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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

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Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#81

Post by codedokode »

bradford wrote: post #10

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opin…

> Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do.

I am not sure this is correct. Telemetry can show what users do but it won't show why they do it. Users don't click the button: maybe they don't need it but maybe they don't understand what it does. Or maybe there are too many buttons and users get lost.

Also making a decision based on telemetry is making a desicion based on opinion of non-experts. There is a quote by Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”. Can you make something innovative this way?

For example if we take a code editor like Sublime Text which in my opinion has very good UI, and it has no toolbar - can you use telemetry as an argument for removing a toolbar? No, because if there is a toolbar, there will be users who would use it without realising that they could do better without it. You need an expert to make better UI, not telemetry.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#82

Post by codedokode »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #66
sz4kerto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On desktops, yes. Other companies have been moving everything to the web, where telemetry is easier and more thorough.

The problem is that Web exists in a sandbox. They can collect data about my usage of their website, full stop (large sites like Facebook and Google get around this, but that's not really telemetry). With desktop there's no way of knowing what's collected with "telemetry"

And that is the problem of using OSes with outdated security model from mainframe era.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#83

Post by SimonPStevens »

> "Those new hybrid hard drives can make this super fast."

- Vista RTM'd - 8th November 2006

- Date on that blog post - 21st November 2006

... and the wikipedia page he links from the blog post about hybrid drives says "In 2007, Seagate and Samsung introduced the first hybrid drives".

I don't think making UI decisions based on hardware unreleased at the time is really the right way to do it.

(The same wikipedia page also lists those early hybrid drives as "featuring 128 MB or 256 MB NAND flash memory options" and given that Vista required 512mb and recommended 1gb, I don't even think that they would have helped that much as most of the ram would still need to be written to the spinner platter part of the disk anyway)

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#84

Post by codedokode »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #35
feelin_googley wrote: post #33

"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stup…

On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to update…

> in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram

Is that really so? Large corporations probably don't want to overspend money for excess hardware power. Intel Celeron or Atom + 1-2Gb of RAM should be enough for office work.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#85

Post by dingo_bat »

titanix2 wrote: post #59
rhencke wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Travesty is a bit hyperbolic, no? The Win10 UI works. It's stable. It's reasonably efficient at getting things done. It's reasonably compatible with people's expectations of how Windows works. (no Win8-style revamp of Start, etc.) There's parts of it I dislike greatly, personally. (Cortana, the Settings/Control Panel split.) It's annoying and unpolished on parts like that, but I can't say it's a _travesty_.

It's ugly (especially the dialog boxes) and obviously targeted at tablets. As the Surface don't perform well, I hope one day Microsoft will come back to its root and release an edition of Windows tailored for the PC.

That's exactly right. It is so ugly! And in the recent builds I've been seeing blurred fonts everywhere. I do like that they are moving fast and most changes are good. For example the pseudo transparency effects alleviate some of the ugliness concerns.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#86

Post by agwa »

pritambaral wrote: post #43
agwa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Wrong. If a Linux process is blocked in an uninterruptible system call (typically for disk I/O), it cannot be killed, even with -9. I have been unable to cleanly shut down Linux systems in the past due to processes getting stuck in this state.

`kill -9` on a process blocked on a syscall does kill the process, it just doesn't clean the process up. The result of SIGKILL-ing (i.e., killing with -9) a blocked process is a zombie process. Zombies are dead, right?

A zombie is a process which has terminated but has not been waited for by its parent.

SIGKILLing a process blocked in an uninterruptible system call does not create a zombie.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#87

Post by swsieber »

codedokode wrote: post #81
bradford wrote: post #10

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opin…

> Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. I am not sure this is correct. Telemetry can show what users do but it won't show why they do it. Users don't click the button: maybe they don't need it but maybe they don't understand what it does. Or maybe there are too many buttons and users get lost. Also making…

I think it would be inaccurate to say you can't learn things from telemetry. You can easily run A/B tests, or even in the absence of proper A/B tests, you can see if a newly added feature is actually being used or not.

The other thing one is the timing of action - I bet you could learn a lot from that, especially if you take a nice group of people, watch and quiz them, line up your learnings with the telemetry, and then use the telemetry of your general user base to infer how your user base is responding.

Standard flame-war prevention disclaimer: I'm not saying we should add telemetry to everything. I'm just saying it seems like it could be another useful tool in product creation.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#88

Post by [deleted] »

nxc18 wrote: post #51
wutbrodo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIUI, Windows took the philosophy that the user should be the god of their system. By running software, the user has indicated to the OS that "This code is blessed and I want it to run". I really don't buy this. Aside from it being an incredibly dumb way of them to think that any process running was intentionally blessed by the user (have they _used_ a computer at any point in the last couple decades?), it's in d…

The forced restart experience indicates that windows is quite capable of killing any process it wants to. Otherwise you could just run an app to block that feature. If you read Windows Internals you'll get some insight into how shutdown works. There are lots of things that want to do special work on shutdown, and windows gives them time. Consider, for example, if you have an unsaved document in word; windows won't sh…

[deleted]

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#89

Post by bulatb »

codedokode wrote: post #84
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to update…

> in the age of i5's and i7's on every desktop with 8+gb of ram Is that really so? Large corporations probably don't want to overspend money for excess hardware power. Intel Celeron or Atom + 1-2Gb of RAM should be enough for office work.

Once you add the standard set of IT shitware, Serious Enterprise Endpoint Security, legacy line-of-business apps, and poorly written drivers for the cheap components in those systems, 8GB/i5 is closer to a reasonable minimum for usability.

And if it comes with spinning drives, just have it shipped directly to the landfill.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#90

Post by shawnz »

codedokode wrote: post #81
bradford wrote: post #10

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opin…

> Telemetry is, by now, a fundamental part of the engineering process. Products that don't incorporate it are going to be clobbered by products that do. I am not sure this is correct. Telemetry can show what users do but it won't show why they do it. Users don't click the button: maybe they don't need it but maybe they don't understand what it does. Or maybe there are too many buttons and users get lost. Also making…

Where does the parent claim that telemetry is the only factor you should be basing your decisions on?
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