> Hard to imagine how many millions of not billions of dollars this one bad update caused.
And even worse, possibly quite a few deaths as well.
I hope (although I will not be holding my breath), that this is the wake-up call we need to realise that we cannot have so much of our critical infrastructure rely on the bloated OS of company known for its buggy, privacy-intruding, crapware riddled software.
I'm old enough to remember the infamous blue-screen-of-death Windows 98 presentation. Bugs exist but that was hardly a glowing endorsement of high-quality software.. This was long ago, yet it is nigh on impossible to believe that the internal company culture has drastically improved since then, with regular high-profile screw-ups reminding us of what is hiding under the thin veneer of corporate of respectability.
Our emergency systems don't need windows, our telephone systems don't need windows, our flight management systems don't need windows, our shop equipment systems don't need windows, our HVAC systems don't need windows, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
Specialized, high-quality OSes with low attack surfaces are what we need to run our systems. Not a generic OS stuffed with legacy code from a time when those applications were not even envisaged.
Keep-it-simple-stupid -KISS-is what we need to go back to, our lives literally depend on it.
With the mutli-billion dollars screw-up that happened yesterday, and an as-of-yet unknown number of deaths, it's impossible to argue that the funds are unavailable to develop such systems. Plurality is what we need, built on top of strong standards for compatibility and interoperability.
OK, but this was a bug in an update of a kernel module that just happened to be deployed on Windows machines. How many OSs are there that can gracefully recover from an error in kernel space? If every machine that crashed had been running, say, Linux and the update had been coded equivalently, nothing would've changed.
Perhaps rather than an indictment on Windows, this is a call to re-evaluate microkernels, at least for critical systems and infrastructure.
And even worse, possibly quite a few deaths as well.
I hope (although I will not be holding my breath), that this is the wake-up call we need to realise that we cannot have so much of our critical infrastructure rely on the bloated OS of company known for its buggy, privacy-intruding, crapware riddled software.
I'm old enough to remember the infamous blue-screen-of-death Windows 98 presentation. Bugs exist but that was hardly a glowing endorsement of high-quality software.. This was long ago, yet it is nigh on impossible to believe that the internal company culture has drastically improved since then, with regular high-profile screw-ups reminding us of what is hiding under the thin veneer of corporate of respectability.
Our emergency systems don't need windows, our telephone systems don't need windows, our flight management systems don't need windows, our shop equipment systems don't need windows, our HVAC systems don't need windows, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
Specialized, high-quality OSes with low attack surfaces are what we need to run our systems. Not a generic OS stuffed with legacy code from a time when those applications were not even envisaged.
Keep-it-simple-stupid -KISS-is what we need to go back to, our lives literally depend on it.
With the mutli-billion dollars screw-up that happened yesterday, and an as-of-yet unknown number of deaths, it's impossible to argue that the funds are unavailable to develop such systems. Plurality is what we need, built on top of strong standards for compatibility and interoperability.