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Interview of the Windows XP SP2 Dev Team
Masa writes "SuperSite for Windows has a nice interview called "Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story". The interview gives a good insight, what kind of a project the Service Pack 2 was, how it got started and how huge effort it actually was." The ITMJ Product Guide is part of OSTG, as is Slashdot.
Jesus Christ, hasn't the guy heard of Deedpoll!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
I followed the link, but it was only a story about the quest for the Holy Grail. Except the Holy Grail was a dixie cup, and the crusaders took twice as long to search for it, but still came up with nothing, except t-shirts with corporate logos.
The Custom Mary
Coincidentally, the fortune cookie at the bottom reads "There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes."
It's interesting to know that there was a fair amount of thought involved in enabling the firewall in SP2. Who would've thought that could break a system? Not that I use Windows much any more, but it's still a welcome enhancement.
"The reason we called it RC1 was that we wanted people to think that we were serious." I for one welcome our serious microsoft overlords... for a change.
The only thiung that really caught me was "lipstick on a chicken"... btw I am on holiday so anything too serious right now won't go in my mind anyway (too much alcohol)
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
So at Microsoft, either something works and isn't secure, or is secure and doesn't work.
I know, this isn't really news, but it's not every day you hear it from Microsoft.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
We knew we had a bigger problem than just enabling the firewall.
...can't wait to read it, actually. Right after I finish reading the Worldwide Service Agreement that came with my lawnmower.
"The SP2 product they shipped bore little resemblance to Microsoft's original plans for the release, but was instead a far more secure and stable product that, ultimately, made XP a better operating system." I knew it! Microsoft originally planned it to be unsecure and unstable!!!!! ~kalinga
"and a virtual team of Microsofties"
So is that like little fairies or something that write code while everyone is asleep?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Looking at the timeline, almost half of it was filled with 'fixing' Internet Explorer
Just drop IE and spend more time on the freaking OS.
Can't wait for "Installing Windows XP Service Pack 2: The Inside Story"
I mean they took too long to release a patchset that caused problems and look, 7 or so new bugs found in CORE components [prolly been there since win98 or earlier].
;-)
Maybe if they spent less time "re-inventing the wheel" er... "innovating" they would have more time to actually write what they NEED to write more securely.
There is no reason why commercial software would have buffer overflows [at all] and specially in something like LoadImage().
In FOSS at least you can blame lack of time, review, etc. But in commercial software you're paying for the eyes and the time.
Show me a story where they agree to hold back on re-packaging the latest video/sound codec as a Windows format [hint: wmv == mpeg4 == divx for all intents and purposes] and instead decide to fix a good 10k bugs or so.
Of course I'd settle with the non-integration of MS IE, explorer.exe and MSN and the addition of a POSIX.1 emulation layer [that comes bundled]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Time to stop giving these people a platform to perpetuate fraud and SPAM.
"Todd: The original idea was to make it sort of like IE Hard. The IE in Windows Server 2003 is really unusable for consumers. ...
I agree with that, as a Windows 2003 server consumer. Although the prevailing wisdom says that browser use from a server should be minimalist at best.
But we were thinking that drastic at first. I can tell you that during the [initial design] phase were definitely thinking as drastic as that."
And that is the problem. It is not so much that Internet Explorer is insecure. It can be made VERY secure. But then it is very difficult to use for Joe Average User. There are tradeoffs all over the world wide web. (example: I want to be able to view these nifty stock quotes, but then my browser is open to exploits). The standards are still evolving and programmers are still adjusting towards the safest yet most robust model for all.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Site gone after 31 posts. Must be some sort of record
"Yeah, we realized that our software was completely horrible. I mean, no one thought anything about networks or intarweb or users or software when this was designed. We feel however, that the more crap we kludge on top of the core kludge(kernel), the better it will be. So we decided to add some 10 year old technology to make things secure for our time"
Nice job, boys.
"An additional processor-based "no-execute" feature is expected to be offered in forthcoming Intel and AMD processors."
No Operation? (NOP, 0x90)
Well, SP2 may be a bust, but at least Microsoft has the art of the slick headshot down pat...
Are those project managers or aspiring actors? I can't tell which!
No the service pack is so you have to "upgrade" to windows XP in order to become secure. I find it unlikely that it's impossible to secure windows 2000 in such a way, but MS doesn't seem interested in that. Instead they want to push more people off of 2000 since there wasn't the landslide migration they expected. It's their OS so I guess they can do what they want with it. In the end if it helps secure clueless home users, it's better for everyone.
FWIW: Laurie Litwack is Canadian, Tokuro Yamashiro is of Asian heritage, and Jim Allchin is from another planet.
I've been reading The Old New Thing for a few months now. It's a blog written by a guy at Microsoft (I don't know what department), and among the things he writes about is why windows sometimes works in unexpected ways.
Yeah, Windows has lots of bugs. But some of those bugs can't be fixed, because certain major programs rely on those bugs . When you fix the bugs, you break the programs. Almost every bug fix windows gets these days is accompanied by a program breaking. MS has to try and decide whether enough users are affected by the bug to make the fix worthwhile.
MS has been pussyfooting it about breaking programs in the past, and I'm glad MS finally bit the bullet with SP2 and broke all those programs in the name of security. It was high time. Of course, it means I have to keep a second PC around for some older games, but hey, that's life.
The people at Microsoft know what is wrong with Windows. They have a variety of reasons for not fixing it. I can't say I agree with them completely but some of them make good "business" sense. It's too bad they care more about "business" than the quality of the product itself.
When Apple did MacOSX, they basically created a "WINE" for MacOS9. Not everything was/is perfect but a great many things continue to work without problems. They didn't sit back and say "oh... we have business reasons for not overhauling the whole OS and starting over from something more secure and stable from the start."
I have said it before and I say it again: Microsoft is perfectly capable of doing exactly what Apple did: Make a new OS and make a WINE to run the old stuff until people finally migrate over. I'm not a developer but there are plenty of examples out there to show it's not impossible. I know I can't be the only person who has ever thought of it and I wonder why they haven't done this at Microsoft already? Some people here have been kind enough to put forth some reasons why Microsoft hasn't just abandoned its current Win32 model -- essentially business reasons -- so can someone offer some likely reasons why Microsoft wouldn't build a new OS and then make a WINE for backward compatibility?
Those are pretty nice pictures for geeks. Almost *too* nice. Is this really a collection of programmers?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I know this isn't on topic, but after reading the article and seeing how difficult it was to get SP2 out the door, I wonder about their goals for Longhorn.
I keep reading how longhorn is going to have wonderful new features and things nobody knows they need. However, I think that most users just want the stuff in windows xp to work the way it should. Longhorn should be a hardened Windows XP SP2.
That might actually be the incentive for the companies that still run windows 2000 for stability to switch over. That is their market.
Consumers are going to get windows when they buy new computer. I don't care how many linspire running walmart PCs are sold, Dell and HP are selling them with windows.
Their competition is beating them on stability and ease of use, not cool groundbreaking new features. Most computer users just want the PC to be easier to use, not more complicated with new file systems and taskbars with more crap on them.
People are switching to firefox from IE mainly for the enhanced security and tabbed browsing. Okay, tabbed browsing shouldn't be too difficult to copy to IE, but security is the reason techies are putting that little fox icon on peoples' desktops.
I think they've done a good job with SP2, but I think that people just want the computer to work and are indifferent to the bells and whistles appearing in longhorn betas.
thought I saw an asian name in there as well as other names that could be ANY race.
Why even mention this?
Answer: Troll.
That's what a billion users spending $50+ billion a year on Microsoft software get for their money. They could have hired tens of thousands of programmers just to do line-by-line code audits without making a dent in their budget.
SP2 for almost every Microsoft product have been buggy and unstable.. Rule of thumb is that it always takes Microsoft 3 times to get it right.. Unstable: - NT4 SP2 - Win2k SP2 - XP SP2 Stable: - NT4 SP3 - Win2k SP3
Why I get 5 calls a night from one idiot or another who has enabled automatic update without knowing it, download SP2, and subsequently had their entire IP stack screwed. Is that a feature?
Microsoft's marketing team deserves a big fat Christmas, no holiday, bonus. What I'm most impressed with is how this string of security failures around retail versions of Windows (going back how many years) can be re-shaped as a team of scientis-like experts facing an impossible task and doing a great job. If this was any other field of business or eve pro sports, this many security breaches or failures in the core of the product line would have shaken things up for the better. Instead, the reaction is a clever marketing campaign to convince consumers the maker of the problematic and generally insecure product is a victim just like the consumer who is violated when all his or her credit card info or financial records are obtained with SpyWare. The lesson to be learned is that if you spend enough money on marketing, any perception can become a reality. www.softwareobjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
Todd: I'm talking Windows [Division] in general, or Microsoft in general. The Longhorn wave
As I had previously read this is not a joke, just look at this quote from a Microsoft worker: http://www.longhornblogs.com/robert/archive/2004/
Now, at the same time all this has been going on, there has been a lot of complaining about the constantly slipping Longhorn release date. I haven't weighed in on that too much yet, but I think it's time to break my silence. Microsoft shifted between 80-90% of the Windows Client Team off Longhorn development and onto Windows XP SP2.
Is not that the SP2 is a bad thing. Is a great improvement, but it took so many time, it was delayed so many times...that's all what Microsoft can do? I mean, they just put all they resources in the SP2 and it took them forever to release it.
Perhaps it's just me, but the open source world evolves much faster and has more resources than Microsoft. Every 6 months I see more evolution in the OSS field than what I saw in SP2 (and again, it's not that the SP2 was bad - it was great! But just look at fedora 3 with its SELinux integrationand all the rest. We're being faster than them IMHO, and how fast can you evolute is more important than "how good are you today"
Isn't that pretty much what the DOS shell is nowadays? Given that the current windows builds run on the NT kernel, DOS compatability (and a couple of friends of mine still use wordperfect for DOS ;) is provided via emulator.
:)
Now, should they make something which will emulate the entire NT/XP framework? Heh. Some of us call that "Macintosh"
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
That article offers an interesting insight into the Microsoft development process.
I know that even sizeable open-source projects can be ridden with political complications, but this article gave me a new sense of how people interact when working on big projects.
Todd Wanke seems like a good guy, but using the article as a vehicle for his sappy management practices wasn't very appealing.
Also not appealing is Jim Allchin's satanic gaze. Jesus.
Too much hype. Too much bullshit. Too many acronyms. I'm sticking to free software people.
- Microsoft's best are not able to turn off Media Player 8.
- Media Player 9 went thru a "security audit", so it must be better than 8, which has been tested by several hundred million people.
- Enabling a firewall breaks *everything*. Apparently they havent heard of a simple GUI with easily-understood checkboxes. (See IE options... for the classic counterexample).
- They somehow expect a semi self-anointed czar of security patches to gain everyone's support.
- Nowhere is it mentioned the (estimated) 45,000 uses of unsafe string functions in the source code.
Sigh^3?I just like the really nice taken professional photographs of the team. That plus the admission that if SP2 with all the security holes it's had, is still more secure than anything MS has shipped, but then again we have always known, that that a MS box is totally secure esp when, "not attached to any network and having no removable media."
http://www.hawknest.com/
Microsoft spent too much time trying to tie-up market-share, instead of architecting and designing their products to help clients.
By (inadvertently) harming their clients like that, they've built a monster, and now, short of scrapping most of their IE work, there is no way they will ever deliver anything robust and secure.
Of course, they WON'T go back and do it right, both because the corporate masters won't stand for it and the fact their development teams are committed to what they've done and their disgracious vision.
So it's game over for Microsoft, who couldn't deliver on what clients really needed.
In fact, they'll survive in computing the same way Mcdonalds survives in cuisine. Some would call that a success, but few would admit to eating there.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
"if we take out all of the failures, what's our success rate?" Now we know how microsoft decides when something is ready for release. When it has a 100% success rate.
See a nice explanation here, and see why it probably never gonna be done here (just check out some of the comments there... sad...)
oh well...
// "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips,
// their brains start working." -- Ford Prefect
Following the first link in the story leads you to this picture (eventually):a m_85.jpg
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/war_te
Isn't that a penguin?
Isn't that Tux?
What's he doing there?
Spying?
Or... noo. They hold him captive??!
a word only used in North America...
I'm so glad Slashdot devotes so many stories to Windows. I haven't used it in so long it nice to touch base now and then.
So what if Laurie Litwack is Canadian. They're still caucasians. It's not like she's Inuit.
You know, to be quite honest, I'm damned sick of this mindset that only a group of different races and genders is divrse. Five white men can be just as diverse as than a black, white, aisian, ect of varying genders. For the inevitable retarded people responses: I'm not saying that there should only be groups white people.
You got it! The only purpose of the SP2 'upgrade' to XP was to upgrade the DRM and harden the product against their own customers who would seek to remove the DRM that already comes with this excuse for an operating system. Read the 'End User Lic Agg' and you will see perfectly well.
Hey this is interesting..a group of project managers talking, and not even 1 developer. Well some would say if you have no abilities, one can always become a project manager, but that would be cynical wouldn't it? Would it also be if I state this interview is about as interesting as a after-the-game football interview, with the player's agents only? Yawn!
This is probably just another classic example of what was once a lean young tech company morphing evolving into a large ineffficient corporate conglomerate that does very few things really well. Just like a football team that won 3 super bowls ten years ago, companies can easily evolve into something totally different from what they once were. Probbaly most of the tech geniuses cashed hteir options in and founded competitor or niche market companies. In the meantime, the bureaucrates have probably taken over and do what they do best - hiring based from a limited pool based on the things they know - Ivy league degrees and all the other things that real tech people know are not associated with success in technology innovation. softwareobjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
Shareholders care only about stock price. Stock price is dependent upon profit and liability. Nowhere in there is there a calculation for "treating people well" to increase profits, because GAAP doesn't work that way. Check out any public company's 10Q - you'll see them crow about how many people they RIFfed this quarter.
This is why many companies hire legions of contractors because they can hide the payroll debit by moving it to "capital projects" buckets. On the balance sheet, they show that they 'reduced' their Liabilities ("Look, the '5250 - payroll' bucket is down by $14 million!") even though they actually spent more ("Oh, that bucket? The '5600 - capital projects' bucket is up to $80 million because we're developing more software!!").
Uh, right. Maybe you should put some shorts on, or something, if you wanna keep fighting evil today.Yeah, right.
If MS were serious about security and simply removed ActiveX from their browser and stopped supporting it
Then Windows Update wouldn't work.
Features-wise and security-wise, ActiveX in IE is no different from an XPI that installs a Netscape plug-in in Firefox. Or are you talking about a user-controlled ActiveX whitelist to match Firefox's XPI whitelist, defaulting to *.microsoft.com and nobody else?
I'd like to interview Linus about the next Kernel, but now I'm confused. Who should I interview? Linus, or the guy that tells him where to be at 9 o'clock, and what he should have finished by 5?
When Apple did MacOSX, they basically created a "WINE" for MacOS9.
Likewise when Microsoft made Windows NT. "Wowexec" is the process that performs ABI translation on 16-bit Windows 3.x applications. I've read that 64-bit Windows on AMD64 (and Intel's clone thereof) uses a similar process to run Win32 apps.
Stock price is dependent upon profit and liability. Nowhere in there is there a calculation for "treating people well" to increase profits, because GAAP doesn't work that way.
It will once the competition matures. Mistreated customers of Microsoft will seriously consider migrating to OpenOffice.org or even to GNU/Linux; it gets easier every quarter. As Microsoft loses customers, it loses its obscene economy of scale on Microsoft Office development, and it loses its PROFIT!
That way, users such as he with apps such as those could still get the OS patches and work on deploying the firewall by itself.It would depend upon the specifics of those "holes" and the apps that depend upon them.
There is nothing wrong with having an app listen on an open port. Web servers do it, email servers do it, FTP servers do it, etc.
Not having a firewall should not be considered "security risks in the operating system".
I know lots of people who have turned off the firewall in XP sp2 because it stopped apps from working (VPN in particular). That doesn't sound like much of a "fix" for the "holes" in the OS.
Also, I like the lipstick on a chicken quote. I'm going to have to add that to my reparte repertoire.
he's an MVP, not an MS worker. MVP's are people awarded by Microsoft for their efforts in helping others out. An MS employee can't be an MVP by definition.
FB, C# MVP
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Richard Stallman asserts that closed, proprietary - non-Free - software is an ethical wrong. That is to say, it reduces the amount of freedom in the world. By developing, supporting, selling, evangelising - etc, etc - proprietary, non-Free software, one actively HURTS one's fellow humans. I mean this in the RMS sense - I'm not talking about Windows being less secure or less stable than GNU/Linux, but being less free.
How do Microsoft (et al) developers, who are obviously intelligent, hard-working and - at the technical level, at least - well-intentioned people, reconcile this with their consciences? Do they...
Hope this doesn't sound like a troll. I just really want to understand why people go along with this system. I don't get it, but obviously most of the rest of the world don't care or have some other cognitive work-around. Please enlighten me someone!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Then the vendors can release patches for their apps so that they will work after the service pack is applied.
And before anyone goes off about how Microsoft would have to spend too much money and time testing every app out there, you're wrong.
There are lots of companies with contracts with Microsoft and Microsoft could ask those companies to run a quick diagnostic app on some of their machines with the apps those companies consider critical to their business running.
That way, Microsoft could see what apps were using the bug that they planned to fix and how many of their big customers would be affected by a fix.
Microsoft has the money, the contact info, the company info and the existing contracts to do just that.
The real reason Microsoft doesn't do that is because there are too many bugs that rely upon other bugs and Microsoft doesn't even know which are which or where they are.
For reference, look at this previous
One of the things I do when I run a project is I never use the word "I." Even if you went back through every piece of mail I wrote for Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP SP2, you'll never see the word "I" in any of those emails, unless there was a specific reason for it. I'm just a believer in that if you want to get things done, the best way to do it is as a team.
What a wanker. This is one of those guys who when he means "you" he says "we". For example - "why don't we spend the next few hours working out the bugs." - which means "why don't you bust your ass for a few hours while I go home and get some sleep.".
Is there some kind of policy for hiring only funny-looking people?
I don't have a sig.
The ring 0 issue has been known ever since Microsoft implemented it in NT 4.0 (3.51 did not run the video drivers in ring 0).
/. and a good technical decision would not have a problem here.
It was a stupid decision to do that and the only reason they did it was to improve the video performance on their GUI-driven OS.
So your whole OS can go down because of the video driver.
This is
But Microsoft makes bad technical decisions and they make them because of Marketing demands. You might not agree with that, but that's the fact.
Respect is earned, not given. For Microsoft to be respected for anything other than lots of money or great marketing, they'll have to earn it by making technically sound decisions.
Service packs are to fix bugs in an existing system.
Like I said in my original post, I know lots of people who have turned off the firewall because it caused problems.
The idea is to add security to the system.
Not to disable an app that you weren't running before the patch because that app causes problems with apps that you were running before the patch.
Once you get the firewall out of the service pack, you can deal with it on its own and work on its configuration on its own, as it should be.
"You go to work with the Windows you have, not the Windows you might want or wish to have at a later time."
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Which is very different from a very specific video problem in Linux.
It is not the same trade-off as with Linux because it is possible to run a Linux server with only the command line interface.
With Windows, every implementation has those flaws.
With Linux, only a very specific sub-set of implementations have those flaws.
I'm not worried about companies that didn't take basic precautions when they licensed software. They made the wrong decision, they suffer the consequences. That's business.
Why should Company A's bad decision mean that Companies B, C and D have to run an OS with a known, fixable bug?
The communication takes place, the problems are identified and adequate time is given to get patches/work-arounds in place.
Beyond that, the companies have to take responsibility for their previous decisions.
Business, like life, is harsh.
Only stupid people use windoze and .Not
or do the majority of those people look like famous comedians?
.. i dont know, his last name is wanke though..
Todd Wanke =
Rebecca Norlander = Lisa Kudrow
Matt Harris = Ryan Stiles (i think thats his name... from who's line is it anyway and the drew carey show)
Laurie Litwack = Rachel Dratch from SNL
or does Mark Harris look like "Lewis" from the Drew Carey Show?
So Microsoft's security strategy is to put together death march development teams? Is this supposed to make me feel better?
Security is difficult and expensive and costly in terms of developer talent. Microsoft responded to a market situation with a team and a hard driven strategy. Fine. What about next year? What about when the tide of worms and trojans is stemmed, and everyone forgets about how bad it was in 2004?
Derek
Todd: The original idea was to make it sort of like IE Hard. The IE in Windows Server 2003 is really unusable for consumers. But we were thinking that drastic at first. I can tell you that during the [initial design] phase were definitely thinking as drastic as that.
It sounds like Microsoft actually has a secure version of Internet Explorer, without all the guck that makes it insecure. But they consider it "unusable for consumers". Probably because you can't run all those stupid "toolbars", "Active-X controls", "upgraders", and other crap you don't need. It's clear that the "features" people won out over the "security" people.
They could at least offer "IE Hard" for everyone who wants it. Most business desktops probably should be running "IE Hard".
Those who try to impose "maximum wages" all need to be killed.
She is so fucking hot! If she'd let me be her bitch I'd happily go down on her for hours at a time! Oh, to dream!
Because people are concerned about bugs in the OS and they aren't accepting your answer of "well, some other company doesn't want it fixed so you are shit outta luck".
The companies running correctly written apps should not be denied patches simply because some other company is running an app that depends upon a bug.
Which is why Linux is the fastest growing server OS. That's business. It's harsh, but companies have to look out for their own best interests.
Not whether some other company can convince Microsoft to skip a bug fix because it will break some ancient app.
When my mom informed me that I could have a bike OR a skateboard, I accused her of "tyranny of the OR" and suggested substituting AND instead. Needless to say, this did not go over well.
As I understand it, this is due to something called *reality*. Optimization quandaries abound in life, particularly with complex systems. If they could be remedied by cute little catch phrases, Microsoft would have copyrighted them by now. There are after all, oodles of very smart people working at the company--of the variety that whipped your ass in the high school science fair. They are wrestling with a Beast of a project which no one understands in its entirety and have to deal with end-user issues that GeekDom can casually dismiss.
I heard that if you light your cigarette off a candle, a sailor dies.
I think SOME things at Microsoft have changed in the last decade. I found the W2K and XP service pack releases to have a LOT fewer problems than those of NT4. The stakes are MUCH higher now considering that the NT kernel is now the only kernel and that the number of installed machines and potential problems is much higher.
What was so bad about XP SP1? It seemed like improvements on all fronts to me.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
- Todd: You know, there were some small things that I really took to heart during SP2. I hated the fact that Internet Explorer didn't have a pop-up blocker. To me, it made pre-SP2 browsing on the Web just a nuisance.
Internet Explorer makes post-SP2 browsing on the web much more than a nuisance!Imagine that if you suffer from schizophrenia you can be a diverse group all by yourself. :P
"Todd: We knew we had a bigger problem than just enabling the firewall. And so at that point, I sent out a mail to everyone in the division saying, "This is what we're going to do. We're going to take a little bit more time to do it. And if you want to submit a security feature, you should do so, and then show up at this room." Well, the next day, it was standing room only, and everyone had a security feature that they wanted to check in. It went all the way down from things like the new Bluetooth stack, to the new Windows Media Player, to the new Group Policy stuff, and on, and on, and on, and on."
it's been 6 months from SP2 and it still goes on... and on.. and on... and on.... (energizer bunny appears) and on... and on...
I'll see if I still have an old copy of Loki's "Civilization: Call to Power" that I can test with.Only if you count total number of units in the whole industry. If Linux keeps growing at the rate it is, it will, eventually, overtake Windows. I don't see anything indicating that Linux's growth rate will slow before that happens.Possibly. We'll see when Linux starts getting about 10-20% desktop share.
the interview was of some young pointy hair manager types, not developers. They were all way too clean cut.
nLite
My last three clients for service made requests for Windows XP SP2. I installed SP2 to all three, and all three had severe problems. Makes a good techie-dude look very bad. Of course, I hand the blame right over to the Microsoft folks who seem to think they must rush rush rush and market the next and latest bunch of bug-filled JUNK to the Market... I will not be installing SP2 on any further machines... probably not until we are about ready for SP3... which is about the time MS will have fixed SP2...... (tongue in cheek...) Not a happy-camper at my tech shop... Wankie needs to take it back to the drawing board, and release the product when it actually solves problems, not creates them. Was he also on the Windows ME team, by any chance????? Jam Handy Michigan
Now the Slashdot mods are cheerleading Microsoft?
First of all Thurrott is the biggest Microsoft suck-up on the planet. Secondly SP2 is yet another layer of software to clog up XP and is not even very good at providing security plus its two years late.
Ah, the Opensource community is so like the Catholic Church. Quick to point out others flaws, while they go about molesting children. What is the patch of the day now ... Linux kernel 2.6.10 rc 54 - mmm abc123. FUCK me! I can't load this driver because kernel symbols don't match! Son of a bitch, start the compile and have some coffee. /snicker
I work for an ISP, the reason tech support calls dropped after SP2 is that installing it changes almost all error messages in the OS to blame someone other than MS for problems that are obviously caused by SP2.
If the firewall is blocking access to the internet for certain apps, the error message will say that the computer doesn't have an internet connect and to call your ISP. We fought with a bug where certain spyware if installed while the SP2 install runs, the installation corrupts the ip stack, causing the entire networking subsystem to fail. The error message blames the ISP or the home network.
Within 2 weeks after the release of SP2 the first question all our tech support engineers asked when they got on a call was "did you install service pack 2 recently?". We had a huge spike in calls after the release, and probably 90% of our calls in that time frame were SP2 related install errors, or misleading error messages after the install that blamed us for MS breaking things.
This makes me question seriously any future "release candidate" from Microsoft. Is it really a "release candidate" (i.e., a version of software that is a candidate for release - if no bugs are found, it ships as is), or is it just another beta? Microsoft, in the guise of Todd Wanke, has now confirmed that they ship beta-quality software and call it whatever their marketing people feel will go over best with the rest of the world.
Feh.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
I can't believe this got modded Troll. Did anybody READ the fucking post?
OK, now Troll me, you load of ignorant, illiterate assholes.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
It should be clear to anyone plagued by security problems - as am I - due to use of Windows and Internet Explorer that MS apparently does not employ the top-tier dev talent. There are probably a few reasons for this. First, MS no longer awards stock options. This used to be the big draw to work there. Second, there is so much bureaucracy that it would be difficult for a truly talented but otherwise not-connected techie to become known within the organization. And lastly, it no longer has a positive connotation among young techie types. It should be no wonder that they no longer excel in most fields of software. The MS of today is a completely different company from the MS of ten years, or even five years ago. Just like the Dallas Cowboys or a host of other real-world examples. Same brand, different product. www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com