Auto-Restart Calc.exe After Crash



  • My work system restarted overnight... like most of the crap computer people make these days, it has a mind of its own.



    When I logged on this morning, Windows 7 went through the process of trying to reopen all of the programs I had been running before the reboot. This is pretty asinine, but I usually just go make coffee or something. If Microsoft wants to try and hide their little forced reboot like a 3-year-old throwing his Brussels sprouts under the table, so be it. I'm neither fooled nor impressed in either case.



    This morning, though, Windows did something that made me laugh: it restarted all four of the Calc.exe sessions I apparently had inadvertently opened. How helpful!



  • Wait... are you not a computer person?



  • @eViLegion said:

    Wait... are you not a computer person?

    I am, but I'm warming up the escape pod right now.



  • @bridget99 said:

    If Microsoft wants to try and hide their little forced reboot like a 3-year-old throwing his Brussels sprouts under the table, so be it.
     

    I just let it happen these days. Not using a windows PC for more than two weeks always results in about an hour's downtime for "installing update 1 of intmax+1, please do not turn off your computer". you've got time to watch an entire season of something before your machine is operable again.



  • @JimLahey said:

    @bridget99 said:

    If Microsoft wants to try and hide their little forced reboot like a 3-year-old throwing his Brussels sprouts under the table, so be it.
     

    I just let it happen these days. Not using a windows PC for more than two weeks always results in about an hour's downtime for "installing update 1 of intmax+1, please do not turn off your computer". you've got time to watch an entire season of something before your machine is operable again.

    Yeah, I mostly just tolerate the restarting behavior... perhaps it can be disabled? I find myself using double-quotes around the word "help" a lot these days, and this is definitely "helpful" behavior. I thought the Calc.exe thing was funny, though. I guess there are situations where one might open multiple Calc windows as a way to perform some kind of complex calculation; but for the most part, I think such mathematical wizardry takes place outside of Calc.exe.



  • I don't really mind the updates-at-startup thing, as I haven't yet got into the swing of whatever I was planning to do with the computer.

    What really grinds my gears is the updates-without-asking-on-a-shutdown-or-restart feature.

    When I restart my machine I'm usually in the middle of trying to do something, and I'm only restarting because of some error, expecting it to take a minute or two and actually being delayed by an hour. On a shutdown I don't really mind so much, although many times a shutdown is really a manual restart, and the same issue applies.

    Bleh.



  • Even worse is Windows 8 will restart without asking, even if you're using the computer. I was halfway through installing Visual Studio (usually takes a couple hours) and BAM! "Windows is installing updates"...followed by a restart that I had no opportunity to confirm or cancel. Had to delete stuff from the registry and hard drive before I could re-install because VS was all messed up.

    I think Microsoft's model these days is basically "Apple does retarded crap and makes tons of money for it, let's start doing retarded crap ourselves so everyone can line up to throw their life savings at us!"



  • @mott555 said:

    Even worse is Windows 8 will restart without asking, even if you're using the computer. I was halfway through installing Visual Studio (usually takes a couple hours) and BAM! "Windows is installing updates"...followed by a restart that I had no opportunity to confirm or cancel. Had to delete stuff from the registry and hard drive before I could re-install because VS was all messed up.

    I think Microsoft's model these days is basically "Apple does retarded crap and makes tons of money for it, let's start doing retarded crap ourselves so everyone can line up to throw their life savings at us!"

    In fairness to Microsoft, the update-at-all-costs mentality seems to be fed by a peanut gallery of people taking potshots at their security. Microsoft didn't ask for that.



  • This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.

    Is that directed at me?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
     

    At least, I don't recall Vista (the last one I used) being that dumb. It look more Windows 95-sy. And linux do 8 month uptime on my home computer without too much troubles either.



  • Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
    Obvious troll is obvious.



  • @Sarcarsm said:

    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    I think that's probably controlled by domain policy here. And I don't think having a setting excuses a poorly chosen default.



  • @Sarcarsm said:

    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Stop. Using. Windows. If you don't like something central to your OS (like its update mechanism) don't fucking use that OS.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Sarcarsm said:

    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Except group policy at my workplace does not allow that box to be checked, or for the update to be postponed indefinitely either.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Except group policy at my workplace does not allow that box to be checked, or for the update to be postponed indefinitely either.

    That is not MS fault, take it with the person responsable for this. @bridget99 said:
    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    I think that's probably controlled by domain policy here. And I don't think having a setting excuses a poorly chosen default.


    It is not a poorly choosen default, for 99.99% of Windows users, that is the correct choice



  • @esoterik said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
    Obvious troll is obvious.

    Don't see how it was a troll. I've never seen Windows behave like that either.
    It's either a lie, or there is some sort of 3rd party software running to save and relaunch apps on restart.


  • Considered Harmful

    @JoeCool said:

    @esoterik said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
    Obvious troll is obvious.

    Don't see how it was a troll. I've never seen Windows behave like that either.
    It's either a lie, or there is some sort of 3rd party software running to save and relaunch apps on restart.

    I've seen this exact behavior many times. It doesn't save, or reopen your document, but it does relaunch the apps that were running. Which makes it worse than useless, I have to wait while splash screens of programs I'm done using (well, I'm done now that it discarded my changes and rebooted without my permission) pop up, just to close them again.

    It might have something to do with the forced, automatic nature of the reboot. Group policy here doesn't let me opt-out.



  • @serguey123 said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Except group policy at my workplace does not allow that box to be checked, or for the update to be postponed indefinitely either.

    That is not MS fault, take it with the person responsable for this. @bridget99 said:
    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    I think that's probably controlled by domain policy here. And I don't think having a setting excuses a poorly chosen default.


    It is not a poorly choosen default, for 99.99% of Windows users, that is the correct choice

    99.9% of Windows users want to return to an inexplicably rebooted machine, log in, and have their four instances of Calc.exe restarted (along with a bunch of irrelevant browser windows and other crap)? I call BS. That's just a failure to face reality on the part of Microsoft.



  • Reproduction steps, please.



  • @JoeCool said:

    Reproduction steps, please.

    1. sex


  • @bridget99 said:

    99.9% of Windows users want to return to an inexplicably rebooted machine, log in, and have their four instances of Calc.exe restarted (along with a bunch of irrelevant browser windows and other crap)? I call BS. That's just a failure to face reality on the part of Microsoft.

    No, 99.99% of windows users want a machine that works, they don't fucking care how, nor want to fiddle with settings, automatic updates is one of the mechanisms that provides this, rebooting is just a side effect.



  • @JoeCool said:

    Reproduction steps, please.

    Well, step one would be "wait for an update with a forced restart."



  • @Ben L. said:

    @JoeCool said:
    Reproduction steps, please.

    1. sex

    Only if you don't know what you are doing.



  • @bridget99 said:

    @JoeCool said:
    Reproduction steps, please.

    Well, step one would be "wait for an update with a forced restart."

    Has to be more to it than that. I've never had apps restart.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @JoeCool said:

    @esoterik said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
    Obvious troll is obvious.

    Don't see how it was a troll. I've never seen Windows behave like that either.
    It's either a lie, or there is some sort of 3rd party software running to save and relaunch apps on restart.

    It's one of the most overused trolls: "You're clearly lying. On my machine, here's what it does..." Of course, blakeyrat was sufficiently vague that he can go back later and make some pedantic dickweed defense of his trolling.



  • @JoeCool said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @JoeCool said:
    Reproduction steps, please.

    1. sex

    Only if you don't know what you are doing.

    Oh... have you figured out how to do it with spores or something?



  • @bridget99 said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.

    Is that directed at me?

    I concede it is possible you have some third-party application that behaves that way. I also concede there may be some obscure option in Windows that restarts applications after an update.

    But Windows 7 does not behave the way you describe unless you or another administrator has gone out of their way to make it behave that way.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @JoeCool said:
    @esoterik said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.
    Obvious troll is obvious.

    Don't see how it was a troll. I've never seen Windows behave like that either.
    It's either a lie, or there is some sort of 3rd party software running to save and relaunch apps on restart.

    It's one of the most overused trolls: "You're clearly lying. On my machine, here's what it does..." Of course, blakeyrat was sufficiently vague that he can go back later and make some pedantic dickweed defense of his trolling.

    Well, I think he just assumes whatever I post is crap. That's OK; I know I have unorthodox views, which 90% of people will reject without much thought. But the bomb/restart anti-pattern is classic Microsoft. There was a version of Visual Studio that crashed a lot and then tried to reopen... I think it was VS2005. Is anyone really impressed or assisted by this strategy? I'm really at a loss to explain it. I say "fix the crash." Anything else is an unwelcome kludge.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    This is a flat-out lie. Windows 7 doesn't behave that way.

    My work Windows 7 does this also. Only after automatic updates. Don't know why, it's very annoying.



  • @Ben L. said:

    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Stop. Using. Windows. If you don't like something central to your OS (like its update mechanism) don't fucking use that OS.

    Central or not, the update mechanism is a pretty minor part of an OS. Even if I found Windows Update to be the most annoying thing in the world (and I don't) you usually only have to deal with it once every couple of weeks.

    Meanwhile, Ubuntu has this "Update Manager" which every other day decides to pop-up right in the middle of my typing and annoy me with the 30 critical security updates I need to download because FOSS developers are too busy picking Doritos crumbs out of their beards to do boundary checking. Then it's like "Oh God, I hope this doesn't once again fuck up one of the two dozen PPAs I have, leaving apt drooling on itself in some kind of retard trance.."



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @Sarcarsm said:
    Take two fucking seconds to hit the little box in windows update that says don't update without my permission. Restart problem solved. Wow, that was fucking tough.

    Stop. Using. Windows. If you don't like something central to your OS (like its update mechanism) don't fucking use that OS.

    Central or not, the update mechanism is a pretty minor part of an OS. Even if I found Windows Update to be the most annoying thing in the world (and I don't) you usually only have to deal with it once every couple of weeks.

    Meanwhile, Ubuntu has this "Update Manager" which every other day decides to pop-up right in the middle of my typing and annoy me with the 30 critical security updates I need to download because FOSS developers can't be bothered to do boundary checking. Then it's like "Oh God, I hope this doesn't once again fuck up one of the two dozen PPAs, leaving apt drooling on itself in some kind of retard trance.."

    Wait, morbs uses Ubuntu? I thought better of you.



  • @bridget99 said:

    Is anyone really impressed or assisted by this strategy? I'm really at a loss to explain it. I say "fix the crash." Anything else is an unwelcome kludge.

    They took "Let it crash" from Erlang and tried to apply it to GUI applications. Too bad that the recovery is not fast enough, nor complete enough.



  • @Ben L. said:

    Wait, morbs uses Ubuntu? I thought better of you.

    They all suck, although Ubuntu is in the bottom half. However, it was quick to install when my last SSD unexpectedly shit itself.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Meanwhile, Ubuntu has this "Update Manager" which every other day decides to pop-up right in the middle of my typing and annoy me with the 30 critical security updates I need to download because FOSS developers are too busy picking Doritos crumbs out of their beards to do boundary checking. Then it's like "Oh God, I hope this doesn't once again fuck up one of the two dozen PPAs I have, leaving apt drooling on itself in some kind of retard trance.."

    You enjoy your Adobe Reader updater, Flash updater, iTunes updater (watch that one, or you'll have Safari real quick), RealTime updater, Java updater, and updates-to-patch-holes-in-updates through Microsoft Update. Really, you can't pull down ALL of the patches and install ALL of them at once? Modern update systems can...

    Also, with the "Update Manager", you simply close it. Closed. Done. It'll come back in a day or two, but if you close it, there's no 15-minute delay, no "I'm going to reboot anyhow" garbage. It's closed. That's default behavior too.

    Two dozen PPAs? What are you up to? I'll concede that those are problematic--I used an Intel display driver "bleeding edge" build and broke boot, but you just have to watch them! PPAs in general I'd say are not for the 99%.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    I say "fix the crash."
    Sadly, this isn't restricted to Microsoft. The author[1] of a recently acquired (we bought the company) piece of software we're now forced to use at work appears to think it's fine for their application to seg-fault when there's a problem.


    • Out of memory? Crash because
      • can't be arsed to use valgrind/memcheck and fix the memory leaks while having no concern for other applications that need memory to run and
      • it accesses the null pointer returned from malloc() without checking for it.
    • Don't know what to do this invocation(see below)? Crash because of (I'm presuming) a null pointer that wasn't checked.
    • Out of disk space (see below)? Crash because you feel like it.
    • Solar flares? Crash because it's the wrong star.


    While the program I maintain forks this process (among various others) and watches out for children quitting (which isn't a problem when they do it gracefully, or are told to), and restarts them when they do when necessary, my suggestion of (for the 2nd point above) "fix the segfault when your program is handed a non-optimal configuration file" was, unbelievably met with "don't pass a non-optimal configuration file."

    The fact that all the seg-faulting caused a dev server to die because all the core dumps generated (once a minute because my program was restarting it because it shouldn't have quit and should be running, per instance) filled up the disk was met with "stop generating core dumps then."

    Fixing the seg-faults seemed to be something that they simply don't want to do. And since the person concerned would appear to be above my boss in the company hierarchy, getting this fixed is not something I expect to happen any time soon.


    [1] They claim to be, or appears to be presumed within the company that he is, the author, but I have my doubts about the veracity of the claim for a number of reasons. Either way, they have the last call on what happens with the code.


  • @JBotAlan said:

    (watch that one, or you'll have Safari real quick),

    The Safari for Windows which was discontinued 2 years ago? That Safari?

    Good to know you're keeping up-to-date on things. You're only going into the Super EZ-Freeze Time Pod for 2-year intervals instead of solid decades like most people on this board.

    @JBotAlan said:

    Really, you can't pull down ALL of the patches and install ALL of them at once?

    Of course you can, but that's not the point.

    The point is that those companies, Adobe, Apple, Oracle, *purposefully* refuse to use the built-in mechanism to do so. Do you believe, if iTunes were on Ubuntu, it would use Ubuntu Software Center to update and not install its own? Explain to us in a 5-paragraph essay why or why not. Due Friday. Remember next week is the field trip to the natural history museum, so have your permission slips signed.

    @JBotAlan said:

    Also, with the "Update Manager", you simply close it. Closed. Done. It'll come back in a day or two, but if you close it, there's no 15-minute delay, no "I'm going to reboot anyhow" garbage. It's closed. That's default behavior too.

    That's exactly how Windows Update behaves, it doesn't force a 15-minute timeout until you've refused to install the updates for a solid 72 hours. This is not new; it's been this way since Vista at least. So... maybe the timer on your Time Pod is defective after-all.



  • @JBotAlan said:

    RealTime updater

    Hwha?

    @JBotAlan said:

    Also, with the "Update Manager", you simply close it. Closed. Done. It'll come back in a day or two, but if you close it, there's no 15-minute delay, no "I'm going to reboot anyhow" garbage. It's closed. That's default behavior too.

    True, but that's only because it has a sense of self-preservation and knows that forcing and update might hose the system, including itself.

    @JBotAlan said:

    Two dozen PPAs? What are you up to?

    I'm a programmer and I need access to libraries, daemons and runtimes actually made during the Obama administration.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    The point is that those companies, Adobe, Apple, Oracle, purposefully refuse to use the built-in mechanism to do so. Do you believe, if iTunes were on Ubuntu, it would use Ubuntu Software Center to update and not install its own? Explain to us in a 5-paragraph essay why or why not.

    Adbobe already does. Java used to be, but licensing pissing matches have stopped that. OK, who knows what Apple would do, but the bottom line is that all you need to do is add your repository to the user's list and then upload a file to your online repository. It's a lot easier than you "think."



  • Didn't we have this argument before? This site goes full circle... a lot. Because I'm bored, here is a picture of a wereturkey



  • Someone else reads Cracked.

    Oh I'm on to you, buddy.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Someone else reads Cracked.

    Oh I'm on to you, buddy.

    Where else would we learn about human emotions and how to blend in society before we k... Oops! yeah, I enjoy a laugh now and then


  • @blakeyrat said:

    Someone else reads Cracked.

    I'm surprised they get Cracked in his country. Surely by now El Presidente Sangre Zorro has cut off non-essential Internet access to try and smoke out the rebel Candy-nistas.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Presidente Sangre Zorro

    Wait, how do you know my name?


  • Considered Harmful

    @serguey123 said:

    human emotions and how to blend in society

    As near as I can tell, the humans have two emotions: horny and hungry.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @joe.edwards said:

    @serguey123 said:
    human emotions and how to blend in society

    As near as I can tell, the humans have two emotions: horny and hungry.

     

    Those are different for you?

     



  • This is clear-cut Citrix Textbook behaviour. You're not telling something that we don't know.

     


  • Considered Harmful

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Those are different for you?

    Don't make me hungry. You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.



  • @bridget99 said:

    @JoeCool said:
    Reproduction steps, please.

    Well, step one would be "wait for an update with a forced restart."

    Hey, most users here are programmers. Is it that hard to write a small Windows application that calls ExitWindowsEx with the EWX_RESTARTAPPS flag (in combination with the needed flags to reboot and to disallow aborting it in case you want a realistic simulation)?


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