Windows 10 May Reserve Another 7GB For Updates.

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, mr moose said:

yes, 512k should be enough ram for most users.

We will never need a 32bit OS for home use.

[mr moose]

Just now, Drak3 said:

We will never need a 32bit OS for home use.

"I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers"

[LAwLz]

11 minutes ago, mr moose said:

yes, 512k should be enough ram for most users.

6 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

We will never need a 32bit OS for home use.

I don't understand what point or arguments you're trying to make here.

 

Are you saying that Windows absolutely needs to be as big as it is, and that it is not possible to make it smaller?

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

 

I don't understand what point or arguments you're trying to make here.

 

Are you saying that Windows absolutely needs to be as big as it is, and that it is not possible to make it smaller?

No,  We're just not that absorbed by the idea that 7GB is so large that people must be doing something really wrong.  I get it there are a few machines out there that will struggle to have a few GB free let alone 7, we also understand that windows is not perfect.  But making out the 7GB is the end of the world is silly when you consider everything is getting bigger, sometimes massively bigger and other times not so much,  remember when GPU drivers where 300KB? now they a 400MB, are they bloated and shit and archaic etc etc etc?  maybe a little bit but it isn't the end of the world.

[Drak3]

24 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Are you saying that Windows absolutely needs to be as big as it is

Nothing in modern computing needs to be as big as it is.

 

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

and that it is not possible to make it smaller?

Possible, yes. Worthwhile, fuck no.

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Anyway, I think people who are saying "just get more storage is missing the point".

The point is that Windows is very, very bloated. The space Windows 10 now has to reserve for updates along, is more than most operating systems need, period. And it's not because Windows 10 is so much more complex and requires all that space. It's because Windows 10 (and Windows in general) is poorly engineered by modern standards.

 

Throwing more hardware at bad software does work, but it's a bad practice that really should stop. The better hardware have gotten, the more sloppy and worse written software has become, which negates the better hardware.

Throwing more hardware at a problem obviously isn't the best solution, but optimization costs so much more than dirt cheap hardware that most people already have. Virtually all software could be optimized to be significantly faster or significantly smaller, but it isn't done because it would be such a ridiculously tedious and poor business decision.

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, 79wjd said:

Throwing more hardware at a problem obviously isn't the best solution, but optimization costs so much more than dirt cheap hardware that most people already have. Virtually all software could be optimized to be significantly faster or significantly smaller, but it isn't done because it would be such a ridiculously tedious and poor business decision.

We also see Microsoft being held to a double standard, "they need to remove bloat and slim up the OS, but can't replace legacy components like Win32," which is exactly what Apple does and the Linux maintainers do.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

No,  We're just not that absorbed by the idea that 7GB is so large that people must be doing something really wrong. 

When the space your product needs for updates alone is more than what other require for their entire product stack, while not really providing that much difference in terms of functionality then something is fundamentally wrong.

 

If the Volkswagen Golf got 40 miles per gallon, and the Kia Ceed, Mazda 3, Ford Focus and other similar cars got 60 miles to the gallon then I'd start questioning what the hell Volkswagen was doing, and think that they needed to focus on improving their fuel efficiency.

"Just drive to a petrol station more often" is not a valid argument, nor is "but it has a bigger tank" or "just buy better hardware".

 

 

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

I get it there are a few machines out there that will struggle to have a few GB free let alone 7, we also understand that windows is not perfect.  But making out the 7GB is the end of the world is silly when you consider everything is getting bigger, sometimes massively bigger and other times not so much,  remember when GPU drivers where 300KB? now they a 400MB, are they bloated and shit and archaic etc etc etc?  maybe a little bit but it isn't the end of the world.

I am not sure if you saw the thread about Blizzard's launcher but I thought that was bloated and insane that a game launcher required 200MB too. It's something that should take up maybe 1MB, not 200MB.

 

Yes, things are getting bigger. But a lot of times it's not because the programs actually need to be bigger, it's because developers are lazy and writing shitty code. Did you know that I have more than 5 instances of Chrome installed on my computer? Did you know that it runs several times slower than native code, and uses more power?

If the programs I used weren't so sloppily written I would have much higher performance, longer battery life and more space on my disk. It's such a colossal waste, and while the Blizzard launcher in and of itself isn't an issue, all these programs being bloated adds up. It's death by a thousand cuts.

 

I think it's really sad that Intel have to work extremely hard to bring minor improvements to their processors. They slave away and eek out maybe a 5% IPC increase from one generation to the next, and then a developer comes by and uses a library that is 5% slower than another one, completely negating the performance increase we would have gotten.

 

 

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Nothing in modern computing needs to be as big as it is.

  

Possible, yes. Worthwhile, fuck no.

Then I really don't understand what you meant by your previous post. Can you explain why you said that "We will never need a 32bit OS for home use"?

 

 

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Possible, yes. Worthwhile, fuck no.

Microsoft has been working on a project to slim Windows down. It's called Windows 10 Lean. I just think that the entire platform is in dire need of a diet and quite frankly rewrite on top of a change in design philosophy.

 

 

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

We also see Microsoft being held to a double standard, "they need to remove bloat and slim up the OS, but can't replace legacy components like Win32," which is exactly what Apple does and the Linux maintainers do.

Not sure what you mean. Are you implying that the only reason why other operating systems are smaller is because they do not have compatibility with older applications? Because that's false. If it weren't for package manager differences, very old GNU/Linux programs would be able to run on modern distros today. 

 

Things like system libraries takes up very little space. 

user32_dll for example implements a large part of the user interface components in Windows (for example window management). It also includes components for message passing and input processing. The entire library takes up less than 800KB and contains over 1000 functions.

kernel.dll is another one of the very large libraries. It has something like 1400 functions in it and takes up 837KB.

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Can you explain why you said that "We will never need a 32bit OS for home use"?

Yes, technology will make old hardware and software standards obsolete. There is no reason to target obsolete technology that exists in a small niche and has for quite a while now.

 

Jusy because there are alternatives that still run on obsolete machines does not justify using obsolete hardware, nor is it a valid argument for one product no longer accommodating said obsolete hardware.

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Yes, technology will make old hardware and software standards obsolete. There is no reason to target obsolete technology that exists in a small niche and has for quite a while now.

Jusy because there are alternatives that still run on obsolete machines does not justify using obsolete hardware, nor is it a valid argument for one product no longer accommodating said obsolete hardware.

Again, fitting a larger tank in a car is not a reason to completely ignore miles per gallon. In what way is optimizing your program to use less resources "targeting obsolete technology"? All it does is make it possible to run on lower end hardware, while simulations performing better on newer hardware.

 

"Just refuel more often" is not an argument for being inefficient.

"Just get a larger fuel tank" is not an argument for being inefficient either.

 

Think of it like this. Let's say I get 40 FPS in Minecraft.

Someone else with a worse computer than me is only getting 15 FPS, which makes it a very bad experience.

Right now I'm saying "Minecraft performs really poorly for what it does". Let's say Minecraft was rewritten so that it performed twice as well.

All of a sudden the person with the bad computer gets 30 FPS, which is decent enough to play it on. That person no longer needs to get a new computer. I who could already play Minecraft at 40 FPS suddenly gets 80 FPS. My experience has improved too.

 

It doesn't mean Minecraft is all of a sudden "targeting obsolete computers". It just means the code is better and it just happens that it runs decently on weaker hardware.

Something that runs decently on weak hardware runs very well on good hardware.

[Drak3]

14 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Think of it like this. Let's say I get 40 FPS in Minecraft.

Someone else with a worse computer than me is only getting 15 FPS, which makes it a very bad experience.

Right now I'm saying "Minecraft performs really poorly for what it does". Let's say Minecraft was rewritten so that it performed twice as well.

All of a sudden the person with the bad computer gets 30 FPS, which is decent enough to play it on. That person no longer needs to get a new computer. I who could already play Minecraft at 40 FPS suddenly gets 80 FPS. My experience has improved too.

Why? You won't see that gain reducing Window's size.

 

15 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Again, fitting a larger tank in a car is not a reason to completely ignore miles per gallon. In what way is optimizing your program to use less resources "targeting obsolete technology"? All it does is make it possible to run on lower end hardware, while simulations performing better on newer hardware.

 

"Just refuel more often" is not an argument for being inefficient.

"Just get a larger fuel tank" is not an argument for being inefficient either.

No point in wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in development just to save what is now an inconsequential amount of disk space.

 

The only machines that are "made or broken" by 7GB, are machines struggling in all aspects and the experience of them cannot be improved by any meaningful margin.

 

So again, it's just a waste of time and dime.

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Why? You won't see that gain reducing Window's size.

  

No point in wasting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in development just to save what is now an inconsequential amount of disk space.

  

The only machines that are "made or broken" by 7GB, are machines struggling in all aspects and the experience of them cannot be improved by any meaningful margin.

 

So again, it's just a waste of time and dime.

I don't think you fully grasp what I'm talking about. You see it as a few megabytes saved. I see it as better battery life, performance, less storage used and fewer bugs/issues.

 

One function in Windows might be used by tens or hundreds of programs, thousands of times a day. Making that code more efficient can have a dramatic impact on all those things. If the code is cleaned up too, it can be easier to do maintenance on the code and less risk of errors when doing changes to programs which hooks into the code.

 

I also specifically said that while one program (or maybe OS) in and of itself might not be a major issue, this is a trend that is happening with everything right now, and if I have 20 poorly written programs on my computer then it certainly has a major effect compared to if all of them were great.

 

Like I mentioned earlier, I have over 5 installations of Chrome on my computer. Those programs are all much slower, uses a lot more RAM, and takes up far more space than if they were properly written (in something like Qt).

 

 

As long as people defend each individual program with "just buy better hardware lol" then this trend of shitty software will continue.

You keep going back to "if you can't handle an increase of 7GB then your computer sucks!", which is not what I am talking about. Again, to back to the miles per gallon comparison. A big tank or close to gas station is not an excuse for a car to have significantly worse miles to the gallon than the competitors.

[Drak3]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

this is a trend that is happening with everything right now

This has always happened.

 

The only time it doesn't happen is when a platform isn't going to see hardware upgrades for years (ie game consoles).

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

This has always happened.

  

The only time it doesn't happen is when a platform isn't going to see hardware upgrades for years (ie game consoles).

No it has not always happened, and definitely not on this scale.

You don't have to go back that long to see things getting written in asm because things like C didn't give enough performance.

 

Anyway, it is a problem that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The more resources we have to spare, the lazies and less optimized programs become. I can't think of any widely used framework as bloated as Electron that existed let's say 10 years ago for example (A Hello world program in Electron is 115MB, it's 1KB in asm without optimizations).

 

 

Also, I don't get your attitude. Are you implying that because it has always been a problem (which I disagree with), it's not worth fixing or complaining about? All our currently unsolved issues have been issues in the past, so are none of those worth fixing either? That's a very defeatist attitude.

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

This has always happened.

 

The only time it doesn't happen is when a platform isn't going to see hardware upgrades for years (ie game consoles).

And it's not because of lazy or even bad developers. It's happening because it literally doesn't pay to put in the money to refactor and optimize most software due to high development costs compared to cheap hardware costs.

 

Windows would absolutely be better and cheaper to maintain if it was re-written from the ground up and effort was put into optimization, unfortunately, a windows home license would also cost significantly more money, leading to a significant increase in the cost of anything running Windows. Ultimately hurting the consumer far more than some performance penalty caused by a lack of heavy optimization.

[79wjd]

 

Quote

You don't have to go back that long to see things getting written in asm because things like C didn't give enough performance.

Yeah, when hardware was expensive, higher dev costs made more sense. As hardware gets cheaper, high dev costs no longer make sense.

 

[LAwLz]

7 minutes ago, 79wjd said:

Yeah, when hardware was expensive, higher dev costs made more sense. As hardware gets cheaper, high dev costs no longer make sense.

I understand that, but when you are a software company, which is by far the most widely used PC operating system, then maybe you should invest some money into optimizing it.

"It costs money" is to me not a valid excuse for doing a poor job. Again, imagine if Volkswagen used that excuse for poor miles per gallon results compared to their competitors.

"It costs a lot of money to make the engines more efficient".

 

And yes I understand that Microsoft makes money basically regardless of how well optimized Windows is. I can understand business decisions for how to allocate resources without having to agree with it. What I am saying here is that I wish Microsoft would take better care of Windows than they do.

 

As a consumer and user of their product, I don't really care how much money they make from something. What I care about is how good the product is. I am not here to argue how Microsoft can create a product I will buy with as little effort as possible. I am here to voice my opinion about how I think Microsoft should make the product better for me. I am not employed by Microsoft so I don't have any obligation to defend them. I am a user so I should express what I want.

[Drak3]

6 minutes ago, 79wjd said:

It's happening because it literally doesn't pay to put in the money to refactor and optimize most software due to high development costs compared to cheap hardware costs.

Not only that, but the benefits Lawlz claims we would have from these optimizations, we don't see in Linux on anything but low end obsolete hardware. OSX sees the benefit of better batter life over some similarly spec'd Windowd and Linux machines, but that speaks volumes about the merits of controlling drivers, hardware, and software, not because OSX takes up less disk space.

[LAwLz]

15 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Not only that, but the benefits Lawlz claims we would have from these optimizations, we don't see in Linux on anything but low end obsolete hardware. OSX sees the benefit of better batter life over some similarly spec'd Windowd and Linux machines, but that speaks volumes about the merits of controlling drivers, hardware, and software, not because OSX takes up less disk space. 

What suggestions exactly do you think I have suggested?

I don't see how reducing the time it takes to execute a specific function from 5 cycles to 4 "only benefits low end obsolete hardware".

The benefits are just as big on all types of hardware.

 

Like I said, 15 to 30 FPS on one computer could be 40 to 80 FPS on another.

 

And you completely ignore the point about code maintenance and readability, which can lead to fewer bugs/issues.

[jagdtigger]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

But making out the 7GB is the end of the world is silly when you consider everything is getting bigger

The only silly thing here is your stance. Just because everything is getting bigger and faster it doesnt mean they can take the lazy route... And you shouldnt make any excuses for them either. They became lazy AF and now their decision comes back to haunt them.

[Drak3]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I see it as better battery life, performance, less storage used and fewer bugs/issues.

 

24 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What suggestions exactly do you think I have suggested?

Those ones.

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Like I said, 15 to 30 FPS on one computer could be 40 to 80 FPS on another.

That's not going to happen. The only imrpovements to be seen will be old, low end junk.

 

25 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

And you completely ignore the point about code maintenance and readability, which can lead to fewer bugs/issues.

Only on paper.

[Uttamattamakin]

1. Not calling anyone out by name but certain responses ...  Not all users are like LTT users.  Many many people buy the minimum computer that will meet their needs.  For a long time 32GB for EMMC on a netbook type device was enough.  It still is enough. 
2. There is no real technical reason for this 7GB of the boot drive, which is most often the only drive.  MS is doing this arbitrarily because they are lazy.     The problem of botched updates could be solved simply by better communication and more user choice.

It was asked do people who use a computer for school need more than 32 GB?  After this 7 GB yes.  Windows itself takes 23.4 GB on my Surface pro LTE.  With seven more that is 30.4 GB....just for windows...  

 

30.4GB just for windows. 

Leaving only 2GB for MS Office (or any other office).

That is the problem. 

WTF Microsoft indeed.

[Drak3]

21 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

There is no real technical reason for this 7GB of the boot drive, which is most often the only drive.

Yes, there is. This ensures that future updates won't encounter issues with storage.

22 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

For a long time 32GB for EMMC on a netbook type device was enough.  It still is enough. 

Evidentally not.

 

22 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

That is the problem

The problem is that people buying obsolete and inadequate hardware still expect accommodation.

[jagdtigger]

10 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Yes, there is. This ensures that future updates won't encounter issues with storage.

No, you are wrong. The proper way to do it is to check the available space before starting the update process. Any other solution is just a bodge job.

 

12 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

The problem is that people buying obsolete and inadequate hardware still expect accommodation.

Problem is the lazy devs who do not want to spend time on optimizing code.

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Problem is the lazy devs who do not want to spend time on optimizing code.

It isn't worth the time or money to optimize the code. To 99% of users, there is no benefit, so why the fuck should end users foot that bill and get nothing in return?

6 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

The proper way to do it is to check the available space before starting the update process. Any other solution is just a bodge job.

According to who? This is a valid, and IMO superior, solution.

6 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

No, you are wrong.

Far from it. It's time to stop accommodating low end, obsolete hardware for no valid reason.

 

And the pathetic excuse of "Linux doesn't have this 'problem" is tiring. The only people who give a fuck about Linux are on Linux already. The rest of us do not fucking care, because Linux is not good enough to switch over.