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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#131

Post by giancarlostoro »

userbinator wrote: post #123
karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I don't think anything tops this one from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139 "Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data" There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.

> There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.

This. We had Electron hell before AI. It's infuriating when you consider that we used to have access to so many easy to design native GUI solutions.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#132

Post by [deleted] »

mikestew wrote: post #24
xvxvx wrote: post #3

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move. (FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in t…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#133

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #131
userbinator wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anything tops this one from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139 "Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data" There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.

> There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it. This. We had Electron hell before AI. It's infuriating when you consider that we used to have access to so many easy to design native GUI solutions.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#134

Post by drooopy »

Lammy wrote: post #67
srmatto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.

Oh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#135

Post by autoexec »

krageon wrote: post #90
PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion? My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.

They broke: * at "random", during regular use * when installing something, sometimes * when removing something, sometimes * slowly, over time They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit. What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran. This has never been true for windows although the reas…

Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working.

Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.

Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#136

Post by anyfoo »

Lammy wrote: post #67
srmatto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.

I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.

Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#137

Post by agumonkey »

autoexec wrote: post #135
krageon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They broke: * at "random", during regular use * when installing something, sometimes * when removing something, sometimes * slowly, over time They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit. What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran. This has never been true for windows although the reas…

Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working. Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For deca…

The irony is that regular and free updates were supposed to help stability .. no consequence no intelligence

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#138

Post by kenhwang »

a-priori wrote: post #52
dcrazy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.

All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.

More that my motherboard came with a Broadcom WiFi chip instead of MediaTek which everyone recommends for Linux, and the shipped Linux drivers can only use 1 of the 4 antenna and won't connect to any 5ghz networks.

It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.

So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#139

Post by Spooky23 »

srmatto wrote: post #51
karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

They really got their shit together from like 2005-2017 or so. Then all garbage.

It’s so bad, the windows engineers in my company are on MacBooks and work in jump boxes.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#140

Post by rpdillon »

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #70
srmatto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion? My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.

This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail.

http://litestep.net/

I was doing random college kid stuff:

    * Surfing the web
    * Using Eudora lite for email
    * Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time
    * Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet
    * Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314
    * Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!)
    * Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point.
This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware.

Looking back, the writing was on the wall...

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