Microsoft reissues September patches after user complaints Problems with Microsoft's last round of operating system and application patches have forced the company to reissue part of the update on Friday. "Since the shipment of the September 2013 Security Bulletin Release, we have received reports of updates being offered for installation multiple times, or certain cases where updates …
I mean, come on!; in the article I counted a total of eleven patches that were re-issued or pulled, out of how many? Twenty-five? Did MS hire a bunch of cheap noobs for the job? Or did they outsource the coding to Elbonia?
It's totally shameful, isn't it?.
All the flowers smell wonderful, the birds are tweeting, the sun is out and everyone is having a jolly nice time.
Providing that we are being sensible, using a stable or long term distribution and using compatible repositories (rpm), and perhaps being careful with backports (Debian). Which I imagine we all are for 'production' machines.
Meh, I wandered into work Wednesday morning to see I had been "patched Wednesday'ed" … with my work laptop booted and displaying the KDE display manager in place of the Windows 7 desktop where I left it.
I reboot (I needed to use VMWare player) and no sooner does Windows 7 boot up, but it immediately shuts down again to install another patch (!).
Then yesterday it did almost a repeat performance.
Thankfully, my main workhorse runs Gentoo, and hence does exactly what I tell it.
Unless of course it's one of the ~950 kernel patches issues to date...
I think you'll find the kernel has had a lot more than 950 patches applied to it. Orders of magnitude more.
The difference here though, in Linux, unless my OS is particularly ancient, I can go direct from one kernel revision to the next without having to pass the ones in between. Microsoft's patches seem to be applied incrementally, which means I need the one that goes before it before I install the next one, and a reboot each time.
Other than the ATI Catalyst Control Panel, which is relatively avoidable. afaik nothing I have near me uses it.
Who is actually using this stuff? Do MS use it for anything? Do the patches arrive whether or not there's a .NET-based application on the system?
I've got a couple of XP boxes and one Win7, is this .NET business one of the advantages of keeping up to date?
The main problem is that most of Microsoft still runs on a mixture of Windows XP, Windows 98 (the finance teams) and coloured crayons and paper (the board and senior execs). The only equipment Ballmer has in his office is an iMac that's never been switched on because he's not quite sure where the power lead goes and an old palm pilot that his PA uses to run the great man's diary.
The development teams were outsourced to CSC and Accenture in 2003, and they run various flavours of Linux on VMware. A single PC, a Compaq 486/33 box, is kept aside for native Windows testing, should it be needed. The 'Raymond Chen' blog is run by a team of 75 smart independent developers somewhere in Russia and they use a self-developed forked version of Windows that no longer runs on PCs.
It's only the reception desk that actually actually runs Windows 7 and 8.1 on anything modern to give the right impression for visitors.
I think this is why problems are occasionally missed.
As all here know keeping ones security up to date is top of the list when dealing with servers (actually, any platform to be fair) and when it comes to MS server software that means updating from windows update as part of that. But I *loathe* doing it as there's always a chance they stuff something up, and every so often Microsoft issue something that's the server equivilent of Ebola. This patch tuesday has caused me an awful lot of work and I'm not very pleased. I can deal with users knackering their installs, but it hacks me off when the people who should know what they're doing cause the issue.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
