That's really too much now

[Aleatoriac]

Smart phones/pads have changed the WAY we do computing, but computers themselves have really changed very little other than the inclusion of SSD since that time.

2026? By then microsucks will have completed "Borg edition 2" (or maybe 3) and you'll be too busy serving to care.

Would be nice. To no longer care. To no longer have the chittery chattery heuristic slop of my biology in the way, to be helped by something that cannot produce an invalid syllogism.

I long for it. I will be a God. A real one. One who doesn't care about being worshipped. One still capable of masturbating to a beautiful sunset but aware that there is nothing magical about it.

[Jace-BeOS]

Well, nearly so. What is it, two monstrous binary database files?

Nope. Unless your idea of "monstrous" is a couple hundred megs spread across about a dozen or so separate files not including their KTM records and logs.

Maybe not very often, but more often than is tolerable for a critical piece of software (the friggin OS), and it's often very serious and not fixable when it happens. It is a central point of failure fir an entire system. It has spawned, like so much of Wondows, a cottage industry of tools to maintain the operating system health, some of which are entirely placebo.

Sure it's complex, but not any more complex than anything else that has significant and direct ties back to kernel operation. On the other hand, constantly having to trash plist files in OSX and still having stuff not work right is just as big a pain in the ass.

Complexity is the enemy of reliability and the registry is ridiculously complex. It's not even entirely human readable through the editor. It grows constantly. Registry errors result in the need for system reinstallation (or at least backup restoration), rather than simply deleting and replacing a preference file. Hell, the simple fact that the registry grows continuously (as does the WinSxS folder) results in a need to semiannually reinstall from scratch to recover system speed and reliability.

What? Since when in the hell does registry size affect system performance? Are you crazy? Lol, it's not like the entire damn thing get's cached and requires something to reference it anytime data is read from a drive. This is simply not true. Anyway it's very easy to look at performance monitor and actually correlate where your specific speed and I/O bottlenecks are happening.

The alternative of configuration storage (individual, human-readable files) is far less likely to result in such critical system failure.

This is silly. You absolutely cannot make everything human readable at this level. That's like requiring every programmer to pen the equivalent of a novel in code commenting. At some point you have to store stuff in raw binary or strings (encrypted or otherwise) that make reference to weird and unknown low-level variables, registers, and function names. If you have a lot of programs that are writing a boatload of crap to the registry then first-off that's shitty programming and in no way the fault of Microsoft.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2684 ... s-registry

Look, I hate Microsoft as much as anyone but I'm not going to willy-nilly bash everything under the sun that they've touched. The reality is that the registry is actually a relatively mature and sophisticated approach that offers a ton of program level readability (across APIs and program calls) to a general repository of global, system, and user level configurations that can each have their own NTFS access controls and auditing.

Would you agree that the presentation is monolithic? I'm more interested in the user experience. Admittedly this isn't an end user realm but it becomes one when you have to give users instructions to make a change to solve a problem.

Also, tech people are users too. Every time I encounter a Windows annoyance, or garbage in the UI I don't want to keep trying to ignore, the answer I find in forums is usually "edit this registry key". On one hand, there's no such place to modify Mac OS. On the other hand, I can't think of any recent examples of things in the OS I wanted to modify, while I experience it constantly when on my PC.

There have been various 3rd party tools made to put a better interface on some such changes (Microsoft even absorbed one particularly excellent developer), but some of them don't tend to stay updated with the OS. Tools like context menu editors are a great example (I can't recall if SysInternals was the guy who made the context menu editor).

Yes the registry grows in size and no, it's not fair to blame the users. Yes, application developers are at fault for this, and yes, Microsoft is to blame for creating a model that's so easy to break or do bad things to. So much of Windows is unnecessarily extensible and it just asks for clutter, bloat, and conflicts.

As for the registry's size and impact on system performance, I've done some more reading and find you're entirely correct. My bad. Thanks for the correction. The system slowdown problems I've seen must be related to other behaviors and not registry access time. I've wrongly associated it with registry bloat probably for reasons such as the following:

On a fresh install without OEM garbage, a right click on something in explorer is usually quick. It's at least consistent after the menu has been cached. On a system that's had lots of software installed (even just mission critical stuff), a right click could do anything from nothing at all (because an extension kills it) to pegging a nonexistent storage device until it times out and finishes the process of assembling the menu. Many application developers fill context menus with junk (and choosing "quality software" isn't the solution, because so many developers do this). Developers have the annoying and common habit of presuming their product is the only one you are going to use and rarely seem to consider that they're adding more stuff to a system with more than enough stuff plugged into it. Removing entries from explorer context menus DOES improve performance of said context menus, especially when they're not cached.

The system tray is another example of extensibility resulting in a cesspool. IMO, most of the OS extensibility is a mistake. Since it's there, I'm forced to mitigate it. This is why the registry pisses me off because I have to go there more often than I wish to.

Back in Windows 95's day, I could configure the Send To menu easily by changing the content of a folder. That's more like how actual people think. Don't like the objects found in a container? Remove them. Not so today. While that folder is still there for backwards compatibility, removing the junk installed by other products (or Microsoft) is now a job for the registry editor. Idiotic. I have no desire to wait for a diskette or network timeout, or similar, just to pass by a sub menu on a context menu in explorer (I abandoned 3.5" diskettes when LS-120 came out and disabled my diskette controllers long before they stopped being included in motherboards; I hated the 3.5" disk shortcut with a passion). It should at the very least have the submenu process in a parallel thread to not block user activity, but apparently nope.

I've never had problems deleting plist files on a Mac system to solve config problems, but I've rarely needed to troubleshoot config problems on Macs. Plist files are easy to find, rarely exist in multiple locations, have mostly readable labels (less so with all the prefixes, but half the stuff I've had to scour from my registries because of apps not removing them after uninstallation have been labeled with unique identifiers, a concept that serves only software, not its users). They're even readable.

The link you provided to stackoverflow... Was there a specific part you wanted me to read? Going through it shows a lot of people feel the same way I do about the registry. I'm all for you promoting my opinion and all

I'm not arbitrarily bashing Microsoft product to win any kind of cool geek label, and I know I'm not always correct about my perceptions of the technical issues (thanks for pointing me to the access time facts on registry reads). I just spent way too many decades of my life suffering as both an end user and as a technician for other suffering end users. So much unnecessary frustration because of Microsoft's choices.

I learned that the best way to use Windows was to never customize it. Not with 3rd-party tools. Not with Microsoft's own configuration options. Nothing but the vanilla config gets tested. But the sheer number of options they actually seem to offer in the UI, and the sheer number of annoyances that CAN be somewhat mitigated, it just begs for modification. So this is a conflict of use for me.

BeOS was a dream of simplicity and I was a convert almost immediately (or would've been had it not been killed by a lousy market/industry). BeOS lead me to investigate Mac OS more (which is still inferior to BeOS in some ways, but what can I do?). I finally made the transition to the Mac because I actually felt better using Mac OS in comparison to how i felt using Windows. The death of a million paper cuts is a great analogy for my bitterness against Windows. The Windows registry is a major part of that experience.

[rifftrax]

WinPE? I do not have such a partition.

Grab it here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... 13860.aspx

WinPE is a great tool for anyone who needs sysadmin level control over a system (and unfortunately, you often do even to accomplish what you would assume would be basic stuff):
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... owspe.aspx

[rifftrax]

Would you agree that the presentation is monolithic? I'm more interested in the user experience. Admittedly this isn't an end user realm but it becomes one when you have to give users instructions to make a change to solve a problem.

Meh, I dunno honestly I do most changes/viewing through scripting and parsing when needed. You can always use an alternate registry editor to get around with a bit more capability:
https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooregeditor

On a core level the ability to import/export single keys/values without upsetting the balance of anything else in a registry essentially means it's the exact opposite of monolithic. By comparison if I could use scripting to add/remove existing plugins or strip out MIDI data from a native .flp file without actually running FL Studio to open it honestly I'd be f**king thrilled (especially when shit goes sideways and projects start refusing to open which happens nowadays all the damn time). The registry doesn't break when you do something weird with it, it just stores a meaningless value or corrupts an existing path or reference the way you (or a program) has defined it. Very straight-forward.

Also, tech people are users too. Every time I encounter a Windows annoyance, or garbage in the UI I don't want to keep trying to ignore, the answer I find in forums is usually "edit this registry key". On one hand, there's no such place to modify Mac OS. On the other hand, I can't think of any recent examples of things in the OS I wanted to modify, while I experience it constantly when on my PC.

Don't get me wrong. I think there's a million things wrong UI/UX-wise with most of everything Microsoft does and I agree there are lots of things that could make the general operability light-years beyond where it is now. That's part of the reason I'm working for a friend's software company building the kind of tools I'm sure a lot of people will find interesting when they are finally ready for release.

There have been various 3rd party tools made to put a better interface on some such changes (Microsoft even absorbed one particularly excellent developer), but some of them don't tend to stay updated with the OS. Tools like context menu editors are a great example (I can't recall if SysInternals was the guy who made the context menu editor).

Again, it's pretty easy to find all the shell and shellex entries in the registry and retool them however you want but I get what you mean about wanting something that would tie it all together with a bow a bit better. Yes, there really isn't anything I would call "great" that exists at the moment to help a typical user turn Windows into more of a modular environment.

Yes the registry grows in size and no, it's not fair to blame the users. Yes, application developers are at fault for this, and yes, Microsoft is to blame for creating a model that's so easy to break or do bad things to. So much of Windows is unnecessarily extensible and it just asks for clutter, bloat, and conflicts.

But it has to be extensible for developers to be able to do lots of whiz-bang-neato things with it. You can't have your cake and eat it too here. If you want developers to be empowered they are also simply always going to be empowered to be able to f**k it all up in a hurry. There's no two ways about this.

Look, I honestly think a lot of your complaints probably fall back on the fact that virtually none of the programming on desktop applications and Windows in general relies on Pascal-strings, meaning that searching and caching additional information as compared to some baseline results in an almost exponential level of resources/delays/processing being added. You would do well to read this in its entirety:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/ ... to-basics/

That one nuance is actually a major reason why most programs today don't actually feel any "faster" than an equivalent might have felt 15 years ago. In the meantime I can run relatively complicated programs on 7 cent toy microprocessors with pseudo-multi-threading because they've gotten the low-level interactions with the hardware fine-tuned so damn well. High-level languages have all but forgotten the level of waste created as a natural result of ease of implementation that most software product managers demand to meet the level of efficiency that the modern world expects.

[incubus]

Smart phones/pads have changed the WAY we do computing, but computers themselves have really changed very little other than the inclusion of SSD since that time.

2026? By then microsucks will have completed "Borg edition 2" (or maybe 3) and you'll be too busy serving to care.

Would be nice. To no longer care. To no longer have the chittery chattery heuristic slop of my biology in the way, to be helped by something that cannot produce an invalid syllogism.

I long for it. I will be a God. A real one. One who doesn't care about being worshipped. One still capable of masturbating to a beautiful sunset but aware that there is nothing magical about it.

Are you the "oracle?"

[Bubbamusic]

Good work Microsoft, if I don't cool off by tomorrow, I'll be rolling back all machines to XP.

I was really happy on XP until last year when support from dev's was dissapearing. When Live stopped supporting XP I bit the bullet and got a machine with Win8.1 ... I'll not upgrade again until I absolutely have to.

Me too. I ran XP for fifteen years. It was great for audio. I finally was forced to step into the 64 bit world. I am now running 10 Pro 64. The 32 Gigs of memory is nice. Can't find the right drivers for the disk controllers yet. They are due out soon. Not everything runs on 10 yet.

[Jace-BeOS]

On a core level the ability to import/export single keys/values without upsetting the balance of anything else in a registry essentially means it's the exact opposite of monolithic.

Hmm. I think I understand your perspective. Maybe my way of expressing myself on the registry needs different language. Hmm.

Don't get me wrong. I think there's a million things wrong UI/UX-wise with most of everything Microsoft does and I agree there are lots of things that could make the general operability light-years beyond where it is now. That's part of the reason I'm working for a friend's software company building the kind of tools I'm sure a lot of people will find interesting when they are finally ready for release.

I'll be interested to know more about these tools, if they're end-user or power-user type tools

But it has to be extensible for developers to be able to do lots of whiz-bang-neato things with it. You can't have your cake and eat it too here.

I think I am actually kind of against this kind of thing. I want the OS to do the basics well enough that there's no need to plug stuff in.

If you want developers to be empowered

I guess I don't want them to be empowered At least, not empowered to modify my OS in any way.

Look, I honestly think a lot of your complaints probably fall back on the fact that virtually none of the programming on desktop applications and Windows in general relies on Pascal-strings, [...]

That one nuance is actually a major reason why most programs today don't actually feel any "faster" than an equivalent might have felt 15 years ago. [...] High-level languages have all but forgotten the level of waste created as a natural result of ease of implementation that most software product managers demand to meet the level of efficiency that the modern world expects.

Efficiency in development time, you mean, right?

The deeper level of compilers and code isn't a strength for me but I absolutely agree that software is not optimized. I still feel no OS has been as responsive to the user as BeOS was. It almost never ignored the user. Almost nothing blocked user actions. It was incredibly multithreaded and the kernel scheduler/timer was so fine-grained that, at high CPU loads, you'd see a slowdown as if it were a slower frame rate in a video, rather than having the GUI start ignoring you.

Mac OS doesn't have that, but it's better than Windows. Windows is almost the absolute opposite of this level of user responsiveness. My ethos is that the OS should never stop responding to the user. Applications might crash but the system should never block the user overall.

BeOS spoiled me. Just like Apple spoiled me with near print-resolution sharpness on screens (yet the jerks have still not brought this to an actual power-user machine).

[incubus]

I decided to try the hack for the bitch cortana and that registry entry isn't even in regedit. I'll look into it further but I'm guessing they "fixed" that also.

[Numanoid]

One of my older Win 10 computers suddenly found out yesterday that it wanted to do the Win 10 anniversary update, spent ages downloading, and then when installing today, I managed to lose power.

Meaning the computer got reset to previous win 10 version, and I had to download the whole update once again

Microsoft: it is not uncommon that power can get lost, because of power outage, accidentially pulling a cord, blowing a fuse, or laptop battery running out.

The installation should therefore start up again where it ended, how is it possible to not have this kind of safety built into such a big update

I mean I can understand that I have to start the installation process all over again, but to actually have to spend hours downloading the same updates files yet again, that is just annoying.

EDIT: After one and a half day the 10 year old HP Compaq 8510p is finally up to date. Who would have thought Why do I hang on to such an old computer, because of the great keyboard, excellent for word processing, modern chiklet keyboards ala ZX81 are horrible.

[shapero]

My mind boggles at what computing will be like in 9 years time

How was desktop computing in 2008, not really that different from how it is today. So why should it be very different in 2026 ?

I stronly believe future will be very different at some point. Because of the internet and the power of the people all around the world, there is going to be open source project with huge community who builds free OS and it becomes new standard at one point.

People are even now complaining so much about privacy, etc issues with so many common products when all these are ruled by closed developers.
Webpages will have effect in the future too, No facebook, no googe type dominations exists, everything is built together by millions of people involving on each project.

Theres so many talented "home people" doing coding for hobby. You can already have great VSTi synths, effects, various software, etc for free and these are mostly made by single person for hobby. In the future the open project communitys will be huge and common for every types of software.
You can already see this happening at small scale.

Think about Ableton, when they have now ~50 people working, or more or less, there will be open source projects that will involve 200,000+ people working together, some will have even millions of people. Its going to be so efficient developement it will dominate the internet at some point and cover most of the software what we use.

But yeah, definitively there is going to be free OS that is going to replace Windows, etc at some point

[Numanoid]

Windows 10 updates have been quiet for some time.

But when checking for updates today (first time since last week), seems Microsoft are back in action.

Download was over 2GB, dealing with cummulative updates KB4013429 and updates KB 4013418

[Zombie Queen]

So, my wife took her laptop out of safe, 'metered' home wifi connection for a while and returned with a question: "why is the display so strange all of the sudden?". This time MS nuked display driver, replacing it with default. I stand in awe! Go MS, go!

[Hooj]

recent pc convert.

good to know there are people who take action & not just bitch & complain!!!

[Zombie Queen]

Yeah, with 10, there's always some action you have to take.

[incubus]

I don't like being forced to do what I don't want.

Other than that, it works well.