News Windows XP gets first post-EOL security patch

There actually is a mathematical formula that predicts the number of bugs that will be in a program depending on its size and complexity. Turns out humans are consistently fallible.

I don't know how old you are, and therefore if you ever used a PC in the MS-DOS days in a meaningful way. But I start to long for those days. The OS was much simpler then, and incredibly compact and almost free of bugs and vulnerabilities. And only a serious computer geek could use them, because there was no plug and play, no automatic driver setup, no memory management to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even a standard for soundcards, joysticks or CD-ROMs. Windows has made PCs almost idiot-proof simple, and it will run on practically any PC, in any of millions of configurations and combinations of dodgy cheap Taiwanese knock-off hardware. It is, frankly, a programming tour de force. I'm amazed it works at all.

It was selling stuff with a 15% failure rate. Good thing people don't remember those days, eh?

 

Nexxo. I am fond of the days with green screen floppy computers from macintosh and IBM, our 486 dx2 66 and playing skyroads. It is an amazing amount of complexity with an almost infinite combination of hardware set ups. Due to the sheer size and complexity of an OS there's always many flaws that can never be found until it gets real world use. It seems that MS is more willing to release a shiny new OS with a huge amount of likely known issues. I can understand why people are reluctant to leave something that is stable and working well to go play "beta tester" per say.

 

There is no other way to know the issues than to subject the OS to real world conditions, where multiple creative minds will hack it for years trying to find vulnerabilities. If you want only a 100% secure OS to be released, you'll wait forever.

Keep in mind that OSX and Linux are just as vulnerable. But they are not as widely used, hence not as widely targeted. Microsoft is held to a higher standard.

 

That's why IMHO it's better to wait and let others be the early adopters.
Microsoft isn't held to higher standards, they just have a higher profile.

 

My dad does. Kept bringing it up when I bought my phone and the kitchen TV.

 

I remember it to their hi fi equipment was total crap

 

Say what? <cough>MS-DOS 4</cough>