Microsoft Black Tuesday Patches Bring Blue Screens of Death 179
snydeq (1272828) writes "Two of Microsoft's kernel-mode driver updates — which often cause problems — are triggering a BSOD error message on some Windows systems, InfoWorld reports. 'Details at this point are sparse, but it looks like three different patches from this week's Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens with a Stop 0x50 error on some systems. If you're hitting a BSOD, you can help diagnose the problem (and perhaps prod Microsoft to find a solution) by adding your voice to the Microsoft Answers Forum thread on the subject.'"
Laugh.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone right now is looking at that error and figuring out how to exploit it.
Re:I just ran an update and don't have any problem (Score:2, Interesting)
On my private machines, I have been using Linux and *BSD for more than ten years, and I only once had a problem with an update (and that was on a Gentoo box that had not been updated for more than a year - in other words, it was to be expected). About one and a half years ago, I started working as a sysadmin at a Windows shop, and I have been enraged, shocked, scared, and surprised more or less continuously ever since.
On the one hand, you want to keep your systems up to date. On the other hand, installing updates on Windows is like Russian roulette with five out of six chambers loaded. I am constantly torn between my deply ingrained reflex, acquired on Linux/BSD, to install any update as soon as it becomes available, and painful experiences I've had on Windows.
Can't Microsoft just get their act together and do some freaking *TESTING* before shoveling their crap out of the door, instead of having their customers do it for them?
Re:The suck, it burns .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the criticism isn't so much that they're too responsive to consumers or not -- they obviously listen. The criticism is that there are so many holes to begin with and that their attempts to fix things that are obviously broken -- things that their competitors seem to be able to make work just fine -- often don't work or cause other problems. Knowing the Microsoft engineering culture, their stuff is mostly a patchwork of different groups not talking to each other. In the Windows API, there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!
When you're disorganized like that in a giant company with a giant piece of software, it's easy to see how bugs can get out of hand.