Dear Microsoft – a sysadmin's wishlist

Dear Microsoft - Windows 10 Phone

As one of the few using this, I would like to be able to update the OS over 3/4G.

Phone c/w unlimited 4G is my main connection to the Internet. Hence Wi-Fi connection runs as hotspot over 4G (but has download limit.)

Also take aim at BBC/ITV/Ch4/Ch5 on-demand services. Won't run over 4G, must use Wi-Fi. However torrents work perfectly over 4G. There's a clue there.

It must be great to have your own news outlet

So you can rant about all the things you're upset about.

https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking

I thank you.

"Never again should we submit to the tyranny of WinSXS's exponential growth, nor some remnant application interfering with a new one."

Yes please.

I honestly don't know what Windows is actually good for these days, or why people still use it.

Oops I've slipped into the Twilight Zone.

Loved the piece on Containers. Why not simply put a ! in front of a directory name and be done with it! (Subtle old Acorn humour there).

I agree they're generally crap at updates but there appears to be something going on inside MS at the moment in this area and it looks like another case of one waring department against another. As a company they're swinging in their approach with updates between "take it all, we document nothing, like it or lump it" and "read about this one, take it if you want it". Here's an example of the latter: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3162345/microsoft-windows/microsoft-uses-new-way-to-distribute-windows-10-update-kb-3216755.html.

..so who knows what they're doing with updates and what the future may hold..which to be fair is pretty much par for the course with Microsoft in general.

Personally I'm in the camp of having to suffer windows in my day job and avoiding it like the plague when working on my own stuff at home.

While reading this article, I had a notepad (++) file open, copying and pasting snippets so I could respond. After five such actions, I realised that my response was the same each time: yes, please!

The problem with all of this is, as Trevor well knows, MS just does not care about any of this. In fact, they are actively against most of it. Why? Because some of the things Trevor is complaining about used to work well but were deliberately changed by MS.

The reason for that is Microsoft's chosen paradigm where they control the desktop rather than the user. As we have seen with the gradual removal of previously-existing features in Windows 10, MS are increasingly trying to position the ability to actual control the OS (and the applications) as a premium, niche feature that (they believe) should only be relevant to large enterprises. Everyone else, so their line goes, just wants to have all that pesky choice and control taken off their hands.

The lynchpin of this whole system is the updates.

The main reason, I believe, that MS pushed so heavily getting Win 10 onto PCs is that it wanted to force as many people as possible to just accept whatever updates were given. Sure, updating can improve security and an unpatched system is, all else being equal, less secure than a patched one, but that is not the concern from MS.

What they want is the control - the ability to add and remove features as they please - to essentially reconfigure the user's OS as and when they want.

Have you removed the Windows Store shortcuts? Silly you - we'll go ahead and put those back where you can see them. There you go - all better now. What's that? You've somehow used a group policy to disable the Store all together? How clumsy of you! You must be at your wit's end wondering what you've done. But worry no more - we'll fix that right up and, just so you don't accidentally do it again (who would want that!), we'll be a good parent and take that dangerous option away. There, now you can't break anything.

And what's this? You've turned off our monitoring? How will we know when you need us? You could be floundering away over there and we'd never know!! For your own safety, we'll turn that back on for you.

How about the new official change policy of "whatchoo gunna do bout it?"

MS has been forcing a lot down our throats lately with server 2016 and win10 that is ESPECIALLY impacting the business customers. They are making server-based licensing uneconomical with new many-core processors, and they are making a very disruptive end user experience without respecting a business need to support and maintain legacy custom applications.

How about

On another note.

How about expanding SMB protocol to be file size and placement aware?

Why is fragmentation still such a thing?

How about having a filesystem that is predictive and application-aware so it can essentially provision space for files based on expectation, current configuration, and usage patterns? Why do I have .log files that are in 300k fragments. Why not free a larger contiguous block for file placement based on existing fragment count and or application request? It can still be thin provisioned and reclaimed without being a sparse file if needed once free space gets low but that shouldn't be a thing.

Nice idea!

Yep nice catalogue.

I just wonder - isn't it faster to install some Linux instead of writing an article like this?

Have a nice day

Zane

On a positive note...

It seems M$ have finally removed whatever it was they were using to slow Windows 7 updates down to a crawl. For the better part of a year, fully patching an out of the box Win7Pro machine was taking the better part of 3 days (2 days or running the updater, before it even found anything to install).

Now they are back to their pre-Win10 benchmark of almost a full day.

On an even more promising note, the long wait for machines to patch let me do a bit of experimenting, were I discovered I can do 27 installs of Ubuntu Mate, all fully patched, in the amount of time it took to patch a single win 7 box. Numbers even our Windows addicted bean-counters (should) pay attention to.