food for thought - swift 5 released - bottom types, string interpolation, and stuff.

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 11:41:14AM +1200, rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 16/04/2019 11:34 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Nothing surprises me anymore, after MS had the audacity to
> > force-feed Windows 10 down my throat under the guise of a "security
> > update". :-/
> 
> Strange, I remember it being opt-in.
> Are you sure it wasn't already scheduled?

The laptop was running either Win 7 or Win 8.  It was only "scheduled"
in the sense that that was the time when MS decided that everything
before Win 10 was no longer supported / deprecated / whatever, and was
pushing for everyone to upgrade to Win 10 (I was not the only one caught
by surprise by this move).  The notification was something like "you
have important upgrades to install" or something like that, which we
usually just press "OK" to -- it's one of those constant annoyances
we've developed a knee-jerk reaction to.

I vaguely remember at the time there were some security issues that
needed to be patched, which was the only reason I even paid any
attention to my wife's laptop at all, but the way it was done was
basically "either upgrade to Win 10, or don't install any upgrades at
all and leave your computer vulnerable to the latest nasty security flaw
and ignore every Win Upgrade notification from then on, which will
constantly pester you with reminders and further notifications".  I
actually googled online at the time and found several other similar
complaints and descriptions of how the only way to *not* be
force-upgraded to Win 10 was to turn off Windows Update completely by
hacking some obscure registry setting.  But by then it was already too
late, since installing those "security updates" automatically puts your
computer on the Win 10 installation track, and I didn't even want to
think about what state it will leave your computer in were I to dare to
interrupt the process.

Needless to say, my wife & I were very unhappy about that "security
update" taking many hours to install itself (IIRC we gave up waiting and
left it to run overnight), during which she couldn't get any work done,
and after which we were confronted with a brand new installation with a
completely new, unfamiliar desktop with stuff randomly moved around so
they weren't in the familiar places anymore, and random applications
went "missing" or no longer working because they're now gratuitously
incompatible with the OS, and thus required wasting several *more* hours
to relearn how to operate the silly "desktop", reinstall/reconfigure
stuff, and move icons back to where they used to be.  Talk about adding
insult to the injury of essentially having our arm twisted to upgrade to
Win 10 even though we consciously decided *not* to when we bought the
laptop in the first place.


T

-- 
The fact that anyone still uses AOL shows that even the presence of options doesn't stop some people from picking the pessimal one. - Mike Ellis