The amount of user data collected in Windows 10 for example. Next to no user benefits, just value extracted for Microsoft.
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.
> "But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."
> After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.
> But then Chemnitz formally protested, saying that because Paderborn had delayed the start time of the match by 25 minutes (instead of the 15-minute maximum as allowed under the German basketball rules), they should be penalized. As a result, Paderborn lost another point (Google Translate) in the standings, according to a Basketball Budesliga press release, which meant that it would certainly be relegated to the "ProB" league of German pro basketball.
The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button.
Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downloading that toolbar, installing that gizmo, disabling security settings".
People smugly complain about this, in many cases from their Linux box (= technical users on a system with a 1% desktop market share => smaller target and better human protection) or MacOS box (= slightly more technical users than the average Windows user, on a system with a 5%-10% desktop market share).
And if it were left open ended at the request of people like you...we'd still have compromised systems out there spread amongst normal people as well as within infrastructure and other more critical pieces of hardware.
People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
>People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.
Pro and Enterprise shouldn't be the same in this regard as Home but often are.
Four days ago I had to entertain a courier waiting to pick up a 6-figures piece of equipment for a waiting air-freight cargo plane, for immediate transport to a remote mining site, all because the fucking piece of shit fucking Win 10 Enterprise on a very expensive rugged laptop decided to hang itself in an update loop for an hour.
We dealt with different garbage during the Windows 7 and previous eras, yes, but I'm not sure we're better off on the whole. Windows 10 has given a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death".
> People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
The very idea that users should be at the mercy of their computers instead of the other way around is contrary to the concept of personal computing.
People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.
> People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.
Why should they be forced to, at the expense of things that matter to them, though? That's the problem.
Automatic updates were a default. People turned them off because they were annoying. One solution to this problem was to make them not-annoying, but instead Microsoft opted to become aggressive and force people to update.
I will never hold anyone who thinks this is a good idea in high regard because they are actively making the world a worse place.
I fully understand the frustration after seeing people having their computers reboot in the middle of presentations and other important events. That's why they made multiple products. Consumer OS = you don't want to be the sysadmin of the computer. Enterprise/LTSB OS = do what you want.
Telemetrics are frequently inaccurate, sometimes to the point they paint a picture are interpreted in a a way that’s the opposite of reality. Windows telemetry in particular is not nice because it’s not really possible to turn off on the lower editions and it also does not seem to translate to benefits–especially as around the time of its inclusion word got out that Microsoft was cutting a large portion of their QA team.
Crash reports usually yes (but how to prevent receiving personal data from stack dumps?), features selection probably not. The reason is that you don't get data from the people who disable telemetry and they could use different features. You must find them, poll them and merge the results with what telemetry gives you. If you don't do that, telemetry is detrimental to those people.
Yeah, such statistics will always be skewed to some extent.
One could argue that telemetry _is_ the poll. If a user decides to disable feature-usage-tracking telemetry, and then realize they’d prefer to have a voice regarding feature selection, one possible solution would be for them to re-enable it.
If they absolutely won’t opt-in, they’re always free to email developers to tell them about their use case – a pretty powerful way to make yourself heard.
That kind of telemetry was in Windows 95 already with dr Watson. If people want the benefit of having the problems they run into fixed and they believe telemetry helps with that, they can just turn it on. No need to force things.
I haven't seen any benefit. Why should microsoft know everything and record everything I do with my computer. It could be opt in I suppose. But as it is, it is -extremely- hard for the regular user to opt out.
I can respect you as a person while still thinking your opinion is not to be taken seriously. Respecting an opinion which is this far off the mark isn't something I'm willing to do.
Today's software is vastly better in UX than software in the 90s and 00. Certainly I don't attribute all of that to telemetry, but your opposite view is incorrect.
To be fair it asks to update or not to update. You can also set how often it does check and when it installs (at night). It's just a google search away.
I go months without needing to reboot windows, and have for over a decade. Typically if I need to reboot it’s due to an update or software that requires a reboot to install.
The bigger issue, I think, I really having to restart just to update minor things i.e. what linux distro needs to restart just to update (the equivalent of) visual studio
Unfortunately, this is not possible on their consumer OS branch (unless you hack the system, but I have found that it often makes the OS unstable because its in an unsupported system state). For me, our IT manages the systems. They get to decide when the systems update. I have a test box that regularly sees months of uptime.
I dont use Windows much, but you can go to services and disable Windows the update service and.. in the Wifi settings check a box that says you have a limited connection.
To be fair, that's typically a policy enforced by administrators: "patch X should be force-installed if not present by Date Y" + "reboot should be forced if not happening after Z days from patching" => "reboot will happen at Date Y + Z, regardless of user's wishes".
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.