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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

#181

Post by earenndil »

jrockway wrote: post #177
aedocw wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Print ads have worked for centuries.

Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

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

#182

Post by lightbulbjim »

andrewstuart wrote: post #141
jodrellblank wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The registry is a fantastic idea - it's a great pity software developers misused and screwed it up so badly, and a shame other OSs haven't copied it and built on it. Instead of every tool making its own incompatible, undocumented, non-standard config file/database/format/tools.

>> 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…

> The beauty of Linux/Unix is that stuff is configured by text files. Windows was on that path i the early days when everything was configured with ini files before someone had the idea of introducing the registry.

cough dconf cough

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

#183

Post by flukus »

gemjam wrote: post #48
Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

One super useful hidden feature but terrible ui is you can start typing as soon as Win 10 start menu is open... example 'notepad'... I used to install classic shell just to get the [run] input box

Unfortunately apart from the search being awful it also does some internet search and if your network drops out while it's searching for something you'll be left with the start menu frozen until it hits it's 1-2 minute timeout.

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

#184

Post by rrix2 »

earenndil wrote: post #181
jrockway wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Print ads have worked for centuries. Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better .

But do they need to?

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

#185

Post by Guvante »

Waterluvian wrote: post #174
aedocw wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute. Assuming that the average video is 2x the minimum required to maximize ad revenue (10 min so 20 min per) that is 25 videos per second. Assuming you can do a deal every 10 minutes you would need 630 people to get ads for 1% of the videos uploaded.

The entire point of that complicated web is to eliminate the cost of all those people and move that 0.1% that you could actually do to closer to 80%.

While it is true that we have given too much power to advertisers the solutions to the privacy problems that solve the advertisers requirements is hard (remember they are the only ones paying into the system so dropping their requirements won't happen). There have been some technical papers put forward but they are as complex as BitCoin is in order to actually allow for a small subset of the features the terrible leaky privacy of the modern web gives them for no effort.

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

#186

Post by will4274 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #91
oblio wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's monumental. Third parties could add their own pages and hook into existing pages. Read the OldNewThing blog for the insanity that is the Windows ISV ecosystem. Windows is space age tech compared to the garbage these companies pull off.

Oh, I can understand leaving a Control Panel framework in place for opening legacy menus made by third parties. What I find problematic is the Microsoft-supplied functionality. Duplicate menus for the same thing adds an extra mental burden.

> Duplicate menus for the same thing adds an extra mental burden.

I think you'd see that Microsoft gets this. Win8 was all dupes. Initial Win10 release removed most of the dupes and they've removed more with each Win10 release. The strategy is pretty clear - incremental rewrite based on what people use.

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

#187

Post by jodrellblank »

andrewstuart wrote: post #162
jodrellblank wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>> "Holding the phone wrong" referred to people using something as they'd expect, but it not working at all. I thought it meant blaming the user for the flawed design.

OK then, yes. Everyone who abuses or misuses the registry has ruined it for the rest of us, and should feel bad.

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

#188

Post by rubinelli »

rrix2 wrote: post #184
earenndil wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Print ads have worked for centuries. Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better .

But do they need to?

No, not really. All they need to know is the source of their traffic and how well it's converting. That source isn't paying for itself? Cut it and divert the budget to one that is.

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

#189

Post by throwaway2048 »

fencepost wrote: post #46
rando444 wrote: post #5

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

Note that part of the size of WinSxS is an illusion because basically everything there is hard linked from elsewhere on the system (yes, NTFS supports hard links). There are some ways to do limited cleanup on it, but it's not a place to poke around in manually. More depth: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8

I Have found via experimentation and freespace monitoring that most of the size of the winsxs folder that explorer shows when you look at properties, is infact eaten off the drive.

Its a royal pain in the ass for 120GB ssd installs or smaller.

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

#190

Post by justapassenger »

rrix2 wrote: post #184
earenndil wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Print ads have worked for centuries. Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better .

But do they need to?

Does advertising needs to exist at all? Do businesses need to exist at all? Does economy needs to exist?

There're issues with current state of online advertising, but when was last time humanity said "improving this would be a great business, but you know what - we don't want it to be better"?

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