Patches in August? Almost as dangerous as a visit to your local casualty.
Many moons ago I worked in the NHS. It was an annual hoot to see the newly qualified medics come in each August for their brief stint as house officers. New and shiny they would walk the corridors of the hospital tending the sick and injured, who in turn were scared witless as this newly qualified medic plied their trade.
What has this got to do with application patches? Well some of you may be aware of the recent issues with Microsoft patches. The quality of one or two is best described as rubbish. Patch (MS06-042), once applied, resulted in a number of machines crashing and lit up the patching news groups as we await Microsoft to release a hot fix.
Sources tell me that the reason for this is that the annual Microsoft musical chairs occurs around this time of year where employees have been reviewed and are looking to move on or up in the organisation. Combine this with the Labour Day holidays and you end up with a bunch of techies wanting to ship patches as quickly as possible so they can go on vacation and prepare for their new job without fear of an immanent review from their boss.
And of course the new guys coming in, just like our medics, are still trying to find their feet. End result is mistakes like this. Scary eh?
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