Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade • Hacker News Board

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#301

Post by sametmax » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #223

nitrogen wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter the dialog box, closing it should always mean "do nothing and go back to where I was before", not "do your sneaky crap later when I'm asleep or busy". Anything else is a malignant antipattern.

Don't Chrome and Firefox do this by default now? Automatically download an update in the background and install it without asking when you close the browser window?

Do not compare an a paid OS I run a business on which upgrade one entire version, force rebooting, freezing my machine and introducing incompatibilities and spywares with an free opensource browser that I can merely swap with any competitor at a click of a button in my start menu.

I don't run my main source of income on Firefox or Android. I didn't pay a licence for a browser or a phone OS. I can't find a quick alternative as quickly for my dev laptop as I can for those.

Hopefully I got a dual boot and make sure I don't boot Windows anymore, otherwise it would be really dangerous, as I could be giving a training and suddenly get my machine locked for some undesired upgrade in from of my customers.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#302

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

Decade wrote: post #182

WorldMaker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing here is that Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 all improved the Windows Update restart timing logic and made it more transparent. (There's a section that states "A restart is planned, Windows has determined the most likely idle time to try the restart is 3:43am" now, for instance.) In this case it's Windows 7's Restart logic that is old/bad (and long has been), not Windows 10, but Windows 10 of course is ge…

In my opinion, there is never a good time to restart. That is simply an artifact of the sad historical circumstances that led to the current state of operating systems. I don’t particularly enjoy waking up to all my programs are closed because Windows decided that tonight was the night that it restarted. It’s slightly better on MacOS, where programs using MacOS-specific APIs can restore their state on startup, but th…

One of the things I thought Windows 8 did really right was trying to instill into applications the lifecycle that they could be force closed/rebooted at any time and should be good at saving and restoring state across application starts. This is good beyond just system restarts and good in general to know that applications would typically come back to where you left off after the system losing connectivity or going to sleep or unloading an application to save memory/CPU while you aren't actively using it.

The complaints about this lifecycle model from app developers is that is hard to program for. Windows 8 was also strict enough forcing this lifecycle (closing out applications sometimes seconds after minimizing and attempting to restore them quickly on window restore) that it showed how bad developers can be at programming hard things like proper app lifecycle management, so they begged Windows to be less strict about it.

(That was one of the magic things about Windows 8 that Windows 10 doesn't quite replicate: minimizing a properly built application and watching the application's memory and CPU usage quickly drop to zero.)

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#303

Post by notalaser » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

fabianhjr wrote: post #269

notalaser wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpectedly enough...) Fedora services that I've managed to drag along two and, respectively, three major releases. On the other hand, I can't remember ever managing to get a clean upgrade on Ubuntu after 8.04 or so. My latest attempt has been miserable, I spent hal…

> many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. You might want to try a rolling release distro, something like Antergos (Arch + Tweaks)

I used Gentoo for a very long time (2005-ish to 2009 or so) and tried Arch, too, both back then (after I, uh, toasted a power supply compiling packages for five days straight) and more recently, about a year ago. It's a very good approach, but far too high-maintenance for my taste. During my (latest) short stint with Arch, I became a walking bug tracker. Stick to Adwaita because everything else breaks, don't do that in a KDE app because it crashes, try to reboot my computer only to find out it's stuck in a loop because some process can't notify some other process through D-Bus...

There's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on Debian, either, but at least it's the same stuff for about a year or so.

Nowadays I get to write Linux software at work so I get all the bleeding-edge stuff there, and dealing with the latest and greatest breakage is part of my everyday job. I have no desire to do it at home, too.

Edit: plus, to put it bluntly, it's really no longer fun. When I said goodbye to Windows, back in nineteen-ninety-something, I did it to get away from the mind-boggling complexity and uncustomizable blackbox blurb on my hard drive.

Nowadays, it's an order of magnitude more complex; some of it is unwarranted and much of it just isn't reliable. Windows' and OS X's isn't, either, but at least it's nicely tucked away behind an interface that works, so you're not exposed to the crap underneath. I spend a lot more time wrestling with my computer than I'd like to.

I can mostly navigate through this whole maze of thisandthatkit and systemd-everything, largely because I'm exposed to it for eight hours a day, whether I want it or not, and have seen it being developed. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I have a feeling I'm going to call it quits one day.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#304

Post by Santosh83 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

As far as I'm concerned the worst aspect of Windows 10 are the forced updates for "unmetered" Internet connection users. As it happens, many of us have wired connections that we pay through the nose for, and as long as MS won't give me an option to control the download of potentially massive updates, I'll continue sticking to my current 8.1. If this is back-ported to 8.1, I'll wipe my last install of Windows and go full-time Linux. MS has no business Forcing me to download stuff that I end-up paying for. The same goes for telemetry that will also presumably consume some fraction of my paid-for bandwidth.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#305

Post by psook » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #216

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an excuse. Microsoft can and has been pushing updates to 7 to enable the constant upgrade nagging. They've even been continually pushing new updates that get more and more naggy. There is nothing preventing them from including an update that makes 7's restart logic less sadistic, but they've chosen not to do that.

Can you explain to me why Microsoft should expend time and effort to encourage behavior (staying on Windows 7) that increases their costs and increases fragility in their ecosystem? I'm not sympathetic to the dark patterns they use to push people to upgrade, but I'm 100% onboard with not pushing improvements to an older operating system.

Because it breaks screenreaders for the blind and it doesn't offer a solution to that.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#306

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #304

As far as I'm concerned the worst aspect of Windows 10 are the forced updates for "unmetered" Internet connection users. As it happens, many of us have wired connections that we pay through the nose for, and as long as MS won't give me an option to control the download of potentially massive updates, I'll continue sticking to my current 8.1. If this is back-ported to 8.1, I'll wipe my last install of Windows and go f…

The metered/non-metered distinction is reasonable, and the behavior that results from it defensible, but the assumption that wired (Ethernet) LAN connections are unmetered is absolutely indefensible, for a number of reasons:

1) Wired WAN connections are, in fact, quite often quota-limited (perhaps with a generous cap, but still limited).

2) A Wired LAN connection may backed by a wireless WAN connection.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#307

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:08 PM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #42

Guest98123 wrote: post #19

A few days ago I was visiting family, and my Mom was online Skyping relatives on her Windows 7 PC. She comes running into the other room and says her PC just restarted while she was talking, and now it says something about configuring Windows 10, even though she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade. So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait…

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm with you 100% on having the explicit opportunity to opt out of updates like this. That said, a large swath of Windows users are not nearly as technically literate as you and your mother are, and automatically helping people forward (if for nothing else, security fixes and ongoing support) is a Good Thing in my book (so long as it's free, and it is). There is no doubt there are co…

With this attitude, we might as well not even have personal computers. You're calling for the return of the mainframe priesthood, essentially.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#308

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #292

marssaxman wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota doesn't get to come to your house and tow your Corolla away when they think you ought to move on. You get to decide that: it's your car, and it's your choice. If Toyota feels so embarrassed by the fact that you are driving your Corolla that they want to spend some money trying to convince you to replace it, they can certainly make you a trade-in offer. But maybe you like your Corolla, or you don't feel like de…

If they offered me a 2016 Corolla in trade for a 2002 Corolla, I'd probably do it. edit: If they had a recall/replacement on the car because it was unsafe for other drivers on the road, people would probably agree as well.

Key point being, "offered."

Microsoft is making an offer that most non-technical users can't refuse. That's not ethical. The ends don't justify the means.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#309

Post by soundwave106 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #227

arximboldi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Holding back the industry" No! I think we, the software industry, are very irresponsible when it comes to __planned obsolescence__ [1]. Computers from 10 years ago are very capable of doing most things common users want to do nowadays. However, many modern operating systems and applications make these computers unusable. We are forcing users to upgrade software, and because of all the layers of cruft accumulated in…

Upgrading software isn't (or shouldn't be) planned obsolescence. There's nothing inherent about software that means throwing away hardware. The only reason a Windows 7 machine wouldn't be able to run Windows 10 is if the hardware maker chose to not update their drivers, and at some point you have to stop blaming Microsoft for that. There is no such thing as planned obsolescence when it comes to software. "Throwing aw…

Upgrades aren't always entirely painless and without cost.

If the UI significantly changes, for instance, there will be a time investment needed to re-learn what you need to get work done. (This was a particularly nasty issue for Windows 8, not quite as bad for 10 but there are a few changes for sure.)

If the upgrade fails in any way, there may be significant time spent getting the computer back on-line. Sometimes this takes a very long time.

Software upgrades may actually introduce bugs. In the worst case scenario, some OS software upgrades have actually "bricked" devices (see: Apple iOS 9.3.2). These further impact productivity / take time to work around.

Some very old legacy programs may not work at all. It takes time to implement a new solution for the problem in a new tool. (This isn't a big issue for 7 to 10 from what I've heard, but you do hear this about other upgrades in the past.)

This cost in time is not nothing. If there is no real net benefit, it could end up being a big waste.

Even if people want to upgrade, IMHO the way Microsoft is pushing out the upgrade is quite bad. Usually in the enterprise world, IT departments tend to test new OS releases (and even patch updates) to make sure everything works, before rolling out the updates in the wild. They don't want a patch to break some mission critical software. The cost of that could be huge in some cases.

Even for Windows 7 retail to Windows 10 retail, I could see many people preferring to be cautious. Perhaps they are wanting to wait for a slightly more stable OS (usually the first release of a Windows version is a bit buggy). Some people also might want to test things out first, to make sure there are no problems. Of course there's those that don't want to update because change bad, but I don't think that's all cases.

Furthermore, a fair bit of Windows retail I'm sure is businesses - these tend to be even more cautious than overall consumers. A software update going wrong could cost them money, after all, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I honestly don't think the "rolling updates" model being pushed works for enterprise... even small ones.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#310

Post by redthrowaway » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:15 PM UTC

Guest98123 wrote: post #19

A few days ago I was visiting family, and my Mom was online Skyping relatives on her Windows 7 PC. She comes running into the other room and says her PC just restarted while she was talking, and now it says something about configuring Windows 10, even though she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade. So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait…

It happened to a DJ at a club I was at about a month ago. Middle of his set, his Surface Pro decides it's a great time to restart and "upgrade" to Windows 10.

Somebody at Microsoft seriously needs to be fired for that "feature".