Microsoft's patchwork falls apart … AGAIN! One of the patches Microsoft released this month, KB2920732, has been withdrawn because it breaks PowerPoint. The patch was billed as improving the stability of PowerPoint 2013 in a handful of ways, most pertaining to video playback. But once installed, the patch improved nothing, at least for the many users who reported that …
"The idea was that into the first ship, the 'A' ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or 'C' ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B' ship - that's us - would go everyone else, the middlemen you see."
Ooh, you mean I might escape "Death by Powerpoint" at that overly long, semi-necessary Power Point Slide reading session called a Weekly Strategy Meeting on Monday?
I vote we give Microsoft a bonus every time they make people talk from outlined notes and actually give shortened, hopefully content rich presentations, not those graphically literate fluff sessions we've come to know and hate.
C'mon Microsoft, you were showing great promise with your 2992611, a patch so insidious that like some of the greatest fuckups, waited for a while before pouncing and taking servers down wholesale.
Now you've regressed to just PowerPoint? Aw, c'mon MS, we expect far bigger disasters than just this. Give us something that will require us underworked and overpaid engineers something to deal with at 3AM on a Sunday morning...
Perhaps your QA department is still too large - might want to slim that down. Good to see that you cut out the early warning system unless we're willing to pay beaucoup dollars for it. Wise move, can't be having anyone know in advance what might be coming. You might want to also change Windows Update to force these patches through the moment they're released no questions asked - can't be too careful you know...
Perhaps you should cut down the patch writing department and, I dunno, one under-worked playful type who'll really do a number on your software.
I never thought I'd say this, but things seemed to be better when Steveyboy was in charge...
Reportedly fixes a problem related to rendering of TrueType fonts that is exploitable by embedded fonts in websites (at least that's what I infer from MS's information), which is well and good except that certain fonts -- Arial and Courier New in my observation, Times New Roman also reported -- do not get rendered properly and look like I am seeing the internet through an old 640x480 monitor. No, this is not going to halt users in their tracks, but tracking down what exactly happened, rounding up OpenType fonts, and re-setting my browsers and text editors to use these as defaults (which will work as long as I don't visit any websites with a "font-face=arial" tag -- what's the likelihood of that?) until Microsoft issues a fix with the next update was not how I envisioned spending Saint Val's. Not the worst that could have happened given what other patches and updates have done, though.
It's also not good for the rest of us as decreased confidence in Redmond's updates may mean some admins delay patches.
I would think that increasing the number of admins who delay installing patches in production until they have been properly vetted in a test environment would be a good thing, though this is not the way I would go about making that happen.
Some of the security patches still bork Active-X controls within Office documents and they're still out there...
The problems of the patches now outweigh the benefits here and each time some Windows $HIGH_NUM fanboi goes on about the disadvantages of earlier versions of this and that not getting patches it leaves me more and more bemused.
The last patch Tuesday had a shed load of Office patches.
After they were duly applied, suddenly all my 'Print To' was going to OneNote. Not that I'd ever used it.
All my Default Language settings in Word were back to US English (not really English if you ask me). The print size was US Letter (WTF).
Why do you mess up with the customisations like this? Come on, we deserve a good reason.
Not impressed at all.
Come on Microsoft you really have to do better.
Hence the Fail Icon.
"For example, working on a 300 page Word document for 3 hrs, and then hitting "Save",..."
Even if I agree with the pending "OS in real-time" problem at hand... I'd have to say "haven't you've been there before?" and "If so, whyTF are you still keeping single documents even close to the 300 page range?"... and... "Three hours without hitting the save button?".
Have a pint and think about what *you have(n't) done.
We had KB3013455 drop in to cause all sorts of production issues with the wacky font. Funny thing is we had the problem years earlier and made sure we blocked that one from loading. E-Mail was unreadable for some users and some users sent unreadable emails to customers. So they basically took an old patch we blocked and updated it to this year.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-windows_update/kb3013455-ms15-010-causes-font-corruption/8640d38d-19bd-46b6-9af0-6213c05107d3
This is what happens when you rush regression testing to meet externally imposed arbitrary 90 day deadlines.
We can work fast, or we can work accurate.
I've never worked for MS, but this has been true in every organization I've ever worked in.
And big organizations take a lot of time just to coordinate changes to system AA with changes to system ZZ.
90 day deadlines are a receipt for disaster. 180 day deadlines might be possible.
Unless of course if there is an exploit widespread in the wild, in which case errors may be justified in the name of security.
This is what happens when you rush regression testing to meet externally imposed arbitrary 90 day deadlines.
We can work fast, or we can work accurate.
...And these 90 day deadlines apparently mean tweaking default values in Muffice is priority #1 and needs to be rolled out stat.
Context: It IS important.
The context being: The codebase is shit and the regression test set is arbitrary and possibly absent. And our dev skillset is arbitrary too. Prima donnas, freshmen and people miscommunicating with their navels trying to deal with arbitrary complexit injected by marketrdroid demands I suppose.
In any normal industry lawyers would be crawling up your arse. And this will happen sooner or later.
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