In reality? No. However, it looks like we would have under the conditions we're talking about.

I've got glitching driver issues that have never been fixed on multiple machines I deal with, for example. Usually we just roll them back to whatever was installed initially, so it's not actually causing a critical problem today, but of course that's exactly the option we're concerned about losing.

Even if:

(a) that is true in the final RTM, which we haven't seen yet,

(b) it remains true in light of future updates, which of course you'll be required to install, and

(c) the user is aware of the risk and turns it off, which apparently plenty of people clued up enough to be trying Win10 early weren't,

presumably that will still only protects you if it's a driver update that goes wrong, as opposed to say, a kernel patch, or a security update.

No, they're probably using Pro, which has exactly the same fundamental problem just deferrable by a few months.

(a) No-one is talking about just Home. This affects Pro as well, which is what most power users and small businesses have.

(b) You choose your OS because of the software you need to run. Across my various businesses, the number of areas where the software available on Windows is significantly better than the alternatives available on other platforms is quite large.

The most promising alternative platform would be OS X, which has the same kinds of server and development platforms available as Linux or BSD but far better options for some kinds of desktop software. Unfortunately, Apple is currently probably the only company on the planet I trust less than Microsoft and Google not to shaft their users with built-in obsolescence, so I have little interest in switching to them for professional systems for now. If they get around to committing to real long-term support for their desktop/laptop OS one day, that view may change.

I feel your pain. :-)

Actually, the most recent system-crippling screw-up I had was installing the latest AMD drivers for a FirePro series card on one of our older machines. You know, the ones where you pay a fortune to have roughly the same hardware as a much cheaper gaming card, because of the quality and capabilities of the drivers? Except that this completely routine update, which we were hoping might finally fix the frequency glitches that have plagued the card from day one, took out the whole machine and even made it difficult to recover using the system restore feature.

Fortunately, this was a Windows 7 machine, so once we did have it up and running again, we just made a note not to install that update, and the user of the computer got on with their work the next day as normal. I'm not sure what the answer to that is supposed to be with Win10, if drivers are going to be pushed out via the same compulsory update mechanism. Presumably you're supposed to defer the driver update on every machine that might be affected (or via WSUS if you're big enough to use it) and hope that someone fixes the problem before the ticking time bomb goes off when you can't defer any longer...

With the diversity of systems running Windows, no realistic amount of testing will ever completely guarantee security updates are good. You still need a mechanism to decline known-flawed ones, and a mechanism for recovery and uninstallation the first time you get hit without warning.

In any case, the way Microsoft is going under Nadella, sadly it seems very unlikely they would do as you suggest. They are literally giving Windows 10 away free to huge numbers of people, and presumably they're going it because they want to be more like an Apple or a Google, picking up the revenues on the surrounding ecosystem, not just whatever they can find from the platform itself.

Those automatic updates would be the perfect way to show unavoidable nag messages to sign up for other Microsoft software and services, or those of their selected partners who they believe may be of interest to you, or to install spyware to feed back extra data, or to disable existing Windows feature that used to be free because some commercial interest makes getting you to pay for it a more promising option for them.

Not that I'm suggesting they'd ever do that sort of thing deliberately, of course. Maybe the Windows 7 update that has been nagging users about updating to Windows 10 itself was just an oversight.

Or stick with an OS that works without needing to develop a whole new set of sysadmins skills, like... any previous version of Windows, say.

And what shall we do when AMD drivers have a problem at the same time?

Perhaps you'd like businesses that paying their staff thousands per week to do CAD work or design game assets to just shut down for a few days until the drivers get sorted out? As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet developed a business model where complaining at a big business that screwed up is an effective strategy for recovering lost revenues from downtime, but if they ever do, it looks like it will be very lucrative in a Windows 10 world.

I surely don't know what you mean!

/glances at KB3079904, which was installed the other day to replace a different update that they got wrong just days earlier, and notes that this is what happened even with patching a serious security vulnerability

But defer is the word, and they're still forced on you within a few months if you want to keep security updates, even if they are potentially hostile, non-security updates.

I'm not going to say I told everyone so. Oh, no, wait, I did. And so did a lot of other people. Shifting to Windows 10 is a one-way trip to losing control of your own computer, possibly unless you're on Enterprise, because presumably the people with real money won't let Microsoft get away with this.

For what it's worth, I'm just trying to demonstrate here that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that some software has not been widely exploited in the past does not mean that it can't be in the future, but a lot of people seem to argue that way when talking about other software that has been a common target in the past. Worse, they then extrapolate to assume that modified versions of software that hasn't been widely exploited in the past still won't be exploited in the future even if it has a larger attack surface and/or successful attack methods will be more rewarding. None of this actually follows logically.

You're absolutely right, of course.

The main reasons plug-ins get attacked so much are that (a) they do more than browsers offer natively, notably including hardware interaction as you mentioned, and (b) they provide a big, juicy target.

Expecting that moving those extra functions into the browser itself will somehow result in more secure implementations is optimistic. Every major browser fixes serious security vulnerabilities with updates, including the likes of Chrome and Firefox. They're right there in the release notes for the new version every six weeks, if anyone wants to look. The people and processes and tools used to make these browsers aren't dramatically more effective than the people and processes and tools used to make the popular plug-ins before. And it's often been the case that large, monolithic programs have proven harder to test and secure than a well-designed and well-isolated system of interacting smaller programs.

The argument that browsers will somehow magically become more secure ways of doing the same things comes from the same mindset that says running Linux is the best way to avoid viruses because Windows is a security nightmare. It seemed credible at first, because few people were being successfully attacked while running Linux, but then someone made a Linux system that became popular with regular non-geek types, and today which platform has the fastest growing malware problem? It's probably Android.

Sorry, I must have missed the part about the dawn raid there. And the part about kicking in of doors. And the part about the media being illegally invited along. And any reference at all to how the actions in that article were in any way related to the laws we're talking about here.

Perhaps it's all true and it's just the quality of the source you cited, with El Reg being so favourably regarded in such matters that the need for any actually verifiable details is eliminated, but personally I prefer to have a bit more than that to go on before forming my opinions.

I was just pointing out that the statement I first quoted about being able to stop within the distance you can see with your headlights is optimistic. Even with new lights that let you see further, you still need to allow for moving hazards coming into your view at speed and not drive to the limit of what you can see right now. A lot of generally sensible drivers don't seem to understand that, presumably just because they've never thought about it, so I thought it was worth pointing out. Don't make a big deal of it. :-)

Yes, that's a possible workaround, but now we have a bunch more problems. E-mail is simple, standardised, and time-tested. There are plenty of tools that will let us transfer a file another way, but very few that will then keep that file associated with all the other relevant messages, and very few that literally everyone will have, and very few that don't require more effort to set up.

Alternative proposal: Don't use e-mail services that don't do e-mail properly.

True, but often the reaction time is much longer, because something falling off that is big enough to cause damage or injury might still be small enough not to notice immediately, and it doesn't come with brake lights.