Rare critical Word vuln is the star of December Patch Tuesday Microsoft is planning to release seven bulletins next Tuesday, five of which tackle critical vulnerabilities, as part of its final Patch Tuesday update of 2012. All currently supported operating systems (including Windows 8 and Windows RT) will need patching. The updates feature critical updates for Redmond's IE 9 and IE 10 …
Jumped from 34% to 42% in fact.
In reality it means little as it tells us nothing about how many vulnerabilities there are in a fully patched install (could be none, could be millions, if we knew, they'd be fixing them!). That extra one they found this year could be the last (though I doubt it). Stats really are meaningless in this area, unless your aim is to say "We fix things once we know they're broken"
...from what I hear. I imagine at some point the corporates - who seem to be skipping Win8 for the most part - will bitch and moan enough to get one.
Or not... I don't think Microsoft wants 7 to be the next XP. IIRC, a Service Pack release restarts the support lifespan clock.
Microsoft support policy for service packs:
"Support ends 24 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first."
Windows 7 is supported until 2020, which is about 2 years less than XP support. The original mainstream support for XP was until 2006 but that was extended to 2009 because Vista was late to the party and the reasoning was that companies would - quite reasonably - wait for SP1, and the XP support should overlap until that SP1.
Yet there are oddly similar patches coming out for Office x86 and Office RT.
I'm pretty sure there's Program Manager buried somewhere in Win RT. When will the source code reach critical mass? (When the Visual Sourcesafe database corrupts of course.)
Probably not, Program Manager bought it with the upgrade to Windows XP SP2.
And just to go a bit off topic, grouping your different types of program into groups (with the same program being available in multiple groups if you wanted) was actually a pretty nice way of working. Certainly nicer than the daft 'everything on the one desktop' model they adopted with Windows 95- in fact it was revived by some of the custom ROMs for Windows Mobile 5 (and then copied by Android) doing exactly that with it's home pages idea.
As I've said before here: Writing something from scratch, based on specification documents, can mean that you end up with the same bugs in pre-rewrite and post-rewrite versions of the code, because the specification was where the problem originated.
I speak as someone who specifies software as a living - I research systems and then specify how I want the software my company makes to interact with that software that we interact with. We work on software that runs on Windows, Linux and UNIXes and quite often see the same problems on all OSes, when the problem is my specification.
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