4 ms·
It's more reliable to install patches as part of a reboot because you know what's loaded and where it is. When you have 1.6 billion users with such disparate h
by scholia 11y ago
It's more reliable to install patches as part of a reboot because you know what's loaded and where it is.
When you have 1.6 billion users with such disparate hardware and software, even a small improvement can help tens of millions of users.
I expect Microsoft has lots of telemetry on this....
- modeless 11y agoWhen you have 1.6 billion users, every time you waste 5 minutes of their time installing updates and rebooting, that wastes 190 human lifetimes worth of man-hours. I know that Microsoft does not properly account for this when deciding how much effort to allocate to making updates less intrusive.
- gruez 11y agoMost people will not stare at the screen for 5 minutes while it's updating. They will be doing non-computer tasks in the meantime. Also, this ignores the ability for the updates to be postponed[1] until a convenient time (at lunch?, after work?), which means the lost productivity is reduced to the time it takes to restore the workspace. [1] Even with windows 10's forced updates, I still think it's possible to postpone updates, just not indefinitely.
- modeless 11y agoGreat, so reduce the time estimate by an order of magnitude. Now you're only wasting 19 human lifetimes per update. Hooray?
- tene 11y agoI have some bad news for you; companies imposing costs on others to reduce their own cost is extremely common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- GrinningFool 11y agos/companies/people
- jimrandomh 11y agoThis is the wrong objection. If only 10% of users lose 5 minutes each, that's... 19 lifetimes' worth of man-hours, which is still excessive. The real reason for not doing rebootless updates is that they're hard to implement, and hard to implement in such a way that they create a risk of problems much bigger than losing 5 minutes (like data loss or security vulns staying open).
- dzhiurgis 11y agoWindows lost my unsaved files few times this month.
- snowwrestler 11y agoBut these are not actual lifetimes. You can't kill people by updating a billion computers for the same reason you can't have a baby in one month with 9 women.