Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 451 posts

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

#431

Post by blakeyrat »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #367
blakeyrat wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feat…

> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability

That is simply not true.

In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use.

> and reduced the number of features available.

Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature".

Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced.

> Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator?

You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why".

> The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get.

Seriously?

How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.

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

#432

Post by blakeyrat »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #427
blakeyrat wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so critical, why hadn't anybody turned off auto-updates? This problem isn't new with Windows 10. It could have just as easily upgrade to a new Windows 7 patch which broke the product.

Do you want the real answer? Every grantee and science group is different, and builds their boxes back in the States with varying levels of IT competence. Being a wizard in geothermal imaging doesn't mean you're a wizard in building Windows 10 boxes. So there's all these varying groups (we support over 20 different science groups on our station alone) building their custom boxes on a variety of OS's and hardware to s…

Right; but you're solving a symptom, not the problem. It sounds like what you really need is some sort of approval process, or at the very least a checklist, to ensure these machines are configured in the way they should be. Or, at the very least, that the teams involved understand the implications of a computer sitting in a base in the middle of nowhere with auto-updates turned on.

The point I was trying to make is that the problem you're seeing isn't specific to Windows 10; it could have easily happened on Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 instead.

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

#433

Post by blakeyrat »

Decade wrote: post #415
blakeyrat wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

On Windows, once in a while there is a Patch Tuesday when the only update is Internet Explorer, a program that I neither wanted, nor installed, nor opened since I got tired of it years ago. Clearly, I need to reboot my computer for this. On Ubuntu, certain packages are labeled as needing a reboot, and when you update them the control menu thing with a gear in the upper-right corner turns red, and the Update utility s…

Your answer doesn't really address the question.

Jameskegel said that in any "mainstream distributions", after you run an update but before you reboot, the OS is running the updated libraries. I honestly don't understand how that is possible.

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

#434

Post by blakeyrat »

jameskegel wrote: post #375
blakeyrat wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

>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.) But this is not what you suggested, is it?

I don't understand this answer, and I don't recall "suggesting" anything.

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

#435

Post by fapjacks »

blakeyrat wrote: post #433
Decade wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows, once in a while there is a Patch Tuesday when the only update is Internet Explorer, a program that I neither wanted, nor installed, nor opened since I got tired of it years ago. Clearly, I need to reboot my computer for this. On Ubuntu, certain packages are labeled as needing a reboot, and when you update them the control menu thing with a gear in the upper-right corner turns red, and the Update utility s…

Your answer doesn't really address the question. Jameskegel said that in any "mainstream distributions", after you run an update but before you reboot, the OS is running the updated libraries. I honestly don't understand how that is possible.

It's really quite simple: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/74172/28974

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

#436

Post by PhasmaFelis »

NamTaf wrote: post #393
marssaxman wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a reasonable point of view, but it's not Microsoft's job to make it happen. I could see a reasonable case for the idea that people should be held liable for hosting malware on their computers, and that failing to patch security holes could have some kind of secondary liability consequences. If that were the law, it might well make sense for Microsoft to offer upgrade contracts as a form of insurance. Ref…

Except MS is the one who cops the blame, the negative PR and the reputation of being insecure when malware runs rife across old Windows systems that weren't patched for years. There's literally no way they can win this. If they force updates they're evil for rebooting PCs. If they don't, users don't update because it's always inconvenient and then they blame MS on malware.

They could design an OS that doesn't require a full reboot after every piddling little update.

Windows has actually gotten better at this over the years, but it's still nowhere near every other OS in the world.

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

#437

Post by blakeyrat »

fapjacks wrote: post #435
blakeyrat wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer doesn't really address the question. Jameskegel said that in any "mainstream distributions", after you run an update but before you reboot, the OS is running the updated libraries. I honestly don't understand how that is possible.

It's really quite simple: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/74172/28974

Right but that very answer says:

> Newly created processes will use the updated contents, running applications will access the old version.

In other words, currently running code is still running the known-buggy version, exactly what I said originally that kicked-off this whole discussion.

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

#438

Post by Bartweiss »

tracker1 wrote: post #313
Bartweiss wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines. I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of…

I seem to recall similar issues for OSX users wrt wifi, and also smb/cifs support. Nothing is seamless for everyone, as it's impossible to test every system... The fact that Apple doesn't get it right on their very limited range of internal hardware is a testament to that fact.

I'm actually stunned by Apple's wifi connectivity issues.

I don't know of OS X breaking updates as acute and widespread as Windows, but the space of Apple machines to test is small and predictable, where Microsoft faces an essentially impossible testing task.

Beyond that, though, Apple laptops seem to just have shitty wifi connectivity. At a guess, it's one of the downsides of metal unibody design (along with godawful native speakers), but it seems almost universal. Things have improved, but strength, speed, and range never seem competitive with non-Apple machines at a similar price point (or half that price point).

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

#439

Post by Splendor »

the_common_man wrote: post #365
Splendor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Actually crying.

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

#440

Post by jameskegel »

blakeyrat wrote: post #434
jameskegel wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.) But this is not what you suggested, is it?

I don't understand this answer, and I don't recall "suggesting" anything.

Settle down. You seem to be taking some heat in the comments, so I'll recuse myself from this discussion, as I feel we are no longer making progress in an intellectual context.
Post reply on HN