Microsoft Patents On-The-Fly Software Updates
If you like silent updates, you are going to love this idea. Instant updates that do not require your software to be restarted.
It is not exactly a new idea and took Microsoft almost eight years to get patent approval. Microsoft filed the patent already back in September of 2004 and described its approach to apply security patches to software that does not force a system to be shut down. The patent is limited to server environments in which only some instances of a software are updated while others remain unaffected and enable a system to remain fully available - which is an especially critical feature in a global organization, which relies on maximum uptime of their servers.
However, the same idea is even more interesting in a cloud server and client environment, in which your only client software may be a browser or dedicated apps. There is no reason to believe that security patches could not be applied on-the-fly in such scenarios as well and even in web browsers that use the required structures of certain instances that can be updated without compromising the overall functionality of the software. Silent updates are currently only fully available on Google Chrome (which, however, requires a restart after the update). Microsoft is gradually rolling out a similar feature set for IE and Mozilla is expected to have it fully available in Firefox 13 or 14 later this year.
It appears that we have grown accustomed to forced, silent updates. Removing the restart requirement would be another huge step for usability, especially in cloud computing scenarios.

You need to update to an enterprise version of Linux and you can update the Linux kernel without need of reboot.
On the lol side, the script that i run to enter a generic ticket, mistakenly entered around 20 tickets into various queues.
You need to update to an enterprise version of Linux and you can update the Linux kernel without need of reboot.
Based off my ~2.5 years of experience with Win7 x64, I only have to reboot my computer from system updates maybe once every other week. Seems acceptable to me
I had a machine suddenly freeze, then on reboot, the drive was trashed. The only thing my recovery tools could get were Akamai files, so it may have been a bad "silent update" or it may not, but it was definitely annoying.
"You haz update!"
-Delay-
"You haz update!"
-Delay, then walks away from computer to do something else-
"You haz update, but now it's only a 15 minute delay or auto-restart regardless of what you were doing!"
-Auto restart, with a two page English essay that hadn't been saved yet-
-A person ends up washing his tongue with soap after his parents overheard him dropping the F-bomb-
It is only hindering progress and does nothing to protect small business. In fact, big business has found all the loop holes to kill competition. Something needs to be done...
Yeah, this needs to stop as well. Not all of us are 5 or 80 years old. We know updates are important, but sometimes getting work done on time is more important. Let us delay it indefinitely if we choose.
actually on ubuntu (the user friendly linux distro) I have to restart after kernel updates
so you use a document editor without autosave, you deserve that