How do you feel about single-use plastics? OK, interesting. Now tell us your views on surprise Windows updates Everyone loves a big a screen, none more so than Microsoft's Windows, which finds the devices irresistible when it comes to splashing unfortunate messages all over them. Today's bork comes from a reader in New Zealand named Rob who spotted Windows in need of a jolly good updating as he strolled through the galleries of the …
Having carelessly let my laptop battery go flat, on supplying it with power it rebooted into an elderly Windows 10 on a small chunk of eMMC before I could stop it (laziness on my part as I also need to move the boot partition) and it was desperate to update. I thought I'd just let it get on with it - how long could it possibly take? Seems like that's a question to which I'll never know the answer because after 10 minutes and a total progress of 0% I gave up and caught the boot menu in time to return to the relative sanity of Linux.
However, I suppose it's finally the excuse I need to move that boot partition and wipe the eMMC so it can more usefully be employed.
I'd hung onto Windows 10 "just in case", but the case seems to be diminishing - it gets considerably less use from me than Windows 7 - and casual daily IT is now all Linux and Android. Why anyone would use it for an information display is completely beyond me.
Well, my normal reason for things like this using Windows is that products like System Center make it relatively easy to manage a fleet of machines, whether that fleet is a few hundred or a few million.
That's not to say that given a similar management system, that I don't think it would be more logical to stick a SBC (be it a PI, Jetson or whatever) in the back of a large screen and deploy that. In fact, I believe NEC do a nice looking range of screens that you can plug a PI Zero into.
That said, the fact they clearly haven't attempted to control Windows Updates makes me wonder if they haven't just bunged a spare machjine in there that isn't being managed.
CIA World book of facts:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/ae.html
New Zealand:
total: 268,838 sq km
land: 264,537 sq km
water: 4,301 sq km
note: includes Antipodes Islands, Auckland Islands, Bounty Islands, Campbell Island, Chatham Islands, and Kermadec Islands
United Kingdom:
total: 243,610 sq km
land: 241,930 sq km
water: 1,680 sq km
note 1: the percentage area breakdown of the four UK countries is: England 53%, Scotland 32%, Wales 9%, and Northern Ireland 6%
note 2: includes Rockall and the Shetland Islands, which are part of Scotland
The correct response to _any_ Windows update should be fear. Microsoft's monopoly of the computer desktop industry has never been more evident, because Microsoft's shockingly poor management of Windows should rightfully have bankrupted any other company.
I've lost count of the number of catastrophic problems I've run into with Windows updates that cost me days of productivity. Even if the problem is readily fixable on a single machine, when you have to multiply that by dozens of or even hundreds of machines, that ends up being a whole lot of work.
Even more fun when you have an update bork a critical software package, causing a 7 figure production line to nearly miss a shipping/commissioning window.
This with updates turned off and deferred on Win 10 Pro too... They "flipped on" again.
Sadly, nobody does a *nix version for most of the software I use daily, and WINE just shatters it's poor glass, usually because of drivers.
the solution is pretty simple: edit the hosts file so that the *critical* machines think that windows updates are downloaded from 127.0.0.1
i was thinking about doing that to a print server a cuople years ago, before i got the greenlight to just use CUPS (we lost the scanner - i was too young and naive to know about SANE - but hey, at least it wasn't rebooting every couple hours).
The machinery itself is all embedded/PLC, what went pear shaped was the software used to program it in the field/on the shop floor.
Microsoft also set some domains to not resolve using the hosts file, including all the update/telemetry ones.
Only real way would be a proxy or VPN provider that stripped/blocked, or stringent air-gap.
https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-name-resolution is the relevant article on the hosts file situation.
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