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

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

#361
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7 If Microsoft had really wanted to avoid that, they'd have made Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants, and treat the installbase as a testbed for forced updates that could easily (and have) render machines ino…

> Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants Can people stop spreading this meme? Worst case, anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware. > Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user It is, regular people around me love it. > and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. I (and many) do, if only because it is immensely better than sticking to Win7 whose non-…

The downvotes are pouring because you suggested that telemetry shipped by Microsoft being spyware is a "meme". This is seen as both arrogant and wrong at the same time - the best combination to collect downvotes.

(I didn't downvote you but I think you are very wrong).

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

#362

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.

IF you have enough time to push an update that causes people's computers to shut down and install a new operating system in the middle of a Skype call, then you have enough time to fix that glaring problem.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, Linux does not do this, and it is an operating system.

Microsoft restarts because updates are in files that are "locked" and can't be switched-out until the system is rebooted. After you install the update, but before you reboot, your system is still running the old known-buggy code. Linux doesn't lock files; instead it creates in-memory copies of them. So the updater can update the on-disk version without any troubles. But if you think about it, it has the exact same pr…

> But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code.

This has not been true for some time, and not in any mainstream distributions currently that come to mind.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The problem with this lifecycle assumption is that there is no way to opt out. I have a "metro" style SSH application, and windows regularly decides it should close it, which kills my active SSH sessions. I understand that they removed the ability to opt-out to force developers to change to a more appropriate model, but there are cases where a task cannot be suspended (because, for example, it's interacting with anot…

You can opt out by creating a background process. The thing that makes that part complicated is that there is a background process lifecycle to learn (including interactions between a UI process and background process). Also, Windows wants a bit more of an explicit knowledge than say classic Win32 about what the background process is for so it can best manage it.

The support for background processes continues to improve. Windows 10, for instance, now supports a "single instance" background processing model where background processes can be seen as an invocation of the UI app (if already running) and vice versa (the UI app is presented as an invocation to the background process if that is already running) with hand-offs from one to the other, simplifying the programming of some of the interactions between background and UI for some apps.

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

#365
post #63

I visited my parents last weekend. My dad says his laptop automatically updated to Windows 10 a month ago and since then he was unable to use the internet (so basically the machine). He was PO'ed. He was tricked into installing it because Microsoft changed the behavior of the upgrade prompt. You can choose "Upgrade now" or "Not now, upgrade later". "Not now, upgrade later" use to behave like and mean "Ask me again la…

Same here. My mother called me in tears because she was tricked into installing Windows 10 on her PC and she can no longer sync photos from her camera.

English is not my first language, so I am curious. When you say 'in tears' are you using some metaphor or was she actually crying?

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft restarts because updates are in files that are "locked" and can't be switched-out until the system is rebooted. After you install the update, but before you reboot, your system is still running the old known-buggy code. Linux doesn't lock files; instead it creates in-memory copies of them. So the updater can update the on-disk version without any troubles. But if you think about it, it has the exact same pr…

> But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code. This has not been true for some time, and not in any mainstream distributions currently that come to mind.

How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7 If Microsoft had really wanted to avoid that, they'd have made Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants, and treat the installbase as a testbed for forced updates that could easily (and have) render machines ino…

End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not. The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office back in 2007 was a huge improvement over the mess of dialogs, toolbars and menus they had before by every metric. People still bitch about it, almost a decade later. The people who bitch about it benefit as much as everybody else from the increased usability, bu…

Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow (https://xkcd.com/1172/), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse.

You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. Nowadays I can't find the more advanced stuff I know that worked in Excel and Word in the past. Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? I don't know, but the interface doesn't allow me to find out.

People bitched at Chrome because removing "http" was seen as a first step of removing the address bar altogether, dumbing down both the browser and peoples' perception of the Internet. The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Sure, it may be good for the quarterly sales report, but it's disastrous for the future of technology.

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

#368
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants Can people stop spreading this meme? Worst case, anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware. > Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user It is, regular people around me love it. > and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. I (and many) do, if only because it is immensely better than sticking to Win7 whose non-…

The downvotes are pouring because you suggested that telemetry shipped by Microsoft being spyware is a "meme". This is seen as both arrogant and wrong at the same time - the best combination to collect downvotes. (I didn't downvote you but I think you are very wrong).

Isn't it true that originally Win10 previews logged a lot of things, but M$ pretty much stopped doing most of that with the release versions of Windows 10? I.e. people seem to be criticizing present Windows 10 by what it was before it was officially recommended for general population.

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

#369

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…

My parents media center pc did a forced upgrade despite the onboard graphics being unsupported. The result was an unusable output. After a few hours attempting to get the drivers to work until downgraded. Windows is still asking me to upgrade!

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

#370
I tried Windows 10, spent 18 hours tweaking and fine tuning until I went too far with disabling the hidden telemetry services (yes W10 has hidden services that you will never see in the MMC but run with an automatic trigger). Went afk which was apparently the trigger condition, two hours later I find my laptop completely locked and unresponsive burning the cpu in some infinite loop.

Have to give them credit tho, the telemetry that cannot be disabled does not bypass the software firewall in case you're blocking the ports, at least not from what I have learned in the span of two days.

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