Windows XP patch rate
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| number6x Feb 10, 2006 11:32 AM EDT |
How long has XP been out? Five years, give or take? What's up with the patch rate? "Secunia, meanwhile, claims that 26 unpatched bugs exist in Windows XP alone." Shouldn't production software that's five years old be a little more stable than XP? What's the patch rate on the 2.2 kernel? |
| tadelste Feb 10, 2006 12:44 PM EDT |
Many people believe Microsoft wants bugs in its software. That way they can charge big dollars for service contracts. For consumers, it's not an issue. For enterprises it's a lot of money. The assumption goes like this: Microsoft threats the customer like they have dumb people working for them - send them to school. You need our engineers to fix what they screwed up. If that's really true and one might think it's true, then it pays them to continue the practice. So many people made so much money in anticipation of the supposed year 2000 bug; you can imagine someone asking, how can we perpetuate this and monetize it? The problem most people have with this notion is they can't believe someone would use such a strategy. That's how someone can keep it's money machine going. They know people don't believe another American, etc. would actually cheat them. It's like the Ford Pinto - not many people to this day believe that a company named Ford would have decided not to fix an $11 part because they would make more money settling with victims than spending money on a recall. I mean it's Ford - they wouldn't do that. Not trustworthy Ford - whose founder btw was a bigger anti-Semite than Hitler. Nah, not Bill Gates - he and his wife are the biggest philanthropic people in history. |
| number6x Feb 10, 2006 1:06 PM EDT |
Tom, I'm not even talking about their motivation. I know if I had a code base for five years, and a team of 40 or so talented programmers, I'd be reducing bugs to reduce my maintenance costs. I'd be working the problem logs and the help desk tickets from the worst problems on down until there were only a few left. You know those ones that you could fix, but it would cost an arm and a leg, and probably break 12 different things. You figure out work arounds for those. Make sure that part gets re-written in the next version. I've done it on 30 year old COBOL systems with only five good programmers, and 300,000 plus lines of code, chock full of 'gotos'. We didn't even have all of the fancy programming tools to check for memory leaks and 'refactor' our models. We just drew designs on the back of green bar. Just break it down into functional chunks and work on the problems one after another. They must be making a heck of a lot off service to keep the buggy code in place. Or maybe they aren't good at testing. You know, put out a patch to fix A, and now C and D go bad. Patch C and A starts acting up again; patch D and F and G stop working, we still haven't figured out what's up with B yet... Don't they have any experienced programmers in Redmond? Pogo Linux is just down the street from MS, maybe the folks there could give Bill and the gang a few pointers at the next lug meeting. ;-) |
| tadelste Feb 10, 2006 2:01 PM EDT |
número seises: Sure. Normally you have developers and then maintenance programmers. With sixty billion pesos in the bank - don't you think they figured that out. I don't think they're short handed in Redmond. I also have looked at their OS for something like 15 years. Compared to UNIX, it's a tiny little ole thang. They do know what they're doing and after one year I think they had every bug nailed. Hello six hundred million users. Isn't that enough users to get everything fixed in a few months? I tried to find a dll last summer and even though they had a KB article about it, they didn't make it availabe as a download. You had to buy it from a partner. I'm not just talking about motivation - I'm asserting that in practice someone could make more money by engineering defects into a product. Now that I think of it, that seems like a Doh. Oh well, 1/2 the people on the planet have an IQ less than 100. I bet BG knows that. He had to know it. Look at how many people have contributed to hs wealth. Do you think he laughs all the way to the bank? "Can you believe how many dumb butts live on this planet. They must be dumb," thinks BG, "they buy my Windows OS. hehe hehe." |
| jsusanka Feb 11, 2006 10:59 AM EDT |
they aren't only dumb but a lot of them invest in microsoft so the more money microsoft makes the more they make - who cares if it is buggy and it is the biggest piece of crap software on the planet - just got to keep those stock prices artifically inflated. |
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