Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities. He argues that no company in America gets away with selling a “defective” product the way Microsoft does.
Even though I dont like MS, as a software engineer, I have accepted it to be impossible to deploy bog free software, even with extensive testing.
Testing is widely accpeted as a means to minimize bugs, not eliminate them. Andy Martin should take some programming classes or something, he will realize VERY quickly that putting out a bug free OS is impossible.
He SHOULD be focusing on the anti-trust issues instead, and the hardware vendors that bundle the OS with their products.
He does raise an interesting point but his arguments are killed by focusing on Microsoft. The software industry is able to release crap and very often is not held accountable for it. How many games have you bought that just did not work until the second or third patch? How many times did you buy (yes, buy) an open source GNU/Linux distro at the store and found that there were a number of problems? Further, Apple at times has released products well before they were ready for public consumption. This problem plagues all sectors of the industry.
The problem is three fold,
1. They have to meet a a schedule.
2. They know that if they release a buggy product they will not be held accountable. How many companies have been fined for the poetential problems that they cause to consumers.
3. Computers are still for an elite section of the population. Those who are more technicaly advanced generally come from higher education and income backgrounds. Therefore, they often do not need the extra legislation and often lobby against it through a number of grass roots groups (very few are industry green washing, but mostly by choice of those involved).
Come on boy’s, Let’s back to work….
every piece of software has some amount of bugs, the bugs in MS software just seem to be typically alot worse though.
from Secunia:
2003 – 2005 win xp pro
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Microsoft Windows XP Professional with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Highly critical
This is based on the most severe Secunia advisory, which is marked as “Unpatched” in the Secunia database. Go to Unpatched/Patched list below for details.
Currently, 26 out of 109 Secunia advisories, is marked as “Unpatched” in the Secunia database.
Suse 8.x (at least as old as XP)
——–
SuSE Linux 8.x with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by one or more Secunia advisories rated Less critical
This is based on the most severe Secunia advisory, which is marked as “Unpatched” in the Secunia database. Go to Unpatched/Patched list below for details.
Currently, 4 out of 167 Secunia advisories, is marked as “Unpatched” in the Secunia database.
——–
1) the suse patches are system wide. Don’t expect windows update to update your copy of adobe acrobat, photoshop, etc which also have security flaws. SuSE patches all of these (or incorporates them into their patching service.)
example, one of the patches in the list is for the Opera browser. Don’t expect microsoft to distribute patches for competing software (which is the problem, they are trying to compete at every level of the market thus have a conflict of interest unless you’re using MS products.)
2) of the unpatched variety SuSE 8.X has only 4 advisories rated less critical and windows has 26 rated
HIGHLY critical. SuSE has moved on to more current Operating systems, XP is still the current OS for microsoft.
If I had a dollar for every time I had to reboot … I would not be working in computers.
Call it Repetitive Reboot Syndrome.
Talk about using your time (un)wisely. This is a fart in a wind storm.
Actually Martin going the wrong software. He should go after Zonealarm. Do they actually do testing on their products? Going to 5.5 to 6.0 pretty much makes a pc obsolete. No taskbar no icons. Nothing. Nada. Same thing happen to version 5.0. Oh but they have no problems charging you to fix their crap, somthing like Symantec does real well. Now that I use Kerio never going back.
SCO is the sub-company of MS
All of the comments about the impossibility of ensuring bug-free code are of course true. Software just doesn’t work that way, or at least it hasn’t worked that way since 80-column punchcards. But there is a tension between the “its not possible so this guy is an idot” camp and the “but it’s a product that the company must stand behind” camp.
I see this as a statement that exposes the shaky legal grounds that proprietary software stands on. The customer is paying for a product that is advertised to provide a set of services, and it is delivered in a manner that makes it (next to) impossible to verify that it does what the customer expected when it was purchased. There is an endless set of caveats to the product’s function. There could be new products developed by other companies or individuals whose existence causes the purchased product to be unsafe or unproductive to use.
If a company cannot be held responsible for a product, then they cannot sell it. This is the message I get when I hear this guy’s argument. He’s saying that it would be fine if Microsoft said, “This is useful software that you can use at your own risk, free of charge. This software enables commercial hardware and/or other pieces of software that Microsoft and/or some other company will stand behind.” But Microsoft can’t stand behind Windows, they accept no responsibility for the capital losses (hopefully not loss of life) due to failures in advertised functionality, and they are still allowed to sell it.
Is this really in line with natural law?
The First XP PC I’ve used had a 900mhz celeron and 128MB Ram with an Intel 810 Chipset (A brand new cheap PC I got a month after XP was released)
To be honest I found XP to have reasonable performance even when playing Games that I knew to have high requirements at the time (Upgraded ram to 256 and added a 32Mb Nvidia TNT2 Card) Of course, I never got more than 30 fps. After I got a newer PC my sister inherited my old Celeron and she’s been pushing her WinXP uptimes since with P2P apps.
The point is that even If I prefer Linux and Open Source and personally dislike Windows (Mostly because of IE, security issues and bussiness practices)I do understand that Windows XP is “good enough” for most people.
Of course I also think that developers of commercial apps should be held accountable when things go wrong. (Especially on mission critical software)