> The implications are > that Microsoft hires people who are not "very sharp". I tend to doubt this.
If you'll allow me to pass on something I was told by an MS employee (my business partner's father, as it happens) -- the bulk of MS's hirings fall into two categories. Some are the experienced people MS buy when they see a product they like (such as the bloke who told me this), but a lot are fresh-from-college graduates. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but the vast majority of new graduates have little to no experience of writing software for the real world. It's those coders, I suspect, that don't see the importance of checking for buffer overruns etc. until it's too late; they might be very capable programmers and designers but simply inexperienced. Whether this will change appreciably is open to debate; certainly some of my lecturers have pointed out security considerations in code, but mainly as an aside (and usually accompanied by a snide reference to Microsoft's products). There certainly hasn't been any serious consideration of security issues; there is an optional unit in the third year on such things but historically few students have taken it. And again, from personal experience I know a lot of my colleagues on the course don't think much about code design and security until it's too late to easily implement it properly. On the other hand, open source isn't better in this respect by virtue of being open source; there's more code review than in traditional closed-source environments, but maybe a more important consideration would be that a lot of open source programmers are working voluntarily for little reward and so might be expected to take more pride in what could be called a hobby. *shrug* Regards, Ben A L Jemmett. (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/) To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
