Microsoft's Problem Isn't How Often it Updates Windows -- It's How It Develops It (arstechnica.com) 227
Ever since Microsoft settled on a cadence of two feature updates a year -- one in April, one in October -- the quality of its operating system (taking into consideration the volume of bugs that emerge every few days) has deteriorated, writes Peter Bright of ArsTechnica. From the story: The problem with Windows as a Service is quality. Previous issues with the feature and security updates have already shaken confidence in Microsoft's updating policy for Windows 10. While data is notably lacking, there is at the very least a popular perception that the quality of the monthly security updates has taken a dive with Windows 10 and that installation of the twice-annual feature updates as soon as they're available is madness. These complaints are long-standing, too. The unreliable updates have been a cause for concern since shortly after Windows 10's release.
The latest problem has brought this to a head, with commentators saying that two feature updates a year is too many and Redmond should cut back to one, and that Microsoft needs to stop developing new features and just fix bugs. Some worry that the company is dangerously close to a serious loss of trust over updates, and for some Windows users, that trust may already have been broken. These are not the first calls for Microsoft to slow down with its feature updates -- there have been concerns that there's too much churn for both IT and consumer audiences alike to handle -- but with the obvious problems of the latest update, the calls take on a new urgency.
The latest problem has brought this to a head, with commentators saying that two feature updates a year is too many and Redmond should cut back to one, and that Microsoft needs to stop developing new features and just fix bugs. Some worry that the company is dangerously close to a serious loss of trust over updates, and for some Windows users, that trust may already have been broken. These are not the first calls for Microsoft to slow down with its feature updates -- there have been concerns that there's too much churn for both IT and consumer audiences alike to handle -- but with the obvious problems of the latest update, the calls take on a new urgency.
Imagine owning a car... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine owning a car. One fine morning, you wake up and the steering wheel has been moved from left to right, and the brake pedal is on the ceiling. You call up the manufacturer, ask "why'd you do that."
Answer: "it's better, you'll get used to be new driver experience."
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Sensationalist FUD much? Microsoft has never updated Windows 10 with such a jarring UI change. The Windows 10 steering wheel is where it has always been, as is every other fundamental control you need to use the OS.
A more accurate description would be owning a car and waking up to find the air-conditioning controls now have a few different control options, oh and as part of that it set itself back from Celsius to Fahrenheit, also additional prompts now come up with different alarms while driving. Maybe the
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I want regular 'ol analog gauges
Cool story bro.
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Actually, the reality is that MS has goobered up the UI to the point that people don't even want to use it.
For how bad you could say the start button was, the current W10 interface is a total POS in comparison.
And guess what, everyone knows it.
Only some will admit it.
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I'm surprised it took me this long to find the MS apologist, but ladies and gentlemen, here he is.
I'm keen to hear why I am wrong. In what fundamental way has Microsoft changed the Windows 10 UI between versions? By the way I don't apologise for MS. I simply call out bullshit when I see it. You're welcome to scroll down the threads and see some of my other posts where I'm critical of MS and the Windows 10 updates.
Actually, the reality is that MS has goobered up the UI to the point that people don't even want to use it.
Back in real reality: People don't give a shit. Even more in reality, nothing has fundamentally changed for people. The only major changes for users has been the Control Panel (something rarely
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Well first, some of how you judge Microsoft's changes depends on when you're measuring from. The UI was *relatively* stable from Windows 95 until Windows 7, but even then, ignoring the re-skinning, they regularly shuffled settings around. I don't remember great examples, but the start menu organization changed now and then, and where a setting was in the control panel changed. You could argue that the changes were good, but still, it's a change.
The switch to Windows 8 was pretty much, "The steering whee
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You could argue that the changes were good, but still, it's a change.
I didn't say there was no changes. I said the fundamental interaction remains unchanged. And yes I was specifically talking about changes to Windows 10 given that the GP was talking about waking up to find changes which systems prior to Windows 10 didn't do.
If you were used to Windows XP and you then sat down at a Windows 7 machine, a lot of things would have moved around, which would be confusing.
The details of using something vs its fundamentals are different things. The GP referenced steering wheel, breaks, and accelerator. He didn't mention locating the fuse box, or identifying warning lights or anything like that which I would agree then woul
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I didn't say there was no changes. I said the fundamental interaction remains unchanged. And yes I was specifically talking about changes to Windows 10 given that the GP was talking about waking up to find changes which systems prior to Windows 10 didn't do.
That post doesn't mention Windows 10. In fact, it's paraphrasing an old post that I've seen a bunch of times on Slashdot and other sites, definitely dating back to before Windows 10.
The details of using something vs its fundamentals are different things.
You say it's just details, but then you go on to show how the behavior of the start menu-- the single biggest UI element of the Windows desktop environment-- has changed. If it's not moving the gas pedal to the ceiling, it's changing the layout of the gear shift. And though I'd agree that most people don't deal with most of t
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So M$ Windows anal probe 10 as a car. Well it monitors everywhere you go and reports back to the manufacturer. It install new passengers and removes them at will. It gathers and sells information about you, where you are going and what passenger you have. It will stop on the road at random intervals, not giving one fuck about where you are and how safe it is, and install new features or remove old ones, they might not work, bringing the car to a stop until you take it to the mechanics to reinstall everythin
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While some seem to prefer the ribbon, to me it exchanged one arbitrary grouping of features for another arbitrary grouping. One gets around in Office by memorizing where shit is, NOT because of their lovely menus/ribbons. It was a stupid UI move in my opinion.
On the money! MS can't help themselves.
It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in some of the Office or Windows UI meetings, to hear the absolute bullshit that gets spread around thick by people that have no clue how real users use their software.
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While some seem to prefer the ribbon, to me it exchanged one arbitrary grouping of features for another arbitrary grouping. One gets around in Office by memorizing where shit is, NOT because of their lovely menus/ribbons. It was a stupid UI move in my opinion.
The purpose of the ribbon is advertising. It exposes features that you may not be thinking of, especially ones that will lock you into the "Office Open XML" file formats.
Less marketable features are small, or buried. If this happens to be a feature you often use, you're SOL and you have to Google where the hell it is.
So the ribbon is doing exactly what it's supposed to. Expose styles, and conditional formatting, and all the stuff MS wishes you would use at the expense of your ability to actually use the pro
Addendum (Score:2)
In the latest versions, you can put your custom group anywhere on any tab, name it whatever you want, and stick your features on it, including ones that aren't on the ribbon at all.
So, MS eventually listened to reason. Office 2007 was a mess though.
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If you're getting to the point where you're going to start memorizing things, you do it right and learn the keyboard shortcuts. Have any of those even changed in the last 20+ years?
Re: Imagine owning a car... (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This explains everything. The agency obviously rents out bug testers and n managers to companies like Microsoft.
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Truer story than you may realize! (Score:2)
Tesla owners are complaining about this very thing right now. The much lauded version 9.0 software update they're pushing out to Teslas right now rethinks the whole UI. Model S owners can no longer pick any two application to split on the top and bottom halves of their screens. Instead, Tesla decided the navigation window should always be present, with anything else you might want to see on a toolbar along the bottom that lets you pick one to slide up, overlaying the bottom portion of the nav screen.
So effe
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Distros like CentOS do limit you to just security updates, and unless the update is for the kernel it won't require you to reboot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is it normal practice still in Microsoft (and other big shops) to have devs who write code as fast as possible with zero time spent on fixing broken code? They shuffle all the broken first pass code to their B team and have them try to figure it out, which much take forever since you have to figure out where the other person's mind was.
This just seems like it begs for bugs and issues. But it surely gets code out the door fast!!!
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This isn't just Microsoft. This is how everyone does it. Since the cost of providing updates has dropped to near zero, companies have no problems with "ship early and ship often" and let the customers be the beta testers.
Microsoft is damaging customers and itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft is poorly managed? Plenty of evidence. [slashdot.org]
Microsoft was badly managed 10 years ago. [slashdot.org]
Microsoft managers lack social ability. They have done ENORMOUS DAMAGE to the Microsoft brand name. That is my best understanding and opinion.
Some of the many, many reports of Microsoft managers thinking they can manipulate and control everyone, as though the managers are government dictators:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." (Aug. 4, 2015)
Microsoft's Intolerable Windows 10 Aggression [ecommercetimes.com] (May 27, 2016)
Microsoft is infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads [theverge.com] (March 17, 2017)
Microsoft, stop sabotaging Windows 10. [infoworld.com] (March 21, 2017)
A huge problem: A high percentage of people who work with Windows computers make more money if there are more problems with Microsoft and Windows. There is a conflict of interest.
Apparently Microsoft managers decided they would try to be like Google's Android. They apparently decided to try to gather information about everything, and try to sell that information. Most people with cell phones don't have the technical knowledge necessary to know if they are being abused.
Can a company be sued for supplying computers with Windows 10? If a company supplies Windows 10 computers to businesses and doesn't get a signed agreement from all business customers that the customers know Windows 10 allows Microsoft to gather data from their computers, the supplier could be the target of court cases, and possibly even go to prison. No business customers want Microsoft employees to have access to their company information. My opinion, shared by many others.
People working with desktop computers don't want to be distracted by ads. They don't want to try to learn new, complicated user interfaces.
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The problem is Windows in the past 5 years (or more!) is that the primary changes being made to Windows is to serve Microsoft, not the user. No one asked for the massive changes that came with Windows 8. No one liked them. Microsoft was uncontrollably lusting after the 30% cut that Apple gets from everything sold through their store and tried to force Windows to work on that model, even though it never did and there was no way it ever could. On top of that, they decided that desktop computers (or laptop
This, indeed this... (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest bugaboo is that Windows updates obliterates the CUDA-enabled nVidia video driver I have installed on the laptop, and replaces it with the craptastic non-CUDA Microsoft WHQL driver... which is why I have the whole thing disabled as deep in the registry as humanly possible.
Would it kill Microsoft to look for 3rd-party drivers before stomping all over shit with their own versions? I mean, if it weren't for a few CG apps (and the lack of a decent nVidia GPU in the latest MacBook Pros), I wouldn't care, but damn...
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Would it kill Microsoft to look for 3rd-party drivers before stomping all over shit with their own versions?
That's not the issue. The third party drivers published to Windows Update should be the same as the vendor actually ships. Windows won't automatically overwrite a driver unless there's a new version or a WHQL version of the existing driver... and you can disable the touching of drivers in windows (it's under System, not under the Update Settings).
Normally I would say the manufacturer fouled something up, but in this specific update there were a LOT of problems relating to drivers even before the file deleti
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In short, Windows is not the product. The user is the product.
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Re: This, indeed this... (Score:5, Informative)
Not a question of marketing, I promise. The Iray render engine [nvidia.com] (built into a lot of CG rendering suites and apps nowadays) requires CUDA-enabled drivers, or else the render kicks to CPU for calculations, causing render times to go up by factors. This means a 30-minute render suddenly takes, say, an hour and a half... if you're lucky.
Microsoft's WHQL GPU/video driver has CUDA disabled, so you're stuck with CPU (not GPU) rendering - and you usually don't find out until after it begins. Also, when you have a 6-12GB GPU card, all that RAM goes to waste under Microsoft's driver. :/
Go backup the older days of SP's also windows serv (Score:3)
Go backup the older days of SP's also windows server is a bit slower but 2016 really needs an SP or update roll-up to fix the long updates.
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This IS a service pack. Simply changing the name back won't solve these problems. The problem is they change so much shit with each Service Pack and then force it down user's throats without testing with the hope of sticking to some arbitrary timeline for releasing them.
Re: Go backup the older days of SP's also windows (Score:3)
Older days, odd number service packs bricked the machine.
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"dangerously close to loss of trust"? Well past! (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait for an acrade game running windows (Score:2)
Just wait for an acrade game running windows (yes do) That get's dropped kicked after rebooting in the middle some of some best game ever.
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does all they can to prevent updates,
And then are shocked. SHOCKED! when the update they've put off for 6 months eventually installs itself.
Or they could just schedule it for a time that isn't during a presentation.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft Windows was only bought based on its quality and reliability there wouldn't have been a Windows 3, and if there had then ME would have killed it off, and of not then Vista would have, and if not then Windows 10... and so it goes one. Windows has never really been ready for the desktop - it's still unbearably bad/slow at even simple file handling.
Microsoft have zero incentive to do things better because the market never punishes them for their mistakes. They just shrug their shoulders and carry on regardless.
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and if not then Windows 10... and so it goes one.
To be fair to the complaints, Windows 10 is the second flop in a row. That IS a first for Microsoft.
it's still unbearably bad/slow at even simple file handling.
File handling itself is fine. The way information about files is aggregated and displayed to users is what is frustrating. e.g. File save dialogues which have custom sorting for a folder and have thumbnails enabled load the thumbnail cache before sorting. That is truly frigging dumb. It's not that file handling is slow, it's that Windows does stuff not relevant for the user at odd times.
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File handling itself is fine. The way information about files is aggregated and displayed to users is what is frustrating. e.g. File save dialogues which have custom sorting for a folder and have thumbnails enabled load the thumbnail cache before sorting. That is truly frigging dumb. It's not that file handling is slow, it's that Windows does stuff not relevant for the user at odd times.
Even if that was the whole of it, it's pretty cold comfort. But my experience of copying large (60GB+) files from a backup drive to the internal drive with Windows 10 is that it simply can't do it and always crashes at some point in the process. Perhaps it's a USB subsystem issue but in any case it's ridiculous.
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Microsoft have zero incentive to do things better because the market never punishes them for their mistakes
Sounds like a failure of the market. If Windows is so terribly unusable, then how come it hasn't been supplanted by macOS/Linux? Businesses aren't going to use tools that specifically work worse than others, so there must be some reason they haven't doubled down on any alternatives that could serve them better.
It's called a monopoly.... Microsoft has one, and there are no other viable choices. When you're the only game in town, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
Re: So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's easy to answer.
1. Businesses like the fantasy of someone to blame, Linux robs them of that
2. Linux for the desktop was killed by OSDL and hardware vendors
3. MacOS, OS/X and Linux don't have the range of applications needed
4. Microsoft's Truth campaign
5. Microsoft taxing vendors if they supply rival OS'
6. Microsoft bribing ISO
7. Legacy install base
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At this point, I really think it's mostly about the catch-22 of, developers don't develop apps for Linux because there aren't users, and users don't use it because there aren't apps. Similarly with hardware-- hardware vendors don't support it because there aren't enough customers using it, and users don't use it because their hardware doesn't support it.
And then, like you said, there are the legacy apps. Some company has some old application created 15 years ago. Their whole business runs on this crappy
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No, a distribution such as RHEL is a one-stop shop.
No, there is only one official kernel, one API, one goal, one vision. (There needs to be a Freddie edition.)
Since when is LibreOffice a poor imitation? You need to try harder.
You don't know about their international tour, dissing open source and claiming a lower TCO? Boy, did you miss out on some garbage. It's just just the CEOs didn't.
Microsoft charge several hundred dollars an install more from every vendor that offers alternatives. They used to offer a r
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Businesses aren't going to use tools that specifically work worse than others
You haven't spent much time working in a larger business, have you?
Re: So what? (Score:4)
Who cares what you make? Past cost of living, money is a number.
It's how well you work and how positive that is in the broader picture.
Windows of all kinds is of very low quality. It has a defect density somewhere between ten to a hundred times that of Linux. It is fantastically insecure and unstable. The office suite is so poor, Microsoft had to bribe ISO to recognise the format. The UI for Office is cumbersome and gets in the way of doing anything productive.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
Also, popularity is irrelevant. Plague charms were popular, once. Didn't mean they worked. Something works or it doesn't, the rest is window dressing and salespitch.
Shout all you want, the response will be the same: (Score:4, Insightful)
"Fuck you, who else are you going to go to?"
There is a problem with how it updates it... (Score:5, Interesting)
There actually is a problem with how it updates it. You see, Windows was designed to emit a two-byte NOP at the beginning of every function, just so it could be hotpatched to redirect to a longer jump instruction. This mechanism would allow reboot-free updating of core system files.
I don't see any reboot-free updating of core system files here.
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Well, honestly, trying to trace out all the file locks and kernel locks is too hard for them without making the system unstable by accident, so yeah. They went with the tried and true rebooting.
It is disgusting to me that they don't have enough technical knowledge to fully understand the shit they are selling to everyone... but here you have it. It is what it is: A steaming pile of crap.
Underuse of the word it. (Score:2)
Works much better like this:
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1 - Both IT's have a crazy clown interface
2 - Both IT's make the townspeople lives miserable (although in fairness, only one of them loses your data)
Yet another failure of capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
New *features* sells software. Bug fixes don't.
Microsoft will keep churning out crud. Same shit. Different day. That same old 90s era C++ "we know better than you" attitude is still very much in evidence.
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But yeah, features are exciting and bug fixes are boring, so the suits want new features to brag about in their Powerpoints. Honestly, there's no reason MS can't do both. They're a huge company, they should be able to fix bugs and develop fea
Don't worry (Score:2)
It will all be fixed in Windows 12.
"Fix bugs" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Microsoft needs to stop developing new features and just fix bugs."
Generally true, but what does Microsoft do about core features that are so intensely buggy that they are literally unsalvageable?
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App compatibility is so bad that Windows still has a "Program Files" folder and a "Program Files (x86)" folder.
What are you even complaining about here? That Microsoft supports customers instead of shitting on them?
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Once they get customers switched over to monthly subscriptions, then they might start fixing bugs... Until then, they need to introduce new features to encourage upgrades.
However it's more likely that they would just stop adding new features, and still not bother fixing bugs.
Windows = Spam & Snoop Engine (Score:5, Interesting)
My observation is that M$ is experimenting with either different ways to spam Windows users, and/or looking for ways to force them into their cloud/store to (hopefully) rent or buy services through it. This is probably the main reason for changes.
I get "Windows notifications" of new or upgraded services offered by M$. The pretty login screens sometimes show vacation spots that M$ appears to be sponsoring*. (I must admit, I have clicked out of curiosity after seeing some nice photo. I fed the troll, and had to shower afterward.) And MS-Paint has a notice toolbar icon that the app will be moving to the cloud soon with a link to their store. The app may be free (now), but they can get you into their store to shop around if they move their usual Windows goodies up there.
They look at Google App Store and Apple Store as their future revenue growth, not selling OS's. The OS is to become their ad and MS-cloud tie-in platform. Linux-based OS's are slowly nipping at their OS cash cow, and they are scrambling for alternative revenue. They lost the phone and tablet OS wars, and consumers and small biz are slowly but increasingly shifting to Android and arguably Apple for desktop replacements or alternatives. New users only use M$ for compatibility, not because they want to. M$ is being pushed to be the new IBM, and Google is the new M$, but M$ won't go quietly, since they see how IBM is struggling to remain relevant. (IBM's A.I. ads have desperate PHB written all over them.)
Cloud is their only recent success story; thus, they're hellbent in turning Windows into an MS-cloud portal. I'd do the same if I were a greedy MS executive trying to leverage the co's only success.
* To be fair, I haven't found a direct tie yet, but some appear very suspicious. I should turn off the login wallpaper, but have to admit they supply some cool pics if you use the tuning feature to see what you like.
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They look at Google App Store and Apple Store as their future revenue growth, not selling OS's.
Not so, they see the App store as a revenue source, but the plan is to turn Windows into a monthly service cost in 2020 just like Office 365 you'll have to pay every month to use windows. This has been in the plans for 5+ years now and it's why Windows 10 was "free". Free in the sense that you gave away all commerical rights to a paid for copy and agreed to pay for the SAAS version of windows when it rolls out as an update to Windows 10.
Honestly if you aren't aware this is the plan you've not been paying at
Isn't that a general problem with agile dev? (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite regular bold statements that agile methods have improved everything, experience shows that it has mostly degraded software quality and consistency and only improved short-term revenue for software companies.
Regarding Windows, this has gone downhill so much that it defies good sense. It actually used to be a pretty decent platform (at least starting with Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000), very consistent. Starting with Windows 8, it started degrading. You just have to remember their main strategy was to push forward Windows on mobile platforms. They failed spectacularly with the mobile market, yet they kept insisting with all the same methods. Windows 10 is essentially the result of a strategic failure, which is incidentally consistent with agile methods, as those basically promote no long-term vision or strategy and only focus on short-term makeshift jobs, AKA "new features".
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Windows 10 is essentially the result of a strategic failure,
No, windows 10 is the result Microsoft seeing the mad profits of the last 20 years of software theft (aka taking control of the software) by the videogame industry (aka Ultima RPG's during the 90's become mmo's and profits explode, world of warcraft, overwatch with lootboxes and microtransactions, etc) and walled garden software model pioneered by smartphones, the videogame industry for the last 20 years has been at the forefront of wanting to get rid of software ownership and take control of the end users
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Hm. Vista was slow because of the DRM in the kernel. Windows 7 was faster because they figured out how to not make the DRM such a resource hog, but Windows 7 was just as anti-consumer as Vista.
Starting with Windows 8, it started degrading.
I would say it became unpalatable around Windows 8. It was already degrading before that. Windows 10 is just a "what the fuck is this shit?! I will never submit to it." step in the wrong direction.
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This still feels like Microsoft are using the same development model under the hood. Go through a burst of writing new features, trying to get them into trunk before "feature freeze", not caring that they are fundamentally broken. Then go through a bug fixing phase before release. The difference is the timing of each development cycle.
They migrated to git internally, but their code base is so large that they had to write a virtual filesystem driver so developers could work on the code without cloning the h
Quality of its operating system has deteriorated? (Score:2)
After 32 years, it's still barely usable, completely unstable, full of security holes. I run approx 300 servers and zero of them run Windows, across all the desktops I manage, only three of them run it, because of a crappy software that some clients require. It's fair to say that Microsoft Windows is a usable, some what functional OS, that can solve simple problems, but past that, forget about it.
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Indeed. Windows is and has always been a toy. For a toy, the quality would be reasonable, bit for something you need to be able to depend on, it is a bad joke.
The only new feature needed... (Score:2)
The only new feature they need to implement in Windows 10 is the one that unfucks the UI and reverts to Windows 7.
Other useful features would involve removing the dire windows store, UWP apps, the new settings bullshit and reverting to control panel.
The Joy of Agile (Score:2)
Clickbait (Score:3)
Wait, we have this clickbait title:
Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows—it’s how it develops it
but this buried in the article:
Microsoft hasn't exactly revealed the development process being used with Windows 10
Explanation: barely tech literate clickbait writer for Ars Technica imagines they have a clue about how software development works at Microsoft. Argue all you want about the quality of windows, but don't try to pretend you have some understanding about software development and how it's gone wrong in Redmond.
QA (Score:2)
MS axed its QA years ago too. :(
Regret. (Score:2)
Stop adding new shit, fix the bugs and let the system be stable and then leave me alone!
Every time all my documents, that I use as reference material for something I am writing, is closed and windows forcibly rebooted I feel violated. Can I sue for psychological trauma?
Every time the "pay per startup", (very expensive), application I use is shut down for a reboot it cost money. Can I sue for that money back?
MS will never lose my trust (Score:2)
They never had it and they will never get it.
Re:SDLC (Score:4, Insightful)
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And don't finish the UI changes you start. See the control panel.
Just sucks that Microsoft has gotten rid of so many good employees that they can't finish that task they started over five years ago.
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Kind of like that old MS joke:
Microsoft Windows 8 and 10, noun: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.
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Disagree on one point...
Win2k had the first iteration of Active Directory, and to be honest, it sucked balls, and each SP they slathered on just made it worse.
Because of that, as far as the Enterprise is concerned, IMHO 2003 stands as the last best version, though 2008 is still somewhat usable.
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Win2k had the first iteration of Active Directory, and to be honest, it sucked balls
Microsoft blatantly ripped off Novell Netware for AD.
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And don't forget, they also randomly remove options that used to be accessible from the control panel. The intent seems to be to discourage customization for anyone but a power user willing to spend time googling (binging) for a the relevant registry setting.
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forgot 1A lay off QA team and pass it to unpaid Beta Testers
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I think that spoke more to the terrible quality of QA that Microsoft had. When you pay less than you can make at a local McDonald's, then of course you're going to either get unqualified or unmotivated people.
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McDonald's on 85th just up the hill on Redmond Way (which becomes 85th) from Redmond is paying up to $18 an hour starting and offers referral bonuses. Two friends that used to work for vendors at Microsoft now work there. Microsoft is literally losing people to McDonald's now.
Re: SDLC (Score:2)
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1B) Dump the unpaid Beta Testers and pass it on to unsuspecting customers.
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I thought the term "unpaid Beta Testers" meant the customers.
Re:SDLC (Score:4, Informative)
This sounds like the Apple way
Depends... if we're talking iOS, you'd be spot-on.
MacOS (OSX) on the other hand? They got that stability/performance shit down fairly cold. My last MacBook Pro (5 years old, my wife inherited it last month, uses it daily) only got one OS re-install, and that was because I swapped out the old platter drive for an SSD not long after I bought it.
Zero stability issues, something like 5-6 OS upgrades on the same disk, a zillion patches/app-updates/etc... no sweat. Even today, it still runs as tight and fast as it did when I bought it in 2013. Only reason that I'm still not using it is because the 512MB GeForce in it doesn't run the Iray render engine worth a damn (slow old GPU, no RAM to speak of on it, etc.)
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Honestly, I don't think iOS is that bad either. I've had a couple versions in recent years that were a little quirky, but mostly it's been trouble free, and some of the recent updates even seem to have made my device snappier.
I have other problems/annoyances with Apple, but I haven't had big problems with stability or just untested releases.
Disclaimer: I don't use that many apps on my phone and I usually wait at least a few days before installing software updates on my phone. If I hear that people are h
Computer SCIENCE (Score:2, Interesting)
I just wonder what happened to software ENGINEERING.
Why is it that user data ends up scattered everywhere ?
Why not have all the Windows software run from a read only directory,
and all Apps & Programs added on run from their own read only directory,
and keep all user info in its own User directory.
Things get scattered about and stuffed in hidden directories, etc.
I would like to see microsoft sort out the OS and default apps / office, so all of it runs from its own read only drive.
Then all data and cookie
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Why not have all the Windows software run from a read only directory,
Where would hello.cpp compile to?
Re: Computer SCIENCE (Score:2)
Because MS has decades of backwards compatible APIs and they attract inexperienced devs who don't know better. If INI files work for you, you use them. If the registry works for you, use it. If XML files in the user profile dir works, use it.
You can't remove these capabilities without a fundamental, backwards-incompatible redesign of how apps interact with the OS, turning it into a walled garden, iOS-esque environment.
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Doing things your way requires an adherence to proper design and discipline to maintain this. This is not the Microsoft Way. The Microsoft Way is to get it out fast, and then if a better way is discovered later then the old way and new way can live together side by side.
Re: Computer SCIENCE (Score:5, Insightful)
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My Computer Science degree, with the countless hours spent implementing every well known sorting algorithm, search algorithm, data manipulation algorithm, data structures, and other things that were done well decades ago, says your concept of requesting a lack of an engineering degree to being a code monkey is crap
That's not what the parent said.
He said if you don't have an engineering degree you're not an engineer - In the same way someone who didn't go to medical school isn't a "medical doctor" or s
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In a century or two, there won't be software engineers. The software itself will do all that for us. Either that or software engineers will be back to using relays and vacuum tubes.
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As a software developer, I'm fully aware of my limitations and take that into account when I do my work. I would imagine most developers do this. In my experience, if there's a buggy release, it's not the fault of developers or testers, but of management. Developers are constantly being asked to squeeze in one more feature, without being given the time to properly design it, and without the time for the testers to do their work. I've known quite a few testers in my day and they are generally very thoro
Re: Computer SCIENCE (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Computer SCIENCE (Score:2)
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Every once in a while I'll sit down with breakfast and have to login, which is an indication that the PC ran an update.
It's been doing that since the free upgrade to Win10 came out for earlier versions of windows.
I have no idea about how long updates take to download, it does that in the background. Installing? I'm asleep, there's a several hour window of opportunit