Microsoft Finally To Patch 17-Year-Old Bug

eldavojohn writes "Microsoft is due for a very large patch this month, in which five critical holes (that render Windows hijackable by an intruder) are due to be fixed, in addition to twenty other problems. The biggest change addresses a 17-year-old bug dating back to the days of DOS, discovered in January by their BFF Google. The patch should roll out February 9th."

Comments

"Finally"?

[holygoat]

Isn't it a little disingenuous to say "finally" when the bug was discovered last month?

That it was introduced 17 years ago doesn't mean that Microsoft has been tardy about fixing it...

I'm guessing you know this

[symbolset]

No, That's Windows 7 by itself. Office is 3GB extra.

The cited DSL fits in 64MB, all things included.

Damn Small Linux is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:

• Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
• Boot from a USB pen drive
• Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
• Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
• Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install * Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram * Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!) * Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize

It includes three browsers, document processing, email, spreadsheet, VOIP, and a lot more.

The smallest pendrive I've ever heard of is the 64MB USB 1.0 device I'm holding in my hand right now that I bought my wife more than a decade ago. I paid $79 for it at Fred Meyer, because tech stores wouldn't carry it. Actually, there were 16 and 32MB versions of this, but let's not go there because this was the Windows 95 era.

I am on the record as stating that we've had no productivity increases since the advent of Windows. Let me quote from a wise man:

"Word processing was a solved problem in 1984. By 1987 spreadsheets had all the functions a normal person would ever use. Databases took a little longer, but by 1990 that was sorted. An infant could have been born that day and by now would be almost of age to vote and we've seen no real improvement in productivity since."

64MB is 0.32% of 20GB.

So let me ask you: If the Office team needs 3,000 MB to install their full application set, what can they do with 30MB - 1% of that? Splash? Can they even do that?