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Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

gizmodo.com.au

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Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#61

Post by da_chicken »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #40
doodliego wrote: post #27

An OS used by billions of people including government agencies, hospitals, and nonprofits is not some videogame that needs new content. It's mission critical software, and these utter delinquents are treating it like a Steam early release. If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.

> or have their OS seized by eminent domain If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software. Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost. It just fails to surface an overwrite dialogue, and assumes the result is no.

> If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.

That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid. As someone who works in the public sector, trust me, we try to get the money to people we know will do a good job. We have to work with the shit we buy every day. We want it to be good. There's just a lot of people willing to put in maximum of effort on a bid and minimal effort on execution.

> Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost.

I mean, kind of. I agree it's not as bad as the article implies. However, it's a pretty common pattern to download a zip file, extract and overwrite, and then throw out the zip file. It's not directly resulting in data loss, but a very common user pattern will result in data loss when you encounter this bug.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#62

Post by JonathonW »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #22
chriscareycode wrote: post #4

I ran the October update and lost my Desktop folder. After install, a dialog box appears: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Desktop is unavailable ..."

Out of curiosity... why was your desktop folder there? That is a really weird place for it.

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\" is the profile folder (%USERPROFILE%) for the LocalSystem account; it doesn't normally have a desktop folder.

If Windows is trying to find your desktop folder there when you log on interactively, something's gone horribly wrong (but, frankly, that doesn't surprise me with the 1809 update).

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#63

Post by yborg »

rincebrain wrote: post #49
thrower123 wrote: post #2

Yikes. This sounds, however, like a completely different bug, if it is only triggered by unzipping archives. I'm sure that the situation is more complicated than it looks - because it looks like there is just a shocking lack of QA testing being done, if basic edge cases like this are resulting in undefined behavior.

I'm going to quote my comment on the original bug [1] here: > Well, you see, when you fire a whole lot of your OS group's QA department... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18154679

It's fine, because "automation" automatically finds all the bugs, and developers are evaluated primarily on code quality and test coverage, not on ability to crank out feature code as rapidly as possible.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#64

Post by pletnes »

Note that the windows implementation of zip/unzip does not always return the original file contents after a round trip. Yes, I’ve seen it myself. That’s an even more serious bug, but it’s been there since win7 at least. I don’t trust the builtin zip at all.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#65

Post by Waterluvian »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #46

This article is super deceptive, these two bugs are completely unrelated, and the one still standing is pretty obscure: 1. You're extracting a Zip file and intend to overwrite your own data 2. The data isn't overwritten, but it doesn't tell you about it 3. You delete the Zip file, thinking that it's extracted. I'm not discounting that this is a Bug, but I can't think of a time I would've ever lost data because of thi…

This would hose me daily if I used windows. Not best practice but the real world has dictated that on occasion we extract data, modify it, re zip it, and ship it off to the product.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#66

Post by drewmol »

>The good news is, if you use a third-party app for archives, such as WinZip, WinRAR or 7-Zip, you won't encounter the bug.

I'm not excusing the bug, but 7-zip had been one of the first tools I install on any windows installation since XP, setting it as default application to handle all archive formats it supports, .zip included. I'm surprised to see so many comments about potentially running into this bug, doesn't everyone just use 7-zip?

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#67

Post by grumblez »

drewmol wrote: post #66

>The good news is, if you use a third-party app for archives, such as WinZip, WinRAR or 7-Zip, you won't encounter the bug. I'm not excusing the bug, but 7-zip had been one of the first tools I install on any windows installation since XP, setting it as default application to handle all archive formats it supports, .zip included. I'm surprised to see so many comments about potentially running into this bug, doesn't e…

Unregistered WinRAR for life

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#68

Post by mauriciob »

doodliego wrote: post #27

An OS used by billions of people including government agencies, hospitals, and nonprofits is not some videogame that needs new content. It's mission critical software, and these utter delinquents are treating it like a Steam early release. If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.

Users can opt out of the targeted updates, so they will update only after the version is consolidated.

Companies and government should not be using the targeted version at all.

It's not an excuse for the issues, but it's not a big problem for companies as you make it seem.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#69

Post by ttty »

dschuler wrote: post #47
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or have their OS seized by eminent domain If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software. Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost. It just fails to surface an overwrite dialogue, and assumes the result is no.

I know you're saying this in jest, but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth (e.g. DoD's WGS 84, all the work by NIST, etc.). Sure, healthcare.gov was not a smooth rollout, but they do deserve some credit overall. Now Windows on the other hand.... I just set up Windows on a new laptop I bought recently.. just plain Windows as it shipped with my new lap…

Never happened to me with Windows. It's not the best, but works.

Linux on the over hand it's a continuous installation of drivers and fixing functionality that works out of the box on my windows: graphics problems, audio, screen, usb, WiFi.

Of course and then you try to install some module and says you have incompatible modules. Then you need to figure out what modules you need to change to match the version of the module to install. This was a few years ago, but I don't have the time to do this.

Plus window management is broken on Linux, too many bugs. Last time I couldn't even alt tab like windows.

Re: Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

#70

Post by gmueckl »

dx87 wrote: post #55
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #46

This article is super deceptive, these two bugs are completely unrelated, and the one still standing is pretty obscure: 1. You're extracting a Zip file and intend to overwrite your own data 2. The data isn't overwritten, but it doesn't tell you about it 3. You delete the Zip file, thinking that it's extracted. I'm not discounting that this is a Bug, but I can't think of a time I would've ever lost data because of thi…

I know it was an error on my part, but I lost an updated password database file because of unexpected behavior with the Windows file explorer. I had mainly been working out of a single folder, so I didn't realize the next time that I opened the file explorer that it was showing me "quick access" since the file list was populated with the contents of the one folder I was using. I dragged the updated database file to t…

This shows what a steamimg pile of incoherent features and behaviours the Windows Explorer has been gradually turned into since Windows 7. It is quite hard for average users to coax that tool into showing an actually honest content of some directory on the hard drive. There are so many abstractions, redirections, alternative view and on the fly translations (only obvious with languages other than English) in there that the very thing it is supposed to be good at becomes cumbersome and error prone. And you cannot easily disable all these things that just tend to get in the way.

If anyone who is working on that program reads this: please rein in this madness and turn the Explorer back into a decent and simple file manager without abstactions and lies to the usera

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