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Bill Gates: Windows Patched Faster than Linux
petard writes "In a very interesting interview published by the Register, Bill Gates made several interesting claims about Longhorn. Many of them have been extensively covered recently, including plans to force users to patch automatically. Surprisingly, everyone seems to have overlooked his statement that Microsoft fixes bugs faster than Linux developers do. 'We've gone from little over 40 hours on average to 24 hours. With Linux, that would be a couple of weeks on average.' Either he's lying or woefully misinformed; their recent performance seems to be more on the order of 3+ months, or over 2000 hours."
Maybe they meant they make bugs faster?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The real question is which OS needs to be patched faster.
Bill Gates is a very intelligent man... who is currently acting like a very intelligent trained monkey, spouting defensive FUD. But that's nothing new.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS does make pages in under 24 hours. But I bet the process looks like this.
- Microsoft notified about a problem.
- Notification email sits in Exchange server for a week due to problems with a corrupted mailbox.
- Flunky reads email, decides it would never happen in real life, demotes to low priority.
- MS Updates their problem tracking database. Issue is lost in the db move.
- Another flunky goes through and re-adds all the issues from emails.
- Smarter employee upgrades importance, flags it as 'do now!'
- Issue languishes for another few weeks.
- Vulnerability 'approved for fix!'
- Programmers fix it in under 24 hours.
- Patch enters testing queue.
- Patch is tested in an inadequate number of systems that all include only MS software an no 'unusual' configurations like, say, not using IE as default browser.
- Patch is sent to deployment team.
- Wait another week.
- Deployment team packages fix, places it on wu.ms.c.
- Fix breaks on many systems, system admins tear out hair, MS pats themselves on backs for their fine bug fixing system.
Myrddin.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Didn't you know that Bill Gates' watch runs Windows CE and it crashed some months ago do to an exploit in RPC in the second hand. Now it just goes really slow. What is a month to you or me is 2 hours to him. He now talks that slowly as well.
...his personal desktop. "It's good to be da king!" (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
reminds me of the Iraqi "Information" Minister.
"What Americans? There are no American troops on Iraqi soil"
Also good to note that Linux patches have been kicking more ass than Windows EVER will, from back in the day with the port 139 "bug" (Linux patch was out within hours, Windows, took ALOT longer for obvious reasons) to any in the unforeseen future.
Hell...I think Ol' Gatesy is mistaken; bugs that are intentionally placed in software in order to patch and call it an upgrade, well....they don't count.
I mean, MSBlast patched my box in no time...
how long until
It's quite obvious that he's talking about the rate at which they are finding vulnerabilities, not the rate at which they are fixing vulnerabilities.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
"The reality is that no one can produce, however we have tried, a perfectly bugless software."
:(
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#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello World!"
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damn. you're right.
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Gates also doesn't seem to have a lot of faith in 64 bit technologies in the consumer space. "64 bit is coming to desktops, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology. Right now, it is costly."
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This coming from the same person who said 640kb is more then enough for anyone?
and this one
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Gates is optimistic about meeting the challenge of the new security threats, he told reporters. "We have to. We invented personal computing. It is the best tool of empowerment there has ever been. If there is anything that clouds that picture, we need to fix it."
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I thought apple invented personal computing?
Brielle
- Linux community touted it as proof patches were fast, because it was into the source tree in 90 minutes
- It took one month before KDE released a new binary compiled with the patch
- It took an additional month before Redhat incorporated this into a patch for their Linux distribution.
The Linux community claimed 90 minutes, when it was really two months.
Or overnight for those of us using Gentoo.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France