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Honest question: Would it be possible for a software company, especially one of Microsoft's magnitude, to produce a bug that would be "not ok" in your book. Is

by scbrg 8y ago

Honest question: Would it be possible for a software company, especially one of Microsoft's magnitude, to produce a bug that would be "not ok" in your book. Is there any kind of technical problem a software package could cause that would make you react in a way that wasn't "oh, that's ok, everybody makes mistakes." I mean, breaking other installed software and potentially making the system unbootable is obviously not severe enough. What would be?

ksk 8y ago
Its probably that people think its unfair to single out Microsoft when other developers doing the exact same thing and worse. Sure MS is a juicier target and you get more publicity, and they do make it easy to poke fun at themselves. Titles like "Linux foundation's failed attempt at releasing Linux" for every single Linux security bug would probably not work so well. On a design note, maybe its time to not require full root privileges to install/copy some files. I think Windows did the right thing, and now even the admin user cannot delete critical OS components.
peterwwillis 8y ago
No. edit Except for critical systems like medical devices, power plants, car ECUs, etc. I expect due diligence for those, and not doing so would make me upset. A technical problem is a technical problem. I'm not going to get mad at someone for unintentionally introducing a technical problem. People make mistakes. Once we learn from those mistakes, we can avoid making them in the future. We may still make the same mistake again, though, because we're humans! Getting angry at people for making mistakes is emotional garbage and not productive. As I mentioned in another comment, even Linux distributions themselves will crash systems, cause data corruption, and actually brick hardware with their updates. If the distro itself can cause these problems, surely I can forgive a random dev from a completely different system for making a crappy installer for an obscure programming language. If, OTOH, you ship an update that it is demonstrable that you were fully aware would brick a system, then I will get out my pitchfork and torch.

by scbrg 8y ago

ksk 8y ago

Its probably that people think its unfair to single out Microsoft when other developers doing the exact same thing and worse. Sure MS is a juicier target and you get more publicity, and they do make it easy to poke fun at themselves. Titles like "Linux foundation's failed attempt at releasing Linux" for every single Linux security bug would probably not work so well. On a design note, maybe its time to not require full root privileges to install/copy some files. I think Windows did the right thing, and now even the admin user cannot delete critical OS components.

peterwwillis 8y ago

No. edit Except for critical systems like medical devices, power plants, car ECUs, etc. I expect due diligence for those, and not doing so would make me upset. A technical problem is a technical problem. I'm not going to get mad at someone for unintentionally introducing a technical problem. People make mistakes. Once we learn from those mistakes, we can avoid making them in the future. We may still make the same mistake again, though, because we're humans! Getting angry at people for making mistakes is emotional garbage and not productive. As I mentioned in another comment, even Linux distributions themselves will crash systems, cause data corruption, and actually brick hardware with their updates. If the distro itself can cause these problems, surely I can forgive a random dev from a completely different system for making a crappy installer for an obscure programming language. If, OTOH, you ship an update that it is demonstrable that you were fully aware would brick a system, then I will get out my pitchfork and torch.