Live data from Hacker News

Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

arstechnica.com

191–200 of 205 posts

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#191
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer is a tool. You buy it to perform what it is advertised to do, just like a socket wrench set. But unlike a socket wrench set, the manufacturer could break into your home in the night and replace your rachet and make it incompatible with your old sockets that still work.

Microsoft Teams is a service, so more like trains or taxis in the physical world. Tomorrow train operators could all be on strike and we'd just be SOL. I think the change that people haven't completely caught on with is a lot of digital tools becoming services. A bit like how enterprises used to own printers, and those are now rented appliances paid by month or by printed page.

Microsoft teams is two things:

1. An online service with a private API endpoint.

2. A client program that communicates over that API endpoint.

So this is more like having a car (client program) that the company owns parked in your driveway (your OS), and you can't drive on the company's private roads (the service API) without using that specific car, oh and the company is allowed to repave your driveway whenever they like.

I would much rather have my own car and my own driveway, thank-you-very-much.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#192

To clarify, though, this is just an issue for people who are deliberately getting preview builds (aka beta testers), correct? The article feels pretty click-baity with that critical detail not part of the title.

> Windows 11 desktop

It's right there.

Sure, it relies on the surrounding context that Windows 11 is in beta, but that's pretty common knowledge.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#193
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge... My company issued laptop came with all that. After installing some important software (embedded compiler and IDE, wsl, etc) my one drive complained it was full, which needs to be addressed or it will keep complaining. The recommended solution is to upgrade to a paid onedrive with more then 5GB. I didnt know I was using onedrive, so I turned it off. All my important files cr…

>Teams is another one I don't even want to get started on. At least this one is actively used by most companies (at least outside of IT/devs firms) and they generally find it acceptable. OneDrive on the other hand... Even when I was an IT consultant, I haven't met a single person who has tried it and didn't absolutely hate it. I have seen employees playing out of pocket for dropbox or gDrive even when OneDrive came f…

> >Teams is another one I don't even want to get started on.

> At least this one is actively used by most companies (at least outside of IT/devs firms) and they generally find it acceptable.

Yes they find it acceptable in the way a slave prostitute finds the client acceptable. I have to use Teams because it is company policy. On my computer such a parody of a program has no place. Using it is an exercise in masochism.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#194

One bug I've been hitting for a couple of years on Windows 10: If the computer starts with a working Internet connection, but then you lose Internet, Start Menu search just stops working during net downtime. Meaning I type some app name like "calc" in the Start Menu search box and nothing appears! Which is absolutely ridiculous, I can't search for locally installed apps, or Windows settings. Even if I disabled Cortan…

For me, in Windows 10, I can type "calc" into the search menu and it will recommend and open the calendar app instead of the calculator app 2 out of 5 times. I will search for an app that I have installed and instead of opening the app it will open a bing search for the app that I have installed. It's so infuriating that if there were a M$ rep within arm reach I might be tempted to do violence towards them.

Old school people use Win + R -> calc -> enter

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#195

One bug I've been hitting for a couple of years on Windows 10: If the computer starts with a working Internet connection, but then you lose Internet, Start Menu search just stops working during net downtime. Meaning I type some app name like "calc" in the Start Menu search box and nothing appears! Which is absolutely ridiculous, I can't search for locally installed apps, or Windows settings. Even if I disabled Cortan…

Haven't happened to me on my desktop. Maybe try updating? File a bug report? The start menu web search is actually really good for quickly searching for things.

> Haven't happened to me on my desktop. Maybe try updating? File a bug report?

You funny. Have you ever encounted a Win 10 bug ? Did you find any fix ? For example: mouse clicks extra when the mouse button is pressed (drag) or double clicks when you single click. Or Title bar and menubar/ribbon dissapears in multimonitor environment.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

windows education edition doesn't have ads, or candy crush.

That's of limited help. It doesn't apply to anyone who's not eligible for that edition, isn't aware of it's existence, is just using the version that came with their device, or needs some specific feature in the 'Pro' variants (or whatever it's called now). I remember having to bump up an edition from Home to get Bitlocker support for full-disk-encryption and something else. e: While I've now migrated off Windows for…

There is an education variant of every windows version. Home education, pro education etc.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#197
post #44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame too. Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon, but they just had to go and push out a new "modernized" version and fill it up with ads. I wonder what you pay to be in the Windows 10 Pro start menu and if it's really worth selling out their professional userbase.

Is Windows 10 really that good? It's been some time now, but I still remember the first time I upgraded away from Windows 7 and feeling disappointed. Since then my hardware is massively more powerful, but I'm still to be convinced my current Windows 10 setup is better than that older Windows 7 setup.

It has its pros and cons.

Pros:

It's generally stable and in my experience works at least as well as windows 7.

DPI scaling is quite reliable and performant.

Vendor drivers are installed automagically by windows update's background process. It's a bit annoying that you can't disable or pause this process without killing it, so waiting for AMD's 300mb video driver to download over a slow connection is a bit confusing, but it's nice you can skip the usual install step and set a decent resolution without browsing to a webpage in 640x480 first. I would rather have an explicit user-controlled package manager, but this is a step in the right direction.

Cons:

They deprecated control panel in favor of the settings app, but the settings app is missing several important settings, so you still occasionally need to dig through control panel, which is a frustratingly fragmented experience.

"Fast boot" (a minimal hibernation mode) is enabled by default, which locks all of your ntfs partitions on shutdown, so you can't mount them read/write in Linux until you leave windows via reboot or disable fast boot.

The bootloader installs in the first EFI system partition it finds, even if it's on another disk and doesn't have room.

If you have a working internet connection during install, you are forced to create a system user that is linked to and named the same as your Microsoft account. Disconnecting from the network during that install phase gives you the option, though.

Exclusive fullscreen mode has been quietly replaced with an optimized windowed borderless mode. It's nice until you want to cut out that tiny extra latency, and then it's a nightmare. You used to be able to check "disable fullscreen optimizations" in properties for your binary, but that doesn't work anymore. You can add some registry entries for the binary, but that only works sometimes.

You can't shut down without installing updates anymore. Not even via the alt-f4 from the desktop modal like you could in 7.

You can delay updates for a limited period of time, and you can set "active hours" when updates won't be forced. Assuming everyone follows a fixed schedule and wants updates installed ASAP is frustratingly authoritative.

Updates try and fail to install when you don't have enough free storage. Is it that hard to just check first? It's this just a passive-aggressive way to remind users to free space? All I know is that it sucks.

There is a lot of bundled garbage, mostly links to app listings like candy crush on the Microsoft store. Just more clutter no one wants.

You can't opt out of all telemetry, which is a frustrating privacy violation.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#198
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame too. Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon, but they just had to go and push out a new "modernized" version and fill it up with ads. I wonder what you pay to be in the Windows 10 Pro start menu and if it's really worth selling out their professional userbase.

Perhaps there's a version of Moore's Law concerning the amount of innovation left at the OS level, and we're only starting to run out of it just now. What legitimately useful features can we expect out of the release of iOS five major versions down the line? Will there be any new features that change the status quo, and that we'd be practically unable to live without? The significant features like the app store and m…

Just get feature parity with the average Linux distro, and I'll be happy.

Windows is so behind, and every step they take in the right direction is an authoritative foot-gun.

Most of its problems are, at their heart, symptoms of Microsoft's proprietary closed-source design style.

Apple made huge strides in the right direction by basing OS X on BSD, then proceeded to make every step from then on in the wrong one. Walled gardens are pretty, not functional.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's of limited help. It doesn't apply to anyone who's not eligible for that edition, isn't aware of it's existence, is just using the version that came with their device, or needs some specific feature in the 'Pro' variants (or whatever it's called now). I remember having to bump up an edition from Home to get Bitlocker support for full-disk-encryption and something else. e: While I've now migrated off Windows for…

There is an education variant of every windows version. Home education, pro education etc.

Fine, okay, but what's the eligibility criteria?

As far as I can tell you have to go through an Academic Licensing service, which would immediately tell me to go away since I'm not a school/university/whatever.

It's simply not available to most people.

Re: Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

#200

It's so mind boggling to me that we're okay with this level of uncertainty about the systems we rely on every day. I run LTSC with updates disabled because the idea that something that's working one day would stop working the next drives me up the wall. I have a linux phone (which is awful) because at least when that breaks it's my fault and I can always just put it back into a known working state. I hate how my rela…

Not being glib, but have you ever tried just getting rid of your laptop, smartphone, internet, TV, etc? They certainly add the occasional convenience, but it's actually really easy to go a week or three at a time without any of it. That's always an option, and it's a fairly good one if it's making you feel how you describe.

I have spent many a summer at a cabin with no internet, potable water or plumbing. I love it, it's a beautiful time. It's one of my favorite places to be in the whole wide world.

That being said I also love technology. It's fucking magic and I'm a mage. I have immense power over one of the most effective forces in the world and I spend a depressing amount of it to circumvent annoyances forced upon me by people trying to part me from my money. It's so frustrating because I love what technology is and what it can enable for people, and I hate how trash the baseline is, and I especially hate most people don't even know how good things could be if we y'know had open standards and shit. I know that there isn't an easy fix, but my frustration is none the less valid. So much of humanity's effort in tech is spent on bullshit that doesn't add value at best, and is actively detrimental to all but a few humans on average.

Post reply on HN