nightmare

I'm immune. I'm running XP as my main os, and Win7 to watch Youtube.

Using VirtualBox to run both simultaneously.

Not running Outlook. Using a plain ASCII email client so I am immune to phishing and other malware in emails.

Using disposable email addresses from E4ward so I can destroy any sites that try tricks. So no problems with malware from sites.

3 minute backup on XP. So I can backup often and recover instantly if I do something stupid.

Can send byte-identical copies of the VDI files to other computers so they are running identical software as my main computer.

So Microsoft can cough and sputter. I merely grin at the poor suckers who have to go through updates.

It's actually quite simple. With Windoze 10, Microsoft does little in the way of testing. The test staff has been re-assigned to other duties while most testing is now the responsibility of the customers. Welcome to customer tested software.

Microsoft Insiders are suppose to do some testing. However, there seems to be problems with Microsoft either not acting on bugs that they find, or simply ignoring bugs in order to stay on schedule. I suspect a big part of this problem is that Microsoft also lacks the staff to sift through the feedback from developers, insiders, employees, telemetry, pundits, and the press. With 700 million machines now running Windoze 10, the amount of feedback that needs to be sifted and sorted is probably overwhelming.

Most of the testing is done by users. Problems are allegedly reported back to Microsoft by telemetry. Without the spying, telemetry would be a great and economical way to develop new software, if it worked. So far, indications are that it's not an improvement over the old in house testing system and possibly responsible for the general reduction in release quality.

As for the muddle in version numbers and release dates, that's what I would expect from lack of communications and coordination between departments. I'm not surprised that something like this happened. However, I am surprised that the explanations from Microsoft spokes-people tend to blame the users for failing to comprehend how the release system works, offer nothing in the way of promises that it will be fixed, and hinting that the muddle might be permanent.

If this is the prelude for "Software as a Service", methinks the road ahead is actually a mine field.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Those of us with a clue have long known that would become the case.

Oldies can remember the curse of the "timesharing bureaux", and why PCs were welcomed with open arms.

Principal reasons: - your data was under your control - your data and processing weren't held hostage by high priests in white coats

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

The Feb update broke a previously working audio/visual hardware/software suite of mine, the mfgr says "talk to Microsoft" and Microsoft says "talk to the mfgr"

Software companies in general always pushing some new feature or other and the shit from 5 years ago still don't even work right.

For literally 8 years the goofy Germans Native Instruments have known about an interface bug that causes external MIDI devices with more than one output to randomly latch up when assigned to their software, they know it's their fault cuz every other similar kind of software does it properly.

for 8 years they ain't fixed it. There's a thread on their forum 35 pages long about it lol

mandag den 2. september 2019 kl. 17.53.36 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

isn't that just for people silly enough to be guinea pigs for not yet tested future releases?

2 weeks ago they broke Office365 (outlook), they fixed it 2 weeks later.

Cheers

A recent Firefox update got tangled with Windows access permissions. That cost me a few hours of IT consultant time to repair. He basically fiddled until it got fixed. Better him than me.

We are in the dark ages of computing.

--

John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Yep.

Customers are willing to pay for new features, but expect bug and security fixed to be free. Therefore, any "quality" release or update has to include some new features. Since these new features now take priority over bug fixes, the programs tend to grow larger with useless features, while the bugs remain intact. Since new features also include new bugs, the bug list grows. The new features also tend to slow the program down or require more resources (diskspace, RAM, network bandwidth, etc). The trend is for features and functions to be added faster than bugs get fixed, resulting in a bloated and buggy product.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Tesla customers locked out of our cars...unknown error. Customer service says they don't know root cause and are all hands on deck to resolve. People stranded all over the country. Key card and fob work so if you have that with you, you are in luck. Call center is blowing up.

Oops

Tom Gardner wrote in news:0ydbF.178225$ snipped-for-privacy@fx01.am:

Sounds cool if you play the backward B side too.

That is a white coat joke in case you missed it.

And that's precisely the argument for limited central government, keeping most functions local. In both cases centralized controllers lack the bandwidth to perform their necessary functions, and are open to catastrophic single-point failures.

I trace the decline in programming ethos (and Western civilization) to Bill Gates, who made selling fixes to his own bugs into a business model. Before Gates shipping bugs was unthinkable; now it's a profit center.

Cheers, James Arthur

No , we are not. I have been using Linux since 2000, first Redhat, then openSuse. It is only the 8-Million-flies-can't-be-wrong people who suffer. Making a billion $ business out of viruses who should not be possible in the first place is brilliant marketing but shit engineering.

werner Dahn

I agree that viruses should be impossible.

--

John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I am a little confused. You often describe your technique of designing as what amounts to fiddling... running some spice sims, breadboarding somethin g to try an idea, swapping parts to see what happens.

How is this different?

A PC operating system has some 100 billion bits. Which one do you want cha nged?

--

  Rick C. 

  - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

my impression of the average tech dude's sort-of "philosophy" of technological progress is that "cutting edge" tech becomes "dark ages" as soon as one non-tech person with a much lower net worth can afford to buy a widget with about the same capabilities as theirs at a much lower price.

Sort of like being big into that one indie band before they became cool but then everybody decided they liked them too so it wasn't cool anymore.

In the case of the older guys you just know they were flipping switches on an Altair or PDP-8 at one time in their 20s and thought those glorified desktop calculators with 1k of memory were just about the coolest thing ever at the time. oh but it's the "dark ages" now okay.

Sometimes older guys wax nostalgic about the big iron they used in their teens and 20s in the fashion that you know they thought it was really something else at the time.

You won't find me waxing nostalgic much about any "In my day" computers because in the same time period for me what the kids had available was early Pentiums and some Mac Quadras and stuff. These machines were unpleasant to use the operating systems stunk they were under-powered, overpriced, and generally sucked balls.

I hate to say it but on this particular point I tend to agree with JL.

Good software can be defined as something which remains useful, relatively bug free and in service five years after it was launched. That was about the timescale where overly enthusiastic large medieval buildings tended to first show signs of subsidence and failure too.

Although there is some excellent software about and best practice is improving gradually (though IMHO too slowly) there is far too much of a ship it and be damned macho business culture in shrink wrap software.

Win10 updates that bricked certain brands of portable for example.

I find it very odd that he trusts Spice simulation predictions when at the same time he rails incessantly against climate change simulations.

The individual components in electronics hardware are generally much better characterised and do more or less what they say on the tin. Software developers have a bad habit of re-inventing the wheel and not always putting the axle at the centre or making the damn thing round!

Problem with binary logic is that a fence post error is the opposite of what you intended to do. It is pretty clear that modern software could be made a lot more robust by static analysis to find all the places where malevolent data packets can target OS privilege escalation.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown