Posted on 08/17/2020 6:20:58 AM PDT by dayglored
Also: Visual Studio Code update, new toys for Kubecon, and 25 years of the Start Button
In brief While eyes were on its new phone, Microsoft slipped out a pair of updates to the Insider version of Windows 10.
The Beta Channel (formerly known as the Slow Ring) received a round of security updates as well as a UWP authentication fix for the 20H2 release of the operating system (due at some point in the back half of 2020).
The Dev Channel, however, received that most rare of gifts in the form of build 20190: an update with some properly in-your-face user interface changes.
The "new post-update experience" now brings up the Tips app to show "the most exciting changes on your PC" after an Insider update has been inflicted on it. Assuming, of course, the thing still boots – this is preview code after all.
Acknowledging that "it doesn't always feel clear what changed with a major update," the gang will select what it feels are the most interesting new features and highlight them via the new first run experience. Clearly the insistence on firing up Edge after updating just wasn't cutting it.
The new experience can be turned off in the Notifications & Actions setting, where users will be intrigued to note that it may also appear "occasionally when I sign in".
The gang has also continued tweaking the graphics settings to allow users to specify which GPU should be used for which application as well as dealing with an issue that could leave explorer.exe borked on touch-capable devices after resuming from hibernation.
Developer darling Visual Studio Code celebrated August by releasing the July edition, version 1.48, with some handy improvements, notably in the browser-debugging arena, and previews of upcoming features, such as TypeScript 4 support.
Debugging a page previously required the "Debugger for Chrome" extension and a launch.json config file. The process has now been streamlined via a new Debug: Open Link command. The JavaScript debugger has also seen a raft of fixes and improvements.
Other useful improvements include some around source control (for example, making the source control view always show the repo rows) and the user interface. Additionally, all the text file encodings of desktop VS Code are now supported when running the editor in a browser.
Looking like it might emerge from preview soon is Settings Sync, which shares VS Code configurations over a user's machines (although requires a Microsoft or GitHub account). A Settings Sync Insiders service has also been added for the brave testers of the platform.
As yet another virtual conference kicked off, Microsoft rolled out updates to its Azure Kubernetes service.
Hitting general availability is node image update functionality, allowing upgrades while remaining on the same Kubernetes version. In preview is integration with the Azure Resource Health, to alert users when clusters are looking poorly and ephemeral OS disk support, "which makes responding to new compute demands on your cluster even faster," according to Brendan Burns, corporate veep for Azure Compute.
It's taken a while for Azure Ephemeral OS Disk to arrive for the Kubernetes service. Azure Ephemeral OS disks went to GA in July 2019, are created on local machines, and aimed at stateless workloads. The theory goes that read/write latency is lower and imaging is faster. The downsides include the loss of Azure Storage persistence.
How was your weekend? Did you throw a 25th anniversary party for the 15 August Release To Manufacturing of Windows 95? No? For shame.
Bringing forth the much-loved Start button, Windows 95 was the follow-up to the soaraway success of Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Replete with 32-bit application support and pre-emptive multitasking, the operating system kind of did away with the separate MS-DOS on which its predecessors tottered (although the venerable operating system can still be found lurking in the background).
The cues found in Windows 95's user interface (such as the taskbar, start menu, windows explorer and notification area) persist to today although the hardware requirements were considerably more parsimonious – it could be made to work on an Intel 80386-powered PC with 4MB of RAM (although the experience would be distressing for user and hardware alike).
Those who forgot the chocolate cake and party poppers need not fear. 24 August was when users were finally allowed to get their hands on Microsoft's latest and greatest before trying out something called "Internet Explorer" courtesy of the Plus! pack... ®
Translate please - is this anything the average user needs to know or is it just techie stuff
The first few bits are rather techie. The last is for anyone, techie or not, who remembers the wonderful joy that was Windows 95. A bit of nostalgia.
OK, you bastiges - I bought your damn Windows 10 computers. Nice job - you hid everything! Cluttered the screen up with stuff I never use. (Notice that the Gummn’t still uses what they want to - and is supported.)
That said, the wife and I will stay on our old Windows 7 units until they die.
At work, we still use DOS and Windows 95 to program our radios.
Not going to update from Windows 7.
Eventually will go Mac or Linux.
Thank you for buying and then testing our beta version for us.
This is exactly why I don’t use Windows anymore. Sure, Linux is not the answer for everyone, but treating updates like Nancy Pelosi treats legislation (pass it to see what’s in it) is a horrible model. It’s also why so many folks rightfully disable automatic updates.
If you’re an administrative type who primarily uses MS Office, you can roll the dice with these updates. If you’re a “power user” that uses applications that tax the hardware (CAD-types, high end AV-editing) no one has the time or the inclination to figure out what changed and what impact it may or may not have on their workflow.
For many of my clients we try these updates in a controlled environment before releasing them to their teams to avoid having core programs break when we could have avoided the update altogether.
Get a Mac.
I thank the Digi-god every morning my Win7 laptop and desktop continue to work.
I have a Win10 tablet that I now only use for internet radio. I tried to do stuff with 10 and would get too frustrated because the same tasks take only moments on Win7. It seems that 10 opted for glitz and glitter at the sake of usability and practicality.
I bought a Linux Mint laptop a couple of years ago. I am liking it better and better. My biggest gripe was its failure to load streaming video, especially for FoxSportsGo, NBC Sports and CBS sports. Recent upgrades (18.3 Mint) have most of them working. However, my cable also streams most channels through their app. It attempts to load but never does. Maybe after Adobe’s Flash is gone (end of 2020), the replacement tech (HTML5, etc.) will work better.
A bit of nostalgia.
—
I am still using VISTA so I don’t keep up with the techie stuff.
Are you trying to run your cable company’s app on your Linux computer? Or using your cable company’s login to access streaming channels (e.g. NatGeo) on your Linux computer. The latter generally works for me (although I am using Ubuntu, not Mint).
MJ
Both, actually.
The cable app runs in a browser, just like the sports apps do. I get the ‘loading’ icon, but all it does is spin — lever loads.
The NBC, ESPN, Fox sports streams do load in the browsers.
It may have something to do with the Flash plug-in.
A relative rarity in these modern times. If Vista does what you need, okay. My two words of caution, which you've doubtless heard many times before, are:
I went to work at Microsoft as a contractor in April of 1995 and was working as a tech in building 24 on August 15th. We weren’t allowed to watch the rollout but I did manage to sneak out for a little bit and listened to the presentation which was directly across the street.
I was able to authenticate a fresh install of Windows XP last week. Over the phone, with help from a very patient lady bot.
Impressive. I thought that was impossible. Were you really communicating with a bot?
Absolutely.
Searching on the web, it seems that Microsoft has known about this problem since May and yet they are still pushing it out to people without fixes.
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