Windows Update Facts [possible satire]

Introduction

Windows Update is a service offered by Microsoft to update components of its software.

These facts illustrate how horribly slow Windows Update is and how it is annoying to use.

Windows Update Facts

  • Windows Update doesn’t.

  • Aesop originally wanted to write his fable as “The Hare and Windows Update” instead of “The Hare and the Tortoise” but could not figure out how the hare will ever lose to Windows Update, even despite him not taking the race seriously.

  • By the time it takes Windows Update to download a 22 MB update without installing it, Mageia Linux’s urpmi was already able to download and install a game whose package is 900 MB (and there was still a lot of time to spare).

  • Only three things are infinite: the universe, human stupidity, and the amount of patience that Windows Update requires.

  • Windows Update does not take forever to finish updating your computer. It takes at least forever and two weeks.

  • Ten measures of slowness went down to the world. Windows Update required at least eleven, so more had to be provided.

  • The Windows Update developers are going to burn in hell for the combined time it took it to install updates on the users' computers.

  • Windows Update is called this way because by the time it finishes, the date has gone up.

    AuthorTrashlord
  • The heat death of the universe is best approximated as half the time it would have taken Windows Update to install a year’s worth of updates.

  • If the Hare in the "Tortoise and the Hare" was pitted against Windows Update, he could have taken a two weeks-long vacation in the Caribbean and still win.

  • What Intel gives, Microsoft taketh, and Windows Update holds hostage.

  • איזופוס במקור רצה לכתוב את המשל שלו כ"הארנבת ו-Windows Update" במקום "הארנבת והצב", אבל הוא לא הצליח להעלות בדעתו דרך שבה הארנבת הייתה מפסידה ל-Windows Update אפילו למרות העובדה שהיא לא לקחה את המירוץ ברצינות.

  • בזמן שלוקח ל-Windows Update להוריד עדכון של 22 מגהבית מבלי להתקין אותו, תוכנת urpmi של מאגיה לינוקס הספיקה כבר להוריד ולהתקין משחק שגודל החבילה שלו הוא 900 מגהבית (ונותר עוד זמן רב).

  • רק שלושה דברים הם אינסופיים: הייקום, טפשות האדם, וכמות הסבלנות ש-Windows Update דורש.

  • עשרה קבין של איטיות ירדו לעולם. Windows Update היה צריך לפחות אחד עשר, אז היה דרוש לספק קבין נוספים.

  • המפתחים של Windows Update הולכים להשרף בגהנום למשך הזמן המשולב שלקח להתקין עדכונים על המחשבים של המשתמשים בו.

Copyright and Licence

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2016, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-by-sa) 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

See Also

  • Software disenchantment - highlights Windows Update’s slowness.

  • Windows Update - IRC Log.

  • “Windows UpHate” - It's recently caused people to miss out on large parts of their exams

  • “Businesses Being Starved of Competent Employees”:

    Eric S. Raymond and I have a hypothesis that Microsoft wishes to deprecate the original Microsoft Windows Internals, and gradually replace them with an open source reimplementation based on Linux, GNU, and Wine. That is because optimising, refactoring, or otherwise enhancing them, have been made more and more discouraged due to the (possibly justified) policy to not break legacy 3rd-party applications (including many old ones or ones with no source available). Programmers and other software developers who wish to work on them, whether young, old, experienced, or inexperienced, are thus frustrated at the process' lack of flexibility and agility that they become unhappy, aggravated and complain. Other obstacles are the iffy legal status of the codebase, which prevents opensourcing it like .NET Core, and its reported lack of elegance.

    Given these developers can easily find many other openings as software developers or other high paying jobs (including on different teams within Microsoft) and increasingly wish to enjoy their work (being geeks or "amateurs"), the team is starved of competent, and enthusiastic workers. Even if Microsoft still sells Windows copies, they are being starved of employees.

    Another note about Microsoft Windows is that I suspect, that in their “Professional”/“Server” sub-line of Windows (such as Windows Server 2003 , Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2019), Microsoft has disabled, either in runtime, or in compile-time ( #ifdef/etc. ) compatibility code. As a result, misbehaving legacy applications will not run there, while properly-coded-or-fixed ones will run faster and with fewer quirks.

    Note: Microsoft has many other products and services, many of them are FOSS and/or provide important services or infrastructure for open source, , or otherwise geeky, hackery or important projects. So I do not wish to completely demonise them. In fact, I make use of some of the Microsoft-owned infrastructure for many projects of mine, including my home-site, and it seems the user experience of GitHub improved since the acquisition by Microsoft, and I am also a fan of TypeScript.