Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button.

Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downloading that toolbar, installing that gizmo, disabling security settings".

People smugly complain about this, in many cases from their Linux box (= technical users on a system with a 1% desktop market share => smaller target and better human protection) or MacOS box (= slightly more technical users than the average Windows user, on a system with a 5%-10% desktop market share).

View on HN

Da, it is for your own good comrade!

I really wish people who insist on claiming some right to control how users use their own computers would leave IT forever.

And if it were left open ended at the request of people like you...we'd still have compromised systems out there spread amongst normal people as well as within infrastructure and other more critical pieces of hardware.

People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.

> People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.

The very idea that users should be at the mercy of their computers instead of the other way around is contrary to the concept of personal computing.

People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.

It's not about specialized knowledge...it's about regular maintenance.

Hate me or not...but people can't be trusted (broadly) to maintain things...thats just the way life works.

Why should they be forced to, at the expense of things that matter to them, though? That's the problem.

Automatic updates were a default. People turned them off because they were annoying. One solution to this problem was to make them not-annoying, but instead Microsoft opted to become aggressive and force people to update.

I will never hold anyone who thinks this is a good idea in high regard because they are actively making the world a worse place.

Microsoft forces them because it has to, there is no law for it. To drive a car, the car needs to pass a yearly inspection.

It saves them money in support calls.

Based on how ludicrously frequently updates are breaking things, this is a dubious assertion.

They have to be forced to because they often refuse to.

It's really that simple...cry about it all you want. It's a necessary evil...because humans.

I fully understand the frustration after seeing people having their computers reboot in the middle of presentations and other important events. That's why they made multiple products. Consumer OS = you don't want to be the sysadmin of the computer. Enterprise/LTSB OS = do what you want.

I still get forced reboots on my workplace Win10 laptop. I can just postpone the update like 4 weeks. And then stuff brake.

> People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.

A thousand times this.

>People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.

This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.

Pro and Enterprise shouldn't be the same in this regard as Home but often are.

Four days ago I had to entertain a courier waiting to pick up a 6-figures piece of equipment for a waiting air-freight cargo plane, for immediate transport to a remote mining site, all because the fucking piece of shit fucking Win 10 Enterprise on a very expensive rugged laptop decided to hang itself in an update loop for an hour.

We dealt with different garbage during the Windows 7 and previous eras, yes, but I'm not sure we're better off on the whole. Windows 10 has given a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death".

> This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.

Reality is often frustrating, I agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com