Microsoft will surely decide for me on my Windows 10 gaming PC. Better save my work (which I sometimes do even on a gaming machine) frequently lest the masters deem it fit to restart while I'm away having lunch if they decide I can live with the performance hit.

• Certain days come up that I, the paying user, do not want to patch on. Microsoft wins this disagreement and I lose. This occurs in a glib fashion with a message like "Hey, just a heads up, we are going to restart your computer" (whether I like it or not). It is my computer, there is no "we!"

It will absolutely close programs with unsaved work if I am not there.

• Maybe I don't want the performance hit on my gaming PC. This is another element of surprise: who knows how bad it'll be? Certainly not the users if Intel and Microsoft have their way.

• Yet another element of surprise: I've had hardware stop working after updates.

I cannot wait until it becomes viable to escape the toxicity of companies such as Intel and Microsoft.

Buy an AMD machine, install Ubuntu, and you're done.

>Ubuntu

Hope he likes Mahjong and Tux Racer

This has been "viable" for a long time now. Ignore the FUD and just try it for yourself. You might be pleasantly surprised.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DcZZQ4HL_Ol969UbXJmF...

i'm pumped to try monster hunter. that game was the only reason I was going to use windows, so hope it runs well

Win10 is free* (so it does this) - Professionals who need to override these settings should get Win10 Pro.

They seem to be getting less aggressive, but I've had my machine reboot with less than half an hour of notice. No notice before leaving the machine, return 30 minute later to find it rebooted. So "just mark every 2nd Tuesday of a month as patch day and never leave your machine(s) unattended on that day and you won't have surprises!".

I've also had (in a recent month) them reboot overnight, aborting long running processes that I had to clean up and restart, after explicitly checking for updates before starting those processes (none being found), and making sure my "active hours" were set such that it shouldn't restart.

Earlier this year I had a patch mid-cycle (not close to the normal patch Tuesday) that caused a reboot too. IIRC it was a flash-for-edge/ie update. An update for a feature I don't use/want and can't remove caused a "random" reboot at an unpredictable time. Ta muchly...

I understand MS wanting to get away from their desktop OS's insecure reputation which is in part caused by people never installing updates meaning that worms and other malware were able to run rampant relatively unchecked, but they seem rather wrong headed about how pushy to be in fixing that.

When I review the update settings, they're as negative as I can make them.

I shouldn't complain too much, sometimes it kindly starts Visual Studio for me, saving me 20 seconds.

It could have asked, or even warned that I'd be wasting my time setting up the nightly job, only for it to be cancelled midway through for little reason.

Basically, it's just a consumer OS, and shouldn't be used for actual work.

Anyway we had a PC running an optimization on the arc length, probe distance etc to get the best instantaneous coupling, trying to save electricity by putting the energy into the steel (to melt it) instead of burning up the probe, creating heat etc.

One morning the plant called, had run overnight but sometime in the late night the thing stopped adjusting, ran 20 minutes before they noticed without moving the probe or adjusting the current. Just sat there burning up carbon and making heat.

You can see where this was going. Investigated, and the PC had gone into 'power save' mode, suspended the app, gone dark. Leaving the probe at whatever setting it was at.

I estimated at the time, that the power wasted during those 20 minutes was more than all the electricity ever saved worldwide by Windows 'power save' feature. Yes, it would have been better had Microsoft Never Invented Power Save, than to have had that incident.

You can say it was our fault, guy installing didn't remember to disable power save. But still, people do things like that. I prefer to blame the computer.

Complexity is evil.

The benefits of adding complexity rarely outweigh the downsides, especially when the "embodied energy" of both creating and maintaining that complexity and the follow-on complexity it adds to other systems is considered. Making things a lot more complex to save energy is usually a wash (or worse) because of the energy you spend creating and maintaining complexity.

Complexity usually creeps into systems as a result of piecemeal solutions to problems, marketing driven feature-itis, or attempts by engineers to be overly clever and show off. The latter is incredibly common in IT and programming.

http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer....

Complexity is evil for efficiency, but it's even more evil for security. The number of states a system can enter is an exponential function of the number of variables and linkages in a system. More complex systems are just exponentially more likely to have vulnerabilities for unavoidable combinatorial reasons. The motive for complexity addition doesn't matter, meaning that complexity increases to mitigate security can easily backfire. Furthermore as systems become more complex they become too big to be analyzed, making it much more likely that major security issues are hiding in plain sight and waiting to be discovered. Black hats always have the advantage here because when you attack a system you get instant feedback about whether your attack worked, while security auditing offers no feedback as to whether or not you've closed all the holes.

Complexity tends to accumulate until systems collapse. Getting rid of it is very hard, since users/customers start depending on every feature and nothing can be removed without breaking something.

The x64 architecture seems to be teetering on the brink. AMD's architecture seems better but we'll see.

Although in this case, it's possible to disable power saving.

(or have they stopped that, too?)

Maybe best to disconnect from the internet when not using- putting to sleep doesn't do it.

https://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/download/papers/anc_ndss17.pd...

lol, javascript

So? Many does not mean most. There's a choice to be made, apply the security patch and accept the performance loss, or don't. Some people may not need to to remain close to as safe as they were previously based on their configuration for some of their systems, and I would guess the number of systems easily numbers in the millions. This is a benefit for those people, and worth mentioning, even if it's not nearly a large a number as the total number of CPUs or customers.

At least, that's all I can think you are trying to imply, because you didn't actually say anything, you just dropped a link. It's hard to have a useful conversation when that happens.

Hopefully he will edit this blog post with better advice to the "casual" computer user.