I've been thinking a bit about virtualization recently (as in hardware virtualization through software, ala VMWare). It's great, wonderful, solves all kinds of problems.
But I do hope that any enterprise using a bunch of virtual machines has automatic downloading of patches enabled, and keeps the patches available for a long time. Because each of those snapshots are frozen in time, and when you bring them up, they are x months (or years if they are archives of particular development systems or customer images for troubleshooting).
There's a ton of benefits to developers by having a large library of snapshots of systems in various states. There's just some extra thought required in how to handle all those library images securely, since in one way they are a lot like ticking timebombs.
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