Seems like the modern Microsoft is willing to inject a surprising amount of humanity into their projects. Wether you agree with the new direction or not, you do have to applaud how bold they've been recently. (You could argue they have to be bold considering the computing world seems to be trending away from the business desktop towards personal devices, but it's still impressive to see these bolder moves actually emerge from a large company. The thing about Microsoft is that when they need to shift strategy, they usually can. That's why you can never rule them out.)
After just watching tech reviewers have to retry swipe gestures three, four, five times and also miss too-small touch zones (in that Win8 tablet video Gruber recently posted) I think it's safe to continue ruling them out, "modern Microsoft" or no.
I'm a Linux user the vast majority of the time, and dislike Microsoft's tactics as much as the next guy, but going from "[a few touchscreen bugs]" to "just fundamentally don't get it" is quite the logical leap. Fundamental attribution error comes to mind.
If they've been working on that nonstop since the iPad launched, and that's the best thing they have to show to the press in September 2011, my point stands.
I don't think so. Buggy gestures or minor UI issues such as tiny touch zones are not the consequence of poor product design or direction; they're the consequence of having significantly large software in a very early stage of development.
I imagine that people who think bugs in a preview release are somehow a reflection of a company's overall vision or understanding of how their users interact with their computer probably are not going to be very accepting of anything Microsoft does regardless of its merits.
Of course in the days of the Sad Mac, that was only upon a failed boot. When it crashed it showed a cartoony round bomb with a lit fuse on the end. Made people mad!
The Sad Mac is no longer used, actually -- I believe it was removed from the ROM in NewWorld PPC machines (iMac G3 and newer). Current machines just display a circle/slash symbol on POST failure.
I get what you are saying, but now no one has any information about what the problem might be and how to fix it, as opposed to people savvy enough to Google the STOP code (and I think you are underestimating the current population and certainly ignoring people's ability to learn to Google error messages).
Sure, there was something psychologically jarring about the old BSOD, but without giving us any clue as to what went wrong with the computer, how is anyone supposed to be able to fix it? Is it impossible to display a STOP code in a friendly manner?
Yes, they do. People knowledgeable in Windows analyze the dump files a BSOD creates. These file have all the information needed for debugging. In addition, it's dumped in the event logs.
People on HN seem pretty quick to jump on this pre-beta release, and Windows in general, without proper situational awareness.
The STOP code is still there. It's small in that screenshot, but the bottom line reads "You can search for the error online: HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED".
yes. or i assume that 8 will have the same feature 7 does, in that on next boot it will give you a "windows has recovered from a serious error, would you like to go online to search for a solution" dialog.
I'm sure all the relevant data is recorded in the event log, which is how it should be done. In fact, I do believe that's what the error message says in smaller font.
> Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?
When your drive/chipset dies and you reboot, you'll get an error saying that no bootable drive is found. It'll be pretty obvious what happened at that point.
KeBugCheckEx(), the method that displays a blue screen, dumps memory to the paging file (which is contiguous and fixed, so it doesn't need the FS driver). When a dump is about to be made, it hashes all of the pieces of the pager and the disk driver necessary to do the dump, and ensures that they aren't corrupted, then dumps. On reboot, the boot manager notices that the system died messily, and copies the paging file to a crash dump.
Now you know more than you ever wanted to about blue screens. :)
A lot of people are seeing this as useless- one commenter called it "function follows form."
I actually think this one's better- with "You can search for the error online: SOME_ERROR_CODE_HERE" it will overwhelm less people and get more people to a place they can find help.
Insofar as the dump file still gets stored somewhere, I don't see why this is bad either. Most of the time, in modern versions, BSODs are hardware/driver related and require somebody half-competent to diagnose it.
That's Google's problem. If Microsoft can give people exactly enough information about the problem that, for example, their knowledge base site can give them some options, I don't see why that's a bad thing.
It is Microsoft's problem if Noober McGreenerson searches for that error code and downloads the "fix" that ends up infesting their computer.
Most people are more than happy to blame Michaelsoft for their computer shitting the bed after they've installed crapware on it.
No, it's Noober McGreenerson's fault for downloading crap from a suspicious site without doing any research. It doesn't matter who Noober is happy to blame, it's still his fault.
Yes, it's nice when end users don't have to think, but no, it's not realistic. Microsoft has no direct control over Google- why should they be responsible for what people find there?
Should they just leave every piece of useful information off the blue screen so nobody will search? That's what would really be "function follows form."
Less imposing than the earlier versions for a non-techie user, but I'd suggest a rewording. "your PC..." will imply a physical hardware fault to a lot of people and that'll not help tech support when it is actually a driver issue (some people can be very difficult to deal with when they've got a mis-diagnosis stuck in their heads).
Looks like an improvement. Though I think it should also say something to the effect of "If you've seen this screen more than twice today, you should have a professional examine your computer for problems."
Microsoft could very well have made this screen some other color (like yellow or red). Would it have been caught out as the new "screen of death" from MS then or would it have been ignored as the software was still a developer preview?
The tendency to tie things in Microsoft's new OSes (Windows Phone 7, Windows 8) to aspects of earlier versions (Windows Mobile, Win XP, Vista) could be one of the things to dog MS as long as it is unwilling to abandon the "Windows" brand (despite being significantly different).
I think consistency in error messages is good though. Sure, bsods were a huge annoyance back in the day. You'd practically be guaranteed to hit one every week. Now though, the system itself is pretty damn stable. My uptimes on my windows 7 machines are all measured in months right now. If something does go wrong though, seeing a bsod will at least let me know immediately that it was a catastrophic failure. It's such an immediately recognizable event that removing it might not be in the users' best interest.
I'm a little surprised there's only English on that screen. Perhaps they localize it? That seems potentially flakey to do if the system is in an unstable state.
OSX's Kernel Panic screen has a handful of languages explaining what happened.
EDIT: I suppose they could generate the text/page statically when the OS is installed and every time the locale is changed thereafter. If that is what they do, it's better than what OSX does.
Windows BSOD's have "always" (as long as I can remember) been localised. I would guess your assumption is correct, since it's entirely possible to install Windows without English support (I don't use OSX, but a quick search gave the impression that English is non-removable there).
Love how quick people are to assume that Microsoft would just be scrapping the memory dump and error log entirely. Come on folks, you should know that's unintuitive and unnecessary to the average user. Don't get caught up in assuming your skills are anywhere near the norm.
There's a bug in either VMWare Workstation or the Win8 HAL that leads to it crashing on startup, and that's VMWare Workstation in the screenshot, so... not long. :P
...who cribbed it from old-school Apple. The original design for the "Sad Tab"[1] is fairly similar to the Sad Mac[2] errors from the original Macintosh. This sort of error screen isn't a totally original design.
au contraire, they probably realized that people see the text on a BSOD, freak the fuck out, and go crazy wondering what's wrong with their computer.
now at least they expose only the most useful information to the user ("you need to restart", "here's a thing you can search for to find more information") instead of crazy stuff like "beginning physical memory dump" and STOP codes.
