191–200 of 588 posts
Upgrades when shutting down prevent me from catching the train on time. Upgrades on startup prevent me from checking the train schedule. Insanity. Thats why I run an OS that I control.
You're probably doing this:
1. disable automatic updates
2. hope that no vulnerability is discovered for a month
3. apply all available patches
4. goto 2
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> The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them. Yeah, much like how I get a choice to not use Jira at work, or to not use Facebook Messenger or not use LinkedIn right? The argument that everything ultimately comes down to individual user choice ignore so many externalities that it’s borderline unrealistic.
I have a social life without facebook, and I have a job without linkedin. You don't need them, you choose to use them.
Network effects are strong. Too strong.
I had been using a great app that’s been around since before the iPhone came out (PocketMoney on Palm). They rewrote it for IOS, and it was able to import the database from the Palm version. Really great. Then sadly the author died, and it languished for a while until it was sold to someone else. The new owner seemed to try to keep it going, but then finally gave up last year and crammed an absolutely awful “update”…
Navionics had a variety of bathymetric charts in the app store that underwent a similar fate when they were bought by Garmin. It didn't matter that I'd paid $20-$30 (forget the exact value) for a lifetime license on a piece of software; they felt the need to shove a crippling update onto the version I'd paid for before releasing a new product line. On the bright side, in the years since I bought their app a free, bet…
Taring everything with the same brush. There was a time, not so long ago, when it was impossible to install Windows over the Internet because so many other machines were compromised and your machine would, with certainty, also end up compromised before it had gotten as far as applying the latest service pack. Then we got automatic updates, and we all breathed a sigh of relief because things got better . We had empiri…
It's very common for (particularly mobile software) to just break the product entirely. Features I regularly used and depended on--sometimes even the main features--are just deleted. Gone, with zero chance of using it again. Sometimes ads are thrown in, adding a major vulnerability. Other times they reduce/cripple features, yet somehow worsen performance despite doing less. Sometimes they wipe data. Sometimes they update and suddenly require a google or facebook login to use "for convenience" (inconveniencing me who never needed to login before).
Updates before used to be bugfixes and cleanup, and major upgrades came out every year or two and you'd have to manually opt in to those by going to their site and downloading a new version, or going out and paying for it. Now your old, functional software is wiped from your system and replaced with a bad imposter using the same identity.
I'll begrudgingly install OS updates sometimes, but only weeks or months after release when all the downsides and upsides are easy to consider. The chances of me coming across some harmful vulnerability in the wild is far less likely than the reality of dealing with a harmful, work-destroying update. I haven't encountered the former in over a decade. I've dealt with the latter several times this year.
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I wonder if there are some differences between Windows 10 versions (like Home, Professional etc) there. I have never had that happen. I have Windows 10 Pro.
I have Windows 10 Pro. It is horrible. And, I have no choice in any of it. Advertisements pop up at random times. I am constantly turning things off, and they get turned back on again. I am diligent about checking for updates at the end of my work day, and then turning off scheduled updates. I cannot afford to wait for a "Do not turn off your computer" screen.
Do you have a screenshot?
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That is the modern tech business model. Rope in naive people with excellent services offered at a loss or at cost, wait for them to develop dependence, use nazi cult-think psychology to inculcate irrational loyalty to the platform, then take everything away in a major software update and sell it back to the poor fools for big profits.
It's possible for developers to think they are shipping must-have features _and_ for users to see that as "messing up all my menus" and "disrupting my workflow". Inevitably some users will complain about changes in every new update while others complain about a lack of eagerly awaited new features and bug fixes. You cannot make everyone happy :/ I'm sympathetic to the idea that workflow/ui changes should be explicit…
I had been using a great app that’s been around since before the iPhone came out (PocketMoney on Palm). They rewrote it for IOS, and it was able to import the database from the Palm version. Really great. Then sadly the author died, and it languished for a while until it was sold to someone else. The new owner seemed to try to keep it going, but then finally gave up last year and crammed an absolutely awful “update”…
> Then sadly the author died, and it languished for a while until it was sold to someone else. The new owner seemed to try to keep it going, but then finally gave up last year and crammed an absolutely awful “update” that was actually a totally different software via the automatic update process. Everyone’s financial data got locked up in this new version that is almost useless. ~20 years of financial tracking just g…
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That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to That will never happen as long as software continues to be regarded as a "cost center" That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users That will never happen as long as evangelists keep pushing this doctrine that more updates, more features, mor…
No you got it the wrong way around. The power is in the hands of the user. > That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them. > That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users The user can simply stop…
And the companies which shell out the big bucks to keep terrible software products shambling along for year after year don't really do it because they hate they staff and want to screw up their happiness and productivity, although it can often seem like that. They do it because either there isn't anything else which does the thing they need to keep doing their business, or becuse they have so much past history and experience of using that product that it would be ridiculously expensive and dangerous to change or because they believe that the pain of supporting fifty different users using thirty different incompatible pieces of software to do the same job is worse than the pain of having all those users screwed up at the same time by an upgrade that goes bad.
None of which are unreasonable positions to take and all of which push the responsibility for improving the situtaion back to where it belongs: the writers and suppliers of the upgrade. Upgrades should adopt a hippocratic principle: the change that YOU make to the system which I have paid for and which I rely on to do my job should not suddenly impossible costs or make it impossible me to use it to do something that I was doing yesterday.
And that, in turn, is not going to happen, unless and until customers (both commercial and private) have the right to compensation for lost time and earning imposed by changes which benefit nobody except the software vendor.
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I'm aware that I will sound condescending but... that's exactly why people "invented" opensource (and/or free software if you prefer). I'm sorry for your problem nonetheless.
App stores and SaaS do an end run around open source.
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I don't want to defend Apple or iOS here, but Android (talking OS upgrades, not apps) is even worse, by far. Depends on the manufacturer and I imagine Google is one of the less horrible ones, but pretty much every update for Samsung Galaxy: * Changes the UI in some way I don't like * Re-enables intrusive, annoying and concerning background services and their permissions and notifications that are painful and time-con…
Thankfully almost anyone can side-load APK with older version - unless a developer blocks the API. But agreed it is a mess. That is why I think auto-updating mobile devices or "the cloud" will never fully replace computers with a local software for a serious work.