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Microsoft: Patches, Patches Everywhere!

Posted by timothy on from the and-not-a-patch-they-think dept.

Ridgelift writes "Even though Microsoft's recently announce they would not be issuing any new patches for the month of December, the boys at Redmond were scrambling today to figure out why some systems are being patched. The reason? They haven't got a clue."

4 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. What's the big deal? by TwistedSquare · · Score: 5, Insightful
    On Wednesday morning, Microsoft discovered that a glitch in the patching process resulted in a November fix not being applied to some Windows XP computers. The same patch was sent out again via the Windows update service on Tuesday night.

    The patch was due out in November, but it got missed so they re-issued. It's sort of going against what they said but it's understandable and I doubt it will make the world stop spinning. Why is this front page slashdot? If it had been any other company than Microsoft it never would have been news.

  2. SUS at least makes this easy. by Coaster-Sj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ever since we started using Software Update Services this has been cake.
    All the clients just pull the windows critical updates that we approve from OUR servers.
    I feel sorry for anyone who is trying to run around and do them by hand.

    --
    "Average intelligence is pretty damn stupid"
  3. Microsoft did the right thing by spitzak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I understand this right, there was a bug. Maybe this bug was introduced by the previous patch, or maybe the previous patch did not work as expected, or whatever, but no matter what the reason, there was a bug, they could fix it, and they sent out a patch. That is the correct behavior.

    They were probably being pretty stupid to say "no new patches". Due to Murphy's law, that guarantees that a problem will come up within days. Probably if they said "we are going to issue more patches than ever" then suddenly all their programmers would start have trouble finding bugs or figuring out how to fix them...

    Anyway we can laugh at marketing for the "no new patches" but technically they did the right thing.

  4. Re:This is Newsworthy? by placeclicker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Windowsupdate is the offical service to update Windows.

    All versions of windows use this service.

    If Windowsupdate sends out a bogus patch, millions of machines install the patch.

    See where this is going? WindowsUpdate could easily be utalized to infect millions of machines with a virus. It could also bug out and send a patch that breaks millions of machines.

    This service should *NOT* be sending out mysterious patches that no one knew anything about.

    --

    Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of /.