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Microsoft's first cumulative update for Windows 10 - KB3081424 - is causing havoc for some users. How do I know this? Because I spent a good part of my Sunday morning dealing with it, that's how.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the update puts affected systems into an endless crash loop. The update tries to install, gets to a certain point, fails, and then displays the unhelpful "We couldn't complete the updates, undoing the changes."
If it stopped there things wouldn't be too bad, but because Microsoft now forces updates onto Windows 10 users, the OS kept trying - and failing - to install the update, which in turn placed the system into a periodic crash/reboot loop that put quite a dent in my productivity.
To make matters worse, the tool that Microsoft released to hide or block toxic Windows 10 updates (as reported by my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott) didn't allow me to prevent this update from attempting to install. So I was forced to either abandon the machine until a fix was made available or try to fix it myself.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-cumulative-update-causes-reboot-loop-havoc-for-some-users/
Submitted from IRC.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Monday August 10 2015, @10:27PM
Why does anyone tolerate this in something they pay money for? I moved my parents to a LTS release of Linux Mint when they retired. Not only has it been rock solid stable, it also breathed new life into old hardware and has resulted in an unbelievable lowering in "family tech support" burden. The calls I do get, which are few and far between, generally can be fixed by applying bugfixes/updates and/or restarting the browser.
They also aren't getting spied upon by the OS itself (see yesterday's story about the insane EULA for Win10), and don't have to worry about malware.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @10:49PM
You do realize that there are hardware and software products that just do not run on Linux of any stripe? Wine is not always an option.
Linux is good - I have it on three on my computers and I installed it on my laptop in response to W10 upgrade issues. However, I am forced to keep two of the machines as dual boot with W10 and WinXP due to software and hardware problems in Linux.
Linux is not the universal solution. Unfortunately.
However, for those that do not have these issues, Linux is a very good alternative to Windows of any generation. I like Mint XFCE, but use Xubuntu instead - it cooperates better with some older hardware.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:03AM
due to software and hardware problems in Linux
It doesn't sound at all like the problem is "in Linux".
The problem appears to be in your hardware supply chain--specifically *YOUR* choice of vendors.
Clearly, *YOUR* RFQ did not specify the OS compatibility required.
...and have you contacted The Linux Driver Project?
Last I heard, they had HUNDREDS of guys waiting in line to make hardware Linux-compatible. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [lwn.net]
Not accepting gratis labor is a sign of a really shitty vendor.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @07:37AM
You're making the silly assumption that the hardware is new. IFF you get to spec out the hardware first - yes you can do that. If the hardware's already in place, replacing Windows with Linux solves nothing.
But you also assume that all hardware is available in some Linux form. Not so - there are real life commercial products with no Linux support and _no_ Linux alternative. Some medical equipment and industrial is not available in Linux form - some is still stuck with WinXP. Yes it's a vendor problem, but that doesn't make Linux the solution.
I know of one factory with assembly equipment running on an IBM 704 - which dates back to the '50s. If it works, don't mess with it. The cost of replacing all the equipment just so they could run a Linux PC would make no sense.
You live in a Linux world. I live in the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:13AM
In that case they probably have an IT department to take care of it, with testing and QA before rolling anything into production, so they probably won't be bitten by forced updates to the consumer version of an OS that was just released.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:04AM
Linux is not the universal solution.
Yes it is! And even if it is not, it would seem to be closer than Windoze. Near universal solution is better than an actual infinite loop. And as Linus Torvalds once said, "Linux can run an infinite loop in under 4.5 seconds!"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:29AM
Yes, we realize that. In fact, that is part of the reason we like Linux - virus writers mostly fail to support Linux.
The sane and rational thing to do, is to abandon those softwares and hardwares that don't support Linux. On Linux, you, your company, even your dog, can search for, and install software to your liking - and alter that software to make it more to your liking. On Windows, all you get is what some proprietary vendor offers - and you very seldom have any idea what that software is doing.
(Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:39AM
You over state the case.
Most people can NOT make their linux software better. Step outside of your own provincial little world and you find that not everyone is a programmer.
Most proprietary software does exactly what it says it does. Those that don't cease to be purchased, and that pretty well kills them off.
People can actually tell that their taxes weren't computed correctly, their email never goes through, or their cad drawings don't actually print.
They can't fix the software, but they sure as hell can determine that it is doing what it sold as doing.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @07:53AM
Blackboard is a proprietary educational software system.
Getting the vendor to patch bugs or add features is like pulling teeth.
Moodle, OTOH, is FOSS.
There are Moodle developers for hire across the landscape, ready to modify the software to your specifications.
not everyone is a programmer
As the above example demonstrates, that is not necessary.
The concept of a bounty on a bug|missing feature is another paradigm available to FOSS.
Closed code slams that door tight.
Sometimes just mentioning a feature that you think would be cool to the app's development team can make a light bulb go on over their heads.
(The LibreOffice crew comes immediately to mind.)
With a proprietary software vendor?
Good luck contacting any actual techies.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:20AM
You are contradicting yourself. That has not killed Exchange Server off yet.
I used to work as a sysadmin, and I can tell you that every single time an email disappeared, an Exchange Server was involved. While email is not officially guaranteed anything, the protocol does make it really hard for a mail to get lost. The sending mail server does not remove a mail from the queue before the next hop mail server explicitly has acknowledged and taken responsibility for it.
We used email for some automated data exchanges (no human involved, e.g. from one financial system to another), and the only times mails were lost... Exchange Server.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:45AM
Most people can NOT make their linux software better. Step outside of your own provincial little world and you find that not everyone is a programmer.
Even non-programmers benefit when anyone can work on the software. For one thing, they can hire anyone to implement their desired changes. For another, people will often decide to contribute to Free Software of their own accord, and non-programmers and programmers alike benefit.
Most proprietary software does exactly what it says it does.
And perhaps more. Maybe it also contains backdoors, violates the users' privacy, and has other anti-features. Who knows?
Those that don't cease to be purchased, and that pretty well kills them off.
Unless the problems aren't so staggering as to chase them away completely. Microsoft and Apple like to get people 'addicted' to their software as early as possible so that they are dependent upon it. It would take a colossal amount of abuse and screw ups to chase normal people away. And that's what proprietary software does: It forces you to be dependent upon your masters as long as you use it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Tuesday August 11 2015, @12:13PM
Most proprietary software does exactly what it says it does. Those that don't cease to be purchased
Ah! the Grantham Grocer Fallacy [demon.co.uk]
Ie, that in a free market the "best" emerges by competition, and the inferior goes to the wall; no political or other outside interference is necessary or desirable. ...... In this free market theory there is an assumption, usually unspoken, that the customers are all-knowing and all-wise.
But they are not.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:18PM
I'll go a step further. A fair percentage of customers are damned fools.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 11 2015, @09:22PM
I'm sorry, but in my experience FOSS software is more likely to perform as it claims to perform than is proprietary software. This despite the fact that most claims made by proprietary software vendors are so vague that they cannot be falsified. (The benefit of a marketing division.)
That said, there were decades when I had niche needs that were not properly filled by FOSS software. That has become much less true over time. It's true that the place filled by Deneba Canvas is not properly filled even by a combination of the Gimp and Inkscape...but it's pretty close. And the spot filled by Finale is not properly filled even by a combination of Muse (MuseScore?) and Frescobaldi. But it's close.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday August 12 2015, @12:06AM
But don't forget that it only in the last several years that interoperability with Windows document formats finally arrived in the Linux world. Mostly in the form of ODF packages that were released for both windows, mac and linux.
The arrival LO and OO allowed many many shops to solve the document handling issues, usually by abandoning MS Office all together. Its amazing how quickly most people can make that jump and never look back.
These days you can survive in a microsoft shop running any modern distro, usually causing no inconvenience to yourself or your workmates. That wasn't always true. For a while, my day job specialized in the integration of Linux workstations and servers into windows shops. There were things that didn't work well, there were things that didn't work at all.
Quickbooks (love it or hate it, it still rules) is still a nightmare, unless the users use the semi-functional on-line version, or run something under wine or in a VM.
As a lone user, you might find some not-too-horrible combinations of packages that do what you want, (or almost), but as soon as your work product depends on others, and their's on your work product, things get tricky.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday August 11 2015, @11:00PM
The average person can reasonably hire someone or ask a friend to add a feature or fix a bug in FREE software. It would likely be cheaper than, e.g., calling a plumber. That's why FREE software is so important; go read some of Richard Stallman's writings. He may be crazy or autistic, but his fears have proved true time and again.
The same cannot be said for proprietary software.
>Most proprietary software does exactly what it says it does.
Not really. Having dealt with a lot of misbehaving software, I have observed that in reality the rate of "misbehavior" is more or less the same between free and proprietary software. The difference is that in free software, it is much easier to fix. Either someone else has already fixed it for you, you can fix it yourself, or, as I note previously, you can hire or ask someone to do it for you. Believe it or not, most FOSS devs are happy to improve FOSS software as long as you ask nicely.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:09AM
These days, there are more hardware and software that just do not run on Windows.
My brother had to get a new scanner after updating to Windows 7. The old one works fine on Linux. A colleague had the same problem with a printer. Works fine on Linux.
Lately, I have been looking for a TURN server for Windows. We make an app using WebRTC at work, and we are a pure Windows shop on the server side. Yet, we have to have this one Linux machine that nobody updates (the guy who installed it doesn't work here anymore), because for WebRTC we need a TURN server. Several hours of Googling by several people has turned up nothing.
We've also been looking for an XMPP server. Not some Cygwin crap that needs to be started manually after reboot, something that comes with an MSI installer and a standard Windows Service. Something that even a Windows guy could install (we are a small shop, with no sysadmins on staff).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by termigator on Monday August 10 2015, @11:08PM
Unfortunately, working with Windows pays the bills. For the project I am on, the customer runs Windows, so the software has to run on it (and run in IE, ugh). For my personal systems, I run linux, but for work that pays, have to run Windows where I install Cygwin and other OSS software that I am productive with.
As for Win10, I installed in an evaluation version in a VM. I only need it to test the software project I work on. Primary work (that pays the bills) environment is Win7.
Crossing my fingers that the company IT department does not force us to upgrade to Win10.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:49AM
Crossing my fingers that the company IT department does not force us to upgrade to Win10.
In my day job, where we knew months ago that our software would work under 10, we still Like Windows7, but have no objection to Windows 10.
In fact, for end users we prefer it, because Microsoft has made it harder for end users to arbitrarily decide to install software in some random ass location, and started protecting the root of the drive (just like linux).
Everything we use, and everything we write works just fine under 10.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 11 2015, @08:29AM
I had a funny "compatibility" issue with an old notebook I just bought. In Windows (no idea which, I wouldn't know one from any other) I could do only panel (lo-res), only hdmi (a few different resolutions, including quite hi-res), or cloned displays (pinned to the panel's resolution). One slightly botched linux install later (I had intended to leave the Windows as dual bootable, /just in case/, but failed), using xrandr I can have the panel and the hdmi simultaniously and independently running together - and the hdmi has about 20 different resolutions available to it. And this is on a laptop which allegedly has notoriously very poor graphics support under linux (a GMA Intel chip with an IMG graphics processor on it. I bought it because it was cheap, and I was a bit "tired"). So "very poor" is apparently almost better than what MS Windows provides. I say almost, as the hardware scaling of video overlays doesn't (yet) work (because IMG are incompetent tossers, and I knew this is a demonstrable fact already because I've been one of their clients), which means that I need to set the HDMI screen to the closest resolution, and let the telly do the hardware scaling (which it does perfectly well).
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