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Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

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Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#113
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care? It works.

None of the major os vendors have great usabability. They work, but with lousy updates, and/or limited customization. Some of the android phones I buy dont even have rooting options.

Android isn't a desktop operating system and mobile device hardware continues to be a huge mess.

That doesn't stop you from buying a PC from Dell or building one from parts and installing Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/whatever-you-want on it. The percentage of other people who do that is irrelevant because the absolute number is still millions of people, which is more than enough to sustain a community and produce a competitive user experience.

I have an old computer with Windows on it and would turn it on once in a blue moon for the occasional thing that required Windows. It has been years since I've had to use it.

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#114
post #10

Is this incompetence the result of Microsoft being unable to retain decent engineers? I mean, who actually would want to work on the next Windows release? You’d have to be a masochist.

It's amazing to me. With the resources MS has, they could rebuild a new OS from the ground up and finally get rid of all the cruft and legacy issues in windows once and for all and still support legacy software via emulation, virtualization or even a compatibility layer a la WINE or WSL. Why don't they do it? Google is building fuchsia, Apple/NeXT was able to take BSD and build MacOS X, certainly MS can do it right?

Probably not.

I'm not familiar with MacOS 9 interfaces, but there are so many implementations of Unix out there (including WSL, Cygwin, Linux, BSD, and another dozen independent implementations) because the Unix interface was, on purpose, very simple. That is, in part, what allows Fuchsia and Darwin to be feasible.

Windows, on the other hand, is not. It has thousands of system calls which aren't really layered in any way. Wine and ReactOS have been at it for over a decade each and they still have "not yet implemented" system calls.

Microsoft has the "reference implementation" to compare with, but the amount of work is enormous even for Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#115
I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you.

My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care how much they mess up the Windows experience in the process.

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#116
post #75
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about herd immunity from viruses here. Imagine that there were a new deadly pandemic every few days. Should a human being, at that point, be allowed (by the social norms of their society, by law, whatever) to refuse to receive once-daily "vaccination updates"?

Yes. And its a bit creepy you think the answer should be no.

Here’s maybe a less-fraught analogy: say you have an autonomous car. Assume that the car’s autonomous-driving algorithms prevent it from hitting a person or another car no matter who’s driving, but don’t prevent it from, say, knocking down a telephone pole, or colliding with one of the support posts holding up a bridge.

Now, do you have the right to own and drive this autonomous car around on public roads, if you’ve modified the car to be an “open server” where anyone can anonymously connect to it from anywhere on the Internet and drive it around?

And, if not, then what’s the difference between that modification, and knowingly driving the car when it has an unpatched vulnerability allowing people to do the same?

And if you find that there is no difference, then what’s the difference between a vulnerable car that can DDoS physical infrastructure, and a vulnerable PC that can DDoS virtual infrastructure?

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#118
post #115

I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…

I'm by no means a low-level OS developer but I can't help but wonder, wouldn't it be possible for Windows to partition off part of the disk to copy system-critical files and then quietly stage updates in the partition (all of this with minimal thread priority so that if some other process demands resources/threads, it will pause/defer itself!). When the staged update is complete, it gives you a friendly notification "You have a new update available!" which you can then complete as fast as your disk can copy files (or even just set some flag to toggle the partition in use... The old partition then becomes the new staging partition)

Does that make sense at all or is this an unrealistic idea? EDIT: Maybe this is how updates already work, I'm not sure

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#119
post #118
post #115

I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…

I'm by no means a low-level OS developer but I can't help but wonder, wouldn't it be possible for Windows to partition off part of the disk to copy system-critical files and then quietly stage updates in the partition (all of this with minimal thread priority so that if some other process demands resources/threads, it will pause/defer itself!). When the staged update is complete, it gives you a friendly notification…

I'm pretty sure this is how ChromeOS' update system works.

Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports

#120
post #19

The whole user experience of installing Windows 10 is abysmal. Wife got a new laptop and I watched her to the initial setup. Stupid things like an "enter your pin" dialog that automatically opens another dialog that closes if you hit enter. So you quickly type your pin and hit enter and just see the dialog flash. Or the confusing "remove" button for the fingerprint scanner setup that just removes all of your fingerpr…

Clearly you haven't been using enough shitty enterprise software!
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