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."

Comments

Bah! The suits at Microsoft are running scared

[Trolling4Dollars]

Why do you think they are giving Linux so much attention these days? I think this means we are now in between the "They laughed at us" and "They tried to fight us" part.

And if we follow Mahatma Gandhi's approach, the best approach is to keep doing what we do while letting MS bash away. Eventually it will become quite evident as to which side is interested in doing good for their fellow man.

Re:Someone RAM Bill

[protohiro1]

I did some research because I am a geek. The earliest post on usnet is from 1992 and it is someones sig. The closest real, attributed reference that might be the origination of this I could find is this:

It's certainly enough memory. The Mac started out with 64K, which is one sixteenth of what the Lisa started out with. Because the Mac's bit map is smaller than the Lisa's, we thought we could do something with that amount of memory. But we were pushing for 128K all the way, and about a year ago we switched to 128K. We figured out how to squeeze the applications down to that size.

When you're writing applications that are going to be simple to use, it's important to have some boundaries that prevent you from throwing in an unlimited number of features; the memory size provides that limit. Certainly what we've got in terms of Multichart, Multifile, Multiplan, and Microsoft BASIC on the Mac are as rich as on any other machine we've seen. I think the people at Apple would openly admit that Plan, File, and Chart are more powerful than their equivalents on the Lisa, and yet they run on an eighth as much memory.

When you do get more memory, you'll be able to have multiple applications active or have more data space available. It's partly those boundaries that have forced us to find more clever ways to do things and stay within the memory size. It's caused us to be more innovative than we would have been if we'd had a megabyte.

-- Bill Gates, interviewed by David Bunnell in Macworld, volume 1, issue 1, 1984, pages 44-45.

Re:Forced patches?

[mikeswi]

Many of them(solutions) have been extensively covered recently, including plans to force users to patch automatically.

Yea, I don't forsee any potential problems with that plan.

I think the original post is misleading. Gates didn't say anything about forcing updates. He said that by default they would be installed automatically. There was no mention of forcing that.

From the article:

Microsoft is also going to make sure that people install firewalls and updates by default. "None of the security problems recently affected people who had their software up to date," Gates said. "But we made it too complex for most people. Critical security patches should be applied with the speed of the internet."

From now on, Microsoft will install these patches automatically. And it will bring the size of the patches down to satisfactory portions. "We used to send megabytes of software to fix a 20 byte file," Gates said.

That's fine by me. Make it the default but leave a way to turn it off for those who wish to. Microsoft has a habit of puting out buggy patches that create worse problems than whatever they are fixing.

I wouldn't even mind if they made the off switch hard to find. If someone can't figure out on your own how to turn the thing off, most likely they are exactly the type that needs it turned on.

Re:YA *I* think he's referring to...

[Mattcelt]

My thoughts exactly. The fact is, MS usually waits until it is ready to release a patch before it announces the vulnerability, and whines loudly when someone decides to notify the user community before the hotfix is available.

The problem is, the bug may be discovered independently by some knowledgable crackers and taken advantage of for months while stolid MS works at its own pace to 'fix' the problem. (Which, incidentally, often a) doesn't fix the whole problem, or b) introduces other problems.)

Worse yet, when the user community doesn't have knowledge of a problem and a cracker does, the user, who may have been able to obviate the problem through another means (blocking RPC at the firewall, or whatever), is now left defenseless until MS gets around to telling them about the problem.

So if MS can keep everybody's mouth shut about the problem until it's ready to release the patch, of course they're going to have an incredible record for getting patches out quickly.

Re:he's probably not lying...

[sheldon]

"And most likely, it's being mis-measured by someone."

It's certainly being mismeasured by the Linux community. While I haven't done a thorough study, I make note of a Konqueror patch that came out last year.

- 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 issue also impacted IE, and it took Microsoft two weeks to release a binary patch on Windows Update.

The Linux community claimed 90 minutes, when it was really two months.

Microsoft counted it accurately as two weeks.

Just reporting good news to yourself doesn't make you better.