What a flaming POS.
I mean, it's one Google search away, so not a big deal, but they do push hard for MS account.
I think in general Microsoft is suffering from an incentive problem. Unlike Apple they don't really have any revenue stream from users except for the up-front cost of the installation but still incur costs for patching etc. so they do all this trickery to at least get access to data and metrics to improve their paid line of products (Office etc.)
AKA so you can't really encrypt your own computer without someone else also be able to unlock said encryption "if they really have to".
Win 11 still sucks but this makes it much much better.
I'd really like to able to send invoices to Microsoft and other companies like Dell who pull this bullshit for wasting time in my life to work around this stuff (and I wonder how much potential productivity is used up by these practices)
I have to unplug lab cables when flashing a machine or I don’t get a choice.
But maybe that's my inner (outer, now?) old man talking? I mean, Minesweeper, patience and a couple of others, maybe even a pinball game always came with Windows.
Windows never came with fortune though, which is the best "I didn't ask for this, but would have if I'd known" default I've come across. Yep, old man is now outer and child is inner.
The point of putting Solitaire + Minesweeper on the machine was to demonstrate the OS's capabilities + get people used to using either a computer or a GUI. Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed for the user, Candy Crush was installed for King.
Windows 7 was actually an amazing OS, everything since then has been hot garbage. I have no experience with Windows 11, but that's on purpose.
When my son was ready for his own laptop, I originally set it up with a Microsoft Family account. That was a terrible mistake. Microsoft Family causes only pain and misery and completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and recently forced everybody to migrate from perfectly functional Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts, which makes everything more complicated. My son's Minecraft account ended up on my wife's Microsoft account, and suddenly I'm called UnshavenFiber (though not entirely incorrectly, I've got to admit).
I now have n+1 accounts on my Windows system because I had the kid who did that leave that account just to use Minecraft and created a new account for everything else.
I'm pretty close to going to Linux on this system. It was the house game system but I just got a Steam Deck, which is fulfilling that role nicely, and that leaves Windows hanging on only by a thread of my personal laziness/business (depending on how charitable you are); everything else that system does is either equally doable by Linux or better done by Linux.
Well, I'm one step ahead of you. As of last weekend, I purchased and returned 3 games due to unplayability on Windows 10 (yes, patched, all drivers updated, msconfig nothing running, ran exclusive/un-bordered/windowed, every recommended change and sfc checks ok), and they all crashed regularly at irregular intervals.
I've partitioned the SSD and have installed Ubuntu. Now to learn how to use Proton to make games work.
That was my last Windows machine. Goodbye Microsoft.
edit: Just to add...I'm the most technical of my group of friends and typically lead the way. If this works, I'll have 5 other guys migrating in the next 12 months with me, they too have been complaining since leaving Windows 7.
It's massively reduced the amount of tech support I need to do, and when it does come up, it's much more straightforward for me to deal with.
...and then even claim that Linux requires more effort. For power users, maybe, but for basic users it's a different thing.
For example, I can't think of one RAW image processor from the original manufacturer that's available on Linux. Honestly, if there was, it would actually be a good reason to switch to that brand.
Also yes, I'm aware of RawTherapee and DarkTable. I use RawTherapee regularly, it's absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it, but it's also absolutely useless for certain use cases.
Nowadays I tend to use linux apps on Windows, thanks to WSL. For example, Windows' file browser crashes frequently on my setup, so I use Dolphin instead.
I'm active in a few photography spaces online and I don't think I've talked to a single person who actively uses one of those. Most people use Lightroom or Capture One, which are also not available on Linux.
I'm curious as to what value you get from OEM RAW processors.
Exactly (or almost) the same render as from SOOC images.
I hate it when I deliver SOOC preview images that the customer really likes, but wants some small tweaks (remove a fly from the image, for example), and the colors or contrast on the resulting image is different because I didn't use the same processing engine or color profiles.
From what I remember, Nikon RAW files don't retain any changes you made to them in-camera unless you remove them from camera using the OEM app.
(Things may be different these days. My knowledge is from 2015.)
The idea that you can slap wine on the few things that you need is a weirdly repeated fiction, it wont make it true by repeating it, stop doing it.
Also, some of those software are mission-critical for me, and I can't really afford to use something that may break unexpectedly when I need to deliver images same day.
Patch day is once a month and takes 15 minutes at worst, sometimes only a reboot after the work day.
Not everyone has top of the line or even mid-range hardware.
People like to dramatically exaggerate how long Windows update bind you each month. Probably no Windows users but it's an easy target.
You can defer it.
Update and reboot? Update and shutdown? Reboot/Shutdown without updating now? All three are possible, so it's fine.
Again, computers are our servants, not our managers.
- Everyone knows that car tabs have to be renewed by a deadline and everyone knows Windows has forced updates by a deadline.
- Everyone knows how to pay their car tabs and everyone knows how to check the Windows update so that it updates when you have free time for it. And if they don't, it's just 5 seconds of Googling to find either.
- Everyone knows what happens if they don't renew their car tabs or allow the reboot by a certain date.
- Everyone knows that neither the vehicle licensing authorities nor Microsoft is going to change their policies. It doesn't matter what people think what the policy ought to be because it isn't that way and they know it.
So basically, they picked up a gun, took careful aim at their foot, pulled the trigger, and are shocked and angry that there's a bleeding hole? Sure, they can go ahead and change operating systems but it isn't going to fix the fundamental problem, if you know what I mean.
Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal? Do you think a car just stops working when that happens in the middle of your commute to work?
"Whoosh", as the kids these days say.
> "Also; where the do you live such that there isn’t a grace period on registration renewal?"
There's a grace period for forced reboots for Windows updates too and these users blithely ignored that. So what's your point?
What’s your point again, with all this bullshit car analogy? And why won’t you post your bad opinions under your real name?
The time locked in update is undefined because the first time an update is available, Windows will never terminate downloading and unpacking it.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/MOTILE-14-Performance-Laptop-FHD-...
Installing updates takes less than five minutes once a month.
I don't do media on it, so I've been quite happy running 9front lately.
There's your problem. Even the cheapest of SATA SSD will massively outperform almost any laptop hard disk drive when it comes to random I/O. And it'll probably increase your battery life a smidge as well.
I wouldn't put applications on any spinning rust these days, especially laptop 5400 (or worse!) drives.
$40 for a 512GB SATA SSD that'll blow the socks off whatever spinning drive you have.
https://www.microcenter.com/product/659868/inland-profession...
I do think my point still stands though. I don't think it's acceptable for software to run this slow, even on this. I'm talking windows has been idling for hours and basic tasks like clicking on the volume slider are sluggish.
On a side note: I'm fascinated HOW cheap SSD storage has become. Really looking into changing my backup drives to SSDs instead of good old spinning drives...
It’s amazing how people tolerate the poor usability of windows and then prefer the poor usability of Linux.
But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back), I decided Microsoft's obsession with licenses and stuff was just getting in my way. I grabbed Ubuntu and haven't looked back.
Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment. But those seem easy enough to opt out of, I can tweak a few things and I'm largely fine day-to-day.
Updates tend to break things in weird ways, but I can always just reinstall, or decide it's time to try a new distro, restore /home/ from backup, and go on with my life. A Windows reinstall is usually a multi-day affair and barely works afterward.
My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs. There's an image viewer apparently just called Image Viewer, and if you think that's fucking obnoxious to search for help about, you're right! Ditto with pretty much all the other default GUI tools. I think the file manager is probably called Nautilus but you can't get it to tell you that, you have to just infer that from googling error messages and finding them mentioned in issue-trackers for something called "nautilus". Aaaaagh.
Oh no they didn't.
That's just Ubuntu.
> My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs
Again it's Ubuntu-specific.
This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.
For common problems in windows you can find a current guide with pictures in seconds, on linux you are more likely to find a slightly out of date forum. And thats ignoring the complexities of different desktop environments and hardware compatibility.
This actually isn't my experience. It's possible that I only ever have had less common problems on windows, but invariably whenever I've looked something up for that, I've usually found terrible windows support forums with incorrect information and usually no correct solution at all.
For linux, and again I'd consider myself a power user so am familiar with most things, I usually find the information easily and it's quite straightforward. I believe part of this is due to the more technical nature of linux users, and due to there being active stack overflow resources e.t.c. which is far better than windows support forums (both in quality of questions and answers).
Obviously this is a very opinion based position, but I find the opposite to what you've asserted.
Windows is a fucking joke of an OS, and that’s why nearly no one defends it on its merits. It’s always defended on the stance of compatibility because of things like O365 and Adobe products. It has nothing to do with the quality of Windows as a platform because as a platform, it’s a pile of shit, and everyone knows it. We’re just forced to deal with it if we want to game, edit photos and music, etc., without a ton of config changes and other hassles.
M$ forgot whats actually good about their OS, its been slowly metastasizing, but even so I dont think desktop linux is the answer. There are some real advantages to the windows paradigm, the idea that the program and the window are the same thing is important; the application should always show what its doing and what you can do. Settings are selected from all the possible options (you dont need to know whats available in advance)
When talking about common problems, I mean truly common, the things an average high-school student runs into like joining an online classroom or editing a document (or even playing a game!). These things do fail on linux, and without being a power user that knows where to start and some keywords to search getting past square one is not so easy.
The only data point I have, is my non-technical partner, who has had far fewer issues since moving to linux than on windows. It's a data point of n=1, and I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for everyone.
I was more than happy to recommend it for her since I know if there is any issue she has, I'll be able to solve it quickly and easily. The fact is though after throwing a standard ubuntu system on the machine I don't think she's had any issues past the first week or two of figuring out where the settings were, and what program does what.
There might have been the odd libre office question maybe?
The fact is, I'm pretty much the family tech support. My linux "support burden" is far lower than my windows "support burden" was when she used that (both in frequency, and for me, complexity). I still get a fair few macOS or iphone questions from my parents from time to time, but almost never things about linux.
And yet I clearly wrote "basic user"...
Bluetooth, email, music, writing, video chat. Everything is just plug and play these days.
The culprit was libinput, which, for some reason, ignored the "flat" acceleration profile for touchpads. It was eventually fixed, but the fix didn't hit an LTS version of Ubuntu until this year.
I know that there's LibreOffice but MS Office definitely beats it in reality.
Yes, I know there's Wine, but I worry (possibly unfounded) that it won't work, or will stop working with some future Office update.
Anything a tiny bit smarter than your usual document (with scripts and/or macros) won't work too.
There's definitely pieces of software that aren't available for linux, and if you require that to do your job, it probably isn't the best solution for you. For me, and my partner (who is a classic browser + office software user, as I suspect 90%+ of computer users are), it's never been a problem (and office software has never been an issue for me personally).
Hours is weird way to spell 5min on pc over half of decade old.
But yes, it doesn't crash or force-reboot.
There has been a few (documented!) issues with major upgrades, like lilo-grub transition and Ubuntu changing system group ids.
But there are no forced lts-to-lts upgrades - and generally they are quite stable.
As sibling comment mentions, canonical even have a live-patch service for kernel updates without reboot (not that I would recommend that - doing a reboot after patch is a nice way to verify that the system still boots ok - which it should - but easier to debug when you know there's just been a patch..).
It should really be delayed by 10 or 15 mins so that the user has a chance to start working on their immediate tasks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/y9fly1/lapt...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/r9w1he/os_bricked_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/sdf5sg/new_up...
My point was specifically about Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS.
Ed: And of course errors found and bugs filed in Debian sid(unstable) or testing - or Ubuntu non-lts contribute to those bugs not affecting those that run stable releases.
that's like moving underground because you once got a sunburn.
After 12 seconds of searching; but many such issues have littered the internet fora. I don't think its unusual for a complex system to have bugs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/fv4c40/bricked...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/qjn9v1/latest_updat...
However, I think the difference is that it's always due to an action you take.
I do think this is something qualitatively different to when your machine decides to automatically update to windows 10, when your machine is not compatible with windows 10, and it bricks itself.
If you randomly turn on a computer and it says "hold on, I'm updating" and then never turns on again without you ever agreeing to an update, I think you'd quite rightly be somewhat upset with it.
Now, I don't even mind windows that much. I prefer other things, but I recognize the strengths of windows and I understand why people like to use it. At the same time, I think it makes sense to recognize the frustrations that windows can sometimes bring to some users.
The bug is that OS is in a borked state, and the update infrastructure cannot deal with it. This is what ends up bricking the system. (Using the loose definition of the term here, I understand that it doesn't literally damage the hardware)
The overall big picture is the fact that most users don't want to be system administrators; they just want it to be managed automatically. However a subset of users, do want to administer the system and have a level of control, and this is where Microsoft screwed up, by not providing us those tools.
At work we have our IT manage the updates on all of our machines, and they have managed to apply some kind of policy where they can control the updates. I am assuming this is only possible in a domain environment, and not on a stand-alone PC.
I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?
I have family in their 90's who can navigate whatever tech you put in front of them, because they think it's important to figure things out when they get stuck. My father can barely turn his phone on because at the slightest frustration he gives up and waits for someone to "fix it" for him. Certainly different folks have different aptitudes, but choice and working through things plays an exceedingly large role.
The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently. Learning a new interface just isn't as important to us as spending that time doing something enjoyable.
Imagine if car companies randomly update the way you drive a car overnight every 7 or 8 years. You go out one day, and suddenly instead of a steering wheel and pedals you have a stick with paddles, then a few years later its changed to something that looks like an oar. Eventually you too might say to hell with it.
> Eventually you too might say to hell with it
I agree 100% and that's even kind of my point. You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine (honestly, probably even healthy at a certain point), but it's not as if there is some biological imperative that as you age you are less able to use technology.
I think the problem is that this is only fine in a world where we aren't forced to rely on these things.
If Windows is going to change their user interface every other year, why would I relearn their UX-du-jour when I can just re-learn once on a Mac and be good for a few years (if not longer)?
If I use hosted Gmail and my UI changes every other month, it just tells me that I should host elsewhere where the UX is more stable.
If you abuse users long enough with this everchanging, constant-beta UI nonsense, you are just telling them to move on to a platform that isn't so unstable, where you only have to learn the UX once, not every X months.
The somewhat recent FaceTime updates have befuddled even my brother and I and my appointments with my therapist. And there’s zero reason for any of the changes. They were just changes, not improvements, and were probably even regressions.
On the flip side, I enjoy learning new techniques, languages, and approaches to advance my craft.
The difference is that the former is dictated by developers and required on a periodic basis just to tread water, whereas the latter is self-directed and helps me become more capable.
So... it IS possible to stay on a system where you are comfortable with, if you are willing to make concessions...
has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever or am I just an idiot? when I restart nginx I want to know if it failed, why , what's the syntax error. instead old reliable /etc/init.d/nginx configtest no I have to dig around
Try trinity as a desktop with sysvinit.
(I don't use kwin, but instead a different window manager, and only part of trinity for this and that, but that's not due to a lack of quality, I just prefer to mix and match.)
It can be useful when there's potentially multiple things leading up to the error in whatever you're running, as it is showing and explaining nearly every action that's recently happened in the system log. But if you're just wanting to look at logs related to nginx starting at the most recent then just query for niginx's system log instead of the whole system.
sudo journalctl --pager-end --unit nginx
sudo journalctl -e -u nginx
sudo journalctl -eu nginx # Output all logs since boot
journalctl
# Follow all logs in real time
journalctl -f
# Output logs for a given systemd unit
journalctl -u $unit
# Combine follow and unit flags to follow logs for a given systemd unit
# Easy to remember: You are saying F*** U to a broken piece of software
journalctl -fu $unit
# Output kernel logs
journalctl -k
# Follow kernel logs
journalctl -fk
# Tip: Use -b flag to see logs from previous boot cycles
# Learn more, including advanced filtering and formatting
man journalctl
# Easy to remember: You are saying F**K because your kernel is broken
journalctl -fk $ service nginx status
if it failed, why , what's the syntax error
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Using_units
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_o...
YMMV. I find systemd a lot easier to work with (I actually started wrapping daemons in proper services instead of sticking everything into nohup or tmux sessions).
And to be honest, I don’t think it’s me. It isn’t clear to me that the people who make all this stuff know how it works either. Nothing works as intended in technology. At least some form of technology doesn’t work as it should every day, from your work machine’s OS, or some program, or your smartphone, or Android Auto or Apple Car Play, or your TV, or your Internet provider or WiFi router, or that website you visit, or your smart thermostat, and on and on. And that’s stuff just plain not working or encountering bugs. It doesn’t even address the usability of all this.
We are just shitting out technology left and right, all at the alter of scale. In my opinion, capitalism is part of the problem. The other is human nature. There are no incentives to get this right. And these days, large companies do not care that they get it right. Statistics of failure and user frustration are explicitly part of their business models. They don’t want to even know if there’s an issue with their product. They just let some statistics drive their decision making.
It’s all just a tragedy and comedy all in one. Amazon has their 12 principles they hire with that makes it seem like they hire geniuses left and right. And they can’t even get book selling right these days. And there’s no way to report issues. They do not care.
Most of these bonuses are probably tied with frivolous, often highly unpopular and unwanted, feature updates. I doubt people get bonuses for fixing usability bugs or improving quality.
it's bs how they can just do this. Microsoft thinks that just because they aren't legally liable for their software breaking a user's system, that they can just do anything like these automatic updates.
I think it's really high time that there be regulation on software and their reliability - that is, some sort of consumer protection, where an update such as this breaking becomes a liability for microsoft. And of course, this doesn't just apply to microsoft, but apple and google and any other software manufacturer.
All we need is political momentum to enact the regulation - and that's easier said than done.
The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted.
Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.
As things stand today, I only trust updates from community driven open source software projects. With exceptionally few exceptions, commercial software seems to offer the guarantee of delivering undesirable payloads.
But I promise you there is never any kind of Machiavellian multi-year plan to condition people for upcoming bad behavior. Most of the things we do screw up are from lack of foresight; we are definitely not strong enough at long range planning to run psyops on customers.
The only real way to address it without the mandatory updates was for the ecosystem to diversify; can't use a Windows exploit to compromise a Mac OS machine.
You can imagine why that solution was not on Microsoft's list of recommendations.
That would mean doing as much of the work as possible in the background in a way that doesn't impact the user and making sure the reboot where it actually gets activated doesn't take noticeably longer. It would also mean not doing things that are against the user's interest like moving things around, installing new ads or misfeatures, or breaking things.
I don't know anyone who hates or wants to disable Chrome updates, for example (I'm sure such people exist, but it's much less common than Windows updates), despite Chrome updating way more often than once a month.
Of course, overcoming the aversion people built over years because of past bad behavior is going to be hard, but forcing people against their will and making updates more disruptive isn't going to help with that aversion. People really dislike being forced to do something, even if they don't actually mind the thing itself that much.
Android does an A/B update and after a only slightly slow reboot is in the new version. It then does some optimization in the background that can have a slight performance impact.
NixOS must be the gold standard here. It downloads and completely installs the new version in the background then a regular-speed reboot is enough to be running the new system. (~10s on my system)
But Windows and macOS both have crazy slow update processes. When I had a mac for work I was dumbfounded by how slow the update process was. It regularly took >30min! Those machines are crazy fast, it seems like it could have written a TiB of data in that time so IDK what it is actually doing.
Point updates of macOS take 20+ minutes on an M1 Max with 32GB of memory and a blazing fast SSD. What could it possibly be doing?
Even iOS updates are a bit faster.
Is apple even interested in fixing this?
If memory serves: point-symbol optimizations to make code calls into The objective-C libraries performant.
Under The hood, objective-C really does use strings to reference library functions. So when the OS is updated, the string interning table is updated and all of the installed software has to have its string to symbol caches rewritten to account for the new API.
There are almost certainly better ways to do this but if I understand correctly, Apple inherited the existing solution without putting enough thought into how it would scale and now changing the solution would break an indeterminate amount of software depending upon the current implementation.
EDIT: a sibling comment jogged my memory; the thing I was doing a bad job of remembering was prebinding. https://opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-622.5.1/...
When a new version of the OS is installed, the OS re-runs prebinding for applications to the dynamic libraries they rely on because the dynamic libraries may have changed. The alternative is to have a big latency bump every time an app is launched for the first time as the caches are rebuilt on-the-fly.
(I think this is the step that used to be called "Making Your Macintosh Happy" during an install, but the veracity of that notion has fallen too far down the Google search hole for me to easily pull up a reference to confirm or deny it).
However, this exposes the real challenge. We cannot have informed consent without informed users. I think this problem will haunt us repeatedly in the future. We need users to know at least a little bit about their options. Only then can they make informed choices on what option to pick. This means people can't glaze over the details and not worry about them. This does not mean you have to be a computer wizard. You just need to know what you want and pick an option that is good for you. For example, I run this on Fedora:
sudo dnf offline-upgrade download -y && time sudo dnf offline-upgrade reboot
I used to wonder why no corporation complains about Windows Update. Then I learned that virtually all companies use group policy to change Windows Update behavior to suit their organization. Therefore, this is a non-issue for them. Welp.
That also includes never crashing, which Microsoft has historically struggled with.
If you don’t reboot in an orderly way, then the machine crashes while the user is doing something, and when it restarts everything is different. “Don’t restart” is insufficient for good UX here.
You can still choose to reboot for every update. The point though is that it is a choice.
sudo dnf offline-upgrade download -y && time sudo dnf offline-upgrade reboot
Here is what I understand about dnf offline-upgrade
> The process of restarting, applying updates, and then restarting again is called Offline Updates. Your computer boots into a special save-mode, where all other systems are disabled and where network access is unavailable. It then applies the updates and restarts.
https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/
> With Windows, it's an almost-weekly, "Hey, update right now, because someone in another country is pwning all unpatched machines that aren't air-gapped from the internet."
I see. I feel like I don't quite understand the extent of the problem. In any case, I am not qualified to even attempt to propose a fix. My mode of thinking was Google Chrome and derivatives are able to slowly walk along with increasingly scarier visible warnings asking users to restart the web browsers but they don't (as far as I know) reboot the web browser while the user is still using it. Even Google Chrome OS didn't do that (well, it didn't back when I had my cr-48). When I updated Mozilla Firefox on my Fedora machine, existing tabs continued to work. New tabs would come with a warning for me to close Firefox and open it again. This is the kind of warning I was getting rid of with offline-upgrade.
I agree with my parent comment though. Updates are too bloated. Windows updates should be very fast with a modern processor (Intel eighth gen, AMD equivalent or greater), enough memory, and a fast SSD. Even DNF which has a very renowned reputation (at least among Fedora users) of being slow, is pretty reliably fast. I think the point that my parent comment was making was make people not dread rebooting their machine. My thought was
1. educate the users why reboots are essential 2. allow the users to postpone reboots indefinitely
However, I don't know what to say if there is an active remote command exploitation in the wild. It is important to get the update to the user before the exploit. However, that goes against everything I've said so far. I guess this leads us to the status quo. Those who have the know-how to use group policy can opt out of certain Windows Update behavior. The rest can either learn to do this: and set up their own Windows Update server? Periodically check CVE and gate update releases? Not sure how it works...
The reason I hesitate and say automatic reboot should be OPT-IN is sometimes I like to do some simple long running task like stitch photos I took into a video using ffmpeg. It can take hours on a slow laptop processor. It would really suck to do something like that and come back to see the computer rebooted itself.
Chrome updates approximately every month unless there is a security issue that has to be pushed out faster.
That's basically not possible in some cases. Not all of us are on super-fast broadband, even in places that are nominally 'first world'. The _best_ my parents can get is 8Mbps on DSL. Every time an update starts auto-downloading, you know immediately because all other connections grind to a halt.
(Now why a minor point update security fix for Monterey is 1.6GB I have no idea. But presumably that's not something Apple is capable of/interested in fixing)
That would be me for one. I hate it when google sneaks in privacy reducing preferences that are automatically turned on. I like to occasionaly go through settings to see what has changed and was surprised when an update showed up a whole host of new active features.
Why on earth should usb ports on my laptop be automatically exposed to any web page that demands it? Chrome can do that now. And not just usb/serial/midi ports, and motion sensors, chrome has also enabled 'presence' (a way for sites to know when you're actively using the browser). I found that creepy.
More software companies need to get on board with the idea of having a separate maintenance branch and "next version" branch. Too many of them just develop on trunk and every time you update for bug fixes and security, you get all the other crap their developers have been working on too.
Too many instances of installed Linux distros breaking because some foo relied on some bar that the distro declared should work fine but must have slipped through the testing cracks somehow. Or I'd gone off-book on some custom project or other because it relied on library versions that weren't in the distro, then I forgot I did that and updating the distro libs broke my project.
I basically never run the apt updates these days.
Just to be clear, this isn't an argument that as a result updates should be forced.
That is the perfect update story. Everyone loves it: the users aren't having their workflows upended, the developers are able to push updates regularly for security problems and the like, the only loser is the graphics designer who got hired because daddy owns the company and needs to constantly re-design the user interface to justify their job. (seriously, people in companies that do this kind of shit, what is it with re-designs? Why?)
However the issue that I've had was my Terminal App shutting down by itself, I thought it was a crash but it turns out it was because the Windows Store decided to update it.
Now that is complete BS! How can a store arbitrarily decide to update an app while it is still running without asking, without waiting? Even Steam waits to download and update games for when you're not playing one. If it ever did the same thing as what the Windows Store does then there'd be a riot for sure. I guess that it means the Windows Store is just not being used by people at all.
For those interested the "fix" for not having Terminal app restart for an update is to download the MSI package, extract it to a directory, and run it from there. That's directly from the Developer's words on Github.
What we see, of course, is exactly what the twitter thread posted mentions: some "dickweasel" hijacked the update system to push crapware or do something user-hostile for purposes completely unrelated to what the user would want.
James Williams discusses this in his book "Stand Out Of Our Light", and likens it to a GPS that takes you off to places that you never wanted to visit in the course of (maybe) getting you to your intended destination. Of course, you arrive late, if ever, and burned way more gas (or battery) than you needed. But the GPS got you to drive by a specific set of billboards that they wanted you to see.
If you set your internet connection to "metered" it exposes an option to disable automatic updates.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/139722-turn-off-download...
It's when they try to launder in a bunch of "feature" updates (i.e. more spyware, more crapware) with needed security updates.
They force the user to make a decision: Do I skip this update and avoid having new "features" from crippling my machine, or do I download the update to prevent my machine from being hacked?
If vendors really gaf, they would make is so that you could download needed security updates w/o the rest of the garbage. But then they couldn't force more malware on you.
In other words, it's only reasonable to expect security updates for a certain length of time and not indefinitely.
I’d be interested to know what the actual story at MS was for this. I think the executives there in the past demonstrated pretty good decision making. Here’s[1] someone claiming something about PM’s thinking they knew better than users and maybe there is some hidden OKR incentive driving that reasoning, but my weak understanding is that that person wasn’t really involved in what happened so I don’t know how true it is.
[1] https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1504567911565824000 nitter: https://nitter.fly.dev/danluu/status/1504567911565824000
There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
> There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
>A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga.
>What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.
A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again.
I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.
I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.
I would say yes, but perhaps the worst-of-worst stories in this thread are prejudicing me. Things like in this thread don't happen on OX though.
(I honestly don't know what you're referring to about "bad backwards compatibility")
But if you mostly dislike Apple UX choices, you probably are going to mostly dislike using it as a daily machine, so.
With regards to OS upgrades, there has always been a vocal minority that likes to complain, ever since the System 7 days, sometimes not without reason but it's minor. Overall, the upgrades are decent, but I'll agree it's not always plain sailing for everyone. The thing with macOS is last year's Lemon is next year's gold. Rose tinted glasses are abundant online, especially with competing OSs.
In my personal, anecdotal experience, macos is more reliable than windows. Neither is as reliable as my 14-year-old but constantly updated and fresh today Gentoo/Linux install. But the things that a laptop needs, macos is better. So I have a macbook and a Gentoo/Linux workstation and I generally feel like I get the best of both worlds.
I also often just run a debian in qemu on my macbook rather than installing a bunch of software from macports or homebrew, which has worked very nicely.
You can implement malware check in many ways. This one is the worst; it also introduces a huge attack surface.
Mac has been great. My 2015 MBP is still going strong, it was many updates behind and I resisted for a while but I eventually just upgraded to the latest (2-3 major versions) and it went perfectly smoothly.
Every company and ecosystem will have its quirks. But some are way more hostile than others, and I've never seen that level of hostility from apple (yet).
Ports can be annoying though but I'd rather take minor annoyances over big problems like this.
BTW -- one of the bigger problems with the forced Win10 upgrade was that it changed the UI / icons and for older folks caused a lot of grief, because they felt lost on top of everything else.
I bought a secondary laptop - a 12 inch Macbook Pro - and it took a few hours to set up. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I didn't have to find the button that wouldn't send my entire life to a tech company. Just a few clicks and done. It's decently fast for such an old, underpowered machine, too.
For the most part, the OS gets out of the way.
I have Windows machines that do all the weird things people are posting in this thread.
Windows is a bother of epic proportions compared to MacOS. It's not even close.
But out of the box it works. Hard crashes are very rare. User hostile things like forced updates don't happen.
The worst things are much much less likely to happen than with hardware that runs Windows, and if something happens the tech support at Apple stores is pretty good. If you want a good Windows machine you have to do extensive research to figure out how not to get crap, and you still end up wrong sometimes. If your grandma wants a computer, you can just tell her to go to an Apple store and get whatever she wants and it'll work.
If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?
The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end.
For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.
Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well.
And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.
The customer must be running some truly ancient version of Mac OS for this story to be true.
Some providers (email and others) can also continue to support deprecated/broken security for a very long time in order to not having to deal with customers using old deprecated software. 512 bits RSA public keys for example was used a very long time, long past where different standards and recommendation had a much higher minimum. Algorithm and key attacks are quite rare so companies can keep a low security standard for many years/decades before anyone exploits it. For customers that could be seen as a positive or a negative depending on perspective.
My 2015 MacBook still runs absolutely fine.
For that matter, I'm considering (but probably not) buying a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR OLD iPad that I'm still using every single day, as it can no longer update to the latest iPad OS.
But my 7 year old (soon 8 years old) laptop is as good as the first day I bought it.
IOW, if one is to supplied anecdotal data, probably best to make sure it's your anecdote, maybe?
In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380
Luna Display is a more premium option.
The former isn't available for the iPad, the latter predates it, and I find the nearest analogue, Serif's Affinity Designer not quite right.
I also like having access to a file system, and the ability to run arbitrary opensource tools such as OpenSCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor and RapCAD.
[1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...
every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how?
every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen.
the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
Just side load an Android app called "NetGuard" which is a free firewall app on Android (though it's only available on the Android phone, but you can still sideload it on the Shield TV). Download the NetGuard APK file and then install it on your Shield TV using a 3rd party file manager app (you can find the NetGuard .APK file on Google search, or you could use an APK extractor and extract the NetGuard app from your Android phone after downloading it from the Play Store). You might need to also download a 3rd party launcher to see the side loaded Android apps as it will not appear on the stock Android TV home launcher. Then open the NetGuard app and disable network connections to the "Software Upgrade" app, then switch on the NetGuard toggle and it will block the "Software Upgrade" system app from accessing the internet, therefore it cannot download the software update and then prompt you to install it with an annoying pop up screen message.
If you get a software update message and the software update gets downloaded, just go to the app settings of "Software Upgrade" and delete the app cache and data.
Once you have the NetGuard app enabled, it should auto start every time you boot up the Shield TV and it will always run in the background. I suggest that you regularly open the NetGuard app and have it in the background so just incase Android OS puts it to sleep.
Additionally, I suggest you go to Google Play Services and the Google app and disable all the app permissions to access storage or change system settings (though if you use things like Google Assistant or voice search, you may need to leave the microphone permission on). Do the same for the other Nvidia apps which you might think may try to control or change settings on your Shield TV without your permission.
I'm still on Android 8.0 on my 2017 Shield and I'm happy with it. I don't really need any extra features and nothing needs to be fixed. This is the only method I found to work. I have tried to delete the "Software Upgrade" app package from my computer using Android ADB but I just couldn't do it (maybe Nvidia blocked it). So the firewall method is the only option. I don't know if Nvidia made changes and blocked this method in newer updates, but try it and let me know if it works.
Recommend GrapheneOS for your Pixel phone. It is so good I wonder how long it will last.
And yes, I get it, they're not perfect, but they're the better of 2 bad options.
https://www.thespl.it/p/apples-sleeping-advertising-business
" For the past five years, Apple has been setting up for what will soon be its most profitable product line. It's not a new phone or computer: it's advertising. "
As some C-suite suit bonus will depend on that, you can be sure that the various protections will evaporate over the years.
Pest or cholera - that's what happens when there is a monopoly and the monopoly buys out or sue every competitor. Google and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank, Just like Microsoft for PC.
Shouldn't happen since NetGuard works as a ‘vpn client’ to pass connections through the app—so afaik reasonably it should stay working as long as the pseudo-vpn-connection is up.
(Not to be confused with actually connecting to a vpn server, which it doesn't do.)
More to the point, the site reminded me that you might want to verify if Blokada is exempted from ‘battery optimizations’ (works via app info —> ‘Battery’ —> ‘Battery optimization’ for me). I checked NetGuard on my phone, and sure enough I have the ‘optimization’ disabled for the app.
(Let me know if you see this comment, or I'm gonna notify you manually.)
It is insane that this level of workaround and hacks is required to avoid advertising and crapware on a £500+ _television_. Normal people have almost no hope for a good experience when you consider something like a Lenovo laptop from the OP.
You have the manufacture-installed adware, windows 10 + edge nonsense constantly nagging you, and then there is just the state of the web itself. Its all just too much.
A lot of us love this stuff, irony acknowledged.
It's one thing to hack for fun or to find new uses for hardware and software. It's another to live in a world where we purchase devices for hundreds of dollars, only to have a bait-and-switch on the software and suddenly we get ads on our splash page and a slower UI.
I'm glad there are workarounds, but they _shouldn't be needed_.
Could this be somehow related to two decades of cheap money and the bloated corporate budgets it created?
Either way do we need a new post every hour making this same point from yet a different angle?
I found one from a brand named “OK” (sold by mediamarkt/mediaworld) and it’s just awesome.
No software, if I ever want new features I’ll get a firestick from amazon or some xiaomi dongle i can plug into one of the two hdmi inputs.
I love it (and i hate smart tvs).
Bonus: it also costed way less! About 250-280 Euros iirc, for a 42" panel with full-hd resolution.
Note that I am only recounting hearsay, and I haven't done my research on this, as my three PC monitors cover my needs completely, and I have no need for a TV. I'm only "idly curious" about this topic, because one day I may need such a dumb TV.
HN consists of many different people in many markets.
For US folks, yes, you generally have to go for an industrial display panel which is slightly more expensive than a smart TV [whose lower price can be subsidized by the data they're eventually selling].
Maybe for the previous poster who is in the EU, faces a completely different market than the US, a market which is more favorable to non-smart TVs.
I’ve been using it with an Apple TV 4K and it’s been great.
(I know I could leave the TV on standby but I don't like doing that, especially just to work around poorly designed software.)
Current Sony TVs offer a “basic TV” mode that disables all the smart stuff though, so they’re a decent option for more discerning buyers looking for a dumb TV.
Same here. I want to buy things without software and Touch Screen.
(I'm in the market for a dumb TV and am not having much joy.)
Make dumb tvs, and maybe put a firestick or similar piece of tech in the box.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
at least with android TV it’s sort of, somewhat a choice, for now, but this is flat-out immutable. you used to be able to sideload an alternative home screen, but another forced update removed that option too
buying a firestick is buying adverts for inside your house
I sometimes wonder, if the founder has controlling voting shares, or the shareholders on public exchange / stock market are non-voting shares. Would the company still have to please their non-voting shareholders?
It's the same reason why, at least in theory, VC founders can't structure a deal that devalues everyone else to ~0 and pockets the extra money in a side-channel transaction. They definitely have the power to do so, but if you can prove that better options existed and have the inclination to take that to court then you have a decent shot at recovering damages.
The reviews on it are quite something to see.
I wish dumb TVs with good panels were easier to buy.
Probably. In fact, I think you're underestimating the degree to which they can.
Very few evil people actually think they're evil. Most think they're legitimately doing good and helpful things, while being extremely misguided as to what is good and helpful.
Was not expecting the level of animosity for this app. The last update in August apparently forced a ton of ads on the interface, even if people had paid subscriptions that would remove ads.
Absolute trash. In their boundless greed, Google decided to force endlessly cycling ads onto the home screen, and had the temerity to highlight it as a feature. I give two @$#@$# about the content they are highlighting, from a Christmas movie (in July) to the latest teen pablum. Pretty sure I had automatic updates disabled, and that was overwritten without my consent (with no way to roll back to the prior version). I took a chance on the Android ecosystem with this device (NVIDIA shield), and that's the last time I make that mistake. I'll be tossing that out and not looking back...
Unbelievable. They added unremovable ads right in the home screen. The "Staff Picks" takes over the top 30% of your screen advertising random videos from apps that I don't ever want to install. No way to turn off. How quickly my $2k TV turned from pleasant to ad infested junk. The only solution I had was was to uninstall updates in App manager. If this is the future of Android TV, I'm certainly not buying another TV with this OS again.
I paid a hefty sum for a top-end TV, then again for the most expansive TV box one can find, and what did I get? Ads! Ads that blink and distract. Ads that take more than a third of the screen, pushing what I want to see on the second page. Ads for movies I cannot be less interested in, on services I have absolutely no intention to subscribe to. Ads that have been trying to sell me the exact same three movies in genres I don't care about since they appeared. Evil greedy corporation at its worst.
Minnesota Statue 325F.67 FALSE STATEMENT IN ADVERTISEMENT.
Any person, firm, corporation, or association who, with intent to sell or in anywise dispose of merchandise, securities, service, or anything offered by such person, firm, corporation, or association, directly or indirectly, to the public, for sale or distribution, or with intent to increase the consumption thereof, or to induce the public in any manner to enter into any obligation relating thereto, or to acquire title thereto, or any interest therein, makes, publishes, disseminates, circulates, or places before the public, or causes, directly or indirectly, to be made, published, disseminated, circulated, or placed before the public, in this state, in a newspaper or other publication, or in the form of a book, notice, handbill, poster, bill, label, price tag, circular, pamphlet, program, or letter, or over any radio or television station, or in any other way, an advertisement of any sort regarding merchandise, securities, service, or anything so offered to the public, for use, consumption, purchase, or sale, which advertisement contains any material assertion, representation, or statement of fact which is untrue, deceptive, or misleading, shall, whether or not pecuniary or other specific damage to any person occurs as a direct result thereof, be guilty of a misdemeanor, and any such act is declared to be a public nuisance and may be enjoined as such.
They advertised there would be no ads, then promptly started serving ads while still collecting monthly subscription revenue I think fall into this area.
I learned to let the users pick the right time for update on my first job. ( by having to drive and fix my mess )
But we were a tiny software shop. No MS I guess.
Might have been the same update that reset my privacy settings.
Also, my impression is that the updates have become much less reliable. So your computer may not be back at all. Or something you need never work anymore.
Windows is a control mechanism that, for now, runs third party code.
My motto with “computer help” is “ok, let me install Linux on that, we’ll see what I can do”
Usually that works. ( people get scared and I’m off the hook)
But the older part of my family is running exclusively on Linux since a decade. Not much support needed.
If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine.
I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates.
I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display.
Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has:
- a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR) - a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more) - decent battery life - reasonable size/thinness - reasonable price - access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff
I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
Want to compel a user to update/reboot? Mess with the aesthetics.
Disable their wedding-photo background. Change the UI to something horrendously ugly (pink-on-green?). Toggle high-contrast mode every hour.
Another senior here.
As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adult judgment, I still don't wear belts half a century later, and I have a successful research career for which I partly thank this errant belt buckle. I lost a potential life as a rock God, but I've been protected from ever buying Microsoft products. This story horrifies me but it doesn't surprise me; I made a fair trade.
I love computers. Microsoft turned the greatest human achievement of my lifetime into a brand of toilet seat.
Wearing belt keeps you from a lot more inconvenience than scratching a guitar.
Besides unless it was IDK some kind of guitar that Jimmy Hendrix was playing I would not scold kid for scratching it - so much that he would stop touching guitars for life or stop wearing a belt for a life.
Buying Microsoft products save you a lot of inconvenience as well.
Removing windows and putting a user friendly Linux distro changed everything. No more invasive software in her way and her aging PC was brought back to life. At first we were a bit scared that there might be technical challenges with Linux that might appear but so far nothing of that sort.
But...
Are you really saying he didn't just buy a new laptop for his last holiday!? Just buy the new laptop, even if the plan was it'd immediately go to someone else in inheritance.
EDIT: Grammar
And it's take not much more effort to order a laptop than to comment about it on HN.
I don't know if you've ever been really sick (or just been around someone who's really sick or suffering from chronic pain), but being on chemo is a thing that completely shuts you down. I fully believe that going out to the store and buying a new laptop and getting it set up was beyond what the parent-poster's father felt capable of. Similarly, going out to the library and doing it all from a shared computer would be entirely too much. Anything that's not the well-worn familiar path would feel insurmountable.
I bought my dad a laptop this summer and he's quite healthy.
I completely understand how things get fucked up for engineers and serious tool users or users who have needs for very specific hardware that require very specific operating systems to run. but an email and e-commerce machine?
what could possibly have broken email and e-commerce?
also I'm very impressed that the very first comment I read on this article has twisted the topic of "value-add software that hardware vendors put on is garbage" blaming Microsoft in record time.
It's amazing how good the vocal HN commenters are about things like this.
No, updates are objectively not all good. Updates frequently break things. This is colloquially referred to as your user experience being "enhanced." Any solution begins with an honest appraisal of these realities.
I keep day dreaming about designing systems that focus on stable, simple, consistent interfaces. That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface. Where service providers aren't even tempted to become user-interface developers. If I could afford to take a year or two off, this is what I would work on.
Then you get the crowd of “indie developers” crying about how the platform has taken away user choice and that they should be able to use every API of the OS to do whatever they want, user-be-damned.
Apple doesn’t go nearly far enough and every “indie developer” working in adtech constantly cries about the entire OS should be accessible to every application developer on the planet.
Fortune 1000-first, themselves second, and customers last.
Thankfully, Apple has recognized that their devices and software are -- at least philosophically -- designed for people, not companies. A phone is a distinctly personal device. I think the reason Windows Phone flopped is that it was ultimately designed to deploy in corporate fleets, with all the usual "the company owns your device and everything on it" experience that most of us have with the corporate laptop. You can say that Microsoft's monopoly in businesses pushed Apple in this direction, but at least they have capitalized on the distinction, and didn't sacrifice user experience to try to court the "corporate purchaser."
This is why I HATE Gartner "market share" numbers. It lumps in corporate purchases (to Microsoft's overwhelming behavior), which completely distorts the view of how people are using operating systems "on the ground." It's my gut-level impression that Apple is leading at least 4-to-1 in individual purchases, and Windows is something everyone but gamers just put up with to do their jobs.
W11 is going to lose a lot of people, and some of those will be in that category.
Why wasn’t someone able to help get the vacay scheduled on his behalf? Did he just not tell anyone until after it was too late?
This was the first time an email company this big pulled some shit like this in the internet era.
All my correspondence from my high school years to my mid-twenties were gone, including cherished back-and-forths with people that were now deceased. It felt like someone came and burned down my house while I was on vacation.
Just thinking about it continues to paralyze me with rage.
Everytime Microsoft forces its product upgrades (I'm not talking about security patches) on people and through shady dark UI patterns, it turns thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peoples' lives into shit.
The fact that they keep insisting on repeating this awful practice, year after year, even perfecting it at each iteration, can only be explained by a company being run by sociopaths, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft has absolutely no sense of responsibility when it comes to its retail market, its product owners would rather compromise the integrity of any senior's computer to make it unusable than just accept the fact that most people on earth don't need a new Windows every two years.
A few years later, when he had been diagnosed with cancer and was on chemo, it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent. It completely fucked up the install, and was unusable for him from then on. He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out, and was thus unable to book a vacation that he had intended to take to recover from that round of chemo.
Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process robbed him of his last holiday and I will not easily forgive them for it.
If a seasoned developer can be robbed of quality of life by this flavour of bullshit, what chance do the non-technical types stand?