the next version will be 10.4. The version numbers were incorrectly identified in a story in the Nov. 15 issue.

In a Nov. 15 story on the merger of Actional Corp. and Westbridge Technology Inc., the name of Actional’s former president and CEO, Frank Bergandi, was misspelled.

CLARIFICATION

In a Nov. 15 story on Progress Software Corp.’s Stylus Studio 6, it was reported to SD Times that the Saxon 8 XSLT processor included with the new tool was the only one to support XSLT 2.0 stacks. Altova Inc. claims its XMLSpy product also offers that capability.