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[Eschar]

We don't have a "constantly mildly nervous" thread, so I'm posting in this thread that I'm starting college classes tomorrow.

I'm gonna mess something up, aren't I.

[Egan_BW]

If you were me, you probably would, but because you're you I don't think you will.

[Reelya]

We don't have a "constantly mildly nervous" thread, so I'm posting in this thread that I'm starting college classes tomorrow.

I'm gonna mess something up, aren't I.

You'll be ok

If I give any advice it would be to not procrastinate with study. Time management is one of the critical areas and where a lot of people fuck up, especially when going from school to college. They don't hand-hold nearly as much at college so you need to be proactive. Also talk to the staff as much as possible, find out about stuff that they're doing that may not be on the curriculum. If you're just doing the handouts and handing those in, and cramming for the occasional exam, that's the basic level. You want to find out what sort of projects and stuff your department is doing. Treating it just like class is missing out on the full value of being there.

[TD1]

Yes, what Reelya said. If I could go back I'd tell myself to be more outgoing, engage in the opportunities.

[Frumple]

I mean. Try to not catch the plague. That's probably a good priority one for going to school right now, especially if it's actually in person.

Other than that, yeah, try to keep in communication with your teachers and any relevant staff. Many of them will be willing to answer questions and help out when you do mess something up, and it helps to be familiar to them when you're wanting either of those.

If it's actually your first classes ever and not just going back, uh. Well, probably don't expect much from your first few semesters -- getting general education requirements out of the way is kinda' tedious relative to how things are when you're done with that and can fill your entire schedule with what you're actually there to study. Sort of a transition period between high school and college proper, just you (sometimes) have a bit more control over when exactly your classes are (which is usually still stupidly nice relative to earlier education, ha).

Small scheduling tip for your next semester, tho', if you're not already doing it: If at all possible, probably try to get similar classes on the same day. Least for me it helped tremendously compared to high school to do that, not having to radically shift tracks multiple times a day was a bloody relief.

[Eschar]

It is my first (college) classes ever, yes.

[McTraveller]

I was working on a project in Visual Studio 2017 Community edition.  Suddenly when I try to debug it, the debugger says it's running but no breakpoints are working (they say "no code was generated"), no window shows up, etc.  But VS did compile my program - I delete it from the output directory and build, and a new one is there.

I had to update VS2017 to make it work.

Why can't the mainstream software vendors just leave well enough alone? Why do OS updates get forced, and why do they break so many things?

This just makes me sad - it's like people aren't even thinking about the impacts of their actions any more, or worse they are only thinking of their own interests. It's all just doing the minimum to get by, or doing what you can get away with.

*sigh*

[Reelya]

Balancing a system for 100's of millions of people just isn't going to go smooth.

Remember that if they did "leave well enough alone" they'd be inundated with "why didn't you patch that, you assholes?" all the time.

If you look at changelogs you as an individual probably won't need anything specific on those lists but you can bet someone does, and it prevents something else breaking somewhere else.

You're asking for two contradictory things in your post: that they leave well enough alone, and then saying they should do more. Those aren't parameters that they can optimize for everyone. For the stuff where they have incremental upgrades, sure not everyone is going to be happy with that, but the alternative is hard breaks and your old stuff just won't install at all if you want new features. So rather than updating VS 2017 you'd be told that if you want to be compatible with the current Windows, just to get VS 2019 instead. This is what Apple does with XCode, for comparison.

Apple just says "shit's broken now, get the new shit, loser". That is easy-mode: old version explodes in flames and the OS maker just shrugs and says "sucks to be you, then". Hard mode is updating VS 2017 and other obsolete versions so people can still use them despite the OS having moved on.

[Rolan7]

They shouldn't be introducing such fundamental bugs.  Sure, 100% reliability is technically impossible, but unit testing exists for a reason and this particular product ought to be particularly thoroughly tested.

There's a reason serious companies tend to disable MS updates and vet them in-house, though.  Very few people are going to stop using MS products just because of yet another mistake (or a bunch of obnoxious ads for their shitty mobile UI/apps, I mean windows 8-10).

[Reelya]

Unit testing isn't possible for millions of possible configurations. They do unit testing, but this stuff is about the large-scale interplay of different components in real systems. These bugs happen because PCs aren't standardized so you can't have enough test rigs for real-world conditions.

Look at the trouble they have getting games to run on everyone's PCs and games are technically pretty easy compared to this stuff.

It's basically why you should never put yourself in a position where you're required to support something, no matter how small it seems. Like you make a greasemonkey script, which should be simple enough then people start sending you "bug reports" of stuff you never encountered. Same browser, same site even.

It's also the main reason people just completely abandon online games they made, despite them not being updated. Just "maintaining" one of those things turns into a full time job if you have enough people connected to it. And it's not going to be fun maintaining, it's going to be dealing with stupid technical issues you had no idea about from testing.

[Frumple]

Yeah... what precious little code-like things I've done have all included disclaimers along the lines of, "If you encounter any bugs: Good luck! You're on your own and I'm not going to help."

It's one of the nicer things about hobbyist type stuff, rather than have some kind of fiscal duty or whatever to do something you can just go "lol no" to future issues without much in the way of possible repercussions, outside of maybe some generally mild enmity.

[Reelya]

Yeah... what precious little code-like things I've done have all included disclaimers along the lines of, "If you encounter any bugs: Good luck! You're on your own and I'm not going to help."

It's one of the nicer things about hobbyist type stuff, rather than have some kind of fiscal duty or whatever to do something you can just go "lol no" to future issues without much in the way of possible repercussions, outside of maybe some generally mild enmity.

You could troll people pretty well to get them to leave you alone. If they come to you complaining about something not working anymore that you're not interested to work on go (in XKCD style) "oh, thank god you came along, would you like to become the project's official maintainer?"

I'd really love to be in a position to use that line. That should get them to run away except in the 1 in 100 chance that they actually will do it.

[Rolan7]

Or at the very least require them to fill out a proper bug report form.  Nothing fancy, just simple details like version and a clear description of the error.
AKA enough to dissuade most complainers.

Yeah, while *my* SS13 contributions were (usually) very reliable in order to please the Maintainers... perhaps I was too judgemental.  Visual Studio's a big project.

On the other hand:  The impact of errors is astronomical, but the spec is only large.  With a proper spec, it shouldn't be so difficult to avoid breaking compatibility.  (and if someone is using functionality out of spec?  Fair game, and my dad has *so* many fun stories of doing so.  Then having to scramble when MS validly changed functionality)

[Reelya]

Windows 10X will be interesting. When that was announced there were some slashdotters getting unreasonably upset ("what you mean there's a Windows version with features that I won't be getting. How dare they!"). But slashdot really is just wall to wall assholes so should be avoided.

The actual point of Windows 10X is that it's not backwards compatible, and it's aimed at their next-gen Surface devices. This is deliberate, even if it makes idiots angry that they can't get it on their devices. The clear goal is a clean slate / clean code, then new stuff going forward works on both 10 or 10X and any backwards-compatibility stuff is then tacked on top rather than being baked into the core of the thing. Seriously, it's a good idea even if it won't run on that many devices at least to start. There's 30+ year old cruft still holding bits of Windows together. Make a fresh start then work out how to roll it out to more hardware, while keeping forward compatibility at the software level. So, 10X is to 10 as NT was to 9x. It won't be ready for the prime time for a number of versions, but that's not the point. Let's see if they stick with it and expand it for more stuff. Seriously, the cruft is bad.

One thing that's relevant to this discussion is how updates work on Windows 10X. it has a boot image that's a solid file, and it downloads a new boot image in the background, then to "update" you just reboot and it uses that file instead of the existing boot image. So it says goodbye to trying to patch things together on the fly or update the registry etc. If things fuck up, you just revert to the old version by simply booting back to that boot image, so it's a faster and more reliable way to update that's reversible.

[Rolan7]

The name "Windows10x".  They haven't topped their Xbox nomenclature in terms of bothering me, but it's damn close.

And hey, I'm happy if they're focusing on tablets like they clearly want to.  Maybe they'll stop actively fucking over computer users by pushing their tablet-UI.