WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
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@sloosecannon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Dude, time estimates and progress indicators should be solved problems in computing by now if they already aren't.
Just so we're clear.. what exactly would you like a progress indicator to do?
See above. Since it didn't complete, it should go backwards back down to zero. And have a time display telling him how long it will take to do so.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I am an very advanced user
It's amazing how many people think they are an very advanced user
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@sloosecannon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Dude, time estimates and progress indicators should be solved problems in computing by now if they already aren't.
Just so we're clear.. what exactly would you like a progress indicator to do?
See above. Since it didn't complete, it should go backwards back down to zero. And have a time display telling him how long it will take to do so.
I have seen some installers like that. It's actually not that bad idea.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@sloosecannon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Dude, time estimates and progress indicators should be solved problems in computing by now if they already aren't.
Just so we're clear.. what exactly would you like a progress indicator to do?
See above. Since it didn't complete, it should go backwards back down to zero. And have a time display telling him how long it will take to do so.
I have seen some installers like that. It's actually not that bad idea.
I'm pretty sure all MSIs do that during a rollback operation.
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@Tsaukpaetra I once wrote a feature that was essentially a file downloader. It had no way of knowing the total file size ahead of time, and it took a ton of shenanigans to get the progress bar I was asked to write to not go backwards when it asynchronously started downloading a new file and added its file size to the running total used to calculate the done percentage. (The whole issue was further complicated by the fact that a lot of our customers were using this application over dial-up Internet... )
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@mott555 There are only two approaches that work sanely. One of those is to use two progress bars, one for the set of files to be downloaded (and which advances when a file completes dowloading) and one that's per-file showing progress of the individual download. The other is to make the other side provide a description of all the sizes of files to be downloaded (and bear in mind that downloading will have a per-file cost as well as a per-kilobyte cost).
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@dkf both of these only work when all files are known ahead of time. Which is not always the case - the simplest example is HTML page which can link to arbitrary number of other files and you won't even know that until you download the HTML document.
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@Gąska Yes. In that case, you can't put up a determinate-length progress bar at all until you have the index descriptor. That might just have the filename list, or might have the sizes too (and whatever other metadata it is convenient to vacuum up without actually opening each file); which one you've got determines what sort of approach you can use with display of progress bars.
And yes, getting the index descriptor can be expensive when there's a lot of files to be moved; it's basically the same cost as an
ls -lR
. Funny that…
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@dkf or you might sacrifice accuracy for usability and use some heuristics to make the progress bar fill kinda sorta okayish most of the time, even if full information isn't available. Because the main purpose of progress bar isn't to keep track of progress - it's to show that the process didn't hang up, by never staying in the same spot for too long.
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@Gąska That's true, although I don't think it usually does a very good job either. Barring those cases when the UI thread gets blocked, it still doesn't make lot of sense. Most people don't want and arguably/often don't need to understand the complexity of the operations happening underneath, but there isn't any other way to display it. Either it's detailed to a fault, extremely complex akin to a full log or it's gross oversimplification where you then get shit like this, where people think it measures progress (yeah, the name itself is part of the problem).
Also, no, those progress bars that go backwards are a bad idea. Nothing happens backwards. Disk doesn't spin backwards to erase stuff. Can't step into the same river twice. Rollback is still doing some sort of a job.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Disk doesn't spin backwards to erase stuff.
Wait... it doesn't?! My whole life is a lie
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Disk doesn't spin backwards to erase stuff.
Wait... it doesn't?! My whole life is a lie
Don't despair yet! It's possible our resident -s will find some obscure example that does. I can't imagine a technical reason for that, but stranger things have been invented.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Also, no, those progress bars that go backwards are a bad idea.
IMO, a progress bar returning to 0 conveys the idea of "returning everything to the state it was before you started doing this thing" very well.
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
the main purpose of progress bar isn't to keep track of progress - it's to show that the process didn't hang up, by never staying in the same spot for too long.
In that case, you should use an indeterminate progress bar, like this :
or a spinner, or another animation.
When I see a regular progress bar, I expect that it provides at least a rough estimation of the progress of the process.
MS has pretty detailed guidelines for those:
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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:
the main purpose of progress bar isn't to keep track of progress - it's to show that the process didn't hang up, by never staying in the same spot for too long.
In that case, you should use an indeterminate progress bar, like this :
or a spinner, or another animation.
With this, all you know is that the main GUI thread isn't stalled. You don't know shit about what's happening with the task itself. Have you never seen "Checking for updates" bar continuing to push that green goo for hours? Have you ever thought to yourself that the blinkenlichten are a sure sign that the task isn't stuck after all?
MS has pretty detailed guidelines for those:
And the very first example they have is this:
Determinate progress bar? That's a lie. Nothing about this is determinate. There are dozens of steps to complete, some steps might or might not trigger additional, sometimes-but-not-always needed steps, and each step takes unknown amount of time because of all the calls to external services and accesses to exclusive shared resources, and there are thousands of things that can go wrong at any moment and there might be some fallback strategies that might take additional time, so the final time heavily relies on a particular system configuration, often in unpredictable ways. The best you can do is guesstimate, and then your progress bar will start at lightspeed, then stop for a minute, then slowly crawl forward for a while, then suddenly jump straight to the end, after which you still have to wait for some time for the task to finish - and that's good enough. As long as the bar inches forward every so often, and it doesn't go back in the meanwhile, it's good enough. And if your progress bar is slower than that under normal conditions, you better figure out some additional way to indicate progress more often - like some installers do, printing the names of files they're copying even though it's a completely useless information.
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@Gąska: I still think faking progress bars is a hack, but I can see your point.
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@Zerosquare all UX is a hack. It's about exploiting human nature wrt. perception to provide the best look-and-feel when displaying the same set of informations to the user. It's basically applied psychology.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Disk doesn't spin backwards to erase stuff.
Wait... it doesn't?! My whole life is a lie
Nah, nowadays with SSDs there is no spinning disk. Instead, the electricity runs backwards through the memory cells.
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@LB_ said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
held hostage
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@LB_ said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
held hostage
Aye.
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@LB_ said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
held hostage
That's what @LB_ meant: if you click "Let's go" instead of "Skip" then you will move to a screen without an exit button. Skipping it here is the only option.
Mind you, when my workplace started requiring a Windows Hello pin I believe that I was able to somehow halt the process and get dropped on my desktop, after which you can close the window using Task manager. Sadly I can't remember what I did, it might have been something like pressing Alt-F4 or Ctrl-Alt-Delete at the right time. Very intuitive!
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I've recovered my account just to say - I'm still using Windows 7
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Windows 7
Windows 10? And nothing else
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@dkf said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@mott555 There are only two approaches that work sanely. One of those is to use two progress bars, one for the set of files to be downloaded (and which advances when a file completes dowloading) and one that's per-file showing progress of the individual download. The other is to make the other side provide a description of all the sizes of files to be downloaded (and bear in mind that downloading will have a per-file cost as well as a per-kilobyte cost).
It was actually a DLL loader for a Silverlight application that had a plugin architecture. The first file was a text-based config with a list of plugins for that client's particular configuration of the application, then several additional files were the actual plugins which were downloaded more-or-less simultaneously. This was all extreme overkill in the way it was architected, but it was necessary because of the dial-up customers. The broadband customers never saw the progress bar long enough for it to be important.
I could have stuffed hard-coded file sizes in the application entry point, but that would have resulted in a ton of nearly-pointless busywork to update it whenever there was a new release and the plugins' sizes changed.
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My computer's lock screen comes up if I've been away for a bit, as it should (although I guess it's GPO'd to a ridiculous setting for my purpose, since it's sitting here in my house). OK, fine...3 fingered salute to unlock it.
Except I've noticed lately that my first attempt almost always fails. I wasn't particularly paying attention to the screen, but I did today...The password box comes up and I started typing, but then it disappeared and briefly showed the "sign in options" "button" or whatever that is and lost a bunch of keystrokes from my password.
??? Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?
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@boomzilla old school problem. I use a pin, and it's been absolutely hilarious having each initial attempt fail despite the simplicity of the keystrokes involved.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
old school problem.
Are you saying that this is a bug that's been in multiple versions of Windows and still hasn't been fixed?
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I've recovered my account just to say - I'm still using Windows 7
@mott555 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I could have stuffed hard-coded file sizes in the application entry point, but that would have resulted in a ton of nearly-pointless busywork to update it whenever there was a new release and the plugins' sizes changed.
You had T4, you had MSBuild extensibility; you could have frontloaded the busywork. Would still have been nearly pointless, but.
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@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
From that page:
That project was code named Windows 7, based on the fact that Windows Vista’s programmatic version number was 6.0, and since this was the version to come next, the natural choice would be to call the next version 7.0. (Though that’s not what it ultimately shipped as.)
IOW, Microsoft can't version properly
FileUnder: Require Windows 7 or better. I'm good. I have Windows 2000
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@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
FileUnder: Require Windows 7 or better. I'm good. I have Windows 2000
Windows 7 was definitely better than Windows 2000.
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@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
old school problem.
Are you saying that this is a bug that's been in multiple versions of Windows and still hasn't been fixed?
Almost every version of Windows since Windows 10.
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@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@TwelveBaud said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
IOW, Microsoft can't version properly
"It was generally understood that this was just a code name, and the marketing department would give it a splashy name when the time came."
Well, there's your problem.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
old school problem.
Are you saying that this is a bug that's been in multiple versions of Windows and still hasn't been fixed?
Almost every version of Windows since Windows 10.
Windows 10 is the worst version of Windows since Windows 8.
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Fortunately, thanks to the "every other one" rule, Windows 9 is a great OS.
...wait a minute...
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
it's to show that the process didn't hang up, by never staying in the same spot for too long.
Except when the download thread hangs and UI thread keeps working on animating your useless kinda sorta progress indicator and you sit there for hours waiting for the "progress" to happen.
I've yet to see a progress bar that keeps filling up when the operation itself doesn't.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
TIL that human race is doomed.
Consider yourself enlightened. Your welcome.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Time remaining: 00:00:15
How the fuck could it ever predict such a metric when it can't even return reasonable error messages?
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@Gąska said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I've yet to see a progress bar that keeps filling up when the operation itself doesn't.
Old versions of IE had something like that in the status bar.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Your welcome.
His welcome what?
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Your welcome.
His welcome what?
Learning.
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Your welcome.
His welcome what?
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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:
I've yet to see a progress bar that keeps filling up when the operation itself doesn't.
Old versions of IE had something like that in the status bar.
I suppose File Explorer going towards a timeout on a non-responding drive is a sort of progress.
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@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Learn more goes to a list of things blocking 1903 on various machines. Looks like mine is the "can't adjust brightness" bug.
Since Microsoft and Intel aren't getting their butts in gear, I went ahead and downloaded the latest video driver and installed it myself. Afterwards Windows was happy to install 1903 and I can still change the brightness. Hurray?
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They keep doing release by mistake
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@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
They keep doing release by mistakeStill waiting for them to accidentally release something worth using.
Microsoft reveals new Windows 10 Start menu
And it still sucks shit, is still completely broken and useless, and is still vastly inferior to the Start Menu in 10 year old Windows 7.
Now that's progress!!
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@El_Heffe said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
still vastly inferior to the Start Menu in
10 year old Windows 7KDEFTFM
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@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@El_Heffe said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
still vastly inferior to the Start Menu in
10 year old Windows 7KDEFTFM
Windows 10 - Worse than Linux.
That's really sad.
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@TimeBandit Well, you know, that "Send To All Rings" button is right next to "Send" on the Ribbon....
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Windows popped a notification. I snapped it before it managed to disappear (why do they only appear for half a second?!?!! But only some of the time!!!?!?!)
Oh, what's this? Microsoft wants to talk to me? What about?
Yeah you can fuck right off.
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Today, my Start Menu doesn't open. Windows key on the keyboard does nothing, clicking the button does nothing. Usually that means Explorer is dead, but I can still open Explorer windows and find program EXE's in Program Files, so I'm not dead in the water.