Entries with tag "microsoft"

You may or may not have heard about the WMF vulnerability that was discovered a few days ago in Windows. Odds are, you haven't. The media isn't really talking about it yet, which is unfortunate, because this is a pretty big one. All versions of Windows are affected, there are already dozens of different exploits in the wild, and Microsoft has not released a patch, nor is it likely they will for another week or more. I hate posting something here that feels a lot like those 'virus warning' forwards you hate getting from your more wide-eyed friends, but this is important and nobody seems to have heard about it. There's a FAQ available here.

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Today I discovered the slides for an interesting talk given back in 1997 by Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) titled "The Next Fifty Years of Software". He makes some intriguing assertions, such as "Nathan's First Law of Software:" Software is a gas, that expands to fill its container. This in turn drives hardware development, and is what makes Moore's Law possible.

The part I really liked, though, was where he starts talking about the storage requirements of the human genome, etc. For example, the stuff that makes you genetically unique fits on a 3.5" floppy disk.

From there he proceeds to discuss the "ultimate computer," the human brain. He brings up something I've pondered as well: once computers reach a complexity comparable to the human brain, will it even be possible to program them directly as we do modern computers? Or will we have to devote time to teaching them, like we do with people? As he says, human takes 20 years to boot up.