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Journal FortKnox's Journal: Slashthink post of the day! 11

Journal by FortKnox
In reference to MS giving info on bugs/exploits to paying customers a guy responds like so. My response is one of his replies.

Now, I am a giant computer user... but sweet hell, there is life outside of computers... life and death situation == a computer bug or exploit? There's some priorities in need of a swift kick in the ass right there, folks.
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Slashthink post of the day! More

Slashthink post of the day!

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  • There was a post a few months ago on an NVidia article declaring that (and I am NOT making this up) "Binary drivers are worse than slavery!".

    Anyway, if the claim about Microsoft is true (and it seems pretty preliminary), there are two explanations that occur to me:

    1) This is a bandwidth issue, and they want to make sure their top customers get patches before throwing the floodgates open.

    2) They've decided to use security patches as a revenue source.

    The first is just stupid -- they are freaking Microsoft, a

    • I agree with your points. I'm not saying its stupid and MS is making a money-grabbing ass of themselves.... but life and death? Some people's brains have been poisoned by CRT waves or something....
      • Lets just hope that these same people use CRTs that are so old they throw off horribly large amounts of radiation and make them sterile...

        jason
    • If anyone that posted on the front had bothered to RTFA, they'd know that MS isn't releasing the patches early, just announcing that there will be a patch.
    • Binary drivers are worse than slavery!

      This reminded me of the episode of Murphy Brown where Stuart Best [imdb.com] is running for Congress. He ends up reciving substantial donatinos from all sorts of random militant & randical groups. They brought him onto the show with two other candidates to discuss the issues, and he kept having to make these insane statements:

      Slavery is a bad word... but welfare is a worse one!

      Are you suggesting we re-institute slavery?!

      "I believe I am. Of course, if someone doesn't wan

  • 911 (Score:2)

    by ryanr ( 30917 ) *
    I believe it was SQLSlammer that took out a 911 exchange. Sure, I think the admins deserve a lot of the blame, but the point is we ARE slowly starting to see example where these things have an impact on life and safety.
  • My wife recently had a baby (at home, but that's a different story). We were taken to the hospital and put in labor and delivery for the process to finish (I'm sure no one wants to know the gory details). They hooked her up to a monitor which, I saw, was running Windows. Sure enough, I sat and watched an error dialog pop up right in front of me. I told the nurse, who paid me little attention execept to walk over, close the program, and restart it.

    In this case it wasn't a life and death situation (I hav

    • FUD. (Score:2)

      by mekkab ( 133181 )
      Yeah, but the BSODs pop up at airports on ARRIVAL/DEPARTURE time displays... hardly life or death!

      The Tower/TRACON/Enroute/Oceanic control systems? Yeah, those don't run on windows. And the surface visualization tools? Only the client viewers run on windows. And those are not safety critical systems, either.

      Most of those systems are closed. Even if they did run windows, there is no chance for virus to survive make your time. ;)

      As for the parts that are open: And a year or two ago during the first big
    • My favorite places I have seen Windows running:


      -Airport (DLL error on one of the arriving/departing flight screens)


      -McDonald's driveup (yesterday in fact) another DLL error


      -Hospital (many many monitors run Windows). That is scary as hell if you figure they might actually be monitoring something you care about (fetal heartbeat for example?)

      • When we were in the hospital with our wee one yes, the fetal heartrate and later respiration//bloodpressure/oxygen levels were diplayed via a windows computer. However, the computer only provided a purdy GUI for the data. The actual machine doing the reading had raw numbers displayed and also had its own alarms.

    • I saw one of those huge ugly java dumps in my gas pump a couple years back, off and on for a couple of months. The good news is, it was only the advertising (it was one of those fancy-schmancy "read our ads while you gas up" pumps at Amoco/BP). Let's just say silly/stupid errors pop up in all kinds of embedded code, and it's not just Winders at fault.

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