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MS Patches Go For Quality Over Quantity?
greengrass writes "eWeek.com is running a story about another Microsoft 'study'. This one discusses how good Microsoft is at providing patches for their OS. This is Part 2 of 3 in a series of articles, the first of which compared Linux and Windows on legacy systems." From the article: "Bill Hilf, who is director of Platform Technology Strategy at Microsoft and heads its Linux and open-source lab, told eWEEK in a recent interview that 'the differentiator for customers is not the number comparison, but which vendor makes the patching and updating experience the least complex, most efficient and easiest to manage.'"
Microsoft Corp. seems to be moving away from focusing on the actual number of security patches and updates that it and its software competitors release.
But of course they are...since Joe Brockmeier and Joe Barr of NewsForge , as well as Pamela Jones of Groklaw did such a masterful job of debunking the ridiculous annual summary of vulnerabilities by US-CERT (discussed earlier on Slashdot), Microsoft has necessarily had to switch propaganda tactics.
Instead, it is concentrating on making it easy and efficient for customers to obtain the security fixes and update their systems.
That's funny...I've never had a problem with my Yast Online Update...
"...patching, particularly for security, is not a 'Microsoft problem,' but something that affects all operating system and platform vendors," Hilf said.
Nice straw man, Hilf. No one is claiming that non-Microsoft operating systems don't need to be patched. The issue is whether the patches are issued in a timely manner...or not.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It may be good to have lots of patches, but once you have a car where the duct tape weighs more than any other parts combined, isn't it time to just get another car?
I wouldn't normally think of 4 hours and 6 zillion reboots as "efficient" or "easy". -Julius
How about, which vendor makes the patches unnecessary (i.e., few and far between) because it released a solid, working program?
I don't want patch quality. I want program quality.
I work in proprietary software. Most places that do proprietary software are overworked and quality suffers. (EA is an extreme example where workplace quality suffered as well as program quality.)
In the places I've worked, everyone's too busy doing what they've been assigned and they're overworked because they're understaffed. Hiring more people means less money for the company so that generally doesn't happen.
With FOSS, anyone can pick up the source if they have some spare time and hack away at it, and even if individual contributions are small, there's always someone with some spare time and a different view about how something should work.
Once you start doing for money's sake, you spend more time worrying about your bottom line than about quality.
Yeah, because typing "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" once in a while is so damn hard to manage.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
If the rumors of Vista are true and it is an efficient and secure operating system that can function in plain jane deterministic manners, then I want it dual booting with Linux and nothing more ... ever.
Those rumours have preceded every version of MS-Windows since NT 3.51 (the most secure and stable version of MS-Windows to date, in my experience). I've stopped waiting for MS to produce an exceptional operating system. There are much, much better alternatives out there -- OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. What's the point of waiting for MS to play catch-up?
I'm interested in seeing Vista in action. I'll probably take a look when someone at work here picks it up. I don't hold out a lot of hope that it will beat the stability of Solaris, the ease-of-use and consistency of OS X, or the openness and general all-over chocolatey goodness of Linux and *BSD.
Let's see if they still group programs by vendor, and not by function.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
ART on dA
Reading that article made such a refreshing change compared to the Microsoft 'propaganda' stories we usually get linked to. eWeek gave Linux vendors the chance to answer and explain all of the figures which seemed to side with Microsoft - and invairiably once dissected, the usual Microsoft massaging of figures clearly comes to light.
One great example was this:
Interestingly, Microsoft's Hilf has a personal Red Hat workstation in his office that he uses on a daily basis. He selected a random week in October to provide a snapshot of the updates made to his Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation over that period. He found that, between Oct. 6, 2005, and Oct. 11, 2005, his workstation was updated 66 times.
"I chose those dates randomly," he said. "I use this system daily, so it was literally a snapshot of a given workweek. All this illustrates is that patching and updating are part of any 'living' software system. It is part of the nature of modern software: Things change, bugs happen, features get added, and software needs to get updated."
But Red Hat's Cox pointed out that the second update release for RHEL4 was issued Oct. 5, resulting in a very large number of updated packages over the period of a day or two, "which is what Hilf saw. We only issued two Update releases for RHEL4 in 2005, so he was quite unlucky in his choice of a random snapshot," he said, tongue in cheek.
Unlucky indeed. Nice to see some unbiased reporting and not just verbatim duplication of Microsoft comments and 'press releases' for a change.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
IF Linux is as stable as you make out, and you want "nothing more...ever", then why not make it - or Windows for that matter - available as a chipset, like the good ol' BBC Microcompuetr of yesteryear...?
Because like any operating system you will eventually want to add something to the machine like a newer video card.... Or a new codex and then what happens when you turn off the machine? But even three seconds of thought would have told you that.
Eventually you (gasp) might even want to try a new distro....
For crying out loud talk about vendor lock...
Why does everything have to be a such-and-such "experience". I don't want a patching experience at all, I want to have it happen in such a way that it's a non experience. They make it sound like it should be a movie or a fun fair by calling everything a such-and-such "experience"!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"IN MY OPINION, the largest thing Microsoft has to fear is a perfectly secure operation system they have created and distributed throughout the world. This is because they will no longer have "upgrades" or new versions of Windows to offer costumers."
Just to play devil's advocate, Apple's OS is largely bug-free and secure, and yet quite a few people pay cash money for an upgrade every year or so. This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
Would Apple sell enough upgrades to make a profit if they weren't making money from hardware (and iPod) sales? Maybe not, but it's worth asking.
So if I plug in communications hardware from 2005 into an OS from 2000, and don't install drivers, it doesn't work? News at 11...
It is interesting though. You say that each OS has its strengths that Vista might not have... but in effect you are pointing out that none of those OSes have all those strengths.
If Vista can provide a good stability (which it should, XP is very stable), good ease-of-use, and "chocolately goodness", then it would be the best operating system for general consumption.
"If God had intended us to walk he would not have invented roller skates." -- Willy Wonka
My gawd Jim, this is a marketing company for heavens sake! ( not sure why Dr McCoy came to mind...)
:-)
Why would anybody think there is any truth to what the head of Microsofts anti-Linux group says?
Do you think he might have a little motivation to make sure people THINK their OS smells like roses?
I do.
IMO
But thankyou Mr Hilfe for making sure CIO's, CTO, etc know that Linux is on Microsofts mind. THAT,
combined with what their employees are experiencing is great for your competition.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
There is just one story after another about Microsoft "going for quality" and "Microsoft running on machines just as small as those Linux runs on", "Microsoft having fewer vulnerabilities according to some web site", and "Microsoft this" and "Microsoft that". If you read carefully, most of those stories were actually initiated by Microsoft.
So, that makes me wonder: is this just the season for the Microsoft propaganda machine to become active? Or is Linux striking more fear than usual into their hearts?