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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Thank you @Leo from talking Steve off the cliff about Win7 end of life. But perhaps you could extend this further. Similar to your thoughts concerning overly extreme reviews (such as the really harsh Pixel 4 reviews) there are many other example of this. For example:
- Apple can have many iOS13 bugs yet they are only supporting a few dozen known devices that they also have full control over. Why so many bugs?
- I love Linux, but to the people you recommend it to on your weekend radio show, they literally have no one to reach out to for support. Isn’t this why you recommend iOS and Chromebooks?
- Microsoft and Google and Linux actually release detailed logs of the security vulnerabilities they are patching. And then the press proceeds to count the fixes and then skewer them for being public about it. Other companies release a blob patch, and just say “security” as the reason for the update and the tech press let it go, nothing to report
- Linux and Microsoft are able to support a huge huge variety of hardware, I applaud them and thank them for the huge freedom of hardware choice this enables. And then we jump down their throats for conflicts.
…I could go on and on…
I rely on the tech press to help me understand the relative importance of the tech news, especially a news network made up of all pundits like TWiT. I love you all especially when you perform this job well. This is the value you add for me and I want more of this. Technopanic only makes me afraid, I want to be informed and be given counter points.
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Steve was ranting about Windows 7 EOL and the fact that large corporations can buy extra support, but private users and small businesses can’t.
I would say here, that the price of a Windows edition is designed to cover its maintenance for 10 years. Once those 10 years are up, support of the product starts costing money that can’t be collected through revenue from new licences - that is already going on supporting the current version(s).
Large companies often have legacy software that is hard (or very expensive) to replace. I’ve worked at several companies that have had this problem, although none were big enough to qualify to buy Microsoft’s extended support. In the cases I was involved with, it was industrial equipment that cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and the control PC ran Windows 95 or Windows XP and there was/is no upgrade path for newer software that will work on Windows 7/8/10. Well, there is, throw out a perfectly functional machine costing several hundred thousand dollars and replace it with a new one, just to get a version of the software that will run on a supported version of Windows!
In that sort of situation, where the machine has an expected productive live of over a decade, paying for a few years of support is chicken feed. But it isn’t an option. Instead, we either remove them from the network completely or put them on an isolated segment.
On the other hand, I can understand Microsoft only offering this to customers with SA and a large number of seats, they already have the infrastructure in place to distribute their own updates and they, generally have only a few external, fixed IPs that need to be cleared for pushing the patches out to their distribution servers.
If Microsoft were to let private users subscribe, it would be a bit of a nightmare, because 99% of them won’t have a fixed, public IP address and they won’t be running their own patch distribution architecture. It would be an absolute nightmare to manage and probably price the patches out of the realm of end users anyway (in fact, how many end users would be actually willing to pay $100, $200 and $400 a year for 3 years of additional patches for Windows 7?).
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Apple can have many iOS13 bugs yet they are only supporting a few dozen known devices that they also have full control over. Why so many bugs?
The amount of supported hardware has nothing to do with the number of bugs in the software itself - drivers are another matter. Getting the software to work on a limited amount of hardware is much easier, but most of the critical bugs are in the kernel and services, not in the hardware drivers. -
Microsoft and Google and Linux actually release detailed logs of the security vulnerabilities they are patching. And then the press proceeds to count the fixes and then skewer them for being public about it. Other companies release a blob patch, and just say “security” as the reason for the update and the tech press let it go, nothing to report
Adobe and Cisco, for example, get lampooned in the IT press a lot for their bugs, especially the number of backdoors being patched in Cisco kit over the last 2 years! But if a company doesn’t issue public release notes, there isn’t much the press can do, other than moan about the lack of transparency.
I haven’t seen any overly harsh reviews of the Pixel 4, most of them aren’t glowing, but I haven’t seen any hugely negative reviews.
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About the pixel 4 reviews, Leo was talking about this on the weekend radio show, the tech guy. I think it was on both the Saturday and Sunday show. It was interesting to here his viewpoint on this.
I think I might just be tired of hearing Steve complain about Win7 support ending and his reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe this is just me. Sorry if I made it an issue if it wasn’t to everyone else.
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I agree completely with you @big_D. Steve just needs to get over it. It’s not like he complains about not being able to use iOS6 anymore, LoL, it was a perfectly good OS, LoL, I love Steve. He’ll never change, LoL
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I always found that interesting, he has no problems with getting his Kindles, iPads or iPhones updated to the latest OS without complaining, in fact saying it is a good thing, yet with Windows he always complains. That doesn’t make sense to me.
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Well, it’s pretty simple. When you bought your car, it came with a 3-7 year warranty (a generalization but applicable to most cases.) You love your car and have customized it to your tastes (maybe replacing the radio with an after market one, and buying expensive seat covers or something.) If the government came and told you that your perfectly good car was no longer allowed to be used, how would you feel about that?
I suspect Steve likes Windows 7, and it works well in the way he uses it, and he wants to keep using it that way. This is the reason he complains about it being EOL for consumers when MS is clearly willing to not EOL for businesses that pay big bucks.
One could make the argument that a manufacturer of any product should be required to keep that product from becoming a public liability. Think of the Volkswagon Diesel-gate as an example. Perhaps MS should have been required to set aside enough money to fund the minimal necessary security patching for any version of Windows they ever sold, such that it doesn’t become a public security risk. If that had been a requirement, then when you bought the software, you would know it was yours to use as long as you chose to.
On the other hand, Steve has found a way to subdue some of Microsoft’s more egregious “issues” built into Windows 10. (Because he mentioned having done so to make his SQRL dev VM.) So at some point he will likely move to Windows 10 when he can no longer feel comfortable on Windows 7. Knowing him, that could be nearly a decade.
Not really comparable. You can keep using the car, but if bits break or wear out, you need to replace them, which costs real money. The problem is, if Microsoft charged consumers $50 for each patch, hardly anybody would pay.
You can’t, unfortunately, compare hardware and software. Just look at intelligent fridges etc. the “intelligent” part, that cost all that money, gets dumped after a couple of years of support, yet the fridge part will probably still be working in 10 to 15 years time.
The EU is talking about making it illegal for manufacturers to build in obsolescence into white goods, like washing machines and fridges. They want them to last for at least 10 years of service, to reduce waste and are looking to extend the mandatory warranty to 10 years for such devices.
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I think you might have people pay if it was $50 a year.
Totally agreeing with Steve that Ford vs Ferrari is one of the best film this year bar none! 
Another great SN episode.
The conclusion I always get after listening to Security Now is that every software and hardware can be exploited, and if intended by the attacker, we’ll get hacked eventually. 
Don’t forget that the OS support life is just one component.
Most computer hardware vendors support their platform and driver updates for a much shorter span than Microsoft does for their OS. Not sure I would want to push MS into long term support for most consumer PCs.
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WOW, this has been a great / awesome discussion. Thank you @big_D for really taking the time to read my stupid long post and taking the time to make thoughtful responses. Thank you @PHolder for inserting the comparison of virtual items with physical items. Maybe I’ll write my own thoughts on this in another channel in the community. All in all, I wish Steve was just more consistent with his rules for how a company maintains their individual platforms and keeps them up to date. Have a good night.
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