A BEEP from the bedroom...

Fuck XP. I'm quite sure also fuck Vista. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck the stupidity. Fuck defaults. Fuck all of it.

I'm not an anti-Microsoft guy by nature. I use both of their last two OS's and I make a living coding for their spreadsheet offering...

But why??.. Why is it not intuitive to these fucktards, that if a computer is left unattended mid-session, there is a big cream cake with a cherry on top motherfucking chance that I don't want the OS to indiscriminately kill all processes and reboot in the name of updating XP whilst I sit in another room browsing Facebook on my laptop before later going back in there to finish sequencing drums for my little acoustic number.

True, I don't use this OS much anymore. It's probably a good 4-5 patch Tuesdays behind. Don't care. I sit behind a router and use Firefox. Most crap you claim to protect me against won't befall me. I don't even give a shit if the thing wants to download and install the updates without consulting me. Not in the slightest, but to then forcefully reboot without asking me, whilst i'm not even there, with no regard whatsoever for what might be running and what may or may not be saved??

I just got through recommending a friend of mine buys a Mac. I don't know nearly enough about them to really be in a position to do that, but I have to assume and am sure I assume rightly that never in a million years will Leopard EVER reboot in my absence. Go on. Tell me i'm wrong.

There may be a way to stop this from happening, but, people, a newsflash - people don't reconfigure their machines. Most people don't go near the control panel. Which group of people would be perhaps the least likely to do this? I'd say musicians. Maybe because it fits what just happened to me perfectly, but if there was ever an example of a group of people that just need the computer to do a few things really well rather than thousands of things in a mediocre fashion with constant time sinking, productivity killing and art destroying, this is it.

I am not happy.

I now return to shut down Ubuntu, boot back into XP and see if Ableton Live has any good recovery mechanism.

Microsoft and Windows take note - this is the worst thing you have done to me in quite some time, and it will not be quickly forgotten. Your marketshare along with the hardware manufacturers you tie yourselves to IS SHIFTING and it's caused by situations exactly like this one. Fix your fucking user experience, Microsoft.

The Aftermath

What happened next? Mostly good things.

- Live has the most incredible recovery I've ever seen. The most recent edit to my pattern was restored without more than having to click "Yes". This means in fact I didn't lose anything at all.

- I realised that I vaguely recall being forced to turn auto update on due to the questionable (please note I said questioinable) legality of my XP installation. This move was Microsoft's way to facilitate full control over pirate copies. Forcing auto update means the "Windows Genuine Advantage" application is installed and updated as mandatory, so on whatever whim of the week they can decide to lock up illegal XP or let it roll. From what I hear they do pretty much let it roll, which I've never quite understood. I have no real excuse or complaint here, other than I still don't see the necessity of a forced (when unattended) reboot after such updates. This would similarly effect legal users who decided to do the MS recommended thing, and turn auto update on.

- I've getting caught out not saving my work a lot recently and this was no exception. I have lost hours of work at my real job and whilst in that arena the redo is always quicker than the original that gets lost, it's still frustrating. What stops me from hitting Ctrl-S every now and then? Simple. Lack of versioning. To a normal person saving means saving. To me it means overwriting the last working/good version. I will work for hours safe in the knowledge that I can restore my previous version. At some point the new version becomes the new working/good version, and then I will save it. It's the bad things that happen somewhere in the middle that cause the problems. In real development scenarios there are large systems to take care of this, but in my adhoc environments, be they music or VBA code, I just don't think they're out there. Am I wrong? The easiest solution is to use Save As and increment, but that can get messy, and in audio, it can get expensive on disk space and time consuming having to rewrite large waves. At work it's annoying because writing a fresh file with Save As takes a lot longer than updating the existing one, particularly over a less than stellar network. These aren't big problems, but problems nonetheless.