Microsoft: Still a Thing

[Thad]

Ars: Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows—it’s how it develops it

MS has had serious problems deploying its twice-a-year Windows 10 updates, most recently shipping an October Update that caused data loss and having to pull it.

This has led to a lot of criticism that the twice-a-year release cycle is responsible for all the problems, that it's too ambitious. As the headline implies, Peter Bright (not exactly a rabid anti-Microsoft guy) argues that the release cadence isn't the problem, MS's 1990s approach to software testing is. The approach appears to be "develop, then merge, then test" instead of "develop, test while developing, test some more, fix every blocking bug, then merge, then test some more."

The decoupling of development and bugfixing is also an issue: during the development and integration phases the reliability and stability of the software will take a giant nosedive. The features being integrated are fundamentally untested (because testing comes later), and have never been used with each other (because they were all developed separately in their own branches prior to the integration phase). The mess of software is then beaten into an acceptable shape through the testing, bug reporting, and bug fixing of the lengthy stabilization phase. In this process, the product's reliability should start improving once more.

[...]

Test the software before you ship it, not after

This tells us some fundamental things about how Windows is being developed. Either tests do not exist at all for this code (and I've been told that yes, it's permitted to integrate code without tests, though I would hope this isn't the norm), or test failures are being regarded as acceptable, non-blocking issues, and developers are being allowed to integrate code that they know doesn't work properly. From outside we can't tell exactly which situation is in play—it could even be a mix of both—but neither is good.

For older parts of Windows that may be a little more excusable—they were developed in an era before the value of automated testing was really recognized, and they may very well not have any real test infrastructure. But the OneDrive placeholders aren't an old part of Windows; they're leveraging a brand new set of capabilities. We might excuse old code being under-tested, but there's no good reason at all that new code shouldn't have a solid set of tests to verify basic functionality. And known defective code certainly shouldn't be merged until it's fixed, let alone shipped to testers.

[Brantly B.]

I can tell you that Microsoft doesn't seem to hire a lot of SDETs. I assumed that was because all the positions were filled, but on reflecting on it it's kind of weird that Amazon and Google can still have hundreds of test positions open and Microsoft is all set, thanks.

[mharr]

This seems like a good place to note my discovery that you can make Cortana bugger off from the 'new improved' Skype (And hopefully send a message to head office into the bargain) by reporting her as a spammer.

[Mongrel]

This seems like a good place to note my discovery that you can make Cortana bugger off from the 'new improved' Skype (And hopefully send a message to head office into the bargain) by reporting her as a spammer.

xD

EXCELLENT.

[Thad]

You know, someday we will live in a world where I never have to spend four hours writing workarounds for IE again.

Someday.

[Brantly B.]

We just put up a block page that says "We don't care if you're in China, use a different browser" like 7 years ago and never looked back.

[Thad]

Not really an option if you're selling life insurance; people who skew older and less tech-savvy are a pretty significant portion of the target audience.

Of course, the importance of making nonfunctional style elements work in IE is a matter of opinion. The people who sign my checks have a different opinion than I do on how necessary it is for sticky footers to work in IE. Ultimately, it's their call and I'm not going to get too bent out of shape about it, but I look forward to the day when stuff like this is no longer part of my job description and I can (for example) just use flexbox and not get a ticket back from QA saying that if you resize the window in a particular way it'll completely break the layout.

[Thad]

TechRadar: Windows 10 turns 5: where did it all go wrong?

[Brantly B.]

"By turning users into resources rather than customers."

Lot of words just to say that.

[Thad]

Windows 10 update could be damaging your SSD

In the case of SSDs, some experts believe it’s not sensible to perform defragmentation at all, while others have previously stated that there are benefits to optimizing a heavily fragmented SSD roughly once per month.

However, as a result of the Windows 10 2004 bug, the Optimize Drives tool is defragging drives every time the connected device is rebooted. In effect, this means many SSDs are being defragged circa 30x more frequently than is optimal.

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, first identified in June, and has already rolled out a fix for members of its Insider program with Windows 10 Build 19042.487 (20H2).

While regular Windows 10 users wait for the fix to be tested in beta and rolled out the entire user base (which should take place sooner rather than later), it is advisable to turn off automatic defragging to prevent further damage to SSDs.

[Thad]

Windows 11 has a lot of UI changes that look pretty good to me.

Can't wait to find out all the bullshit they're going to do to make up for the good stuff. "Require a Microsoft account" and "keep putting more unwanted bullshit in the taskbar" are both obvious guesses, but there's bound to be some fuckery I don't even see coming.

[beatbandito]

The only thing I've heard about Win11 so far is it requires a "TPM 2.0" security chip. Which is bad because it's commonly used in prebuilts but not on high-end cards custom builders would use, so the internet has told me. Not sure what new features of Win11 rely on that and if they'll be good or bad for the user experience.

[Grath]

The only thing I've heard about Win11 so far is it requires a "TPM 2.0" security chip. Which is bad because it's commonly used in prebuilts but not on high-end cards custom builders would use, so the internet has told me. Not sure what new features of Win11 rely on that and if they'll be good or bad for the user experience.

Discrete TPM chips are more of an enterprise workstation thing than just prebuilt computers (it's Trusted Platform Module, basically dealing with hardware encryption; hopefully this means Windows 11 will have something to do with Bitlocker that helps address ransomware?)

The big requirements for Win11 are DirectX 12 and TPM 2.0; people in a Discord I'm in were panicking last night but literally every AMD Zen CPU has a Firmware TPM built into the CPU; it's not as secure as a Discrete TPM chip attached to the motherboard, and some of the oldest CPUs may only have TPM 1.2 built-in rather than TPM 2.0? I'm not sure. I had to go enable mine in the BIOS last night but that made my high-end gaming desktop fully compatible with Windows 11, so I should be able to upgrade my old Window 7 key all the way to 11 for free a year or two after Win11's release when people will have figured out how to make it not suck. I know Intel has some extent of support for fTPM as well in their CPUs, but... is it really a high-end build if it's running Intel these days? Certainly a high-cost build, but AMD's better and cheaper.

[Thad]

Jim Salter:

Intel calls its firmware-based TPM iPPT (Intel Platform Protection Technology), and AMD calls its own fTPM (Firmware Trusted Platform Module). Generally speaking, iPPT shows up in most Haswell (4th-gen Core) CPUs, although the K-series gaming models inexplicably fail to get iPPT until Skylake (6th-gen Core). On the AMD side, we see fTPM show up with Ryzen 2500 and up.

There's also a line where he says "TPM 1.2 may or may not be "good enough"", but if he expands on that farther down in the article, I missed it.

[Mazian]

At least for the bog-standard Dells that work likes to buy, TPM 1.2 systems can be upgraded in firmware to 2.0.

All the laptops we've picked up in the last couple of years have had TPM by default (and correspondingly BitLocker by default - which, to its credit, is transparent enough that it took me a long time to notice it). Not sure if that applies to the market as a whole, but there's not really a build-your-own laptop market to speak of.

[Thad]

Microsoft’s Windows 11 outreach efforts aren’t going very well

In a July 21 livestream, Microsoft Program Manager Aria Carley answered Microsoft Tech Community users' questions about the final hardware requirements to upgrade to Windows 11. Although hardware requirements—including but not limited to TPM 2.0 support—aren't enforced for the Windows 11 alpha images available now, Carley confirmed that the "hardware floor" would be real for final versions.

[...]

Despite acknowledging that the situation "sucks" for affected users, Carley doubled down on the inflexibility of the hardware floor in response to a later question, saying "group policy will not enable you to get around hardware enforcement for Windows 11. We're still going to block you from upgrading your device... to make sure your devices stay supported and secure."

Unsurprisingly, these answers didn't seem to go over well with the audience—according to Windows Central, the video's top comment read, "A lot of these answers come off as super tone deaf... it's looking like Windows 11 will be another Windows 8." Other comments—again, according to Windows Central—speculated that the seemingly unnecessary hardware requirements are a thinly veiled ploy to push new computer sales, with corresponding boosts to Windows license sales.

Unfortunately, we're left to take various blogs' word on what the Microsoft Tech Community users had to say, because Microsoft simply disabled comments on the video—deleting all existing comments—in response to the negativity. Although the comments are gone, the voting is not—with 2.7K dislikes and only 146 likes as of this afternoon.

I really don't know what they're thinking here. It doesn't seem like there's a technical reason why they need TPM 2.0 support. I'm sure breaking compatibility with a bunch of old hardware makes your OS easier to maintain, but that's never been MS's bag; that's more of an Apple (and every cell phone vendor) thing.

I don't see much benefit to breaking upgrades, either. The theory that they're trying to goose sales of new hardware so they get more money for a license doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, because upgraders are paying for a license whether they get a new computer with it or not. (Except the pirates, of course, but I don't really see MS substantially increasing its profits just by forcing pirates to buy new computers with OEM licenses.)

And of course MS's strongest market remains businesses, who (1) buy licenses in bulk and (2) are going to haaaaaate this.

[Mongrel]

Man, just like I've been bitching about the game industry lately. Absurdly self-destructive updates based on a truly bizarre confidence that they can straight-up do anything they like to their customer bases without any relevant consequences.

Seriously... what the fuck is going on with software companies?

I mean, there's some elasticity, sure, whether it's companies being loath to switch enterprise software, or gamers being hooked in by deliberately addictive mechanisms. That shit's been abused by software producers for longer than I've owned a computer. But some of the weird behaviour I've seen lately is just way, waaayyyyy, beyond where even their most entrenched users can be stretched (well, most of them).

[Thad]

Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop

This problem combines two of latter-day Windows' most annoying tendencies. First, the operating system relentlessly promotes and prioritizes Microsoft's first-party apps and services. Second, the operating system talks to Microsoft's servers in the background to report diagnostic data, fetch advertisements, and even download Windows Store apps without asking. As Aleksandersen correctly points out, these non-essential background processes shouldn't be capable of breaking core functionality. And while this problem happened to beta builds of Windows 11 and not something that's actually running on most PCs, we are less than a month out from the official launch, and recent Windows 11 builds have mostly shifted to bug-fix mode rather than adding big, new features. This exact build of the operating system was offered to IT organizations in the "release preview" Insider channel, which is typically reserved for final or near-final builds.

(links stripped by copy-paste)

[beatbandito]

I tried out Windows 11.

don't

[mharr]

They've broken the Star Trek movie rule? Heresy.