15 ms·

This is the type of thing I imagined could happen, but hoped it never actually would happen. The worst example I had heard until today was an update that cause

This is the type of thing I imagined could happen, but hoped it never actually would happen. The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted. Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.

colechristensen 4y ago
And this is why people buy macbooks. Apple products have a minimum guaranteed level of quality. There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  And curiously enough, this was the moment she converted to being an Apple user. She expected and found the same quality on her Mac as she did on her iPhone. > There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products. There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
  - another2another 4y ago
    >There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. >A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. >What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly. A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again. I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    And people wonder why I still hold a grudge against Microsoft. We still live with the consequences of three decades of bad behavior. A little deathbed conversion doesn’t mean as much as some think it does.
- ansgri 4y ago
  Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though? I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    OSX doesn’t surprise me in hostile ways
    - fsflover 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
      - shishy 4y ago
        That sounds like it was a bug / mistake than a deliberate decision by the company unless I misunderstood something?
        fsflover 4y ago
        Information about every executable your run on "your" laptop goes to a special server belonging to Apple. It must be a huge and costly mistake...
        such12 4y ago
        Nobody is saying that the malware check is a mistake.
        fsflover 4y ago
        But it is.
- belorn 4y ago
  It wasn't that many months ago that I had a conversation with a customer that if they wanted to continue to use email (outside the browser) then the best option was to buy a new mac because their current mac version don't support the new certificates required for modern tls and in order to get a new macos version they need to buy a new device. If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
  - a2tech 4y ago
    They may have bought it 5 years ago, but it wasn't 5 years old. Also for future reference you can update the certs on older OS X versions to get a few more years out of a system for someone thats happy with it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-update-my-root-certificates-on-an-older-version-of-mac-os-e-g-el-capi https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-up...
    - belorn 4y ago
      An interesting hack. We went with a different hack to accomplish a working solution, but good to know there is alternatives. The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end. For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.
    - nucleardog 4y ago
      Yep. My wife's still running a MBP from 2012 that I think finally got its last update to Big Sur (released 2020) without issue. Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well. And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  I would, if Apple would just make a MacBook w/ a stylus --- I don't want the hassle of multiple devices, but I'm not willing to give up a stylus --- at this point, I'm considering just breaking down and getting a Mac Mini and Wacom Cintiq Pro 16 and giving up portability/battery.
  - macintux 4y ago
    What applications do you want to use a stylus with? iPads are really good at what they do, and Apple makes integration with their laptops straightforward. You can easily share files back and forth. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.
    - junar 4y ago
      Yeah, so Sidecar is free for owners of recent-ish iPads and Macs. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380 Luna Display is a more premium option. https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/ https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/
    - WillAdams 4y ago
      Carbide Create and Macromedia Freehand are the major stumbling blocks. The former isn't available for the iPad, the latter predates it, and I find the nearest analogue, Serif's Affinity Designer not quite right. I also like having access to a file system, and the ability to run arbitrary opensource tools such as OpenSCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor and RapCAD.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  No, that is why people turn to Linux (and *BSD to a much (, much) smaller extent) after having been thoroughly disgusted by these practices whether they come from Microsoft (Windows et al) or Apple or anyone else. It is the only "platform" where you can be really free from this type of behaviour. They first install it on the hardware previously used for Windows or Mac OS and quickly find out their old hardware could perform much better than it did when burdened by those marketing strategies disguised as operating systems. The next step comes when they buy new hardware on which they directly install some Linux distribution, usually keeping the factory-installed Windows or Mac OS around where it tends to languish. When they then decide to boot into those factory images they are immediately hit with the upgrade hammer which only increases their determination to stay away from those systems as much as possible. This is easier for those who used to run Windows than for those who need to use Mac OS to develop for one of the other Apple brands since these all mandate the use of Xcode [1] which needs Mac OS which "needs" [1] Apple hardware. [1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...
mysterydip 4y ago
"When people had a choice in updates, too many would postpone them. This left our OS susceptible to attacks which made for some bad press for us. If we force updates, this won't happen." - some exec, probably
- raverbashing 4y ago
  And the worse part is that they're not wrong
  - II2II 4y ago
    They were wrong in the sense that they used it to condition people to accept non-security updates and they were wrong in the sense that some people are better placed to determine whether any form of update is an unacceptable risk. As things stand today, I only trust updates from community driven open source software projects. With exceptionally few exceptions, commercial software seems to offer the guarantee of delivering undesirable payloads.
    - brookst 4y ago
      I work for one of those very large commercial software companies. In general, I think we do a pretty good job. We absolutely fuck some things up, for sure, for a lot of different reasons. But I promise you there is never any kind of Machiavellian multi-year plan to condition people for upcoming bad behavior. Most of the things we do screw up are from lack of foresight; we are definitely not strong enough at long range planning to run psyops on customers.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  If by "bad press" you mean "other users getting fucked over by an entire homogeneous ecosystem of the same OS being a breeding ground for gigantic botnets that criminals were able to turn on services to knock them off the internet," yes. The only real way to address it without the mandatory updates was for the ecosystem to diversify; can't use a Windows exploit to compromise a Mac OS machine. You can imagine why that solution was not on Microsoft's list of recommendations.
permo-w 4y ago
this is much more minor than a cancer patient missing his last damn holiday, but I have a device running android tv, and every few days it auto-redownloads “Android TV Home”, which is an advert-infested replacement home screen run by (I assume) Google. every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how? every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen. the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
- UI_at_80x24 4y ago
  Nvidia shield perhaps? Just side load an Android app called "NetGuard" which is a free firewall app on Android (though it's only available on the Android phone, but you can still sideload it on the Shield TV). Download the NetGuard APK file and then install it on your Shield TV using a 3rd party file manager app (you can find the NetGuard .APK file on Google search, or you could use an APK extractor and extract the NetGuard app from your Android phone after downloading it from the Play Store). You might need to also download a 3rd party launcher to see the side loaded Android apps as it will not appear on the stock Android TV home launcher. Then open the NetGuard app and disable network connections to the "Software Upgrade" app, then switch on the NetGuard toggle and it will block the "Software Upgrade" system app from accessing the internet, therefore it cannot download the software update and then prompt you to install it with an annoying pop up screen message. If you get a software update message and the software update gets downloaded, just go to the app settings of "Software Upgrade" and delete the app cache and data. Once you have the NetGuard app enabled, it should auto start every time you boot up the Shield TV and it will always run in the background. I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep. Additionally, I suggest you go to Google Play Services and the Google app and disable all the app permissions to access storage or change system settings (though if you use things like Google Assistant or voice search, you may need to leave the microphone permission on). Do the same for the other Nvidia apps which you might think may try to control or change settings on your Shield TV without your permission. I'm still on Android 8.0 on my 2017 Shield and I'm happy with it. I don't really need any extra features and nothing needs to be fixed. This is the only method I found to work. I have tried to delete the "Software Upgrade" app package from my computer using Android ADB but I just couldn't do it (maybe Nvidia blocked it). So the firewall method is the only option. I don't know if Nvidia made changes and blocked this method in newer updates, but try it and let me know if it works.
dopidopHN 4y ago
Damn you can’t say no ? I learned to let the users pick the right time for update on my first job. ( by having to drive and fix my mess ) But we were a tiny software shop. No MS I guess.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  It's gotten a bit better, but I still remember booting up my machine (after not using it for a while), getting a "WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPDATE NOW OR IN 10 MINUTES?" dialog, and sure enough, after 10 minutes, the system force-rebooted, discarding any unsaved work (!), and spent the better part of the hour I had available to finally play a game on installing an update. Might have been the same update that reset my privacy settings.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Well, "better" here means you get the chance to start the update by yourself withing a few days. No warning is displayed on those few days, and if you fail to update by yourself, the system still force-reboots and loses any unsaved work. Also, my impression is that the updates have become much less reliable. So your computer may not be back at all. Or something you need never work anymore.
- _jal 4y ago
  That's why friends don't let friends run Microsoft software. In return for your money, you get to follow their orders, watch their ads, and generally compute in whatever way they want you to this quarter. Windows is a control mechanism that, for now, runs third party code.
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    I mean yeah. I thought they got better with time. Apparently not. My motto with “computer help” is “ok, let me install Linux on that, we’ll see what I can do” Usually that works. ( people get scared and I’m off the hook) But the older part of my family is running exclusively on Linux since a decade. Not much support needed.
WillAdams 4y ago
I still regret that when Fall Creators Update came out, that I assumed that my active stylus (Staedtler Noris Digital, purchased as a bundle w/ my Samsung Galaxy Book 12) being used for scrolling and becoming unable to select text was a bug, so I simply rolled back, assuming it would be eventually be fixed. If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine. I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates. I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display. Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has: - a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR) - a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more) - decent battery life - reasonable size/thinness - reasonable price - access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
tomjen3 4y ago
Not that I want to defend MS, but the longest I have ever seen it take to update is a couple of hours. Annoying, yes. Should it be user postponable? Yes. Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  They put more thought into their anti-piracy mechanics. Want to compel a user to update/reboot? Mess with the aesthetics. Disable their wedding-photo background. Change the UI to something horrendously ugly (pink-on-green?). Toggle high-contrast mode every hour.
- Nihilartikel 4y ago
  5 days! How magnanimous of them! (Snark not directed at you personally at all) But I write as a person who once had to make idle chitchat with an audience of 300 for 8 minutes when a university presentation computer decided that it had to restart RIGHT NOW.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    That is almost certainly because the IT department configured it that way. Most IT departments are not very competent.
asmr 4y ago
I worked for the computer store on my University's campus during the initial rollout of Win 10. Many such cases. There were also TOO many instances of Dell computers doing a BIOS update in the background and booting to bitlocker because the drives come from factory encrypted.
tomcam 4y ago
I hate bringing this up, because that loss should never have happened. But I ensure all such data lives on the cloud as well as locally because there could be a catastrophic hardware failure, natural disaster, or other external cause of that same problem regardless of Microsoft’s obvious negligence.
- esalman 4y ago
  That is a good point. However, when I am working on my thesis or even a piece of code that resides on OneDrive folder, I usually pause sync for at least 24 hours. This is because OneDrive will often lock files or otherwise interrupt running/saving code so that it can do continuous sync, like frequently ramping the CPU usage up to 100%, send the fan on frenzy or cause other distractions. And a lot can go wrong in that 24 hours, or even 8 hours which is the lowest setting.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    That’s just a shitty situation and I empathize completely. You would think OneDrive would have conquered that problem by, say, three years ago.

colechristensen 4y ago

And this is why people buy macbooks. Apple products have a minimum guaranteed level of quality. There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.

HeckFeck 4y ago
And curiously enough, this was the moment she converted to being an Apple user. She expected and found the same quality on her Mac as she did on her iPhone. > There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products. There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
- another2another 4y ago
  >There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. >A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. >What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly. A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again. I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.
- hinkley 4y ago
  And people wonder why I still hold a grudge against Microsoft. We still live with the consequences of three decades of bad behavior. A little deathbed conversion doesn’t mean as much as some think it does.
ansgri 4y ago
Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though? I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  OSX doesn’t surprise me in hostile ways
  - fsflover 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
    - shishy 4y ago
      That sounds like it was a bug / mistake than a deliberate decision by the company unless I misunderstood something?
      - fsflover 4y ago
        Information about every executable your run on "your" laptop goes to a special server belonging to Apple. It must be a huge and costly mistake...
        such12 4y ago
        Nobody is saying that the malware check is a mistake.
        fsflover 4y ago
        But it is.
belorn 4y ago
It wasn't that many months ago that I had a conversation with a customer that if they wanted to continue to use email (outside the browser) then the best option was to buy a new mac because their current mac version don't support the new certificates required for modern tls and in order to get a new macos version they need to buy a new device. If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
- a2tech 4y ago
  They may have bought it 5 years ago, but it wasn't 5 years old. Also for future reference you can update the certs on older OS X versions to get a few more years out of a system for someone thats happy with it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-update-my-root-certificates-on-an-older-version-of-mac-os-e-g-el-capi https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-up...
  - belorn 4y ago
    An interesting hack. We went with a different hack to accomplish a working solution, but good to know there is alternatives. The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end. For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.
  - nucleardog 4y ago
    Yep. My wife's still running a MBP from 2012 that I think finally got its last update to Big Sur (released 2020) without issue. Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well. And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.
WillAdams 4y ago
I would, if Apple would just make a MacBook w/ a stylus --- I don't want the hassle of multiple devices, but I'm not willing to give up a stylus --- at this point, I'm considering just breaking down and getting a Mac Mini and Wacom Cintiq Pro 16 and giving up portability/battery.
- macintux 4y ago
  What applications do you want to use a stylus with? iPads are really good at what they do, and Apple makes integration with their laptops straightforward. You can easily share files back and forth. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.
  - junar 4y ago
    Yeah, so Sidecar is free for owners of recent-ish iPads and Macs. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380 Luna Display is a more premium option. https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/ https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Carbide Create and Macromedia Freehand are the major stumbling blocks. The former isn't available for the iPad, the latter predates it, and I find the nearest analogue, Serif's Affinity Designer not quite right. I also like having access to a file system, and the ability to run arbitrary opensource tools such as OpenSCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor and RapCAD.
the_third_wave 4y ago
No, that is why people turn to Linux (and *BSD to a much (, much) smaller extent) after having been thoroughly disgusted by these practices whether they come from Microsoft (Windows et al) or Apple or anyone else. It is the only "platform" where you can be really free from this type of behaviour. They first install it on the hardware previously used for Windows or Mac OS and quickly find out their old hardware could perform much better than it did when burdened by those marketing strategies disguised as operating systems. The next step comes when they buy new hardware on which they directly install some Linux distribution, usually keeping the factory-installed Windows or Mac OS around where it tends to languish. When they then decide to boot into those factory images they are immediately hit with the upgrade hammer which only increases their determination to stay away from those systems as much as possible. This is easier for those who used to run Windows than for those who need to use Mac OS to develop for one of the other Apple brands since these all mandate the use of Xcode [1] which needs Mac OS which "needs" [1] Apple hardware. [1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...

mysterydip 4y ago

"When people had a choice in updates, too many would postpone them. This left our OS susceptible to attacks which made for some bad press for us. If we force updates, this won't happen." - some exec, probably

raverbashing 4y ago
And the worse part is that they're not wrong
- II2II 4y ago
  They were wrong in the sense that they used it to condition people to accept non-security updates and they were wrong in the sense that some people are better placed to determine whether any form of update is an unacceptable risk. As things stand today, I only trust updates from community driven open source software projects. With exceptionally few exceptions, commercial software seems to offer the guarantee of delivering undesirable payloads.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I work for one of those very large commercial software companies. In general, I think we do a pretty good job. We absolutely fuck some things up, for sure, for a lot of different reasons. But I promise you there is never any kind of Machiavellian multi-year plan to condition people for upcoming bad behavior. Most of the things we do screw up are from lack of foresight; we are definitely not strong enough at long range planning to run psyops on customers.
shadowgovt 4y ago
If by "bad press" you mean "other users getting fucked over by an entire homogeneous ecosystem of the same OS being a breeding ground for gigantic botnets that criminals were able to turn on services to knock them off the internet," yes. The only real way to address it without the mandatory updates was for the ecosystem to diversify; can't use a Windows exploit to compromise a Mac OS machine. You can imagine why that solution was not on Microsoft's list of recommendations.

permo-w 4y ago

this is much more minor than a cancer patient missing his last damn holiday, but I have a device running android tv, and every few days it auto-redownloads “Android TV Home”, which is an advert-infested replacement home screen run by (I assume) Google. every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how? every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen. the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders

UI_at_80x24 4y ago
Nvidia shield perhaps? Just side load an Android app called "NetGuard" which is a free firewall app on Android (though it's only available on the Android phone, but you can still sideload it on the Shield TV). Download the NetGuard APK file and then install it on your Shield TV using a 3rd party file manager app (you can find the NetGuard .APK file on Google search, or you could use an APK extractor and extract the NetGuard app from your Android phone after downloading it from the Play Store). You might need to also download a 3rd party launcher to see the side loaded Android apps as it will not appear on the stock Android TV home launcher. Then open the NetGuard app and disable network connections to the "Software Upgrade" app, then switch on the NetGuard toggle and it will block the "Software Upgrade" system app from accessing the internet, therefore it cannot download the software update and then prompt you to install it with an annoying pop up screen message. If you get a software update message and the software update gets downloaded, just go to the app settings of "Software Upgrade" and delete the app cache and data. Once you have the NetGuard app enabled, it should auto start every time you boot up the Shield TV and it will always run in the background. I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep. Additionally, I suggest you go to Google Play Services and the Google app and disable all the app permissions to access storage or change system settings (though if you use things like Google Assistant or voice search, you may need to leave the microphone permission on). Do the same for the other Nvidia apps which you might think may try to control or change settings on your Shield TV without your permission. I'm still on Android 8.0 on my 2017 Shield and I'm happy with it. I don't really need any extra features and nothing needs to be fixed. This is the only method I found to work. I have tried to delete the "Software Upgrade" app package from my computer using Android ADB but I just couldn't do it (maybe Nvidia blocked it). So the firewall method is the only option. I don't know if Nvidia made changes and blocked this method in newer updates, but try it and let me know if it works.

dopidopHN 4y ago

Damn you can’t say no ? I learned to let the users pick the right time for update on my first job. ( by having to drive and fix my mess ) But we were a tiny software shop. No MS I guess.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
It's gotten a bit better, but I still remember booting up my machine (after not using it for a while), getting a "WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPDATE NOW OR IN 10 MINUTES?" dialog, and sure enough, after 10 minutes, the system force-rebooted, discarding any unsaved work (!), and spent the better part of the hour I had available to finally play a game on installing an update. Might have been the same update that reset my privacy settings.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, "better" here means you get the chance to start the update by yourself withing a few days. No warning is displayed on those few days, and if you fail to update by yourself, the system still force-reboots and loses any unsaved work. Also, my impression is that the updates have become much less reliable. So your computer may not be back at all. Or something you need never work anymore.
_jal 4y ago
That's why friends don't let friends run Microsoft software. In return for your money, you get to follow their orders, watch their ads, and generally compute in whatever way they want you to this quarter. Windows is a control mechanism that, for now, runs third party code.
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  I mean yeah. I thought they got better with time. Apparently not. My motto with “computer help” is “ok, let me install Linux on that, we’ll see what I can do” Usually that works. ( people get scared and I’m off the hook) But the older part of my family is running exclusively on Linux since a decade. Not much support needed.

WillAdams 4y ago

I still regret that when Fall Creators Update came out, that I assumed that my active stylus (Staedtler Noris Digital, purchased as a bundle w/ my Samsung Galaxy Book 12) being used for scrolling and becoming unable to select text was a bug, so I simply rolled back, assuming it would be eventually be fixed. If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine. I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates. I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display. Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has: - a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR) - a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more) - decent battery life - reasonable size/thinness - reasonable price - access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.

tomjen3 4y ago

Not that I want to defend MS, but the longest I have ever seen it take to update is a couple of hours. Annoying, yes. Should it be user postponable? Yes. Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.

jstarfish 4y ago
They put more thought into their anti-piracy mechanics. Want to compel a user to update/reboot? Mess with the aesthetics. Disable their wedding-photo background. Change the UI to something horrendously ugly (pink-on-green?). Toggle high-contrast mode every hour.
Nihilartikel 4y ago
5 days! How magnanimous of them! (Snark not directed at you personally at all) But I write as a person who once had to make idle chitchat with an audience of 300 for 8 minutes when a university presentation computer decided that it had to restart RIGHT NOW.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  That is almost certainly because the IT department configured it that way. Most IT departments are not very competent.

asmr 4y ago

I worked for the computer store on my University's campus during the initial rollout of Win 10. Many such cases. There were also TOO many instances of Dell computers doing a BIOS update in the background and booting to bitlocker because the drives come from factory encrypted.

tomcam 4y ago

I hate bringing this up, because that loss should never have happened. But I ensure all such data lives on the cloud as well as locally because there could be a catastrophic hardware failure, natural disaster, or other external cause of that same problem regardless of Microsoft’s obvious negligence.

esalman 4y ago
That is a good point. However, when I am working on my thesis or even a piece of code that resides on OneDrive folder, I usually pause sync for at least 24 hours. This is because OneDrive will often lock files or otherwise interrupt running/saving code so that it can do continuous sync, like frequently ramping the CPU usage up to 100%, send the fan on frenzy or cause other distractions. And a lot can go wrong in that 24 hours, or even 8 hours which is the lowest setting.
- tomcam 4y ago
  That’s just a shitty situation and I empathize completely. You would think OneDrive would have conquered that problem by, say, three years ago.