Microsoft Accidentally Released Internal Windows 10 Development Builds (theverge.com) 76
Microsoft is apologizing for mistakenly releasing some confidential and internal Windows 10 builds to the public. "Builds from some of our internal branches were accidentally released for PC and Mobile," reveals Dona Sarkar, Microsoft's head of its Windows Insiders program. "This happened because an inadvertent deployment to the engineering system that controls which builds / which rings to push out to insiders." The Verge reports: Microsoft says it quickly reverted the issue and put blocks in place to ensure these development builds didn't reach more people, but a "small portion" of Windows 10 users still received them. Worryingly, the accidental mobile build even reached retail devices outside of Microsoft's Windows Insiders testing. If Windows 10 testers installed the mobile build it forced phones into a reboot loop and bricked the device. Testers will have to recover and wipe the device using the Windows Device Recovery Tool. Windows 10 testers that installed the PC build, an internal Edge branch, will have to wait for Microsoft to publish a newer build or roll back using the recovery option in Windows 10 settings.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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Every year it gets a little closer. Like the Babbage Analytic Engine, it may take 100 years.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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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
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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
What's Microsoft's count up to now? ;)
"Bricked" - you keep using that word... (Score:2)
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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*.
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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..
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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: "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.
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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.
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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.
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You can still get into the BIOS and boot from another device. That is NOT bricked.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Windows Phones ... (Score:1)
All three of them?