Hacker News Reader

Comment by matrix | Hacker News Reader

The heavy-handed updates forcing frequent reboots are the deal-breaker for me. It seriously pisses me off to come back to my machine only discover that all those editor windows I had open gone, the IDE close, and all the open browser tabs lost, etc. Why are frequent full reboots even necessary in this day and age?!

View on HN

Those reboots are heavy handed because attackers are heavy handed with new attacks and if not forced to reboot, you never will.

You get plenty of time to prepare for the reboot that's coming. You can even delay it by a day or more.

It isn't Windows' fault that you aren't prepared for it when it comes; it's yours.

This ridiculously idiotic notion of "security" needs to stop. Especially when "fixing" things that already require full admin access anyway. True remote exploits are (fortunately) very rare, and even then there should never be a need to reboot --- patching files in memory was perfected years ago.

Give the users freedom to choose when to reboot, and even to choose whether they want to. Some users will continue to manage to get infected with malware despite constantly being disrupted by the constant reboots, others never installed a single security patch and yet would never be infected due to what they do (or what they don't, to be more accurate.) But that's their choice and theirs alone.

Unfortunately it seems companies are far more authoritarian and would rather breed a docile obedient type of users in which to force their ideas on and control.

I will resist the urge to post that old Benjamin Franklin quote again.

Well when someone's Windows computer gets infected, that person rarely blames themselves. They blame Microsoft.

I'll take the updates and reboots. I don't know what exploits are coming tomorrow, and I know very little about the ones currently in the wild. My SSD allows reboots carrying updates to happen in just a minute or two.

I will do my due diligence and protect myself.

If you don't want to, don't use Windows, then you won't have anything Windows-related to complain about.

> Unfortunately it seems companies are far more authoritarian and would rather breed a docile obedient type of users in which to force their ideas on and control.

You are on drugs or are otherwise compromised logically. Tech companies are nowhere nearly as organized as would be required to make this a reality.

You're saying that the manufacturer of an OS that requires reboots for certain fixes to be patched onto the operating system is actually an authoritarian regime grooming its users toward a manufactured Idiocracy?

I'll have whatever you're having. It sounds like LSD but only for geopolitical concerns.

>I will resist the urge to post that old Benjamin Franklin quote again.

Good, because like everyone else who does, you'd probably misrepresent what he actually meant by it.

This might be something you like then:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/microsoft-wind...

No forced updates, no store apps, no Cortana.

It's ok if they are necessary. It's not ok if they are needed ASAP.

I agree with the gp that consecutive full reboots definitely shouldn't be necessary. That Windows forces your hand on when to reboot just worsens the case.

The state of Windows update is terrible to me. Say what you will about Linux, but updating on most distros is a breeze compared to Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com