WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
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@japonicus said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Current status as of July 22, 2020
Windows 10, version 2004 is available for users with devices running Windows 10, versions 1903 and 1909, who manually seek to “Check for updates” via Windows Update. We are now starting a new phase in our rollout. Using the machine learning-based (ML-based) training we have done so far, we are increasing the number of devices selected to update automatically to Windows 10, version 2004 that are approaching end of service. We will continue to train our machine learning through all phases to intelligently rollout new versions of Windows 10 and deliver a smooth update experience. The recommended servicing status is Semi-Annual Channel.
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@topspin that part actually makes sense. They're making statistics on what kinds of problem what kinds of PC configurations have, calculate compatibility score based on this, make tiny patches to fix things, then deploy W10 to new computers that are predicted based on their spec to have high compatibility score. Machine learning is a perfect tool for that.
Machine learning seems a lazy and appalling fit for this task. An update will either fail or succeed and for a well-defined and explicable reason - there are no probabilistic vagaries involved and, if there's any hope of patching them, reasons-for-failure must be precisely understood, and therefore exactly testable for. The criteria for blocking an update are therefore going to be similarly well-defined.
Question: how do you determine whether an update will succeed or fail on a specific machine before trying to update that specific machine?
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@Gąska Assuming (this being Microsoft) that nothing has been tested ahead of time: you send the update to a random sample of users and receive a slew of error reports, with some diagnostic information.
A 'machine learning' result would be: the update fails with 78% probability if the PC is more than 6 years old and that users in Moldovia have 10% less chance of success. That's not a particularly good place to start debugging from...
Instead, non-probabilistic analysis reveals that the update crashes with ATI Rage II graphics cards and/or when there is less than 1.2GB of hard disk space left.
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@japonicus said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Instead, non-probabilistic analysis reveals that the update crashes with ATI Rage II graphics cards and/or when there is less than 1.2GB of hard disk space left.
Everyone knows there's no such thing as deterministic behavior when it comes to Windows.
OK, too little disk space is probably easy and already accounted for. Weird combinations of hardware and alleged drivers will almost certainly be spookily inconsistent.
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@japonicus said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska Assuming (this being Microsoft) that nothing has been tested ahead of time: you send the update to a random sample of users and receive a slew of error reports, with some diagnostic information.
A 'machine learning' result would be: the update fails with 78% probability if the PC is more then 6 years old and that users in Moldovia have 10% less chance of success. That's not a particularly good place to start debugging from...
No, but what about Machine Learning in the form of "a combination of this CPU, this GPU, this second GPU, this motherboard, this FSB frequency, this CPU multiplier, this storage drive, these additional storage drives, this domain configuration, these group policies, these peripheral devices connected, these peripheral devices installed but disconnected, these driver versions for all these devices, these applications installed, these services enabled, and these system configuration options, has succeeded updating X out of Y times (with Y usually being 1 because that's how diverse PC configurations are)" and then deriving probabilities for untested configs from similarity with tested configs?
Do you honestly believe that your non-probabilistic analysis will produce better results than that for the hundreds of millions of Windows 10 installations worldwide?
And at what cost? I mean salaries here. Let's assume 0.01% failure rate of Windows update. That's at least tens of thousands of errors. How many man-hours do you think it will take to compile the criteria for when the installation is likely to succeed?
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Let's assume 0.01% failure rate of Windows update. That's at least a few million errors.
You're also assuming there that there's at least an order of magnitude more computers running Windows than there are people on the planet. There's a lot, sure, but that many?
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@dkf originally I wrote 1% and forgot to update followup sentence.
Edit: fixed.
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@Gąska My initial answer was obviously somewhat facetious and thinking about it more, there might be a narrow use case for machine learning if it allowed deployment to six-year old Moldovian PC's to be constrained until the bug could be diagnosed properly.
What irritates me is the idea that 'Machine Learning' could be anything more than a band-aid in this context. It's hardly something to boast about as it's not going to help with fixing the underlying bugs or improving the quality of future patches.
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@japonicus said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska My initial answer was obviously somewhat facetious
What irritates me is the idea that 'Machine Learning' could be anything more than a band-aid in this context.
So you weren't facetious about your main point. Look. There is a problem. The problem needs to be solved. Anything that helps solve the problem is good. The problem at hand is that there are hundreds of millions of automatic unattended updates to perform on hundreds of millions of very diverse machines, and the failure rate should be as low as possible. Sure, the first line of defense should be QA, which MS doesn't do, which should be classified as a crime against humanity on par with Armenian genocide until they make the updates optional so users can protect themselves against the headquarter's stupidity, but that's besides the point. I wish I could stop repeating that in every post I write in this topic but I know people will be back to pointing out the lack of QA the second I stop repeating that.
I'm not talking about what MS should or shouldn't do. Everyone knows what they should do is make updates optional and every other course of action is vastly inferior to that. But obvious solutions make for boring discussions.
What I'm talking about is whether triaging the hundreds of millions of computers can be done more efficiently with ML algorithms than with manual labor. And for that, the only thing that matters is whether the problem can be reformulated into one of the problems that we already know that ML algorithms are good at.
Think of image recognition. Specifically, the way Google Image Search can categorize pictures based on just their content. This is the book example of ML done right. It's exactly the kind of problem ML was created for. The problem of image recognition is basically the following: given this grid of hundreds of thousands or millions of input variables (image pixels), figure out the probabilities of belonging to each of these thousands of categories.
The problem of updating Windows is surprisingly similar to that of image recognition. Given the hundreds of input variables (computer configuration details), figure out the probabilities of belonging to each of these two categories ("will work" or "won't work"). This problem doesn't just follow the same pattern as image recognition - it's also orders of magnitude simpler, because the number of input and output variables are orders of magnitude smaller. That means the training of the ML algorithm can be done with a minuscule fraction of a fraction of what image recognition requires - in other words, it's computationally very practical and fast.
I'd also write how it relates to quality but the path from knowing which computers are problematic to faster and better patches should be obvious to everyone with more than a half of a brain cell, and this post is already long enough.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Think of image recognition. Specifically, the way Google Image Search can categorize pictures based on just their content.
You mean, by turning them into CAPTCHAs and having unpaid users solve them?
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@HardwareGeek: I know what you're saying is true, but that's only the case because each "release" for a chip is extremely expensive. Otherwise, chip manufacturers wouldn't bother. (And in practice, we still see chips getting released with major bugs...)
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Think of image recognition. Specifically, the way Google Image Search can categorize pictures based on just their content.
You mean, by turning them into CAPTCHAs and having unpaid users solve them?
More or less. MS relies on user bug reports too.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
on par with Armenian genocide
TIL Microsoft is run by Turks
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@Luhmann said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
on par with Armenian genocide
TIL Microsoft is run by Turks
No, that’s Amazon.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Anazon
An a anonymous delivery service?
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@Luhmann fixed.
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@topspin
Stop ruining my jokes!
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Got new updates, and after restart I see this.
Followed by Microsoft Edge "setting up", "syncing account" then asking me to "get started". No reaction to close button, no reaction to closing from taskbar. Thankfully it reacted to task manager. That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
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@Gąska It's also imported all your Firefox (and old Edge) bookmarks too. And since you killed it with Task Manager, you can't undo that action.
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@TwelveBaud could I have undone that if I didn't?
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@Gąska yes. It imports everything then asks of you want to import everything. If you answer no it deletes the imports
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@Jaloopa well then. Time to edit registry and turn back time...
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Chose an option to delete profile. To my utmost surprise, it seems the profile was actually deleted. That's good enough for me.
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Did it say "your profile is no longer where you left it"?
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@Zerosquare it pretended it's the first time I launched Edge. I know it knows that's not true, but that's the most I can expect out of it.
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
And since you killed it with Task Manager, you can't undo that action.
Is this important, given that he doesn't plan to launch it ever again?
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Yes, but your profile data may still be sent to MS because of "telemetry".
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@Zerosquare well, it's going to be sent either way, so...
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Followed by Microsoft Edge "setting up", "syncing account" then asking me to "get started". No reaction to close button, no reaction to closing from taskbar. Thankfully it reacted to task manager. That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
And put a shortcut on the desktop. I did discover that if you lose your internet connection (that laptop's wifi always drops about 1m after boot. I have to disconnect/reconnect. It's old. It's dying. It's a useful test machine for now) you can get out of it by alt+f4. Of course, I had to go back in later and turn off all the interactive shit. Blank page means blank!
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
Is that better or worse than my corporate IT that pins IE to the taskbar at every reboot?
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@remi said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
Is that better or worse than my corporate IT that pins IE to the taskbar at every reboot?
It won't be long before that stops working, they say. Even Microsoft wants the world to stop using gdmf IE.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
It won't be long before that stops working, they say.
Says who?
IE11 on Windows 10 is supported as long as Windows 10 is, which is at least 2025.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@remi said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
Is that better or worse than my corporate IT that pins IE to the taskbar at every reboot?
It won't be long before that stops working, they say. Even Microsoft wants the world to stop using gdmf IE.
Well, they did change the pinned one to (whatever the fuck they call IE now).
I just leave it there. Because for a while, att.com simply didn't work in FF. Seems to now. But they'll probably break it again.
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
(whatever the fuck they call IE now).
Edge.
Named for what they drive people to.
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@remi said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
Is that better or worse than my corporate IT that pins IE to the taskbar at every reboot?
Mine pins IE and Chrome! Two browsers I don't use, taking up precious space! Oh, and an Explorer shortcut that somehow doesn't group with the opened window, which leaves even less space!
Why is this policy setting even a thing.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Mine pins IE
Why is this policy setting even a thing.
I think you answered that yourself. p
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@topspin now explain Chrome.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
In all fairness, Firefox does the same thing when you install it. Seems to be the standard douchebaggery for all software.
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@El_Heffe the difference is that I INSTALL FIREFOX!
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@topspin now explain Chrome.
I assumed the question was why it’s possible to create such a policy, not why yours is like that. No idea.
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@topspin I could understand forcing MS products on users. But that someone at Microsoft thought it's a good idea for corporate IT guys to decide against users' wishes what the taskbar contains - not just initially but on every login - is just retarded. Nobody gains anything from it!
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Microsoft ... is just retarded.
Speaking of, haven’t seen him around in awhile.
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@El_Heffe said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
That's when I noticed the motherfuckers pinned Edge to taskbar.
In all fairness, Firefox does the same thing when you install it. Seems to be the standard douchebaggery for all software.
Which you're not suposed to do. Ever. And management complains "but Firefox does it".
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@El_Heffe the difference is that I INSTALL FIREFOX!
And in
Soviet RussiaPoland, Firefox installs YOU!
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@topspin I could understand forcing MS products on users. But that someone at Microsoft thought it's a good idea for corporate IT guys to decide against users' wishes what the taskbar contains - not just initially but on every login - is just retarded. Nobody gains anything from it!
I suspect that it is just Microsoft trying to win the battle against users by being more idiot than them (we all know how this ends, of course).
Something like call centre drones who randomly click everywhere (so they might unpin without noticing) and if they don't have Spam-O-Tron pinned (i.e. always there) in the taskbar they freeze with a dumb stare (how is that different from their usual state, I'm not sure). So of course the solution is for IT to ensure that every morning they find back a pristine environment with the same programs pinned in the same place (and likely the same ugly corporate background, and no they can't change that either).
Oh, and don't get me wrong: I fully agree with what you said, I'm just commenting on it, not disagreeing. It is retarded, and nobody gains from it. But it was asked by enough , so here you are.
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Which you're not suposed to do. Ever.
Yes, apps aren't meant to pin themselves to the taskbar but they do anyway. Given that Microsoft say this shouldn't be done because the taskbar is the user's space to do with what they wish, it's rather hypocritical of them to pin things there the user didn't ask for.
On the note of Programs Doing Things Microsoft Frowns Upon, tonight I reinstalled Windows on a new SSD. I had wanted to clone it but it didn't work and I was in no mood to troubleshoot my own computer so just started fresh. When I went to install Opera, I noticed that when I told it during the install to be the default browser, it mimed opening Settings (probably not the right word), selecting itself from the default browser list, and then closed settings, then pinned itself to the taskbar.
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@Douglasac said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Given that Microsoft say this shouldn't be done
It might be that it's getting re-pinned for @Gąska by a script that's run on every log in, instead of being forced there by a policy override (the policy in use is to run the script). Which is like the usual policy override stuff, but with even more retarded in the mix.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Soviet RussiaPolandThere's hardly any difference nowadays.