Hacker News Reader

Comment by daly | Hacker News Reader

I bought a new computer with Windows 10 for my wife, an artist. It contains Windows Home edition.

Windows Update reboots her computer "outside of working hours". Of course, she leaves the computer running with partially completed work sitting in the application because art isn't something you do in one sitting. She comes back on occasion and finds that Microsoft rebooted the computer, LOSING ALL HER WORK.

This shows that Microsoft does not value its users and their work.

I could, of course, BUY an "upgraded, professional version" but I have a better solution.

I'm about to reformat the machine into Linux.

View on HN

Honestly, as a pro digital artist, the two habits I found most useful to teach myself were "regularly zoom out to 100% so I don't get lost in needless detail" and "save every time I feel like taking a break". Windows' behavior here is inexcusable but there are a ton of other things that can happen - art software crashes, power interruptions, drink spills, kids/cats poking, etc. Switching to Linux won't save her from these.

Seriously. I've been doing digital art for money since 2000. I've lost work. I've learnt to consider anything unsaved as potentially something I could lose any minute. The sooner your wife learns this, the happier she will be as a digital artist.

(And set her up with automatic backups while you're teaching her this. "Oops I deleted half my sketch by accident ten saves ago" is wonderful to recover from.)

It is not the state of the PROGRAM, it's the "state of the DESKTOP".

You have your art tool running, a browser with a dozen open windows, a couple PDFs open, a chat window with the art group, and all of the other open applications. POOF. Gone.

It's like someone came to your office and "cleaned off your desk". Some of us rely on where things are as part of our "external memory". Do you remember which 3 PDFs (aka books) you were looking at last night?

The image might not be lost but WHERE you were working on the image, the state of your toolbox, what brush you were using, what color you had picked, etc. are mostly all in your head and reflected on the desktop.

That said, it is truly ARROGANT to reboot someone else's computer without permission. Next time you go to work, walk around and reboot everyone's computer while they are working. See how that goes.

I've gotten very very spoilt by OSX trying very hard to retain information about what was open when you reboot, I suppose. At any moment I've got like four or five different desktops set up with various numbers of windows related to the task I'm doing on that desktop, and those will all come back if I reboot. I still find the "save early, save often" habit very worthwhile.

Hell, maybe I'm also spoilt by the fact that Illustrator defaults to re-loading a file with the view sized and centered exactly the same way it was when you last saved it.

Even with all these things making life easy for me, I'm still saying that "don't walk away from your art app with anything you'd be sad to lose unsaved" is a habit worth having.

I am not defending Windows rebooting and ignoring unsaved changes in the least. That is inexcusable.

Reminds me of something from Woz about always doing backups.

The forced reboots are especially amusing if you consider them in the context of the fact that the Windows NT series was long touted as being so stable they never require rebooting, while 9x with its minimal memory protections would need to be rebooted often if your applications weren't well-behaved. Meanwhile, year-long uptime was a common occurrence with Unices (including Linux).

It seems Microsoft does not value uptime anymore either.

I think they realized that people obsessing over uptime yielded machines that hadn't been patched in half a year, and took the easier route to fix it (forced reboots, instead of a Windows equivalent of kGraft).

While I don't agree with the most recent iteration, this is just a continuation of the slow march they've been on since they added Automatic Updates and downloading the updates before prompting you to install, then increasingly invasive prompts, until now, where you can't opt out of restarting without highly invasive registry changes or an enterprise license.

And in the process overlooking the massive number of gray boxes sitting around on shelves and under desks doing "something" and running some bottom of the barrel Windows install.

Now why those boxes are even online so that they can download updates, never mind reboot at "random" intervals, is the biggest puzzle.

I have no love for Microsoft -- but any application that doesn't do auto-save to protect the user from crashes and power failures is broken.

On the flip side, any OS that restarts without explicit user confirmation is broken.

I agree, the OS shouldn't be adding to this problem, but there are plenty of ways for an application to close unexpectedly. OS crash, application crash, power outage, the computer locking up etc. Any application that keeps a user's partially completed work open for long periods of time should be durable to all of these situations. An OS restarting itself should never be more than a hiccup.

If MS' motivation is to protect against intrusion, then the most invasive thing they should do, after whatever internal countdown, is to simply drop the internet connection.

I don't disagree at all, but it might be easier to get a better app than to get Windows to stop doing crazy shit.

There is a lot of state that gets lost in a forced reboot, not only in terms of things that could easily be auto-saved like files. Not to mention this is something an application has no control over, so you still lose whatever you did since the last auto-save; and I believe this (being suddenly terminated) is something an application should not need to care about either --- requiring that every application care about saving and restoring state is ridiculous. The OS is the one terminating processes, it should be responsible for restoring them.

If a "reboot" simply meant a few seconds where the computer is unusable, and then you get put back in the exact same environment with everything being exactly the same as before, I would probably think it acceptable, but the reality is very different.

I agree that forced reboots are unconscionable, but there's nothing the OS can do about power failures, as long as we're using volatile DRAM for main memory. There's also the possibility of crash-causing bugs in the app itself. I think any app used for content creation has to do auto-save.

(I worked on a micro-Emacs-clone, Mince, in 1981, that ran on a 64KB CP/M machine and had very usable auto-save -- on floppies! You can't tell me it's too hard.)

any application that doesn't do auto-save to protect the user from crashes and power failures is broken

That's a cop-out. I'm about to start a number-crunching process that usually takes about a week to complete. Is that supposed to have some magic facility to be interrupted at any point and restart from where it left off, or at least somewhere close? How much of my time should I spend on that, given that I wrote the scripts so I'll be the one implementing any auto-save as well? Should I also reimplement the dependencies that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, given that calls into some of that functionality can take considerable time to complete?

Oh, wait, I don't have Windows 10. Never mind.

Is your number crunching program geared towards a mass market; or a 'once in a while' report run by a single company?

I would expect the two markets to have very different requirements.

Is your number crunching program geared towards a mass market; or a 'once in a while' report run by a single company?

Neither of the above, though this specific type of work might be unique to the project in question for all I know.

I also don't know how many other projects with unusual or unique long-running tasks are out there. However, given that there are hundreds of millions of people, if not billions now, with personal computers, I imagine the answer is well into "quite a lot, actually" territory.

I don't have to care about this on Linux, why should I on Windows? What good does it give me, the user?

I would expect to be able to plug a router into my computer and flash it without Microsoft deciding to potentially brick the device on basically any operating system.

A lot can happen in a week. Periodic state dumps or checkpoints can save a lot of wasted time if there's a power interruption 5 days in.

Periodic state dumps or checkpoints can save a lot of wasted time if there's a power interruption 5 days in.

True enough, but so can a UPS and automatic sleep function in the event of extended power outage, and we already have those routinely installed anyway.

For those who may be interested: the way to turn this particular trait off in Windows 10 is to mark all of your Internet connections as "metered connections." Windows will no longer download updates unless you specifically ask for them, which you can do when you're not in the middle of a big project.

And then they say that Linux is the non user-friendly OS...

this loophole is being "fixed", windows will soon download "essential" updates automatically over metered connections regardless

http://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-could-start-pushing...

perhaps that update will never get downloaded onto my machine

How long will you go without security updates to achieve that?

The game was over as soon as Microsoft decided not to allow some users to install individual patches any more and to bundle security fixes with other changes as part of the same update mechanism.

Well, I did a little bit of research and it looks like the policy Microsoft had in place was already allowing for emergency updates to be installed over metered connections, and this change in wording may just be a clarification of the existing policy. I'm going to hold off on updating until there is more information out there about what the change in wording actually implies. If things are bad enough I might change to a new OS to work on my projects. Automatic updates are just so distracting and frustrating most of the time. Like most humans, I just want control over my environment.

I "love" how MS removed/disabled group policy on the Windows 10 variants involved in all this...

Unless they've changed something, wired connections cannot be set as metered (even though in practice most of them are either metered or capped); this can only be done for wireless (both WiFi and mobile.)

It's because of this misfeature that I've decided I'm going to build my own Wi-Fi router, which will hard-block any and every IP address belonging to Microsoft.

I've been late to work before because my Surface restarted to install an update, it got stuck rebooting, and my alarms didn't go off.

enjoy windows update and random sites (because azure) breaking

But I want to break Windows Update. I'd be fine with never installing another update ever again.

enjoy getting pwned by 0days

The problem Microsoft has created is that you now have to choose between trusting their updates and having a chance of your system being broken by them, or not trusting their updates and having a chance of your system being compromised through an unpatched vulnerability. This is a binary question with no good answer, and it's no longer clear that accepting all updates to ensure you get the security patches is the option with the lowest risk.

I think if you want to be on time to work, the logical thing to do is to buy a dedicated alarm clock rather than building a WiFi router to block Microsoft's IP addresses. You've only addressed one of many possible failure modes with that solution. People have been using dedicated alarm clocks for decades, and the failure modes are well-understood. It's mostly power failures, which is why they all have a backup battery to keep the alarm working even if your power goes out.

Amazon has alarm clocks for as low as 55 cents!

Yup. I use phones and tablets for alarms, but a good old fashioned clock radio is my most reliable one.

Is this better or worse than a 0 day being used to take over her system, encrypt the HDD, and hold it ransom?

FWIW, good apps should support session restore. If a hot fix gets pushed, especially for an active exploit, then getting it installed asap to everyone (not just those of us on HN who keep up with security bulletins!) becomes important.

Then they should only force the reboot for critical security fixes that are exploitable, and only if they can't just restart that service.

Not for all updates every time :(

Curious what art apps she uses in Windows and what she'll transfer to in Linux?

krita, gimp, inkscape

Sadly, likely not an option for a professional that has to collaborate with others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com