7 ms·

I don't know why people complain about updates and restarting, particularly in this thread. You fill your car up with fuel regularly because it has been warning

• zouhair 9y ago
  I hope your car doesn't stop randomly against your will so it can get a refill.
  • dagw 9y ago
    It does if I put off getting that refill for long enough.
  • taneq 9y ago
    If you don't refuel it, then yes, it will stop.
  • setq 9y ago
    Not yet. Only when you run out of gas. However in a few years, are people going to get pissed off when their Tesla has enough of their shit and drives itself to a charging point because the owner is too incompetent to heed the warnings?
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      As if Tesla had a monopoly on the car market as Microsoft has on the computer OS. Then again cars only warns when the fuel tank is getting empty, Microsoft updates may happens at times and is totally unrelated to the ability of your computer to continue working.
    • Qwertious 9y ago
      In the long term, I'd hope that charged batteries are just driven to the car to be swapped in, when the car is in use, instead of the car having to stop and spend time charging itself when you want to be driving.
• txmx2000 9y ago
  You are driving down the interstate, message pops up saying it needs to refuel, you don't hit the button fast enough, your cars shuts off, and you spend the next 15 minutes parked in the middle of the road with cars honking behind you. Or you wake up, get dressed for an important meeting, unlock your door, and suddenly realize you're going to be late because your car decided this was the best time to finish refueling in spite of your instructions to refuel at another time of day.
  • setq 9y ago
    This has never happened to me unless I've actively ignored it and I sit in front of a Windows PC for 12 hours a day and have done for 19 years.
    • throwanem 9y ago
      How nice for you! Having active hours be ignored, and the machine update itself in the middle of a workday, has happened more than once to me. (Once would be enough.) It's happened more than once to a lot of other people, too. How far do you expect to get with this argument by implication that that's not the case, and we're all just full of it?
      • setq 9y ago
        That only happens if you put the updates off of they've been there for a couple of days and you have something running that makes it assume that the machine is still active. People seeding torrents overnight seems to be the only place I see that not happen. See update notifications? At the end of the day, restart and install the updates. It's not rocket science. It doesn't just hit patch Tuesday and then reboot immediately, shafting you. And it doesn't screw your workflow up. Really this has to be done because even the best of us put it off eternally.
        • throwanem 9y ago
          > That only happens if [case that isn't the only one where this happens] The whole point of active hours is that, when updates are pending, they install and the system reboots outside the hours in which I've expressed the desire to have my machine not reboot itself. Yet I've lost count of the number of times where this does not happen - I see an update notification, shrug and assume it'll be applied in the window I've set, and take no action - only to find the next day that the updates haven't been applied, the reboot hasn't been performed, and if I don't interrupt my work day by applying updates and rebooting immediately - which rarely takes less than 15 minutes, not counting getting all my tools up and going again - then I can rely on losing some work, and a lot of time, later on, when something important needs doing on a deadline. And that's insane! If for whatever reason the updates legitimately can't be applied in the window, the right action in response is to wait for the next window, and not to fuck-start my workday. That is always the wrong thing to do. I mean, I get what you're saying, right? If active hours worked as claimed, you'd have a real point here. But they do not work reliably at all, and that's a whole 'nother issue.
• cousin_it 9y ago
  > You fill your car up with fuel regularly because it has been warning you it's nearly empty for a while I like this analogy! A car that runs out of fuel when its manufacturer tells it to! > Windows only updates when you're doing something because you're putting everyone else at risk Are you sure it's me putting people at risk, and not Microsoft?
  • setq 9y ago
    It's you. Look at the spread of this malware. If MS17-010 was applied automatically unconditionally, this would have not spread. The global scale of it shows how the end user is less trustworthy than the vendor.
    • 15charlimit 9y ago
      If Microsoft hadn't burned a decade's worth of "leave auto-updates on to keep your system safe!" public goodwill by force-feeding WIN10 BS to a massive number of people who did not want it, it's highly likely that this update would have been nearly unconditionally applied. The default attitude of most people I've interacted with regarding technology is apathy. If it works, they're happy and they leave it alone. Do you really think that a significant number of non-tech people would have gone to the trouble of looking up how to turn off updates to their facebook/email/google machine if Microsoft hadn't caused a massive shitstorm with their forced update BS? The vendor is entirely at fault for making stupid short-sighted decisions that caused users to lose trust in the update process. No amount of handwaving can change that fact.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      Ok let's place the 'if' game. - If Microsoft had coded its software properly there would be no need to patch vulnerabilites, - If the NSA had told Microsoft about the vulnerabilities when they were discovered instead of exploiting it (Assuming the NSA did not tell MS to not patch them on purpose), - If Microsoft did not have decades of being untrustworthy gathering the logical response of disabling auto-updates, - If Microsoft had not paid vendors to have windows pre-installed on new computers it would have the monopolistic position it has today, - if the NSA exploit and tools had not been made public, - and so on... All these are also valid ways that would have prevented wannacry spreading.
• madiathomas 9y ago
  In my case, it is simply too expensive to download updates. I live in a country which is notorious for expensive data prices. I don't mind interruptions. That's a good problem to have. The choice for me is between spending a week's worth of groceries to download updates periodically or spending that money to buy food and risk getting my PC infected.
  • setq 9y ago
    This is an interesting and genuine case where I can see that it doesn't make sense. In your case it should be possible to have a windows "branch" with just critical vulnerabilities patched with binary diffs or something rather than 680-odd Mb patch sets.
    • Qwertious 9y ago
      That's the obvious general solution for everyone - having critical security vulnerabilities on their own channel, without being required to take the features/antifeatures too.
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    You have a few possible alternative: switch to a different kind of OS, use sneakernet to share updates with people around you. etc
    • setq 9y ago
      Talking of which: http://download.wsusoffline.net/ http://download.wsusoffline.net/
    • madiathomas 9y ago
      Majority of software I use only available on Windows. Visual Studio, MS SQL Server and Microsoft Office. I tried switching to Fedora.
      • bigbugbag 9y ago
• cartoonfoxes 9y ago
  Forced restarts have been wreaking havoc among my users that have switched to Windows 10. Plenty of notice, you say? Hardly. Our software and engineering staff are no longer confidently able to perform long-running operations overnight or across weekends. Simulations, and data-capture runs in particular are now routinely being done during normal business hours since users cannot trust that their OS won't kill everything for an update midway. Among my tasks for this coming week is working up plan to isolate key workstations, and estimating the required budget to provide the affected users with secondary PCs for routine tasks which require internet connectivity.
  • ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    > Our software and engineering staff are no longer confidently able to perform long-running operations overnight or across weekends. So, you're admitting in public that your organization is using the consumer editions of Windows for business use instead of the enterprise edition, which allows administrators to control updates and reboots? Sounds more like your IT department basically doesn't know what it's doing; the additional cost of the enterprise edition is negligible compared to the cost of your engineering software and other tools.
• psyc 9y ago
  Car needs gas. User doesn't need the updates. > putting everyone else at risk What hyperbole. And what a bizarre thing to socially shame people over. This is like using 9/11 to emotionally argue for behavior changes, a week after 9/11.
  • setq 9y ago
    The user is not usually in a position to decide if they need updates or not or to judge whether or not they are putting themselves at risk by not updating the machine. That's a terrible analogy. I have been shaming people for bad security practices and self-righteous ignorance for many years (even before 9/11 ironically!). I've seen too many people have been wrong and had a bad outcome including complete data loss and in one case livelihood being shot entirely. This isn't a random assertion from thin air. You can't trust people to look after their computers.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      Shaming people is neither constructive nor effective at improving the issue. The case you mention seems to be cases where having backups would have prevented the dramatic outcome.
• bigbugbag 9y ago
  I fill the gas tank because I monitor the fuel gauge, not because it warns me that it's nearly empty. Using an appropriate analogy to make something clearer works better than shoehorning something to push your view. I plug my laptop to charge the battery when convenient and operate in a geographical area where power shortages are still an exception so I have no fuel issue in my computer usage whether I use automatic system update or not. Actually I do not use automatic system update, if there is such a thing for this OS, it is discouraged as updates can sometimes break the system if applied blindly. How exactly can someone not applying updates when windows asks for it put everyone else at risk ? What risk do I face from this from behind my BSD firewall on an Arch linux powered computer ? Then again my experience of windows computers since windows update was introduced is not in line with what you describe here, getting even worse in recent times with updates applying themselves with little to no warning, sometimes running several times in a row: logs you out of your computer, applies updates for 10-45 minutes, reboots, applies updates for 15-60 minutes, logs you in, crawls your computer down by downloading more updates, logs you out of your computer, applies update for 10-45 minutes, etc... I've witnessed this happens 3 times in a single week, the owner of the computer was pissed, I'm paid by the hour and happily browsed the web on my linux laptop while the client pestered against his computer, microsoft, technology, corporations, politicians allowing this to happen and so on.
  • setq 9y ago
    > I fill the gas tank because I monitor the fuel gauge, not because it warns me that it's nearly empty. You are better than 99% of users which is what this issue is about. You are a power user capable of looking after a machine. The problem the people who aren't.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      I'm not better than others, the contrary even. Everybody learns to do this when the nearest gas station is far enough that you will probably not make it there by the time the fuel warning lights up. Now it has become a habit for me. Assuming that things work the same elsewhere as they do around you is akin to self-deception. I'm probably leaning towards the power user category of computer users nowadays, but I wasn't born that way I learned it the hard way by having to deal with Microsoft's crap for years. Now it has become a habit too.