
For shame!
Windows 10 ate my hamster
Users of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, rejoice! Microsoft has slung out a hefty patch to, er, fix a whole bunch of stuff that was broken in the Update of the Damned. Released last night, KB4469342 is packed full of updates, with two notable changes lurking at the end of the list of tweaks. The failure of mapped drives to …
Yeah, tell me when they at least bother to put out an update without any "known issues" (documented or not).
Then I might look at testing it.
Until then, my decision to stay as far off Windows 10 as possible seems to have been worthwhile. I might have to deploy it next year. If so, then this issue might (finally) be fixed by then. But likely I'll still have to do everything in my power to stop updates deploying without consent.
We've all been there, hopefully not personally for many years, but the general signs of a programmer in trouble is when they go into 'gopher bashing' mode where fixing one bug invariably breaks something else. They'll tell us "Its all very complicated" but that's unfortunately the job -- we have to design to reduce complexity to manageable levels so if the code is truly incomprehensible then its effectively unusable and needs a redesign.
I know how this can come about, though. I have occasionally to work on a piece of embedded code that's insanely complex, it was written by someone who embraced object oriented programming without first learning about what objects are, how they're used and how to design with them. The result is an astonishing pile of spaghetti, random interactions and variables all over the place, which has driven many a competent programmer to seek employment elsewhere. (You can't critique it because you're obviously old-fashioned and don't understand proper programming techniques so you just leave it to the genius that designed it and have as little to do with it as possible.) Now I'm not saying that this is the cause of MSFT's woes but I'd guess that there's a failure of software design methodology somewhere because they're struggling with what should be trivial bugs, they've not managed to compartment their system but at the same time they're trumpeting quite trivial changes as major improvements. This is a very large red flag for anyone who's had to manage software projects.
There might also be another thing at work : all the old timers that made Office and Windows the two breadwinners for Microsoft have now left. Their knowledge, the care they took to not disrupt the user experience too much, and the rules they had set down to keep things smooth went with them.
Now Microsoft probably has scores of youngsters who are certainly very Agile, but not Thorough, and the result is Microsoft is starting to get a shade of a bad reputation.
Now Microsoft probably has scores of youngsters who are certainly very Agile,
Agile at putting everything but the simlest problem on the Technical Debt list marked as 'THTF' (To Hard To Fix) and then forgetting about them.
As a Software Developer, I'd be ashamed to admit that I had ever worked for MS on Windows 10.
There we were thinking the Visa was as bad as it could get as far a MS Operating Systems went. My how wrong we were.
There's also the possibility that as the codebase grows older it gets harder and harder to maintain as there are fixes changes redesigns and tweeks all over what in the beginning was nice clear and easy to understand code. I guess a large part of the windows codebase could realy do with a rewrite, sadly you tend to never get the time to do that as you need to get new shiny feature (that makes the code even worse) out to make the beancounters happy.
@martinusher “The result is an astonishing pile of spaghetti .. I'd guess that there's a failure of software design methodology somewhere”
I suspect Windows is designed using such spaghettilogical methods to make it difficult to clone.
Woah boy. And in 2006 we thought Vista was a complete pile of s**t. Seems like Microsoft's worst OS was still yet to come. Nothing is tempting me away from Win7, better a relatively stable OS with the odd security hole unlikely to be exploited than rolling updates on Win10 which break basic functionality seemingly at random.
Win 10 arbitrarily deciding that it could not connect to drives you used just minutes ago, while still connecting to others on the same server, predates the October update. Happened to my Win 10 1803 build in the last few days... unless, of course, it is a new and exciting issue they added to the October debacle and subsequently fixed.
Now that drive mapping has come up I wonder if the problem my W7 virtual machine has gained this autumn is related. It comes up asking something about restoring drive letters in the background and no matter what I do it shuts down or reboots again.
No network drives or anything like that in use on the VM.
I have reverted to a good September snapshot several times but can not successfully apply newer updates.
I have been a linux user for many years and abandoned Windows completely when mobile phone apps replaced my occasional need to use it. Just out of interest I thought I'd install Windows 10 on an old Dell XPS13 which will be running Ubuntu. What an eye-opener. I've hardly been able to use the laptop as it feels like every time I turn it on it's finishing an update which had already taken hours to download and install. When one of the updates finally worked it tried to change all the settings I had meticulously answered "no" to Microsoft defaults.
What has happened to Windows since W7 which was a very good OS. Where did it ll go wrong?