The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration. Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the beginning of the decade, and I admit that it was a fantastic design, despite some annoying bugs (e.g. one that revealed that Facebook staff had no idea there were time zones outside US Pacific time). It was launched at the right time: a real innovation that helped boost my waning interest in the platform. But then they started fiddling with it. I equated it to what General Motors did with the Oldsmobile Toronado: a really pure design upon launch for 1966, with that purity getting spoiled with each model year, till the 1970 one lost a lot of what made it great to begin with. Donât get me started on the 1971s.
Facebook had, for instance, two friendsâ boxes when they began fiddling. The clever two-column layout eventually disappeared so what we were left with was a wide wall, a retrograde step.
Theyâve spent the rest of the decade not innovating, but by seemingly ensuring that every press announcement they make is a complete lie, or at least something not followed up by concrete action.
When they bought Instagram, they began ruining it as well. First to go in 2016 were the maps, which I thought were one of the platformâs best features. Instagram claimed few used them, but given that by this point Facebook owned them, any âclaimâ must be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps their databases could not handle it. Back in the days of Getsatisfaction reports, there were more than enough examples of Facebook’s technical shortcomings. In December I had to replace my phone after the old one was dropped, but now Iâm wondering whether I should have spent the money getting it fixed. Because the new phone is running on a skin over Android 7, and it looks like Instagram doesnât support this version, as far as videos are concerned. So you could say that videos are no longer supported. Since December Iâve had to Bluetooth all my videos to my old phone, peer through what I could make of the details on a dodgy screen, and upload that way, if I wanted a proper frame rate. User feedback on Reddit and elsewhere suggests the cure is to upgrade to Android 8, not something I know how to do.
It might have been a bug, or it may have been a case of trialling a feature among a tiny subset of users, but for ten months I could upload videos of over eight minutes. As of February 2019, that feature vanished, and Iâm back to a minute. I notice others now have it as part of IGTV, but I canât see anything that will allow me to do the same, and why would I want vertical videos, anyway? God gave us eyes that are side by side, not one above the other. Frankly, when youâve been spoiled by videos going between eight and nine minutes, one minute is very limiting.
Now I see with the latest versions of Instagram that the filters donât even work. For the last few versions, no preview appears for most of the filters; and now itâs constantly âCanât continue editingâ (v. 90) or âYour photo couldnât be processed correctlyâ (v. 89).
Instagram is a steadily collapsing platform and I shudder to think what itâll be like when they get to the 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado stage. I almost wonder if Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of asset-stripping and taking the good stuff into its own platform, to force us into their even shittier ecosystem. At this rate, others like meâlong-time usersâwill cease to use it and go with the likes of Pixelfed. I stay on there because of certain friends, but, like Facebook, at some stage, they may have to get accustomed to the notion that I am no longer on there for anyone else but a few clients. And they may bugger off, too, sick of every second item being an ad. Weâll have foretold this bent toward anti-quality years before the mainstream media catch on to it, as we have done with Google and Facebook, and all their gaffes.
I’ve had a great week with my new laptop, though it exhibits some of the same traits I’ve frequently seen with Windows 10: settings’ windows vanishing when attempting to load. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, demo PCs I’ve seen at the store have terrible reliability history scores, and mine is no exception. It ranked a 10 when it left Just Laptops in Auckland, but dropped to 1 when I began installing software on it. The lesson here is this: Windows 10 is allergic to software and usage. Never install a thing on it, and never touch it, and it might continue being a 10. It’s that simple.
Of course, there is the issue of updating it, and even a PC on absolutely stock settings has trouble with that âŠ
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donât seesee me on Twitter as often, itâs becausebecause itâsitâs no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canâtcanât be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenâreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
Everybody wants PS2. Still from The Professionals episode ‘Servant of Two Masters’.
I read this article in The Guardian, thinking: surely, after Microsoft rolled out some terrible updates, it wouldnât be so stupid as to do one that bricks customersâ computers again? Especially after the bug was reported a month ago.
The April update worked reasonably well, though I lost my wallpaper. But everything else was there, and I was using Vivaldi, which is a Chromium-based browser.
Then I rebooted.
That was it: my computer was bricked. The first boot, a very tiny rotating circle eventually appeared, but I couldnât do anything except move the circle with my mouse. Subsequent reboots just resulted in a black screenâsomething, I must say, I had already encountered with an earlier Windows update that saw my having to take the PC back to the shop.
I rebooted the computer three times to force it into recovery mode, but then there was another problem: neither mouse nor keyboard worked. It was as though USB was dead.
Out of sheer luck I had a PS/2 keyboard that was unused, and after more forced reboots, I was able to use the old keyboard to look at various recovery options. Remember: no input device on USB works, and this was a bug that had surfaced with the last update in February.
Forget system restore: the April update is a fresh OS, so there are no restore points.
I had no choice but to roll back to the previous version I had installed.
And here I am, back again, an hour wasted. It would probably be longer if I didnât have an SSD.
Microsoft, get your QC sorted, because this current model youâve employed over the last few years simply does not work. I have spent more hours on these updates than with any OS you have ever rolled out, and that includes XP Service Pack 3 on a comparatively ancient system.
And if you get stuck like I do, and like all those in The Guardianâs article did, I hope you still have a way of plugging in a PS/2 device and have an old-school keyboard lying around.
Since Facebook bought Instagram, itâs been getting buggier, of course.
Iâve complained about Instagram uploading a series of posts in a totally different order to what I had (which, on ANZAC Day, made it difficult for anyone to follow the story I was trying to tell on my account when the order is 2, 1, 5, 4, 3, 6, 7).
Video (2) was an interesting one, because Instagram allowed me to post something that was 2 minutes, 6 seconds long, which it had never done before (or since).
I thought it odd at the time but given that it was twice as long as normal, I didnât complain. It allowed me to show more of the Air Force band performing ‘Au e ihuâ (Soldierâs Hymn).
I did complain about one particular video featuring our national anthem which Instagram would say was loading, then on checking again, it would vanish. I made three attempts over a two-hour period before it âstuckâ (video no. 3 in the sequence above). I had to wonder if Instagram was picking up the music and flagging it as a copyright violation: after all, YouTube flags static as copyright violations (hat tip to Retrorechercher).
Above: Instagram says these two are loading, but the one featuring our national anthem (the top one) kept vanishing. It never made it on to my account without three attempts.
This morning, on checking the stats, I noticed that no one had viewed the longer video, and, after asking some friends on Twitter, learned that Instagram blocked anyone from seeing it. Itâs like shadow-banning on Twitter: you can see your own stuff, but no one else can. Try it for yourselfâhere’s the link Instagram claims it’s at.
Look at the eighth post down. On my account (top), I can see it. When logged in as someone else (above), I can’t. Instagram’s version of shadow-banning?
I can still play it straight from Instagram on the web and on my phone.
You can give the MP4 a shot here (and note the URL, which is an Instagram one, and the duration). The thumbnail is here.
However, I canât embed the video the normal way, and any link that it lets me share results in a 404. It all feels very familiar, because this is the sort of bug that Facebook used to cook up, e.g. on days when you couldnât post, like, comment or share, or tag yourself in a photograph.
I might save the two-minute-long video separately in case thereâs a way you can tell that it was edited inside Instagram.
To sum up: Instagram will not load content in the same order you do (we already know this); it will permit much longer videos that exceed one minute, but if they let it through, no one will ever see it except you. We also know that Facebook will pump through any advertising on to Instagram, even in categories you have expressly asked not to be shown.
There you have it, Instagram in 2018.
PS., April 25, 1.19 a.m. GMT: I’ve just tried a 2 minute 50 second video, and it appears it is visible. For how long, I don’t know. Check it out here, or, if the embed’s visible below, have a look.
P.PS., 1.59 a.m. GMT:Looks like four minutes is fine, too. While the first one is still invisible, it does appear Instagram has lifted the one-minute limit, and that’s not something I can find documented anywhere. Still, I’m grateful, because it makes far more sense to show two- to four-minute vids.
P.P.PS., 8.54 a.m. GMT: Just tried one at seven minutes, and it’s hidden. Seems Instagram is very inconsistent on what it shows and what it doesn’t. Link is here (it won’t work) and the MP4 is here.
As many of you know, between around December 8 and February 2âdates during which I had Microsoft Windows 10âs fall Creators update without the January 31 cumulative patchâmy computer suffered roughly three to six BSODs per day. Going on to Bleeping Computer was helpful, but Microsoftâs wisdom tended to be hackneyed and predictable.
While I was lucky at Microsoft Answers and got a tech who wasnât rehashing remarks from other threads, eventually he gave up and suggested I download the old spring Creators update, if that was the last version that was OK.
I never had the time, and on February 2, I got the cumulative patch and everything has been fine since.
It means, of course, that Microsoft had released a lemon at the end of 2017 and needed a big patch to deal with the problems it had caused. No word to their people on the forum though, who were usually left scratching their heads and concluding that the only option was a clean installation.
I had bet one of the techs, however, that there was nothing wrong with my set-up, and everything to do with the OS. We know Windows is no longer robust because of the QC processes Microsoft uses, with each team checking its own code. Thatâs like proofreading your own work. You donât always spot the errors.
I said I could walk into any computer store and find that the display models were crashing as well.
Last weekend, I did just that.
Here are the Reliability Monitors of two Dell laptops running factory settings picked at random at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt.
Above: The Reliability Monitors of two display Dell laptops at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt, picked at random.
Above: My Reliability Monitor doesn’t look too bad by comparisonâand suggests that it’s Microsoft, not my set-up, that was responsible for the multiple BSODs.
The Monitors look rather like my own, not scoring above 2 out of 10.
They are crashing on combase.dll for the most part, whereas mineâs crashing on ntdll.dll. Nevertheless, these are crashes that shouldnât be happening, and a new machine shouldnât have a reliability score that low.
For those of you who suspect you have done nothing wrong, that your computer has always worked till recently, and you practise pretty good computer maintenance, your gutâs probably right. The bugs arenât your fault, but that of slapdash, unchecked programming. I doubt you need full reinstallations. You may, however, have to put up with the bugs till a patch is released. It is the folly of getting an update too earlyâa lesson that was very tough to relearn this summer.
Now that I’ve gone four days without a BSOD, it does appear Microsoft realized it had rolled out another lemon, and, nearly two months later, patched things. Goodness knows how many hours it has cost people worldwideâthe forums have a lot of people reporting BSODs (maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I really don’t remember this many, ever). I posted this in a discussion entitled âWindows 10 is a nightmare!’, and the comments there make for sobering reading. A small number have had to purchase new computers; others report that the OS has made their computers unusable or that countless hours were spent trying to fix things. I can believe it. My addition:
I have to concur with the original poster: Windows 10 has been, hands-down, the most shockingly unreliable OS ever made, by anyone, anywhere.
I have spent more time here for this OS than at any other time with Microsoft productsâand Windows 10 has been terrible from day one.
Most recently, I have had multiple BSODs per day since the fall Creators update was installed, and until Microsoft rolled out a patch at the end of January that finally fixed problems of its own making. If your computer is BSODing multiple times a day, with 800-plus events in the reliability monitor per week, then you can imagine how little work gets done. Things finally calmed down on February 2, when I received the cumulative update. You can see the thread for yourself here: I actually feel sorry for the MS tech who stepped in, because heâs solving problems a crap product with faults not of his own making. They wonât be bugs that are in his handbook. Looking at this part of the forum alone, BSOD comes up a lot in the subject lines, more than I ever remember. So it isnât us, Microsoft, itâs you.
Going right back to day one, I canât believe how many threads Iâm involved in. Windows 10 started up differently each day, as it would forget its own settings each day. Some days Cortana worked, other days it didnât. Sometimes I had the UK keyboard (which I had never once installed), other days the US. In November 2015 I had to post a queryto ask how many hours it would take for a Windows 10 machine to shut down. Thatâs right, hours. At least thatâs better than some of you who commented earlier who canât get yours to start up.
Initially, Cortana required fiddling with each day to get it to work. Notifications once went back in timeâon a Saturday I began getting notifications from the previous Thursday. None from Friday though, they all vanished. Windows began forgetting my default browser and default PDF application, and no, you couldnât fix either from the standard settings. The Anniversary update took 11 attempts to install on this PCâand one of them screwed things up so badly my PC was bricked and wound up at the shop, where I had to spend money to get it fixed urgently. (I joked at the time it was called Windows 10 because you needed more than 10 attempts to do anything.) It never installed on my laptop at all: by the time Creators spring came round, the one update that was compatible with my laptop, it had been through 40 unsuccessful update cycles.
Thereâs still more that I can share, and you can probably find it via my profile. I would add more but on the original reply I actually hit a limit on these boxes. I guess Microsoft has a limit to how much bad news it can take from one user.
Microsoft has actually changed its QC procedures for the worseâthat is a matter of recordâand youâd think after three years of abject failure they would switch back. We see the same hackneyed official responses here day in, day out. They need to spend more time getting things right before they ship their OSs, and spare their community people a lot of wasted hours with solutions that generally do not work. In my latest thread, I fixed itâyes, the tech helped a bit, but ultimately I had to listen to my gut and believe that MS had messed up. I was right, but wow, at a massive cost to my real job with days lost to being Microsoftâs unpaid technician.
It is good, however, to come out the other side (knock on wood)âand despite the countless hours spent, I was once again right, and conventional wisdom was wrong. I’m not sure if that’s something to be that proud of. A healthy mistrust of big firms stands one in good stead nevertheless, and remember, every industry has thick people making stuff.
I wonder if we have finally got there with Windows 10âs many BSOD crashes.
Since my last post on the subject in late January, I have had a few more BSODs, but (knock on wood) things have been more stable for a few days. Then again, I haven’t pushed the computer quite as much. Here’s how the Reliability Monitor is looking:
Changes since my last post included adding lines to eudora.ini to switch Quicktime off, which seems to have stabilized that program, and brought the number of appcrash crash messages down.
However, when I did get a BSOD a few days ago, it looked like this (again after using Explorer):
The memory dump revealed nothing new; it was the same as the one I saw when all this began (as far as I can make out).
The big change seemed to have happened after I installed the Intel chipsets, and the number of crashes reduced from dozens to between seven and ten.
I don’t think I have got to an absolute cure yet, but we are getting closer.
The cumulative Windows update (KB4058258) released a couple of days ago may have helped, tooâif it did, it showed that Microsoft had released a lemon with the fall Creators update and rushed to fix things. The number of fixes during the month of January alone suggested that they knew that the OS was iffy. That update was installed yesterday.
Microsoft should rename Windowsâ Reliability Monitor to Unreliability Monitor.
This isn’t too unusual for Windows 10, is it?
I’ve put Oracle Virtualbox and Cyberlink Power2Go back on, because it’s becoming more apparent that Windows 10 is incompatible with my hard drives in certain circumstances. It’s always when a drive (including a phone set up as a drive) is accessed that the system BSODs. It may also be a USB incompatibility. To be on the safe side, I have unplugged one of the two external drives I use.
The Microsoft technician has finally given up and asked I do a clean install. As if I have the timeâthe last time I did that was on an Imac: it took days to get all the OS X updates and the software up and running again. Bwv848 at Bleeping Computer is, like me, determined. I’ll do a memtest (their latest suggestion) when I get a chance.
Just another day using Windows 10 then.
PS.: Since the post: as my settings window would not come up (another fault of Creators fall), I deleted everything out of C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe. That was solved. I also went to Intel to download SetupChipset.exe. Not saying these are solutions to the original cause, and I was largely away from the computer for Sunday. However, I have a real suspicion that, because the computer often BSODs when Explorer (or something relying up on it) is open, there are hard-drive drivers that are failing despite, according to Device Manager, being up to date. One of the modules regularly affected is ntdll.dll, something the Reliability Monitor revealed.âJY
It’s fast becoming apparent that Windows 10âs fall Creators update is a lemon, just like the original Windows 10.
As those of you who have followed my posts know, my PC began BSODing multiple times daily, on average. There were brief interludes (it went for three days without a BSOD once, and yesterday it only BSODed once) but these (now) anomalies don’t really diminish my ‘three to six per day’ claim I made earlier by much.
And it’s all to do with drivers. I won’t repeat earlier posts but the result was that drivers that came with Mozy, McAfee, Malwarebytes and Oracle Virtualbox caused these. In Mozy’s case, it was an old one. Same with McAfee, the remnants of a program that even their removal tool could not take out. Malwarebytes didn’t even show up in the installed programs’ list, and required another program. In Virtualbox’s case, there were both old and new drivers. They all had to be removed, in most cases manually, because removal procedures don’t seem to take them out. This is a failing, I believe.
But with all these drivers gone, I still had a BSOD this morning. Four before lunch. The culprit this time was a CLVirtualDrive.sys driver that came with Cyberlink Power2Go, which came bundled when I replaced by DVD burner last year.
And Cyberlink knows something is wrong with this driver. On December 13, two days after I began getting BSODs, it issued a patch for its latest version. Of course, it leaves those of us with older versions in the lurch, and I was surprised to find that the one it had issued for mine (years old) wouldn’t even run because I was on a bundled OEM edition.
I’m crying foul. If your program is causing BSODs, then I feel it’s your responsibility to help us out. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a trial version, because this is a window into your business. This signals that Cyberlink doesn’t really want to offer a simple download to prevent users from losing hours each day to fixing their computers, even when they’re partly to blame for the problems.
Let me say this publicly now: if any of our fonts cause system crashes like this, contact me and I will provide you with fresh copies with which you can upgrade your computer.
I’m removing Power2Go as I write. It’s superfluous anyway: I only use it because it came as part of the bundle. Windows’ default burning works well enough for me.
But there’s one thing that Cyberlink’s pages have confirmed: the fall Creators update has problems and it seems to me that it is incompatible with many earlier Windows drivers. We can lay a lot of these problems at Microsoft’s feet. Indeed, based on my experience, you could go far as to say that Windows 10 is now incompatible with many Windows programs.
That’s all well and good if you have a new computer and the latest software, but what of those of us with older ones who will, invariably, have older drivers or upgraded from older systems?
Are we now reaching an era where computing is divided between the haves and have-nots? It’s not as though decent new computers at the shops have got any cheaper of late.
