Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Has Broken Millions Of Webcams With Windows 10 Anniversary Update (thurrott.com)
The Anniversary Update which Microsoft rolled out to Windows 10 users earlier this month has broken millions of webcams, the company said on Friday. The problem is that after installing the update, the company added, Windows no longer allows USB webcams to use MJPEG or H264 encoding processes, and only supports YUY2 encoding. Microsoft says it introduced the changes to prevent an issue that was resulting in duplication of encoding the stream (poor performance). If you're facing the issue, there's a workaround (via Thurrott.com): Rafael has figured out a workaround that should hopefully stop the freezing issue; if you are comfortable tweaking the registry, make this change. HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform, add DWORD "EnableFrameServerMode" and set to 0
I mean, I get it. I get that you don't want to support more than one platform or configuration at any given moment in time. It's not fun having to regression test against a billion third-party devices, and it's not cool to QA things that work fine on your machine - and in a DevOps world, you don't have to - but please, find someone in your office with a little grey in his beard, and ask them, just once, about writing software with the user's needs in mind, not just your manager's desire to cut support costs.
It wasn't that long ago that software that worked, continued to work until the end user broke it by changing something. Now the users aren't breaking things -- but you are. Why?
Would it seriously be too much to ask if, in exchange for no longer being able to receive technical support (because technically, a working configuration that isn't "the newest version" is unsupported in this brave new world Nadella's created for us), users be permitted to not change already-working configurations?
Real reason is that they want to reduce people from development and QA teams by removing features. Less people, better business performance and more bonuses to MBA team. Of course in long term there are less customers, but at that time the management team has already collected their bonuses and changed company to ruin.
I fired Microsoft a while back.
It was an old Memorex USB flatbed scanner. Windows wouldn't allow the old drivers and there were no new drivers, and driver compatibility mode or whatever it's called still wouldn't allow the drivers. No problem plugging anything into Linux. I haven't looked back since.
Which is of great comfort to the owners of medical imagers that are now junk unless someone catches and rolls back the anniversary edition. There is claimed to be a fix in the pipe.
If you're running a medical imager and you're auto-installing patches willy-nilly without thoroughly testing them, then you're doing it wrong. I don't care what OS you're running, that's just negligent.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
The basic problem was that the developers at Microsoft don't understand who uses their OS and why. They had 5 use cases when they were developing their new feature, but forgot about the 50,000 use cases that already exist, unknown to the development staff.
"We changed an API's behavior because of this new feature that nobody cares about, which broke almost every imaging device attached to the OS" reeks of poor engineering management.