10 ms·

I'm dumbfounded why Microsoft can't fix this, it's essentially just a parameter validation issue. They must have some ghoulish software actually relying on the

I'm dumbfounded why Microsoft can't fix this, it's essentially just a parameter validation issue. They must have some ghoulish software actually relying on the broken behavior. Add to that their recklessly incompetent initial fix: https://twitter.com/maddiestone/status/1341781306766573568 https://twitter.com/maddiestone/status/1341781306766573568

q3k 6y ago
I assume it's bigcorp slowness, having to roll up all updates into patch batches, following release schedules, testing against all release trains, going through QA, etc. No accelerated way to push critical, but trivial software fixes.
- Retric 6y ago
  Microsoft has patched issues fairly quickly in the past. This may be a “critical” issue, but I think they have even higher internal classifications which this doesn’t qualify for.
- the8472 6y ago
  MS can and does issue out of schedule patches every now and then. This presumably doesn't meet the bar since it only is a local privesc.
- foepys 6y ago
  Last year they pushed some "simple" fixes fast and broke quite a few older VB applications. That was quite a fun day at my office when some customers couldn't work anymore...
  - dmix 6y ago
    This is interesting do you have more details you could share or point to a link?
    - foepys 6y ago
      https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-these-windows-10-updates-fix-broken-visual-basic-apps-but-not-for-1903/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-these-windows-10-upd... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/windows-update-2019-08-cumulative-update-has/baeea089-9bba-4a2a-9660-0a220f1656e9?page=2 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/windo...
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Perhaps they are trying to avoid breaking 3rd party code. I've spent quite a lot of time poking around in the print spooler and my gut feeling is it's probably riddled with issues like this.
- Meph504 6y ago
  I would agree I was baffled how basically windows will take anything from print drivers and ram it into the spooler.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Also I suspect nobody wants to work on it because who wants to do printing.
    - m-p-3 6y ago
      That must be some kind of purgatory where developers goes to slowly die inside.
      - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        I said it somewhat tongue in cheek because I have been working with printing technologies for my whole career.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      I actually think working on printing infrastructure might be fun. There is image processing, font rendering, etc. which are fun niches. And you can see something physically tangible from your work. It's not going to increase in relevance or take over the world, but it is probably satisfying.
      - x0x0 6y ago
        I strongly suspect it's a haphazard, under-tested mess of compat hacks to work with thousands of models of printers, with thousands of quirks and bugs that Microsoft has painfully worked around to take care of their customers. As opposed to Apple, who just assumes you don't use printers older than 2 years and liberally breaks old printers and scanners.
qz2 6y ago
Alt+tab has been thoroughly broken on Windows 10 20H2 for over two months now. It randomly switches between the second and third window. No fix in customer facing versions yet either. They are slow and incompetent.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  This may explain it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-role-in-cloud-focused-reorganization-1522335763 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-ro... > The company is breaking Windows in pieces. The platform technology, on which Microsoft’s partners build their own devices, apps and services, will now fall under Scott Guthrie, who runs the Azure business. Mr. Guthrie’s unit, called Cloud + AI Platform, will also include the company’s mixed-reality business, including Microsoft’s Hololens device, as well as its artificial-intelligence business. Maybe someone with insider knowledge will comment, but it looks like Windows is far from being a priority for Microsoft.
  - dmix 6y ago
    Man I still can’t believe Azure is number 2 behind Amazon for cloud computing. When they first started their marketing push to developers years ago, which I remember was very aggressive and full of evangelism marketing which I disliked, I kind of blew them off as some mid tier or old school oddity. But it really shows you how powerful their enterprise sales machine is and the legacy reach of existing programming languages/frameworks. It’s always easy to underestimate Microsoft I guess. Ditto with Oracle and the like. From our view down in the startup world. That said. Alt-tab not working is an embarrassment though. And I hope they really haven’t let their OS QA slip this badly in favour of some growth area or whatever.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      They're including managed services like office 365 in that number though. Might be fair because aws includes their services as well, but I'm pretty sure aws main income is from ec2, while azure is business tooling like active directory, office etc
sedatk 6y ago
> 2020-12-03 Microsoft advises that due to issues identified in testing, the fix will now slip to January 2021.
mwcampbell 6y ago
Having gone from sole developer at a tiny company to a developer at Microsoft (and now back again), I'd like to propose a corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to either malice or incompetence what can be explained by complexity that you don't know about.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Isn't allowing complexity to grow to such an extent that you cannot fix critical bugs in a reasonable amount of time a form of incompetence?
  - natpalmer1776 6y ago
    In my view, it is a form of incompetence so common and, in practice essential for growth as a business that it has become a ubiquitous baseline against which we should strive to differentiate ourselves from. It is complexity that is accepted in small amounts across dozens of projects over many years. Projects that add real value to the business while contributing to this invisible debt that from the business point of view, matters only once it has started directly affecting your revenue. Eventually an organization can't scale without a major refactoring, rewrite, or an entirely new market vertical.
  - konjin 6y ago
    I have a modification to Hanlon's Razor: anyone who invokes it is both.
  - martamorena284 6y ago
    It's simply not economically viable to build software at the scale of windows without such issues. There are thousands of teams (not people) working on it and hundreds of thousands of people over the lifetime of the software. Even companies like Microsoft have pressure to deliver on time and be frugal, not just startups. Incompetence is to spend too much time making software into a golden, egg laying donkey. As is building software that becomes impossible to change after a couple of years. Finding the fine line in between these extremes is what professional software engineering is all about.
bigiain 6y ago
> They must have some ghoulish software actually relying on the broken behavior. Probably XKeyscore or Solarwinds Orion or something... Can't break that shit, it gets important work done!

q3k 6y ago

I assume it's bigcorp slowness, having to roll up all updates into patch batches, following release schedules, testing against all release trains, going through QA, etc. No accelerated way to push critical, but trivial software fixes.

Retric 6y ago
Microsoft has patched issues fairly quickly in the past. This may be a “critical” issue, but I think they have even higher internal classifications which this doesn’t qualify for.
the8472 6y ago
MS can and does issue out of schedule patches every now and then. This presumably doesn't meet the bar since it only is a local privesc.
foepys 6y ago
Last year they pushed some "simple" fixes fast and broke quite a few older VB applications. That was quite a fun day at my office when some customers couldn't work anymore...
- dmix 6y ago
  This is interesting do you have more details you could share or point to a link?
  - foepys 6y ago
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-these-windows-10-updates-fix-broken-visual-basic-apps-but-not-for-1903/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-these-windows-10-upd... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/windows-update-2019-08-cumulative-update-has/baeea089-9bba-4a2a-9660-0a220f1656e9?page=2 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/windo...

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Perhaps they are trying to avoid breaking 3rd party code. I've spent quite a lot of time poking around in the print spooler and my gut feeling is it's probably riddled with issues like this.

Meph504 6y ago
I would agree I was baffled how basically windows will take anything from print drivers and ram it into the spooler.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Also I suspect nobody wants to work on it because who wants to do printing.
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    That must be some kind of purgatory where developers goes to slowly die inside.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I said it somewhat tongue in cheek because I have been working with printing technologies for my whole career.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I actually think working on printing infrastructure might be fun. There is image processing, font rendering, etc. which are fun niches. And you can see something physically tangible from your work. It's not going to increase in relevance or take over the world, but it is probably satisfying.
    - x0x0 6y ago
      I strongly suspect it's a haphazard, under-tested mess of compat hacks to work with thousands of models of printers, with thousands of quirks and bugs that Microsoft has painfully worked around to take care of their customers. As opposed to Apple, who just assumes you don't use printers older than 2 years and liberally breaks old printers and scanners.

qz2 6y ago

Alt+tab has been thoroughly broken on Windows 10 20H2 for over two months now. It randomly switches between the second and third window. No fix in customer facing versions yet either. They are slow and incompetent.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
This may explain it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-role-in-cloud-focused-reorganization-1522335763 https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-diminishes-windows-ro... > The company is breaking Windows in pieces. The platform technology, on which Microsoft’s partners build their own devices, apps and services, will now fall under Scott Guthrie, who runs the Azure business. Mr. Guthrie’s unit, called Cloud + AI Platform, will also include the company’s mixed-reality business, including Microsoft’s Hololens device, as well as its artificial-intelligence business. Maybe someone with insider knowledge will comment, but it looks like Windows is far from being a priority for Microsoft.
- dmix 6y ago
  Man I still can’t believe Azure is number 2 behind Amazon for cloud computing. When they first started their marketing push to developers years ago, which I remember was very aggressive and full of evangelism marketing which I disliked, I kind of blew them off as some mid tier or old school oddity. But it really shows you how powerful their enterprise sales machine is and the legacy reach of existing programming languages/frameworks. It’s always easy to underestimate Microsoft I guess. Ditto with Oracle and the like. From our view down in the startup world. That said. Alt-tab not working is an embarrassment though. And I hope they really haven’t let their OS QA slip this badly in favour of some growth area or whatever.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    They're including managed services like office 365 in that number though. Might be fair because aws includes their services as well, but I'm pretty sure aws main income is from ec2, while azure is business tooling like active directory, office etc

sedatk 6y ago

> 2020-12-03 Microsoft advises that due to issues identified in testing, the fix will now slip to January 2021.

mwcampbell 6y ago

Having gone from sole developer at a tiny company to a developer at Microsoft (and now back again), I'd like to propose a corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to either malice or incompetence what can be explained by complexity that you don't know about.

bawolff 6y ago
Isn't allowing complexity to grow to such an extent that you cannot fix critical bugs in a reasonable amount of time a form of incompetence?
- natpalmer1776 6y ago
  In my view, it is a form of incompetence so common and, in practice essential for growth as a business that it has become a ubiquitous baseline against which we should strive to differentiate ourselves from. It is complexity that is accepted in small amounts across dozens of projects over many years. Projects that add real value to the business while contributing to this invisible debt that from the business point of view, matters only once it has started directly affecting your revenue. Eventually an organization can't scale without a major refactoring, rewrite, or an entirely new market vertical.
- konjin 6y ago
  I have a modification to Hanlon's Razor: anyone who invokes it is both.
- martamorena284 6y ago
  It's simply not economically viable to build software at the scale of windows without such issues. There are thousands of teams (not people) working on it and hundreds of thousands of people over the lifetime of the software. Even companies like Microsoft have pressure to deliver on time and be frugal, not just startups. Incompetence is to spend too much time making software into a golden, egg laying donkey. As is building software that becomes impossible to change after a couple of years. Finding the fine line in between these extremes is what professional software engineering is all about.

bigiain 6y ago

> They must have some ghoulish software actually relying on the broken behavior. Probably XKeyscore or Solarwinds Orion or something... Can't break that shit, it gets important work done!