Doug's Mailbox: Third-Party Submissions for Patch Tuesday, More

Here are some of your responses for Doug's idea of third-party patches, like Adobe, being bundled with Microsoft's Patch Tuesdays:

Huge YAY from me! Currently, Adobe requires a "Yes, Install" click and a manual restart for the installation of patches. For many of the users in my office, they just don't take the time to do this and thus the software goes without the update.

 I would be thrilled to have the updates installed automatically so I don't have to worry about the Adobe security holes being open on the workstation computers in the office.

Also, I wouldn't have to go around to every workstation to ensure that the updates have actually been installed.
-Heidi

Yes, please make Adobe patches part of Patch Tuesday. We need an easy way to patch Adobe products and harden our Microsoft OS systems. Pushing patches via WSUS gives us some hope that the Adobe products will be effectively patched.
-Tony

Adding third-party software to Patch Tuesday would help to improve the overall security rating of all those PCs on the internet and I think it may help those PCs from becoming Spam-Bots.
- Raymond

With Microsoft, IBM and Azure all vying for a piece of the cloud computing pie, Doug wants to know who you trust to deliver the best experience. One reader believes there is already a clear choice:

IBM, because I haven't heard any negative press on their entry. And I don't hear about AS400's and OS390's crashing.
- Pat

Finally, here are some more of your responses for your top companies or products that have gone the way of the dodo:

Atari for the Atari 2600. This put game consoles on the map.

The Coleco Adam home computer. It was affectionately known as the "adam bomb" due to poor sales.
- John 

My favorite defunct product is the eight-track. It was practical, robust and had good fidelity.
- Carlos

Your article brought up many memories. The VIC-20 was the first computer I could barely afford in college.

Prior to serving time with Wang systems (more on that later) my career started on Data General equipment. Their OS was phenomenal (this was 1983) but their hardware sucked. If you accidentally kicked one of the support legs, the system would crash. Also they had just released their VS series that was a full 32bit!

I used a Wang VS100 for a year in 1984. The system drove me nuts! It was entirely function key driven. No GUI or command line interface. It had a secret box inside of it that did the word processing. None of the service techs really knew what it did, they just knew not to touch it. 

If I had to choose my favorite dead product, I would vote for the HP3000. We had one at our office when I started in 1985. We went through five different versions over 20 years and the original software written would still run. The product line is dead now but there are still people using it.
-Roger

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Posted by Doug Barney on March 24, 2010