Survival Time for Unpatched Systems Cut by Half

[Brian Kelsay]

Uncle Jim wrote:

> 
> If you think this makes sense then you should worry because your government pretty much
> agrees with you.  I don't know about a government grant but software developed under a
> government contract is generally available to the people that paid for it.  The contractor
> that developed it is only responsible for getting the software to the government.  It is
> the government that will give it to you.  They don't look at it as open source but rather
> more like public record.  It's there if you know how and where to look.  Years ago I saw
> catalogs of government software they were making available to business.
> 
> The government has also worried about re-inventing the wheel.  They have tried to reuse
> software.  The first thing they noticed was that they had projects in C, FORTRAN, COBOL,
> an assortment of assembly languages, and probably some ALGOL and PL/1.  They decided that
> the first step to reusable software was to have a common language so they invented Ada.
> It did what they wanted but it didn't seem to catch on.
> 
> And the software that might pose a national security risk?  Well, ... it just doesn't exist.

It would be nice if they could standardize on maybe 2 databases.  One 
large scale, DB2 or Oracle, and one small scale, MySQL or Postresql. 
They have at least 10 I can think of and many are now unsupported or the 
client has not been upgraded in years.  They tried to have us package up 
a client and design tools that were meant for Windows 3.1 and maybe 95. 
16-bit all the way.  Need to think about migrating before the product 
disappears from the market.

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Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.