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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

moishelettvin.blogspot.com

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Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#101

Post by yuhong »

wrs wrote: post #93
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…

Putting on my asbestos suit... I started the telemetry project (aka SQM or CEIP) at Microsoft when I was on the MSN Explorer team. (Then Office got excited about it, then SQL Server and Windows and nearly everyone else.) The original inspiration was being in a meeting much like the one described, where people were arguing about whether we should optimize the UI for 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 screens. The "argument…

This is a good time to mention:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20161104-00/?p=...

(I never knew about it before Raymond blogged it, even though it dates back to Win8 and was patented)

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#102

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#104

Post by lathiat »

glangdale wrote: post #78
pavement wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I don't like what a computer is doing, I will frequently just yank the plug, pull the battery, flip the circuit breaker, and fuck the rest. All this buffering and fault tolerance is bullshit at the consumer level. If the disk's file table gets fucked up, then let it burn. I'll format the disk and re-install your stupid operating system as I see fit, whenever I want, and keep my actual data safe and sound far away…

There was a nice paper a while back on the topic of 'crash-only systems'. That is, the idea would be that no software system was permitted to have a dignified shutdown path at all. Every system would be turned off with the equivalent of the power switch or "kill -9". https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper... The point that was made was that frequently the recovery paths were on net faster (for a…

There's a storage vendor (hilariously for thread context) that took this to heart. They don't have a power button, just a switch. You turn it off.

I think it was Tintri?

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#105

Post by eadmund »

codedokode wrote: post #75
saagarjha wrote: post #34

Aside: is this website messing up the scroll for anyone else?

Blogspot's UI is awful. They probably tried to follow trends and make an app out of website. While loading the page it first shows you the preloader with gears, then loads the top post and only later loads the post you were going to read. It probably gives good score in automated load speed test but in fact you can start reading the text much later than if it were plain HTML page. And when I clicked the search box, t…

I think it's pretty terrible that Blogspot requires JavaScript in order to display text. There's already a really great way to display text on the web: HTML. It just makes no sense to me to change that.

It's much like how the original wiki is so badly broken now.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#106

Post by closeparen »

0xbear wrote: post #73
Clubber wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's not anywhere close to true. It might be in SV, but most businesses just care about how well you solve problems.

Says someone who's not 40 yet. Tech is notoriously ageist.

Most people in programming entered it recently, so while an ageism problem is possible, programmers skewing young is not, by itself, evidence of ageism.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#107

Post by spookthesunset »

taneq wrote: post #95
wrs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting on my asbestos suit... I started the telemetry project (aka SQM or CEIP) at Microsoft when I was on the MSN Explorer team. (Then Office got excited about it, then SQL Server and Windows and nearly everyone else.) The original inspiration was being in a meeting much like the one described, where people were arguing about whether we should optimize the UI for 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 screens. The "argument…

There's a right way and a wrong way to do telemetry. The right way: When the Windows 7 RC was released, you guys made it available for free, with telemetry, as the final stage of real-world testing. It was up-front, it was open, it was optional. I was happy to join in, and bought Windows 7 when it came out, and it good. The wrong way: When Windows 10 was released, a whole lot of nebulously defined, mandatory telemetr…

Every website you and everybody know you visits is full of telemetry used to improve the website. Why should "real" desktop software be any different?

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#108

Post by mvindahl »

Entertaining blogpost. And reading the 2006 comment thread below is also pretty entertaining. All of the comments seem to be about ten years old. Most of them tend to agree that Microsoft seriously botched this feature. But there is also a very vocal minority who argue that Joel is a moron who should shut up and the thing that makes Windows so great is its flexibility, and all those 15 menu options make sense, and people should just shut up about their Macs and deal with the fact that Mac has just a teeny weeny market share.

Well, fast forward to 2017. MacBooks are all over the place. And when trying to shut down Windows 10, I'm faced with just three options: Sleep, Shut down, and Restart.

Vista really was the nadir of Microsoft in terms of UX, no matter how furiously some people contested this back in the day. And Joel was spot on.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#109

Post by flukus »

spookthesunset wrote: post #107
taneq wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do telemetry. The right way: When the Windows 7 RC was released, you guys made it available for free, with telemetry, as the final stage of real-world testing. It was up-front, it was open, it was optional. I was happy to join in, and bought Windows 7 when it came out, and it good. The wrong way: When Windows 10 was released, a whole lot of nebulously defined, mandatory telemetr…

Every website you and everybody know you visits is full of telemetry used to improve the website. Why should "real" desktop software be any different?

Real desktop software has access to a lot of private and often sensitive information, my browser doesn't share that with any website.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#110

Post by wutbrodo »

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…

> I'd say the n times you hit 'postpone' count as windows giving you your fair warning.

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely and utterly insane. It's beyond idiotic to suggest that an arbitrary point hours or days in the future will magically be appropriate for your computer to shut down just because you passed over the chance to update at several unrelated times in the past. I agree that it was ill-advised for my roommate to skip the updates so consistently, but the idea that this means that it's

You apparently only use your computer for Facebook games or something, but some of us (meaning like.....99.9% of computer users) use it for important things at least occasionally, and many use computers for things that are absolutely critical. The idea that Windows is justified in ignoring whatever important thing you might be doing at this moment in time because at several moments in the past you postponed updates is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

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