Re: This Is Why They Say Windows Is A Great OS -- If Your Time Is Worth Nothing

On Tue, 12/31/2024 2:08 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

Yet another
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-windows-11-24h2-bug-could-block-future-security-updates-see-whos-affected/>
in the ongoing stream of bugs from Microsoft resulting from the
Windows update process itself. This one breaks the ability to receive
further security updates. So once you get it, how do you get an update
to fix it? Particularly when there have already been updates that kept
introducing their own new bugs?
 

Wow, you take two minutes to have a piss and this happens :-)
I had trouble spotting the byline, and using archive.org and
the mess that makes of the screen, made it stand out better.

   Written by Lance Whitney, Contributor
   Dec. 30, 2024 at 11:04 a.m. PT

Someone reported a Windows Update failure, where a Windows Update
"complained it could not find the manifest of a previous update".

This is not how Windows Update is supposed to work. Remember that
the word "Cumulative", a little-understood English word, no longer
means "Cumulative". It means "whatever-we-want-it-to-mean".
Your updates aren't stateless, after all.

In fact, your machine has a *number* of state-machine related
failure conditions (such as properly fixing BlackLotus, sometime
after the Windows-Update-mediated method did it).

The OS has some items, that need to be repaired if your
machine suffers a related calamity. Say for example, your
little brother does a factory reset on the UEFI security
materials. Does Windows "measure" the fucking mess and fix it?
No. Of course not. There could be portions of that which remain
broken.

*******

The way to cover off some Windows issues of this sort, is the

   Repair Install

which is a procedure that ordinary users can handle
without hair loss. But it does not "guarantee" much of anything,
it's merely a "best effort" from the user community, to help you.

For example, the Windows installer media *still* does not handle
the SafeOS feature properly. The partition still isn't the right
size, defensively designed for the next shit-show.

For a company that is to "Do Security", um, what are you doing ??? Exactly ?

Yes, out here, we can whack at it, like it was a mole. Whack-a-mole.

I would say all the good staff are working on <cough> Windows 12.
Which will come with AI ash trays.

   Paul