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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Windows Security and the market
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Sam Gentile isn't happy about the latest buffer overflow problem reported for Windows - partly because it also impacts Win2K3. That's not surprising; the code base is, after all, shared - and it's a veritable mountain of C++ code. What's interesting to me is the reaction:
I had just sold management in the company I am clienting for on the ability of W2K3 to avoid these, with the line that during the Windows Security Push, all 9,000+ Windows developers stopped and poured over essentially every line of Windows code remove these kinds of situations and make W2K3 the most secure OS. Now two of these in the last month. To say that this has stopped a massive redeployment is an understatement. The company was looking to just skip Win2000 Server and move many NT4 servers to Win2K. These kinds of situations are simply unacceptable. So is the patching strategy. To require a reboot for every security path installed is simply unacceptable. An OS like Win2K3 should never have to be rebooted and should be able to go a year or more without a reboot. A way must be found to apply these patches without causing reboots. Now that the operating systems have gotten super stable and operate for these kinds of times, we cannot have a patch requiring reboots. Patches like this can be applied to other OS like Linux and Mac OS X without reboots. I hate to bring up the fact that we had VAX/VMS systems up for years in the 1980's. This has just got to get better.
When the consultants who rely on you for a living start to get angry, it's not a good thing. This is exactly the sort of thing Apple could capitalize on....
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