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Microsoft Black Tuesday Patches Bring Blue Screens of Death
snydeq (1272828) writes "Two of Microsoft's kernel-mode driver updates — which often cause problems — are triggering a BSOD error message on some Windows systems, InfoWorld reports. 'Details at this point are sparse, but it looks like three different patches from this week's Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens with a Stop 0x50 error on some systems. If you're hitting a BSOD, you can help diagnose the problem (and perhaps prod Microsoft to find a solution) by adding your voice to the Microsoft Answers Forum thread on the subject.'"
Someone right now is looking at that error and figuring out how to exploit it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think the criticism isn't so much that they're too responsive to consumers or not -- they obviously listen. The criticism is that there are so many holes to begin with and that their attempts to fix things that are obviously broken -- things that their competitors seem to be able to make work just fine -- often don't work or cause other problems. Knowing the Microsoft engineering culture, their stuff is mostly a patchwork of different groups not talking to each other. In the Windows API, there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!
When you're disorganized like that in a giant company with a giant piece of software, it's easy to see how bugs can get out of hand.