Microsoft: This Windows 10 build has 'NO significant known issues' Microsoft has released its bestest new build of Windows 10 as part of its Windows Insider preview programme, with general manager Gabe Aul boldly stating: “we don’t have any significant known issues for this build.” Since the company has promised to release Windows 10 on July 29, you would expect it to be pretty much sorted at …
This is almost certainly an extra thing for touch users and NOT the removal of search-by-typing
Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? MS still has several weeks with which to find and eliminate useful features for desktop users.
"Microsoft is still tweaking the Start menu and in this build you can tap or click a letter to get an alphabet menu, so you can jump to apps beginning with a specific letter. It does not quite work, though: I tapped P in search of Paint, but it does not come up, since Paint is under Windows Accessories. I should have tapped W."
Rubbish - on Windows 10 build 10158, tap the Windows key, hit P, Paint is first app listed....Tested OK on 3 different installs of 10158...
You need to use an upper-case P. If you don't you'll get this:
Pictures
Privacy Settings
Play key sounds as I type
Power and Sleep Settings
Web
Pirate Bay (Yes it really is at the top of the list! No I have never visited the pirate bay, this is simply the top web search for the letter p)
paypal
putlocker
....
Paint is not there at all. Useless.
Oh, dear me. I read that as "Microsoft Stool". Maybe acceptable on the docks.
And please don't forget that you can always fall back to their 8.3 name for your stupidly long filenames. If you have long paths, don't forget SUBST or whatever that POSIX command was.
I predict that people will stop storing information in those old containers called "files" and just make the full pathname contain everything needed.
elDog proposed: "I predict that people will stop storing information in those old containers called 'files' and just make the full pathname contain everything needed."
Hmmm...
C:\Passwords\BankAccount\WobblyFrog555\Password\redherring.txt
Brilliant!
The limit is not Explorer's. It is Win32's. It was promised (back in 1991 or thenabouts) that 260 characters would be enough for any file. This was over three lines of typing in a command prompt back then and the designers clearly asked themselves what would be a stupidly long name and then doubled it.
(There is an API work-around and so Microsoft could have written Explorer to be able to handle longer names. This would let you quietly create files that your other programs couldn't handle properly, perhaps causing a buffer overrun or a truncation-related security flaw, depending on quite how they couldn't handle it properly. Microsoft presumably thought that the ability to dig yourself deeper into trouble wasn't a great feature. I'm inclined to agree.)
Of course, some people like to put all the meta-data for a file into the parent's (and n-fold grandparent's) directory name. This is typically a crap idea because you lose it the moment you move the file somewhere else, but people do it anyway. Such people can quite easily blow the 260-character limit. The view of an operating system designer is that these people are twats and they can sod off.
I would note in passing that *any* fixed limit will eventually upset some "test suite" and that having no limit at all will eventually produce an eco-system where twats store file contents in the filename and the files themselves are empty -- just because they can.
Unix has similar hard limits, but they are generally larger and less documented. The consequences are that (firstly) Windows gets the schtick and (more importantly) the equivalent failure in Unix-land depends on what application you are using. That's not actually better.
The limit is not Explorer's. It is Win32's.
Spot on correct. Note that the underlying filesystems aren't a bottleneck, with file/folder names of 255 characters and complete path names of up to 32760. The culprit is the MAX_PATH define in Win32, stuck forever at 260 characters since nearly forever.
It's also important to note that programs not dependent on Win32 calls (like Robocopy or FAR Manager) will happily handle the much longer file paths.
"The limit is not Explorer's. It is Win32's."
No it's not . The limit is 32767 characters IF you use the Unicode version of the API and IF you prefix the path with "\\?\" , part of the UNC scheme. Unicode is Microsoft's version of UTF16 and present since Windows 2000 in Win32 . That was 16 years ago.
The MAX_PATH limit is only for apps stil using ASCII and for Windows Explorer. I guess Microsoft hoped that retards , uhm, programmers , will switch to Unicode in their apps and then the will upgrade Explorer as well, but it still hasn't happened.
The limit in Explorer is kept for COMPATIBILITY.
NTFS as a file system doesn't have such a limit. It's also case discriminant if requested.
Also, anyone programmed on Linux ? Never encountered the PATH_MAX limit ?
I suggest you read the documentation. The limit most certainly *is* Win32's and the "\\?\" prefixing is documented as a way to skip Win32's validation and pass the filename blindly to the lower level. It sounds like you've failed to distinguish between the Win32 personality and the NT OS layer. MAX_PATH continues to apply to the Unicode APIs if you don't use the prefix and I don't think I've ever met and end-user who did.
You are somewhat right.. MAX_PATH is enforced by functions but only if you want them to.
The reason for all this is compatibility with FAT fs I think. Once they give that up it should be easy to just make that the default behaviour
@TheVogon
Good point, but I think you should pull the figure down by a fairly large factor to reflect the fact that most of us would find a path like
C:\nvonsoiN/457fkdLvh/NVLSNGHHkbrb/FLLOPba.txt
a bit hard to recognise. I suspect working out which combinations of 256 characters that are significant to humans might be a hard problem though, and langage dependent.
Yeah worked for a company that insisted their code tree had 1 letter names, so when we were trying to find a source file you had to go looking for
c:\Source\A\F\X\B\Y\H\Z\Q\U\L\O\P\G\R\L\My Code.cpp
I spent more time looking for the file than working on it.
"That path length is substantially more than required to give a seperate folder to every atom in the universe..."
What!? Just one...? Not very far thinking, that.
edit:- What!? Just one universe...? Not very far thinking, that either!.
"...give a seperate folder to every atom in the universe..."
By the time one has organized a large organization and structured the projects and structured the folders and subfolders within the project and start pasting in files with real world filenames, BAM! Too long.
It's annoying.
One trick is to have short-cuts back-up the tree structure. Deep down in the tips of the branches, a short-cut back up to near the top of the project folder, e.g. ...Project\Shorty\...
It's a trick that works fairly well.
Oh we get caught with that all the time.. and it gets better.
File server - folder shared out half way down the tree, users pour files into it.
System can't then back the files up, as it's starting at the top. User: "hey, restore my file please!".....
Does Outlook still have the endearing feature that you cannot attach a file to a message if the filename is longer than (ISTR) 110 characters? This was in all versions up to the last one before Office 2003 - I have not had much exposure to Outlook/Exchange since then.
It took me quite a while to work out why users were unable to attach certain documents. Experimentation and numerous tries eventually revealed the limit (the company I worked at then had a file structure of the order Mapped Drive:\LongClientName\LongEventName\Year\Some\More\Long\Identifiers\LongFileName.xxx, some of which had to be truncated to fit within the 256 character limit.
My workaround was to ask them to copy the file to their local My Documents folder, attach and send and then to delete the file afterwards (this obviously led to a number of other problems, chief of which was people that moved rather than copied files and then deleting same, or a plethora of other combinations of exciting things that one can do to files (like moving entire directories and dropping it in some unsuspecting directory halfway through the procedure, when they realised that they were doing something wrong and then let go of the left mouse button)).
I've been working with Windows 10 since the start of the preview program, and it's come a long way. One thing that really does bother me is the rapid shifts in user interface from one build to the next. Every single build, it seems they try to introduce more and more phone-like qualities. We desktop users really want the ability to control user themes, for example. Phone users are stuck with whatever Android skin their carrier chooses to implement, or iOS, and it's a take it or leave it prospect. Desktop and laptop PC users are a little different -- most still expect some level of control over the UI, and a lot of that was taken away in the later builds of Windows 10.
The good thing is that the OS under the hood really seems to be shaping up. I just don't understand why Microsoft doesn't seem to want to support themes, especially since they are expecting a bunch of Windows 7 users to come over to Windows 10. Why not make the transition easy? What if someone actually likes the flat Windows 8 UI? Oh yes, I forgot -- marketing and brand identity.
I think it translates as "your microphone does not have the required NSA invisible intercept facility/hardware lock override".
While likely true, that doesn't directly answer whether Cortana should be designed for microphones instead of the other way around.
Press Windows key, type "p", and Paint is the first entry in the list. The way it's been since Windows 7.
If you've got to go to town on Windows 10 (and I don't blame you), why not mention the half-baked Continuum feature; the fact that nothing actually works quite right; that settings are STILL spread across about six different apps / programs; the lack of Intel display drivers; Cortana being cranky; the half-finished theming etc etc etc.
The theme support isn't half finished, it is half-removed. With each new build they remove or disable more theme customisation options. The colour picker is gone now, and there is no longer a transparency option. Window borders still have a translucent aero glass type effect, you just no longer have any control over it because in Microsoft land the current thinking is that all options are bad and confusing so let's remove them.
The colour picker has been replaced with a Microsoft sanctioned choice of colours. If you don't like any of those colours you obviously have bad taste and should not be allowed to decorate anything. Microsoft will then offer to come over and paint your house in an appropriately modern theme and remove offending items from your wardrobe as well.
...", she proclaims herself unavailable in the region and language you’ve selected”.
Good, must remember that trick and pick Swahili or something upon install to disable this clusterfuck... Overall I've stopped using M$ boxes for anything personal. But I'm forced to keep using them for work where Linux isn't a replacement as yet. Don't know about others, but I'm so done with Redmond...
Plus given that there are a huge number of 1366x768 laptops out there (and more being sold every day - sigh) why have they put so much 'white space' in the controls? Some really quite simple one have bits that disappear off the screen. Started a little bin in W7, got a lot, lot worse in W8/8.1. Now? gone bonkers IMHO
It's not like that they actually care about the usability of their stuff. The majority of us have to use it and that's it.
Microsoft - The modern version of Henry Ford's 'You can have it in any colour you like as long as its black'.
Except, of course, for the very significant issues explicitly described (and ignored) in the article:
"…after set-up seemed complete the Store still had 20 downloads to do, including key built-in apps such as Music, Camera and Photos…"
So the Windows Store is now replacing things like Windows Update, and becoming the only source of essential (formerly built-in) software tools. Not a good thing. Especially since Microsoft had originally said a Microsoft log-in would be optional (to use Windows 8). But you can’t access the Windows Store without a Microsoft login. I suspect that all UWAs (Universal Windows 'Apps') will come from the Store, and Win32 code (in ever-diminishing amounts) from Windows Update. Bottom line, you are now using Microsoft's flavor of iOS. Congrats!
"Cortana’s “Notebook” (the database of personal information which informs Cortana’s suggestions) is now in its final stage…"
Windows 10 basically wants to know everything about you.
"Now Cortana can be activated with “Hey Cortana”
And it listens to everything you say. Can you ever be sure this is truly turned off?
"When you type "Calc" in the Start menu, only the new app is listed…
Most of the core utilities are now UWAs. So using ‘Metro’ (i.e. the Universal Windows Platform) is no longer optional. Start throwing away all your existing software, because, as Microsoft has explicitly stated on many occasions, "UWAs are the future of Windows." (I'm not sure why they can say this over and over and still have nobody believe them...)
"…marked as a "Trusted Windows Store App"…. The same trusted note appears for other Microsoft apps, such as Music and Photos, which is a hint that the company would like users to perceive the Store as the safe way to install apps."
The Store is gradually becoming the only way to get Windows software. Sorry... Windows "apps." And Windows "users" are gradually becoming obedient, carefully-watched mobile 'monetization' fodder. Microsoft has been quite forthright about this in recent announcements. They even merged their Windows OS division and Cell Phone divisions! How can they possibly be more explicit: Windows is becoming a mobile "devices and services" platform, as carefully locked-down as iOS, as disrespectful of privacy as Android.
No thanks! Even Apple knew better than to screw up its desktop OS this badly. Windows 10 needs to fail, or basically Windows as a desktop OS is finished.
But on the positive side, it is "free" (as in beer, that is)...
me too. Upgrade took all night before freezing at 82% (fortunately the moon was full, so the screen glow did not disturb). Better still, the last version was then perfectly restored after re-boot. Now trying again, and a few unattended hours in already. Am I really supposed to recommend this to my XP/7 cousins?
Believe it or not, there are significant numbers of computer users who do not require nor want to connect some or all of their PCs to the Internet. It seems to me that Windows has become an OS that cannot be installed on a PC unless it has Internet access at the time of install - because half the OS must be downloaded and is not present on any installation media, and it requires the installer/user to enter an online account.
Computers are not only used for online activities, though to read many PC related articles you would be forgiven for believing that a computer is a device used only for playing games and web-based activities.
My system has a NetGear WiFi USB receiver.
I need to instal drivers before this works in Win 10.
Previously installing with a local account before a MS account so I can instal the NetGear drivers has rendered the instal HDD 'Missing Bootmgr' after the next restart.
If using ethernet and installing with MS account.....no problem.
"It seems to me that Windows has become an OS that cannot be installed on a PC unless it has Internet access at the time of install - because half the OS must be downloaded and is not present on any installation media, and it requires the installer/user to enter an online account."
It seems you are wrong. The Windows 10 install works just fine with no internet access - and no online account will be required for the RTM version.
Will it be (finally?) possible to stop an application stealing window focus?
I know it's really trivial, but I miss that on XP (I think it was XP...it was a looong time ago) where whatever I was working on would stay the active window until *I* decided that I wanted to type into another window.
Far too many times I've been doing a delete/copy/move/other operation and typing into (say) a Word Doc, only to momentarily have the focus stolen while I was typing and then being in the position of not being sure which option it had chosen on the dialog box.
It would have been XP, but your recollection is flaky.
This has always been a problem. It was originally possible for an application to make itself the top window. This is an important feature. If you launch a child app to perform some task (and setup programs often do this) then it is quite irritating to the end-user if that child app is not visible because the parent still has the focus.
Some apps abused the feature, insisting on spewing themselves in your face every time they felt they had some "important" message to give you. Eventually MS said enough was enough and changed the rules. But there still had to be a way, and it was only a matter of time before the bad apps learned the new rules and we were back where we started.
Around the XP time-frame, MS nearly came up with a set of rules that worked. It took the twats quite while to produce a work-around. That's probably the halcyon period you were thinking of.
This is one of a class of problems where the following rule is true: For any massively rude behaviour, there will be some managers who reckon their program is important enough to justify it and some of them will employ programmers who are smart enough and unscrupulous enough to pick up the bonus for making it happen.
... on a cheapo HP Stream 7 tablet. It's not OK for a build so close to RTM.
An awful lot of bugs and annoyances have been sorted out. But these were my observations within half an hour of use:
* After upgrade none of the bundled Store apps worked, and even the Store itself wouldn't start. I ended up having to delete and recreate my user profile.
* An awful lot of dead files from the previous build were left hanging around, even after running Disk Cleanup.
* By default Windows now seems to think that the first day of the week in New Zealand is Sunday rather than Monday.
* It keeps trying to install English (United States) language resources, even though it's an English (United Kingdom) language installation running with English (New Zealand) region settings.
* I imported bookmarks from Chrome to Edge, and it worked OK, but managed to store them all in reverse alphabetical order with no obvious way of fixing them.
* In touch mode, you can still hear the gears grinding when an app is closed - it still doesn't always take you back to the start screen, and sometimes it does when it should take you back to a parent window / process.
Nothing showstopping in a 'suddenly bluescreen and ruin your day' way, but a mountain of nuisance bugs and fit and finish problems.
You also need to check and change privacy settings in half a dozen different places, Google-style, which is considerably worse than Windows 8.1. Some weren't respected and reset to 'send Microsoft everything' after the upgrade. All this is very concerning. And all that's before we get into the various UX deficiencies that have been discussed ad nauseam both here and elsewhere. Any chance of sanity prevailing now seems slim.
According to some reports, Microsoft will be preparing the RTM build any day now. Build 10158 must be very close to the final version that will be sprayed at millions of unsuspecting users and the mainstream press. It needs to be polished to a brilliant shine if Microsoft want to make a genuine effort to restore their reputation with regular users. (Not that I particularly care about Microsoft's reputation, of course.)
As it stands, it's not good enough.
didn't you get the message?
USA USA USA USA No 1 No 1 No 1 USA USA USA
{well, 4th July is not far away}
Ask a good percentage of Americans where N.Z. (or even Oz) is and you will be met with a blank stare.
They just don't give a toss about anything outside of the lower 48 states (or even their outside their own state) unless it has to do with some rag-head (U.S. insult) in the middle East.
Don't you know the rule? Every other version of windows is crap. That's why people hung on to Windows XP for ages, and moving people from Windows 7 to 8 has been challenging as well. This time Microsoft planned ahead and avoided that problem by skipping the good version.
Windows 10 is in no way shape or form a rewarmed 7. It is basically Windows 8.2. Windows 10 is not customizable like Windows 7. 10 is focused clearly on Tablets and Phones. They bleat away about desktop users have a start menu. The top requested feature for 10 has since October 2014 is give us our Windows 7 style Aero back and we need a classic theme for lab computers (Windows 2000 desktop) and locked down work computers. I am not giving up my Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate licences for Windows 10 Metro Land Garden.
They Microsoft are trying to sell Cortana as a great feature of the operating system. I suspect once the novelty wears off this toy will be made quiet. I do see a really good use for her with disabled PC users who may not be able to type well or the visually impaired but power users no way. Now we know why it is free for a year, nobody in their right mind would buy this crap.
to be yet another version of windows to avoid.
Im not an MS nay-sayer (far from it and i have defended them to the hilt in the past ) BUT but the more i read the more i think, no MS, i do not subscribe to your view of how i use my computer or how i want my computer to work.
That fucking penguin is getting closer and closer to my house...
Iffy on it being a Penguin, more likely hybrid, but agreed. I even, sorta like 8.0 (no 8.1U1) on pure desktop and it was decent on my touchscreens. Windows 10 and me and mine are far away on the view of what and how the user does things. Now the 14 yo will love it, it matches how he uses phones and tablets, provided it's in the first day or so. Broken otherwise.
Maybe a few months or years down the road but probably not.
When I last used Windows 10, it had the following issues:
* The most requested feature, Aero, is still not available to those who want it.
* There is still no proper backup program.
* F8 is still not enabled by default.
* Anti-privacy measures are enabled by default.
* The start menu is not customizable, unlike the one in Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, NT.
* The start menu does not organize programs in a hierarchy.
* System Restore is still hard to find.
* Programs are still called "apps".
If those problems aren't "significant issues", then one wonders how bad something has to be to be a significant issue.
I doubt Microsoft's does either. I bet in fact that every version of Windows has 10,000s of bugs logged against it and each is assigned a severity and a priority.
I assume that "significant" here would refer to those that are highest priority and the most severe. And it may be true that those are cleared but it's also likely that there a very large number of others still waiting to be fixed and probably still waiting to be fixed when the OS launches.
That said, complex systems are never bug free or anywhere close so I wouldn't expect the bug count to ever reach zero. But I do hope that when it launches that it has a high level of stability and it continues to improve as they start slapping in features or other things left and right thereafter.
news: Windows 10 RTM is released to manufacturing and NOBODY cared.
NOBODY downloaded the RTM release of Win10.
A COMPLETE FAILURE, WORSE RELEASE EVER
PHONE = FAILURE
CLOUD = FAILURE
WINDOWS = FAILURE
OFFICE = FAILURE
No wonder they are a negative net profit company. They make zero profits and lie about everything.
MICROSOFT = FAKE
This post has been deleted by its author
When I switched from XP to 7, there was a paid-for third-party converter that did the job (almost as badly as Microsoft did from 7 to 10). But for most stuff it worked. Now I dual-boot Win10 and Mint, but most of what I use isn't on Mint and my vast files are on the NTFS partition, where Mint doesn't expect them. So where's the paid-for converter that just lets me avoid booting Win unless something vital really can't be virtualised?
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