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[Nix]

On 4 Nov 2009, Christopher Hunter outgrape:
> No.  "Windows Update" is badly broken, and F-Secure is a joke.  Windows
> Update actually broke some of the basic facilities of Windows.

Seconded. My work XP machine has now been forcibly disabled by work's
security team, because Windows Update decided that the right thing to do
when asked to install updates was to spin the useless 'determining what
updates to install' progress bar forever, and the security team
automatically decided that this must be because I'd explicitly turned
off all the security updates (which I hadn't) rather than because the
bloody thing refused to install anything no matter what entreaties I
gave it. I suppose their procedures expected that of course it could
*never* have gone *wrong*. They soon decided otherwise after sufficient
flaming in email.

MS's corporate support (and we're a huge corporation with a team of MS
consultant pseudoemployees permanently onsite) can't figure out the
cause, and their best suggestion was to wipe the OS and reinstall,
losing, oh, all my profile, all local configuration, and everything
else, because it is 'not policy' to back up anything on local machines'
hard drives, even if you're just about to wipe them.

As I'm currently on multiple critical paths and have several major
deadlines coming up within the next week, this is... not good.

Gah.

>> > We had both crash several times, and one of
>> > them lost the ability to network at all.
>> 
>> What? Because it was activated? Huh?
>
> No.  Because Windows is unstable crap.

Crap serves a useful purpose and is very nutritious to the right organisms.
I dispute your implication that anything similar is true of Windows :/

>> Windows 7 is a pretty good product and it would seem MS has listened to
>> its customer base for a change.
>
> No.  It's an abysmal, overpriced, bloated mess of a product, which still
> contains Cutler's undocumented, hacked together demonstration kernel and

The NT kernel was a demonstration later taken live? How surprising (and
typical of the entire industry).

Guess why I always overengineer the hell out of my demo code?...

>> Is it a threat to Linux? I doubt it.
>
> No.  It's certainly no threat to Linux, but is a serious threat to
> Microsoft.  I'm tempted to run a book on how long they last...

They are renowned in the financial world for keeping enormous cash
reserves. This looked really stupid until last year, but now looks
prescient. They can make payroll for something like five years from that
alone, even if their sales dropped to zero tomorrow.

Alas, they're not going away. (I do note that their HQ and
largest-by-far 'campus' (ick) is in an earthquake zone, though.)
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