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Comment by nehal3m | Hacker News Reader

>"Microsoft has received reports of an issue in which users are receiving an 'UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR' error message on a blue screen after installing updates released on August 2," Redmond said.

>The company also added that the problematic cumulative updates "might automatically uninstall to allow Windows to start up as expected."

"Might"? What a weaselly way to put it. Either Windows will, or it won't. I realise there's tens of millions of LoC but if we're talking about an update that crashes machines shouldn't you know what the failure mode is before talking to the press?

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Linguistically, "might" could also mean "will under certain circumstances". It doesn't definitively imply they don't know.

I myself have used "might" when speaking to customers when the criteria by which we would differentiate is something that isn't necessarily accessible to the audience.

Yeah I guess you're right. If that's the case I'd expect the journalist to ask some follow up questions to broadly define in which circumstances it would or wouldn't.

That assumes that the company lets journalist talk to non marketing people.

The term might in marketing department vetted communications often cover over "the techies droned out for 10 minutes using words we did not understand" and few large brands feel that comfortable letting anyone not under some kind of confidentiality agreement talk to anyone in the technical teams.

Everything seems to be from the linked text source so I doubt the journalist actually got to interact with Microsoft at all.

There's a recent Windows feature called Known Issue Rollback (KIR) that you would have to opt into using Group Policy, which might soon address an anticipated snafu like this, once it's become apparent after deployment:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...

Here's last month's article from the same author giving an example of how KIR can be used to mitigate a video showstopper at the time:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-fi...

My follow-up consisted of following the journalist back, and that might give an idea about what he had in mind.

That's awesome. Both the feature and you leading by example.

Thank you!

When an issue is at this scale, you have to give some acknowledgment of the issue even if you don't know its cause.

Agreed, but then you'd expect a behemoth like MS to respond that they're aware, working on finding cause for the issue and releasing a fix. What they did here is throw out a 'maybe it'll fix itself'.

For end users, it's pretty important to know whether their system is hosed or will fix itself

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