Microsoft Takes a 'Patch Tuesday' Break

Phill0 submitted a ZD story about Microsoft's week off which says "Microsoft has no new security updates planned for Tuesday, despite at least five zero-day vulnerabilities that are waiting to be fixed. The patch break could be a welcome respite for IT managers still busy testing the dozen fixes Microsoft released last month. Also, many IT pros may be occupied with the switch to daylight saving time, which at the behest of Congress, is happening three weeks earlier this year. "

Re:Zero Day

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, I mean, screw it. Who cares about security vulnerabilities, viruses and spyware? If we did, none of us would be using Windows, that's for sure... ;)

Re:DST

[Anonymous Coward]

How much energy do they think we will save by moving up DST 3 weeks?

Simple answer: 100,000 barrels of oil daily. [foxnews.com]

How much economic loss will be caused by companies all over the place busting their ass trying to get all kinds of systems pathced (sic) and working right...?

It's already law. If you don't like it, too bad.

Idiot congresspeople.

Harsh truth: you're no match for lobbyists.

Sorry buddy, it is a loss

[alexhmit01]

You're illustrating the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org], which assumes that since money for repairs is spent somewhere, it isn't lost and is entirely stimulative.

The problem with that is that the opportunity cost of not having that money elsewhere. Of course money never vanishes, it recirculates. If the $1 spent on Y2K7 compliance isn't spent there, it is spent elsewere to earn a return, or as profits to be retained and reinvested or given to shareholders as dividends. All involved would no doubt prefer to spent the money A) increasing widget production, B) developing a new widget, or C) reinvesting it in a profitable opportunity elsewhere. None would choose to spend it D) on updating DST calculations.

Now, when an economy is in a depression or deep recession, sometimes their is a stimulative effect of bad spending (hence the Keynesian stimulation of deficit spending), because the economic loss of unemployed resources is such that the economy may get a lift from spending to bring it out of the depression... that's how WWII ended the great depression... in a non depressed economy, few would argue that the best use of scare resources is to blow up the cities of other countries and send a chunk of your workforce to go into combat half a world away, but in a depression, reducing unemployment through war spending and by removing conscripts from the potential labor force may be stimulative enough to get the economy growing.

However, right now, this isn't economically beneficial. That said, I can't wait for the extra hour of sunshine Monday night!

Alex

Re:DST (it's about the money)

[wasabikev]

It's not about energy, regrdless of the name of the bill it was in, it's about money- more specfically, commerce. Not as many people go shopping when it's dark out. That downtown just isn't as much fun to walk around when it's dark out. Conversely, when it's still light out (after work) people are more likely to go out and... that's right, spend money shopping. Bean counters figured out that the economy will generate [x] more dollars a year with an extra hour of daylight. That's tax revenue folks.... the retail sector wins, government coffers win, the only ones that gets hosed are those of us with toddlers trying to adjust thier bedtimes 1 hour. =P

I don't understand this

[lbschenkel]

I really don't understand this. All software should support arbitrary dates for DST start and end.

I am from Brazil and here we don't have fixed dates for DST. The stupid government change them every year. But at least every single piece of software produced here supports changing the DST period. You shouldn't have to patch anything but just change some configuration file (ok, changing the configuration file is still patching, but you got my point). How hard is this?

And probably most of those new patches *still* have hardcoded dates for the new DST period. So if it ever changes this whole mess happen again. Sigh... Won't they ever learn? Y2K, anyone?