Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Jul 2006 17:47 UTC, submitted by JCooper
A new report from Symantec security researchers contends that Microsoft's much-awaited Vista operating system could harbor a range of vulnerabilities that will make it less secure than previous iterations of Windows. According to research published July 18 by Symantec, a number of Vista's software components, specifically a handful of protocols related to its redesigned networking technologies, could become security loopholes if Microsoft does not fix the problems or ensure that the product is configured appropriately to hide the glitches when it is shipped.
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Member since:2006-01-02
W2K was another 5 year gap release. It had less in it over NT4 than Vista has over XP, but it did add a large number of new features and was a coordinated server and client release.
They added PNP, Active Directory, DirectX, EFS, and tons of other stuff to NT between NT4 and W2K.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Well, you certainly don't need to be an expert on software security or quality to understand that overhauling enormous amounts of code is sure to inject enormous amounts of bugs.
I don't envy Microsoft, they're in a pretty tough situation. They need to catch up with everything that's happened in the PC industry in the past 6+ years and get it mostly right on the first shot. Of course there's gunna be bugs, and there's probably going to be several times more bugs in Vista RTM than there are in fully patched Windows XP SP2. The way that most software vendors smooth out the spikes and roll-offs in the defect rates across release cycles is by keeping the cycles relatively short. Two years seems to be good rule of thumb for the largest software projects. Beyond that, the number of new feature requests makes the release of a high-quality product highly unlikely.
I believe that the success of Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 was largely due to the relatively short release cycles and the relatively modest set of new features in each release when compared to its (architectural) predecessor. With Vista, MS has let the feature requests completely dictate the release management policies. The result is that they've sacrificed the stability of the (Windows Server 2003) codebase and potentially moved in a direction that doesn't exactly agree with those of its customers.