Microsoft is evil and does not care about the best interests of their customers. These updates are harmful but users don't have a choice other than Windows 10 because Microsoft is a monopoly. Odumba should have issued an executive order to break up Microsoft for violating antitrust laws.
I'm doing security consulting for a living. Many of our customers are currently evaluating a replacement for their aging Windows 7 systems. And quite a few of them are actually and seriously considering moving away from Windows rather than moving towards Win10, or at the very least putting some money behind evaluating whether such a move is feasible.
Can you imagine just HOW much this spyware has to shake up CEOs that they would rather consider retraining thousands of workers to use a Linux based system than
macOS hardware choice sucks! you can hack it but after each update you may have to re hack it
Mac hardware is much more carefully-spec'ed than you realize.
For about 85-90% of applications, what they offer does just fine. The other 10% usually hack. Apple has obviously accepted that tacit arrangement. They could lock macOS to Apple hardware with ease; but they don't.
First, it's not home users that are trying the switch. Nobody gives a shit whether you in your basement go for Linux. Even if you really go through with your plan, you're one lost license. Ok, ok, two because you have that laptop. This is corporations with thousands of licenses. And there's a long, long tail of jobs (and consultant jobs!) hanging on it. You already have a lot of Linux machines in the server market (we actually have more installations of RHEL than MS-Server running), a lot
I use Xfce, and agree with you completely. I'm an old-time CLI hack, I used Windows 3.1 a bit, but only when I needed it. The first time I used a GUI full time was when I was working at a company in the '90s that had Win 95 on every desktop. By the time I migrated to a full-time GUI about ten years ago or so, organizing my desktop in the Win 95 fashion, with one panel and columns of icons down one side of the screen simply felt right to me. Gnome 2 let me do that, but the fact that Gnome 3 wasn't going
That's also wrong. Remember the outcry when Win8 came with the "tiles"? You might argue that that was ahead, but in the end, people hated it.
If you want to convince people that they should move to your flavor, you have to have the flavor they know and like, or at the very least got comfortable with.
Actually I never found Linux to be behind as far as the basic desktop went. After all, the desktop, minus GUI tweaks, has been pretty standard for the past 20 years. What keeps changing is the locations and "wizards" for various settings, which is annoying as hell. Another thing is the ever changing MS Office file formats, which they appear to have been caught by themselves with the long term life span of Office 2010, which forced them to be backwards compatible.
Second, the Linux desktop has always been about 10 years behind Windows
Then why did MS Windows 7 with it's little window snapshot icons look like the Enlightenment Window Manager from 1997 that did the same:) It hasn't been technical superiority, it's been merely the effort required to change.
Yes. Previously the complaints against Microsoft were largely non-technical, and people were faced with a choice of paying a small amount for a Windows system which worked and they were familiar with, or having Linux for free but with no practical advantanges. Microsoft were always able to keep the prices down to the point where switching just wasn't worth while. But now we have a Windows which doesn't work and people aren't familiar with. Even if it were free customers don't want an operating system with a
Remember, this is corporations. What the users want is essentially pointless.
The key here is that management doesn't want the way Windows takes them. The older ones currently have flashbacks to the days of IBM's dominance, where big blue could essentially tell them to grin and bear it or close shop, and if you were deep enough in the Blue, they essentially ran your IT department, and they did it the way THEY thought is good. This was actually what made MS big in the first place, because they were maybe not
Another "even my mom can use Linux" post that is just simple browsing. That's pretty much true on any platform. Try day to day usage including updates and upgrades. Let me know how she deals with a dependency problems and broken repos.
When you say Windows 10 is spyware you lose most of your credibility, regardless of Slashdot opinion and your post's score. ABMers, like other fixated, inflexible, partisan and absolutely self-assured person, removes the possibility of intelligent conversation. Do you own a mobile device? Ya know, because Android and iOS are totally open platforms.
Yea, go ahead and argue that you've rooted your device so you can 'secure' it better. The smartest people on the planet RELY on your blissful ignorance.
Notice how no one modded you up? Because you have contributed nothing to the conversation. Just threw around a bunch of words and hoped they stuck. Well they didn't.
I have never said that Android or iOS are better (actually, they're worse). But what is the alternative? Gimme one and I move.
No, Win10 on mobile isn't. For exactly the same damn reason.
The mobile ship has sailed, at least for now. Yes, I do have a mobile phone, simply out of necessity. And I have a quite restrictive company policy concerning what content it may transport. But that's besides the point.
The difference between mobile and desktop devices is that with the latter, you DO actually have a non-invas
To be fair, Microsoft tells people not to run Insider builds for any purpose other than beta testing. That a beta release was broken is not a problem or even an interesting story. The fact that Insider builds hit retail installations is the newsworthy item here. But that was not by design, so really your rant is way off base.
"Bricked" means exactly what it's supposed to. It means the device is in a reboot loop and is about as useful as a brick. I have applied patches to over 80 thousand laptops and desktops running everything from Adobe Acrobat to Visio, and Windows Update sometimes goes into a reboot loop and bricks the device. I need to boot from a recovery disk and run a system Restore to unbrick it.
Nah, that's not bricking. When you need special development cables and/or to open the device to restore its function, THAT is when it is a brick. If it cannot be fixed at all, no matter what, it is an eternal brick. If it requires replacing a component, it is a hard brick. If it just needs the developer mode or JTAG flashing, it is a soft brick and "a piece of cake":-)
If it is a normal-consumer field-fixable thing that, e.g. only requires booting from repair media, it is not bricking *at all*.
My 20 years in IT disagree with whatever the JTAG flashing is. I have worked as a video game tester, I have worked for google. Right I am a Sr. Systems Administrator at an unnamed 3 letter government agency, administering 80 thousand workstation laptops, workstation desktops, and tower workstations. I think I know what bricking means junior. You are talking about a hardware failure. Bricking is a software failure, and in this case the software is Windows. There is no such thing as soft-brick or hard-br
20 years in IT is nice (I have a lot more) - but his descriptions are correct and nobody cares what someone who doesn't even know what a JTAG cable is thinks about the subject.
Hm. My understanding of "bricked", which is probably out of date, is to put the device in a state where nothing can fix it short of physically replacing components. I guess language and its uses marches on.
If it's as simple as a restore or reinstall the o/s then the device ain't bricked. Bricked means unresponsive, inert, unable to be revived - basically a dead parrot. There's a bit of a grey area if we're talking reflashing the bios, tackling the anti-tamper screws or flimsy plastic catches on a laptop, or whipping out the soldering iron, but plugging in a USB stick/DVD and reinstalling? That's not bricked, that's just Microsoft.
a couple of weeks ago, dell pushed out a bios update for multiple models of PCs through its dell support assist utility that comes bundled with them. that update did, in fact, BRICK those computers. since dell doesn't provide a bios recovery method and still ships PCs without a backup bios (such as gigabyte's dual bios feature on their motherboards), the only 'fix' is to replace the PC at your own expense or ship it back for a motherboard replacement -- a potentially out of warranty repai
Hmm, a bios misflash (or flashing a broken bios that doesn't work and can't even be made to autoreflash from a pendrive using a safety bootblock that isn't usually updated, like the stuff from other vendors can), and that requires a direct reflash using a SPI flasher certainly counts as bricking.
Especially if the SPI flash chip is soldered (and is a ultra-small surface-mounted component for the extra annoyance factor), and you have to partially desolder it to be able to direct-flash:-( So, yes, I have to
Was MS Visual Studio used to publish the project? Shouldn't these kinds of controls be baked into the Build Configuration Manager settings to prevent accidental releases?
I'm sure Office 365 and Azure customers will be...heartened and encouraged...by this sort of expertise in operations and system management on the part of their cloud service provider.
Users of their client software, by contrast, can think happy thoughts about how robust and well supervised the release process for Windows updates is.
... thats exactly what happened with "windows 2000", that was only intended for internal use, didnt contain fuckup.dll that was mandatory for all products...
Well, they are moving everything to something git-based, which is a _LOT_ of work. Especially because normal git can't handle something that massive, so it is actually a diffused, virtual networked git object storage, with every other CI and deployment tool needing to be migrated to this new backend.
Someone likely screwed up on one of the provisioning tools, or a new tool was easy enough to misuse, and someone got confused (for real, or on purpose -- lots of people there are not really happy that they need
Minor quibble: Their old system couldn't handle the size they needed. They are migrating to git precisely because it CAN handle everything in one repository.
They are merely using this "object storage" model is so developers don't have to download the entire repository. And that's mostly about saving bandwith.
No, git really could not handle the scale there, the repo has over 1T (one Tera) objects and grows by something like a million every couple weeks. Standard git handling of packs and objects gets too burdened by this, it is not just the size of the backend packs in.git/objects.
The fact that it needs to run in Windows also matters, the windows kernel and filesystem layer are different from Linux' and has its own slow spots. Their distributed "load on demand" object storage with local caching sped things up
You can get Public symbols for most builds via http from Microsoft. These contain enough information to get you a stack trace but not local variables or source code file/line index information. Consult the Debugging Tools for Windows documentation if you want the nitty-gritty details.
If only. You need to download the debugging symbols to make any sense of BSOD crash reports. That's always fun trying to find out why a new machine is crashing. First step: Download several hundred MB for your build Step two: Install a few programs that really should be part of the windows installation in the first place. Step three: Follow some online guides and realise that your BSOD is nearly always caused by some dll with Mcafee in the publisher name.
We are in the hands of truly incompetent, malicious assholes. I have no control of my computer whatsoever, and it isn't being managed by competent, well-meaning people. Windows is a nightmare, but it's the only choice. Linux just isn't an alternative, no matter how much you want this to be true. I'm seriously considering ceasing all use of "hi-tech" and moving out into the remote wilderness.
Why isn't Linux an option? If you have "special snowflake" apps you can't live without run them in a Windows VM that doesn't have web access so you don't need to worry about Microsoft phoning home.
OK, I can see Microsoft inadvertently releasing a desktop or mobile internal by accident. Shit happens, but both is a something hard to do considering they are two separate platforms. But it wasn't released to the public in general but rather people doing testing and development. So these should not have been critical machines in the first place. If you were testing on a critical device, then you should have known better. Any beta could mess up a device.
Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.
Microsoft is evil (Score:1)
Microsoft is evil and does not care about the best interests of their customers. These updates are harmful but users don't have a choice other than Windows 10 because Microsoft is a monopoly. Odumba should have issued an executive order to break up Microsoft for violating antitrust laws.
Re: (Score:0)
This is a great example of why bleeding-edge, duct-tape development with forced updates is fucking stupid. Welcome to Windows 10, suckers.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, it's great for the developers. They get instant feedback from the user community on new releases.
Ok, most of that feedback is unprintable, but still, it is feedback, of a sort.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm doing security consulting for a living. Many of our customers are currently evaluating a replacement for their aging Windows 7 systems. And quite a few of them are actually and seriously considering moving away from Windows rather than moving towards Win10, or at the very least putting some money behind evaluating whether such a move is feasible.
Can you imagine just HOW much this spyware has to shake up CEOs that they would rather consider retraining thousands of workers to use a Linux based system than
Re: (Score:0)
Everyone I know in the game is likewise evaluating alternatives.
I think this is a really exciting time for Linux and BSD.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone I know in the game is likewise evaluating alternatives.
I think this is a really exciting time for Linux and BSD.
Or for the only reasonable alternative, macOS.
Re: (Score:0)
Everyone I know in the game is likewise evaluating alternatives.
I think this is a really exciting time for Linux and BSD.
Or for the only reasonable alternative, macOS.
MacOS is NOT an alternetive, period.
Re: (Score:1)
MacOS is NOT an alternetive, period.
It's pretty mainstream.
macOS hardware choice sucks! you can hack it but (Score:2)
macOS hardware choice sucks! you can hack it but after each update you may have to re hack it
Re: (Score:2)
macOS hardware choice sucks! you can hack it but after each update you may have to re hack it
Mac hardware is much more carefully-spec'ed than you realize.
For about 85-90% of applications, what they offer does just fine. The other 10% usually hack. Apple has obviously accepted that tacit arrangement. They could lock macOS to Apple hardware with ease; but they don't.
I believe that is exactly why.
Re: (Score:-1)
Oh man I've been reading /. on and off since about 1997 and every year is the year of Linux on the desktop. Thanks for making me laugh.
Re: (Score:0)
Oh Billy, you're such a tease.
Re: (Score:2)
Every year it gets a little closer. Like the Babbage Analytic Engine, it may take 100 years.
Re: (Score:2)
This is different.
First, it's not home users that are trying the switch. Nobody gives a shit whether you in your basement go for Linux. Even if you really go through with your plan, you're one lost license. Ok, ok, two because you have that laptop. This is corporations with thousands of licenses. And there's a long, long tail of jobs (and consultant jobs!) hanging on it. You already have a lot of Linux machines in the server market (we actually have more installations of RHEL than MS-Server running), a lot
Re: Microsoft is evil (Score:0)
In some ways, the desktop part of Linux is farther ahead than Windows is, looking at KDE of course.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's also wrong. Remember the outcry when Win8 came with the "tiles"? You might argue that that was ahead, but in the end, people hated it.
If you want to convince people that they should move to your flavor, you have to have the flavor they know and like, or at the very least got comfortable with.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Then why did MS Windows 7 with it's little window snapshot icons look like the Enlightenment Window Manager from 1997 that did the same :)
It hasn't been technical superiority, it's been merely the effort required to change.
Re: (Score:2)
This is different.
Yes. Previously the complaints against Microsoft were largely non-technical, and people were faced with a choice of paying a small amount for a Windows system which worked and they were familiar with, or having Linux for free but with no practical advantanges. Microsoft were always able to keep the prices down to the point where switching just wasn't worth while. But now we have a Windows which doesn't work and people aren't familiar with. Even if it were free customers don't want an operating system with a
Re: (Score:2)
Remember, this is corporations. What the users want is essentially pointless.
The key here is that management doesn't want the way Windows takes them. The older ones currently have flashbacks to the days of IBM's dominance, where big blue could essentially tell them to grin and bear it or close shop, and if you were deep enough in the Blue, they essentially ran your IT department, and they did it the way THEY thought is good. This was actually what made MS big in the first place, because they were maybe not
Re: Microsoft is evil (Score:1)
Re: (Score:0)
When you say Windows 10 is spyware you lose most of your credibility, regardless of Slashdot opinion and your post's score. ABMers, like other fixated, inflexible, partisan and absolutely self-assured person, removes the possibility of intelligent conversation. Do you own a mobile device? Ya know, because Android and iOS are totally open platforms.
Yea, go ahead and argue that you've rooted your device so you can 'secure' it better. The smartest people on the planet RELY on your blissful ignorance.
Re: Microsoft is evil (Score:0)
Notice how no one modded you up? Because you have contributed nothing to the conversation. Just threw around a bunch of words and hoped they stuck. Well they didn't.
Re: (Score:2)
I have never said that Android or iOS are better (actually, they're worse). But what is the alternative? Gimme one and I move.
No, Win10 on mobile isn't. For exactly the same damn reason.
The mobile ship has sailed, at least for now. Yes, I do have a mobile phone, simply out of necessity. And I have a quite restrictive company policy concerning what content it may transport. But that's besides the point.
The difference between mobile and desktop devices is that with the latter, you DO actually have a non-invas
Re: (Score:0)
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Re: (Score:2)
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
What's Microsoft's count up to now? ;)
Re: (Score:0)
Re: (Score:0)
To be fair, Microsoft tells people not to run Insider builds for any purpose other than beta testing. That a beta release was broken is not a problem or even an interesting story. The fact that Insider builds hit retail installations is the newsworthy item here. But that was not by design, so really your rant is way off base.
"Bricked" - you keep using that word... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:0)
I count at least 15 words in TFS that I don't think Microsoft understands.
Re: (Score:0)
it means exactly what he thinks it means, this is windows10...
Re: (Score:0)
Re: (Score:1)
Nah, that's not bricking. When you need special development cables and/or to open the device to restore its function, THAT is when it is a brick. If it cannot be fixed at all, no matter what, it is an eternal brick. If it requires replacing a component, it is a hard brick. If it just needs the developer mode or JTAG flashing, it is a soft brick and "a piece of cake" :-)
If it is a normal-consumer field-fixable thing that, e.g. only requires booting from repair media, it is not bricking *at all*.
Re: (Score:0)
Re: "Bricked" - you keep using that word... (Score:0)
Okay, both of you whip out your credentials and we'll see who's is bigger.
Re: (Score:1)
If you dont know what JTAG is then you have no room in this conversation. Damn sure not as much room as you take up..
Re: (Score:0)
Re: (Score:3)
That you don't know about something as basic as JTAG means you have zero credibility here to talk about anything.
That's my 29 years of experience (out of almost 35 years of life, now) with computers talking, CHILD.
Re: (Score:0)
I would hope you know all about a word that describes you.
Re: "Bricked" - you keep using that word... (Score:1)
20 years in IT is nice (I have a lot more) - but his descriptions are correct and nobody cares what someone who doesn't even know what a JTAG cable is thinks about the subject.
Re: (Score:2)
Hm. My understanding of "bricked", which is probably out of date, is to put the device in a state where nothing can fix it short of physically replacing components. I guess language and its uses marches on.
Re: (Score:1)
If it's as simple as a restore or reinstall the o/s then the device ain't bricked. Bricked means unresponsive, inert, unable to be revived - basically a dead parrot. There's a bit of a grey area if we're talking reflashing the bios, tackling the anti-tamper screws or flimsy plastic catches on a laptop, or whipping out the soldering iron, but plugging in a USB stick/DVD and reinstalling? That's not bricked, that's just Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
You can still get into the BIOS and boot from another device. That is NOT bricked.
Re: (Score:0)
LOL....if the bar for "bricked" is that low, then I guess my phone is bricked every time the battery dies.
Re: (Score:0)
how about this one:
a couple of weeks ago, dell pushed out a bios update for multiple models of PCs through its dell support assist utility that comes bundled with them. that update did, in fact, BRICK those computers. since dell doesn't provide a bios recovery method and still ships PCs without a backup bios (such as gigabyte's dual bios feature on their motherboards), the only 'fix' is to replace the PC at your own expense or ship it back for a motherboard replacement -- a potentially out of warranty repai
Re: (Score:0)
Hmm, a bios misflash (or flashing a broken bios that doesn't work and can't even be made to autoreflash from a pendrive using a safety bootblock that isn't usually updated, like the stuff from other vendors can), and that requires a direct reflash using a SPI flasher certainly counts as bricking.
Especially if the SPI flash chip is soldered (and is a ultra-small surface-mounted component for the extra annoyance factor), and you have to partially desolder it to be able to direct-flash :-( So, yes, I have to
Re: (Score:0)
Clearly, you don't know what it means.
Re: (Score:0)
Bricked = Not recoverable. You render the device worthless junk, unfit for anything other than recycling.
These devices are recoverable, they are still fully functional computers. Not a brick.
And it TRUMPED the phone? (Score:0)
Dead on Arrival folks!
How does the dog food taste? (Score:0)
Was MS Visual Studio used to publish the project? Shouldn't these kinds of controls be baked into the Build Configuration Manager settings to prevent accidental releases?
Impressive... (Score:2)
Users of their client software, by contrast, can think happy thoughts about how robust and well supervised the release process for Windows updates is.
I have a theory... (Score:0)
... thats exactly what happened with "windows 2000", that was only intended for internal use, didnt contain fuckup.dll that was mandatory for all products...
Maybe a bug in source safe (Score:1)
Maybe a bug in source safe or whatever is called the new tool they are using.
More seriously, I hear the new tool, I forgot the name, is much better than source safe.
Re: Maybe a bug in source safe (Score:0)
Visual Git?
Re: (Score:1)
Well, they are moving everything to something git-based, which is a _LOT_ of work. Especially because normal git can't handle something that massive, so it is actually a diffused, virtual networked git object storage, with every other CI and deployment tool needing to be migrated to this new backend.
Someone likely screwed up on one of the provisioning tools, or a new tool was easy enough to misuse, and someone got confused (for real, or on purpose -- lots of people there are not really happy that they need
Re: (Score:0)
Minor quibble: Their old system couldn't handle the size they needed. They are migrating to git precisely because it CAN handle everything in one repository.
They are merely using this "object storage" model is so developers don't have to download the entire repository. And that's mostly about saving bandwith.
Re: (Score:0)
No, git really could not handle the scale there, the repo has over 1T (one Tera) objects and grows by something like a million every couple weeks. Standard git handling of packs and objects gets too burdened by this, it is not just the size of the backend packs in .git/objects.
The fact that it needs to run in Windows also matters, the windows kernel and filesystem layer are different from Linux' and has its own slow spots. Their distributed "load on demand" object storage with local caching sped things up
Re: (Score:0)
One would hope they're not still using source safe... anywhere.
Re: Maybe a bug in source safe (Score:0)
They never have. Microsoft just (and rightly so) thought that their customers where idiots enough to use it. MS themselves never used it for anything.
The build bricks the devices? (Score:5, Funny)
Gee, if you didn't tell us it wasn't intentional, we probably wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from any other update.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, that explains it (Score:5, Funny)
I must have been using an accidentally released internal build all these years.
Once again (Score:1)
Debug Symbols? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did the builds have debug symbols? That would be a goldmine for reverse-engineers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can get Public symbols for most builds via http from Microsoft. These contain enough information to get you a stack trace but not local variables or source code file/line index information. Consult the Debugging Tools for Windows documentation if you want the nitty-gritty details.
Re: (Score:2)
If only. You need to download the debugging symbols to make any sense of BSOD crash reports. That's always fun trying to find out why a new machine is crashing. First step: Download several hundred MB for your build
Step two: Install a few programs that really should be part of the windows installation in the first place.
Step three: Follow some online guides and realise that your BSOD is nearly always caused by some dll with Mcafee in the publisher name.
Accidentally (Score:0)
on purpose.
Computers today = nightmare. (Score:0)
We are in the hands of truly incompetent, malicious assholes. I have no control of my computer whatsoever, and it isn't being managed by competent, well-meaning people. Windows is a nightmare, but it's the only choice. Linux just isn't an alternative, no matter how much you want this to be true. I'm seriously considering ceasing all use of "hi-tech" and moving out into the remote wilderness.
Re: Computers today = nightmare. (Score:0)
Why isn't Linux an option? If you have "special snowflake" apps you can't live without run them in a Windows VM that doesn't have web access so you don't need to worry about Microsoft phoning home.
Windows Phones ... (Score:1)
All three of them?
DOH! (Score:0)
NT
What's the big deal? (Score:0)
MS has been releasing half-baked crap for years.
*CONTINUES TO ENJOY WINDOWS 7* (Score:0)
Aaaaah, this is the life. No worries about telemetry spying... or forced updates that could brick the system.
Things, just work.
Shitty managers (Score:0)
This is what happens when you have shitty project managers in control
How do you do this? (Score:0)
OK, I can see Microsoft inadvertently releasing a desktop or mobile internal by accident. Shit happens, but both is a something hard to do considering they are two separate platforms. But it wasn't released to the public in general but rather people doing testing and development. So these should not have been critical machines in the first place. If you were testing on a critical device, then you should have known better. Any beta could mess up a device.