Microsoft Delays February Patch Tuesday Indefinitely (sans.edu)

UnderAttack writes: Microsoft today announced that it had to delay its February Patch Tuesday due to issues with a particular patch. This was also supposed to be the first Patch Tuesday using a new format, which led some to believe that even Microsoft had issues understanding how the new format is exactly going to work with no more simple bulletin summary and patches being released as large monolithic updates. Ars Technica notes the importance of this Patch Tuesday as "there's an in-the-wild zero-day flaw in SMB, Microsoft's file sharing protocol, that at the very least allows systems to be crashed." They also elaborate on the way Microsoft is "continuing to tune the way updates are delivered to Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2."

Comments

Sigh

[MightyMartian]

I've never been a big fan of the way Microsoft rolls out updates, or how the system handles it, but since Windows 10 they've made it just a fucking agony, with annoying pop up screens, unintended system reboots (with loss of data), and just general chaos. How can a company that has been making software for over thirty years have suddenly become so stunningly incompetent.

Re:Sigh

[Desler]

Maybe ask the Slashdot coders? They've been incompetent since 1997 so would have plenty of insight.

Re: Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

They fired their qa team.

Re:Sigh

[Penguinisto]

Wait... what did you mean by "suddenly"?

Re:Sigh

[darkain]

Look at the CEOs over the various eras of Microsoft, it seriously explains everything. The current CEO is from their cloud devision, and in distributed computing, take a few nodes offline from time to time for patching is perfectly normal as other nodes are online for redundancy. Rolling updates are the norm in this area. This logic however absolutely FAILS on the desktop. Updates are scheduled to Microsoft's maintenance windows now, rather than when is the most opportune time for the consumer actively using the operating system. Now think of this not only in terms of Windows Update, but Microsoft as a whole. Gates was a business man, all of their primary software focused on productivity within a business environment. Ballmer was all about DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS, and as much as we all love to make fun of him for it, he was indeed quite good to them (Visual Studio had decent advancements during his time). Now we have Nadella, who's entire focus has been on automation, regardless of who all it effects. Again, this worked great in the datacenter, but he's entirely missed the mark when it comes to the end user perspective.

Re:Sigh

[lgw]

They fired their QA guys, most of them gone about 2 years ago IIRC. You started seeing a dramatic decline in product quality thereafter. Did you know it's impossible to patch a fresh Win7 install via normal Windows Update? That broke less than a year after they dumped the QA teams.

Re: Sigh

[CrashNBrn]

Wait, Slashdot had a QA Team?

Re:Sigh

[Hognoxious]

Did you know it's impossible to patch a fresh Win7 install via normal Windows Update?

Yes. Luckily it's easy to download the updates manually at another computer.

Ha! I lied, it isn't.

Re:Sigh

[Luckyo]

Up until the release of 10, they have been an excellent example of how to do updates. Individually installable, commonly individually uninstallable updates with excellent documentation on what each update does. Ease of both choosing how to install, when to install, and what not to install at all.

That is all gone now.

Re:Sigh

[hairyfeet]

Go to YouTube and look up Banacles Nerdgasm's "I was fired" video if you want to know why MSFT's OS division has turned to shit, but the short of it is they fired the QA and tester teams in their entirety in one giant culling. Now YOU are the beta tester for the actual customers which Nutella has made clear is the ENTERPRISE users, not the Windows Home or Pro buyers. Basically Windows Home is now the alpha, Windows Pro the beta, and Enterprise is the finished product.

Why do you think you can't turn off updates or all that telemetry shit even on Windows Pro, which as the name implied in the past was for professionals? Its because they need to see how badly the patches fuck your system up so they can fix or remove them before it gets to their actual customers, all those corps paying juicy endless rent to have Windows Enterprise licenses. So congrats all of you that took the windows 10 "free" upgrade or worse actually bought Win 10 Home or Pro, you gave your precious time and hardware to be a testbench for a product you don't even get in return.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, it is.

http://download.wsusoffline.ne...

only the actual security updates (and optional things like mse, runtimes, etc), no bullshit.

Re:Sigh

[Motherfucking Shit]

Manually download and install a "roll-up patch".

Careful; on Windows 7, the cumulative roll-ups include the backported telemetry KBs.

Re:Sigh

[swb]

Your description is apt, but the salient insight is that a desktop is being treated like a node in a cluster -- in other words, you can take a few down without taking the entire cluster of consumers being taken offline.

This means that the purpose of the cluster isn't your individual productivity, the purpose of the cluster is your value as a consumer intelligence node. Just as in a clustered environment the specific workload of a physical server isn't important provided there are other nodes running to handle the cluster workload.

  The OS isn't about providing for your productivity, the OS is to provide Microsoft with consumer intelligence.

Oh...Microsoft...

[surfdaddy]

You've always been there throughout my tech career, for some entertainment. I loved that shell that was Windows 3.1 I gloated over Windows ME. I was Tickled when the first Zune "Welcome to the social! effort to chase the iPod came along. I was amused when you laughed at the iPhone and then belatedly came out with Windows Phone, only to crash in the marketplace. Of course there was Longhorn which became Vista. And don't forget Metro and Windows 8! People bought media and counted on Plays for Sure---- but it no longer plays.... and then there was that unlimited OneDrive storage that less than a year later users were "abusing"(haha) and it was rescinded! You gave your word and then changed it! Top it off with the devious Windows 10 "FREE!!!!" upgrade that was tricked upon people including my mother of 83 years old... and then the advertising and the advertising ID in the OS followed...so now your UPDATES DON"T WORK? Microsoft, don't ever change your character, it is entertainment that will last forever...

Re: Oh...Microsoft...

[david_thornley]

When Gates started, well before the Mac and Amiga and when Unix and VMS were not available for reasonably priced desktop use, Microsoft was best known for their BASIC interpreters, which were good for the time on the available computers. The PCs of the time had 8-bit CPUs without hardware multiply and could address 64K of memory, except that 64K was pretty expensive at the time (I was happy to be able to pay only about $100 for 16K) and not all computers supported it. Most of the big commercial brands had their own proprietary OS, and CP/M was the dominant OS for the other computers. This went on, and Microsoft was a quite successful software company, but not a real standout.

Then IBM decided to bring out a PC, and didn't want to do any more work than they had to, so they looked for an OS. Gates knew this from his mother's contacts in IBM, and bought exclusive rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from the Seattle Computer Club. He repackaged it, sold a non-exclusive license to IBM, and it became known as PC-DOS once the PC came out. I read at the time that you could also get your PC with CP/M-86 or the UCSD p-system, but I never saw a PC with either.

At this point, we can start saying Microsoft was succeeding because it was the only provider. With the exception of some computers that quickly became niches in the market, everybody ran PC-DOS. IBM was selling computers to businesses, because they were IBM. A computer from some place called Apple or Radio Shack was obviously not suited for real business work, but IBM! If you wanted a computer for serious use, and you didn't have a reason to get something else, you got an IBM PC (which was a pretty good computer at the time), and Microsoft got some of your money.

Remember when I said IBM didn't want to do any more work than they had to? This means that the PC was made as much as possible out of off-the-shelf components, with a 16K BIOS that was nothing really special. Somebody produced a clean-room BIOS that was functionally equivalent, and from there it was easy to use off-the-shelf components to make a PC clone. These needed operating software to run, of course, and Microsoft was happy to supply a renamed version of PC-DOS. The clones would run all IBM PC software, no problem, and they were a lot cheaper (at one time I estimated that getting the IBM on the side of your computer cost about $500 a letter). More manufacturers sold more computers, each of which had to have PC/MS-DOS on it.