Microsoft pauses Windows 11 update as it's sending some PCs into infinite reboot
techradar.com
techradar.com
For the latter, it’s unfortunate but you’ll rarely find a company diss`ing another company. Especially so if they are a Fortune 500 companies or if they are a major B2B company. Microsoft is both a Fortune 500 (Fortune 2?), and a major B2B company. You’ll never find a major B2B company dissing their B customers.
In the Linux world, the first is usually addressed with a “oh! the config for that moved from X to Y. We didn’t write a migration script, but did you not follow our open source development mail list? Recreate your config files following this example. We’ll write an update to handle it” or “fuck Nvidia/Intel/AMD, they are fucking morons and fucked up their drivers. Fucking idiots”
What annoys me is creators double-dipping and adding sponsor reads throughout their video, to the point I have to run an extension (SponsorBlock) to get passed those. Or them gating arbitrary application specific features (PIP being a big one) behind their premium service.
The best part of that approach is that it is completely unable to deal with anything that isn't logged in the first place, such as bricking a device.[1]
Similarly, it can't collect good info on performance issues such as intermittent lockups or freezes.
NVIDIA drivers for example collect an absurd amount of telemetry, but to this day their drivers freeze my computer completely (can't even move my mouse!) for about 10 seconds a short while after logging in.
No log, no problem.
[1] Oh sure, you're about to say that they can log the "started patching" event and then monitor for "didn't come back up" event afterwards. They could, but they don't. For years I had issues with blue-screens after forced semi-annual upgrades, and Microsoft was blithely unaware.
func someBullshitFunction() {
logger.info(“started”);
defer performance.Meausure(“someBullshitFunction”)
…
}There is a metric-fuck ton of telemetry on a windows machine (really any sufficiently sophisticated software/device).
Not only do they correlate the update start event with the update end event, they also have a billion other metrics that nosedive if the machine can’t actually reboot.
That doesn’t make it any more acceptable, but it’s the truth. It’s totally possible the first metric report doesn’t show up for a day, too. So, it’s doubly not ok for them to push something so haphazardly.
The summary of issue is "systemd-tmpfiles" also creates/manages '/home' in some cases and if one tries to run that command with "--purge" and expect it to just clean-up all generated temp files, it will delete '/home' too!
Not looking to start a flamewar, but sometimes the criticisms of massive scope creep in systemd do feel justified.
I guess this justifies my decision.
MS stopped caring about quality long ago. Now they seem to be experimenting with how abusive they can be towards users.
Didn’t they fire all their in-house QA ages ago?
No, they didn’t? Like most other companies 10 (or so) years ago they transitioned their internal QA teams to development-role teams. Unless you’re referring to some particular XBOX gaming studio. For Windows there was some layoffs at the time of QA-to-dev transition, but they didn’t “fire all their in-house QA”. They just moved them to the current “industry standard” dev-qa-ops model, unfortunately.
But keeping the people and giving them a new role means the old role isn't being done, and I don't think it's done good things for product quality. The old way was expensive, and far from industry norms, but the product was more reliable.
At least I'm glad they keep an isolated channel for these early deployments.
> Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. [1]
So we've got a year and change. And they may push it back, like they pushed back EoL when people didn't upgrade from XP or 7.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
Perhaps "supported" should really mean "controlled by Microsoft".
2000 take.
ME, skip.
XP, take.
Vista, skip.
7, take.
8, skip.
10, take.
11? Definitely skip.
NT 3.1 - Good(?).
NT 3.5 - Bad(?).
NT 4.0 - Good(?).
2000 - Bad(?!)
XP - Good(?).
Vista - Bad.
7 - Good.
8 - Bad.
8.1 - Good(???).
10 - Bad.
11 - Good(?).
And before anyone asks, yes this is a bad meme and doesn't even make any sense.
I don't think it quite works though, because NT4 and NT5 (2k) were both good, although NT4 was hard to use with many games and win2k was better but still had some issues. I didn't hate XP on release and people grew to like it. So that's kind of 3 hits in a row, but then vista bad, 7 good, 8.x bad, 10 good, 11 bad kind of fits the pattern.
On the consumer side, there was 95, then 98, then 98 SE (Second Edition), and then ME.
...and with the exception of ME, all of those were actual improvements.
Windows 8 had a controversial UI but was respectful of user choices.
I have a hard time imagining a new Windows version not getting worse on respecting user consent.
oddly enough I have a computer at work which works better than all the rest of my colleagues who go through updates on a weekly basis which often break their machines...
1. "If we can't stop Windows botnets, we will just create our own."
It'll be smooth as butter, right?
Right?