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Comment by enzanki_ars | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: Didn't recognize the username at first. I still have some doubts, but I do remember you talking about going to Antarctica in the Tron subreddit. I recently used Tron, and I hope that there isn't some undocumented part of the script that is disabling automatic updates.

I have some doubts about this story... The forced Windows 10 update was only sent to non-enterprise versions of Windows. I highly doubt any of these experiments were running the home editions of Windows due to the lack of control. Also, I am pretty sure that running home versions of Windows in contexts like this is against the Windows TOS.

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> I have some doubts about this story.... I highly doubt any of these experiments were running the home editions of Windows

I guess you've never worked with budget-constrained grant projects before.

> I do remember you talking about going to Antarctica in the Tron subreddit

7 months on ice.

> I hope that there isn't some undocumented part of the script that is disabling automatic updates.

Tron doesn't perform ANY undocumented actions. Unlike most the people defending Microsoft's actions in this thread, I am pro-user and seek to minimize negative impact to users in any project I'm involved in.

> Also, I am pretty sure that running home versions of Windows in contexts like this is against the Windows TOS.

If you're telling me there are people in the world using Windows in violation of its TOS I'm shocked, SHOCKED to say the least.

So, no offence, but this reads more like you and your colleagues destroyed a multi-million $ project by trying to save a few dollars by using Windows Home instead of Enterprise?

And you're pissed at MS because of this?

Yeah he was practically BEGGING to be updated to windows 10 what a slut.

Why are you trying to excuse Microsoft's behavior here? Who could have predicted that Microsoft would have actually done what they did and forced the Windows 10 update on everyone?

You may generally disagree with their update policy, but even in the worst scenario it's as much his fault as theirs.

And yet he wants to completely blame them.

No, it's definitely Microsoft's fault. Even Home users should be able to have the expectation of controlling when or if major OS updates are applied. It's not like "doesn't automatically update to Windows 10" is an advertised feature of Professional.

Enterprise edition is exactly what it says on the tin - you need to purchase certain number of licenses, and these licenses are on top of the OEM licenses.

They are useless for a small team doing a research project.

None taken, but you obviously didn't even read the post.

These project machines are shipped (or physically hand-carried) by grad students from random universities all over the world. They come from who-knows-what IT department running who-knows-what software packages, often cobbled together JUST enough to get it working because they're so budget and time constrained that's all the resources they had to throw at it. So the lab is full of bespoke machines running a variety of very obscure software, much of it on tailored Windows boxes.

So no, "me and my colleagues" didn't "destroy a multi-million dollar project by trying to save a few dollars."

>I guess you've never worked with budget-constrained grant projects before.

Unfortunately that also comes with completely incompetent IT staff.

4 years NSA, 14 years Army Signal Corps (routers/switches/radios) with multiple overseas tours, now working in an enterprise financial data center with CCNA/CISSP and a TS/SCI with full scope poly would put me a little ways out of the "completely incompetent IT staff" category.

It was sent to all versions of Windows, as long as they weren't part of an Active Directory domain, and that detection was pretty flakey, too.

If you had a mixed OS environment with a Samba-based domain (or no domain at all, because these machines just take data from lab equipment and shovel it onto network shares), there was a good chance of the update firing off anyway.

>that detection was pretty flakey, too.

FWIW there was a handful of reports of exactly that happening on /r/sysadmin. There was also a ton of domain joined machines that were spammed with the Windows 10 nagware but didn't actually upgrade on their own.

>I am pretty sure that running home versions of Windows in contexts like this is against the Windows TOS.

For Windows, Microsoft restricts features but not what purpose you can use it for if you're talking about Home versions. For Office however, the home version actually has restrictions in the TOS that limit use to only noncommercial purposes. For a standalone Windows box that is only used for some lab equipment and will never be domain joined there's a good chance that there's no technical reason to go with Windows Pro over Home.

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