Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Singing the Update Blues

analysis
Feb 8, 20081 min

Today it was Firefox. Yesterday it was QuickTime. Next Tuesday it'll be Windows, Office, and Internet Exporer. I'm talking about critical bug fixes. It's worse for me than for a lot of people because I personally have 6 Windows computers and a bunch of Windows Virtual PCs that I have to keep up-to-date for software testing. Now, I used to think this was just a Windows issue. Then I started reviewing Linux system

Today it was Firefox. Yesterday it was QuickTime. Next Tuesday it’ll be Windows, Office, and Internet Exporer.

I’m talking about critical bug fixes. It’s worse for me than for a lot of people because I personally have 6 Windows computers and a bunch of Windows Virtual PCs that I have to keep up-to-date for software testing.

Now, I used to think this was just a Windows issue. Then I started reviewing Linux systems: Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, SuSE, Xandros, and so on. Every one of those systems needs frequent critical bug fixes, and most of them need more of them than Windows XP. Fedora may well be the worst distro I have for the number of critical bug fixes that need to be installed, but maybe that makes it the most secure day-to-day: I don’t know.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to get any real work done if you spend all your time updating your computers.

I’m singing the blues about this, but the words aren’t suitable for publication. Do you have a verse to offer on the subject that could be printed in a family magazine?

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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