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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.'"
This microsoft patch will probably open up about 5-8 other security vulnerabilities.
MS is doing a great job.
Somebody tell Taco Slashdot is broken...it's started stripping the <sarcasm> tags from posts again.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The vast majority of people are wallowing in their own filth and simply don't know any better. They aren't happy because Microsoft produces something worthwhile. They aren't even necessarily happy either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Four hours for a SP4 install? That's odd. I wiped a system, and installed Win2K SP1 for the customer, and ran the update system to bring the software to current SP4, downloading every update available, needed or not. Took me just better than an hour for the updates, and 45 minutes to wipe the drive and install the OS from scratch. (I did opt for installing the media direct from the hard drive which does make the install faster). I personally like how much easier it is to update microsoft's OS versus various linux distributions. There are those days where Microsoft's update servers are too busy to handle the load...but, this reminds me of my FC3 install. When I first installed FC3 on one of my machines, I really admired the update process. I then discovered a few problems with the update process, and people can argue that these are 'my' problems, but this will explain why the windows update is easier (Even if it has twice as many bugs).
.NET framework 1.1 update). But, no matter what updates I install, and other than the problems with the .NET failure, I've never had other problems, and I've never broken anything that I had on the system beforehand.
1) the Fedora Core update process generally led me to insane download times. I spent over a week downloading the base install of Fedora Core 3.
2) Because I am not a linux master, I can't figure out why some of my updates failed to install
because of 'dependancy issues' or conflicts. This made no sense, because the software was already
installed, but the updater is telling me that it can't install a program because it conflicts with
something else already installed. I may not be good with linux, but most normal windows users would not be able to figure out even to the extent that I did why the update process is goofing up and/or
not letting them install updates to software they already have.
3) installing new programs is a lot easier now than it has been in the past, with package management
like RPM, YUM, and the GUI interfaces for them. That said, every program has dependancies. Some programs have a LOT of dependancies. Due to the nature of the way this works, those programs could
be vastly superior..at the same time, program_X may require an older version of something that program_Y updates..so, program_Y breaks program_X. I can't remember specifics, but this has happened to me in the past. I am not a programmer.. I used to write simple programs in Pascal, but this would
hardly be relevant for me to try and update a program on my box just to solve an issue like this.
I have had downloads fail with the windows update service, and in fact those downloads have become broken, so that no matter how many times I retry, I can't install that particular update. (happened to me twice with the
People complain about microsoft, myself included. Yeah, their products are bloated, buggy, full of bad code/bad design/flawed security. But for most people, it is the only choice they can make.
As far as what I've seen with 'avoiding' certain patches...from what I've seen, you can avoid certain
patches with both windows update and the many linux update options.
I fully support open source. I even use a lot of open source apps and recommend them highly over any commercial alternative. But, if Linux had the dominant market share in consumer desktop OS, more software vendors would be writing their software for linux. More of that software would be categorized as commercial, and you'd have to buy it or steal it. Then, there are so many distributions of linux, and not all of them are 100% compatible with eachother..while making the required software ports would not be too difficult, imagine the confusion for joe blow when he goes to the store and finds six different releases for the game he bought? Where would the vendor draw the line? they won't release their source code so you can recompile. more likely, they'd force everyone to use Linux based off of a single original distribution, like RedH
wasn't on Steve's Its readers and imPlementation to is ingesting bring your own else up their asses lesson and dying. All major for trolls' Surveys show that
I'd switch off the engine while replacing parts on my car otherwise I'd choke on the exhaust fumes or have to do it outside. Err. Do normal people really need an analogy to see that Linux is better than Windows? Oh dear.
which is totally what she said