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Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#171

Post by aedocw »

Waterluvian wrote: post #164
w1nst0nsm1th wrote: post #114

It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most : > Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site. It's no wonder Google is pushing to remove (partially) the ability…

To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements. But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it…

Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc.

The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it with something less bad.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#172

Post by realo »

alister wrote: post #167
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. What home user even realizes they can change the clock time any more? Consider: can you change the clock time on your phone? I've never even considered doing so, personally. Seems like it'd screw up the GPS, if it was possible. Anyone whose first computer was a smartphone isn't going to think of changing their computer's clock time. To them, the time is a network feature, not a local feature.

> What home user even realizes they can change the clock time any more? Indeed. Even if you have the temerity to go and change the clock, the iPhone is secretly maintaining the true time internally and can use it or revert to it at will. I'm making a bold claim, so here are the steps to reproduce: - Go to Settings -> General -> Date & Time -> Set Automatically -> disable - set an incorrect time - Go to Settings -> {W…

Cough ... GPS ... cough ...

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#173

Post by cookingrobot »

gmueckl wrote: post #137
anticensor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have made a partial machine translator to convert to the modern control panel and an API wrapper for runtime compatibility in the interim.

How would you automatically translate hand-layouted dialogs (originally even manually adjusted for localizations where required) into a completely different layout and design language? Never mind the few dialogs that do custom controls and custom rendering (joystick test and joystick calibration, for example). In plain Win32, that stuff is often part of the window repaint event handler and not encapsulated in a way t…

They could render it off-screen, and use neural network style transfer to make it look fresh..

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#174

Post by Waterluvian »

aedocw wrote: post #171
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements. But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it…

Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it w…

I do kind of agree. But I think that can be a process and tooling problem that can be solved in numerous ways that don't involve handing over the keys to those blocks to the ad industry.

I do kind of disagree. I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated. I just think the industry kept growing to a point that it needed to justify complexity. There's entire categories of jobs that don't need to exist.

Consider how advertising works for YouTube sponsorship. It's literally just some person emailing another person saying, "hey I've seen your site and based on a bit of research (the thing that justifies my jobs existence) I think your personality and demographic and other factors are all a match for advertising this product. Want to talk about it more?" And then the advertising agency hands over a package for the YouTuber to fit into their channel in an organic, appropriate way. Why oh why is that so hard for the web ad industry to do? Let's hash out the details, and then our guys will send your guys some html and other assets and you can plug it in to run for a month, using whatever technical architecture you use to run ads.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#176

Post by Forge36 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #116

The Registry is the biggest architectural mistake in Windows - it's a great pity they haven't had the courage to remove it entirely.

They've indirectly stated support for it so long as VB6 (and COM) continue to be supported. I suspect a 32bit runtime deprecation is probably slatted for a sooner deprecation than the registry

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#177

Post by jrockway »

aedocw wrote: post #171
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements. But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it…

Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc. The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it w…

> How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc.

The same way print ads have worked for ... centuries?

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#178

Post by toyg »

maccard wrote: post #128
Litmus2336 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This week in "HN looks at software that took thousands of devs 30 years to write and says 'eh I could've done that in a day!'"

They could rewrite it using electron?

Don't give them ideas!

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#179

Post by toyg »

jodrellblank wrote: post #155
andrewstuart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it's a great pity software developers misused and screwed it up so badly So the Registry is a great idea and great software design, but developers are "holding the phone wrong"? I think applications should be standalone and not tied into some giant central spaghetti shared knot of chewing gum. The beauty of Linux/Unix is that stuff is configured by text files. Windows was on that path i the early days when everyth…

"Holding the phone wrong" referred to people using something as they'd expect, but it not working at all. The registry turned to trash by people using it wrongly, because people don't write software very well. When ordinary users needed admin rights because developers stored per-user settings in the system-wide config, that's developers misusing the registry. When tools register themselves as file-format-handlers in…

The minute you make third-party developers potentially responsible for the overall stability of your system, the fault is yours, sorry. Microsoft simply did not grok security principles when building Windows 95, and they have been paying the price ever since.

> your /home/.program/program.conf file is from a newer version and the program doesn't run.

But a problem in program.conf would sabotage the program, not the entire system. Whereas a bad registry can stop you from booting. That is the main problem.

A real unix equivalent could maybe be a problem with something in /etc, but that stuff is supposed to be 1) set to basic defaults that will work in any circumstance, and 2) kept under lock and key. Whereas the Registry was born as a free-for-all, and only much later got a permission system retrofitted on top.

Was the Registry a good idea? Maybe; but it certainly had a terrible execution, and now we're stuck with the results.

> if only there was a standardised key/value store

Yes, if only - but there isn't, the Registry is Windows-only. That's why developers end up managing text files: because they work everywhere, in 1995 as in 2019; whereas APIs come and go.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#180

Post by flukus »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #135
ushg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's related to the trend in recent years of manufacturers marketing ultra low-budget Windows 10 laptops (and to a lesser extent tablets) with critically small amounts of non-upgradeable storage? An install of Windows 10 typically takes up ~26GB and there's already a problem with consumers discovering that their 32GB soldered eMMC machines are unable to perform any OS updates without jumping through extra…

One of the earliest Win10 updates was "bricking" machines if a device was in the SD card slot during the update process. Guess where my update media were? The machine became a Debian machine. It was "bricked" only to the extent that there was no way forward from the failed update to getting Windows back.

Reminds me of my Nokia 3 which is stuck in a non up-gradable loop. What I think is happening is that the the new image is downloaded to the SD card, then when you restart to upgrade the SD card isn't mounted so the upgrade fails, then you reboot again and you've lost all your shortcuts to apps on the SD card. I'm not sure if it's the image itself on the SD card or something else required but it's obvious Nokia don't spend much on QA.
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