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That is a really, really big hammer.
I think I'll just keep using my machine as-is. I hard rebooted, deleted the SoftwareDistribution folder, and windows is no longer trying to get me to update to the latest and greatest.
Given I'm running under Bootcamp, reimaging everything to solve this issue is like knocking down a house to fix a leaky tap.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: to solve this issue
WIndows 7 ?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: WIndows 7 ?
As much as I'd prefer to stick with 7, have you tried to do a clean install these days, and then bring it up to date?
It's a crapshoot. It may work, it may abort and roll back...but either way you're in for hours. Seriously, I've installed from the same ISO, for multiple VMs, on the same host (so the hardware, even though it's virtualized, is absolutely identical in every way), and one might succeed while another may fail installing updates. It makes absolutely no sense.
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Windows 7 was absolutely horrible when it came to updates. I had more problems with Windows 7 updates than I've ever had with Windows 10.
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Windows 7 Updates: Optional, and if you wanted them, it was WHEN you wanted them
Window 10 Updates: You bought the machine; you paid for the software - but Micro$loth owns it. Basically, you're just considered a donor.
(You did read the OP, and how it happens in the middle of things, at time?)
I've posted this remark many times before: My upgrade from Windows 7 is Linux.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Chris, If you have VS Professional MSDN you can put in a ticket.
I had a problem where 2019 wouldn't install, kept erroring out on the same errors & repaired same & rerun & get same errors.
Got some local help & we still weren't able to get it to install.
Finally in desperation, put in a trouble call to MS through my MSDN subscription. Took the fellow about a week, but finally got the 2019 update installed.
You can also put in the ticket w/o the subscription; costs about $400.
Either way I was very pleased and the money was well worth it.
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A pop-up or any other kind of feedback, other than those stupid animations running in a different thread that don't really tell you anything and keep running even if the thread doing the actual work has "expired", would be nice.
But we live in a world of ignorance and obscurity where the user can't know what the update is actually doing because the user must be treated as an ignorant and telling what the installer is doing would make rival companies know how the program works! Or so I was told... by an employer.
I had that install/update problem happen to me in...
1) Win98 and, after too many days trying to install (so many that it is embarrassing to say the exact number), it ended up being a conspiracy between the installer and the HDD. The installer toke so long to start that the HDD would go to sleep and the installer didn't wake it. I only found out because I decided to get the manufacturers diagnostic utilities for every device on the PC and tested. After disabling power management on the HDD using the utility it installed with no problem.
2) WinXP had several issues but I remember one of them being a forgotten entry on the registry from a program (can't remember which) and the lack of a big enough swap.
3) Win7 was the infamous bogus update installer that would not correctly connect to MS update servers, and a joystick. Yes, having a joystick connected was, apparently, Win7 Achilles heel, at least on my system. When not in a game that used the joystick, like a flight simulator, I had to physically disconnect the joystick or win7 would start detecting random input from it, the system would become slow and, eventually, freeze. Not even ctrl+alt+del would save it.
4) Win10... Actually never had a problem with it since I could never install it. The installer says that my super expensive (at the time I bought it) AMD Phenom II x6 1055T CPU, 32GB RAM, 16TB HDD "is not supported because your CPU does not support NX", which it does, according to their separate MS compatibility utility. So, I upgraded to Ubuntu  .
So, my advice would be to start by disabling all power savings, disconnect all non-essential devices, scan your registry for problems, check that you have enough free disk space with a big enough swap, close all programs except the installer/updater and don't go away until you see that installation bar moving with a clearly readable "Installing". Maybe then, who knows.
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I got so annoyed with Windows 10 updates that I totally disabled the updater on my PC. Unfortunately, I can't remember how I did it and I couldn't switch it back on if I wanted to (standard fixes don't work). I rely entirely on anti-malware now. Then again, I ran XP for years after it expired with anti-malware and I never had any problems. MS needs a better model.
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tavern chief alerting owner (7)
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I think I've got it, but I'll give the others a chance for a few hours first.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There weren't any other takers, so want to have a go at it?
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tavern BAR
chief KING alerting owner
BARKING
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Like ancient Rome, they fall under their own arrogant weight.
I'm referring (primarily) to engines on shopping sites but the petulance surely spreads.
So, for example, you're on Amazon.com (probably the most ubiquitous online shopping site in the world). You search for 1/16" FOOBARS . Your return will include some of those. And Foobar of other sizes, as well. And possibly things with 1/16" in their description. OK - so far it's the engine OR-ing the keywords. Not great but an acceptable choice on their part.
How does that explain the hand sanitizer? Face Masks? Sandpaper? Note that I'm not logged in (where they keep track of previous purchases) and my browser deletes cookies, flash cookies, and history when it's closed. It's not looking into my dark and shady past. They seem to be just throwing random things into the search. Same thing, if one request the sort "Low to High Prices". Since when does $39.95 come between $3.99 and $4.29 ?
I think by now I've made it clear - you search for something; they give a few of those and then push whatever else it is that they want to sell.
Brick and Mortar? All is not yet lost !
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos, GHB wrote: Since when does $39.95 come between $3.99 and $4.29 ?
When they're doing a string comparison instead of a numeric comparison? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Besides how dismally stupid that would be (on their part - they're a big grown-up company), the values are probably stored as FP, and should sort properly. Most of the orderimg seems to fit that scenario.
I attribute it to marketing and "sponsored product". For pricing, before the sort request, I could fully understand them allowing people to buy their way to the top. They are not, after all, a charity.
It's like stuff piled up at the end-caps of isles in stores - to entice you into buying something. However, once I walk down the pasta isle I don't want to find motor oil between linguini and rotini.
I guess the question is really "Do marketing people every consider how they'd like things to be when they shop?" What if the answer to that is yes and this is what we get?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I wouldn't like to make any assumptions about how they store their data.
Don't forget, the product price could be in a different currency to the currency they're showing you, and might attract different levels of tax depending on where it ships from and where it's delivered to. It's not going to be as simple as a single FP value.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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For small differences, what you say could be what's happening.
When it's an order of magnitude difference - well, I don't think so.
Furthermore, pricing, currency-to-currency (thus country to country) is not merely by calculating a currency conversion. It's more like what you pointed out - various polices affect the price. A separate price listing for each of the markets they support. Separate product availability, shipping costs and regulations, &etc., would be required.
You're talking about, in this case, one of the largest corporations in the world. I don't give them that slack for a phenomenon becoming both more prolific and bold.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quote: the values are probably stored as FP, and should sort properly.
The number one rule when dealing with currency in software is not to use floating point for currency.
Unless you like bugs.
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First of all, we talking about sorting - so what bugs are you talking about?
Secondly, they have, really, two other options:
1 - Store as integers and divide by 100 (for US$, at least) - so it's back to FP arithmetic
2 - Store as string values - in which case the sort will fail (unless stored left-paddded with blanks or 0's) - and you'll still need to convert them, along the way, to FP in order to do arithmetic with them.
As for your original premise? Bugs? NOT! Round-off errors due to their representation in memory is something a REAL programmer keeps in mind. How much do you think anyone spends on the Amazon website where 64-bit FP's round-off errors will become significant?
There's no excuse for the high priced item to show up in the middle so often, except, of course, marketing.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quote: First of all, we talking about sorting - so what bugs are you talking about?
Using FP for currencies is a bug.
Quote:
1 - Store as integers and divide by 100 (for US$, at least) - so it's back to FP arithmetic
That's not how it is done. No FP is used other than for display.
Quote: 2 - Store as string values -
That's also not how it's done. Currencies have to be stored as a fixed-numeric type.
Quote: As for your original premise? Bugs? NOT! Round-off errors due to their representation in memory is something a REAL programmer keeps in mind.
Software in banking systems have to be certified (I write EMV and related software, including all the other card processing on the back ends), and the software does not get certified if you are using FP for currencies. They call it a Bug. An Error. A Defect.
Whenever you are dealing with currency, using FP for it is a bug. You could have spent 2m on google finding this out.
Look at all the standards that have to be adhered to for banking and currency software - currencies are specified in specified fixed-numeric types. See all the ISO standards that banking and transaction interchange are written to: No FP.
But, hey, as a "REAL" programmer maybe you should go tell all these institutions and regulators why FP is not a Bug. After all, I've only been employed as a programmer for 25 years, writing interbank switching software and transaction processing software; what could I possibly know about the datatype of currencies.
Sh*t, even the PostgreSQL (or MySQL, or MSSQL, I forget which) manual warns not to store currency as floating point types. Of course, I'm sure a REAL programmer like yourself read the SQL rationale for the NUMERIC type, right?
I mean you wouldn't be posting so arrogantly if you had known about the existence of DECIMAL in the SQL ANSI standard, and why they put it in? Right?
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First, none of what you said explains, in the least, the original premise: they they cannot seem to sort numeric values, and furthermore, pretty much any numeric type sorts those values perfectly well - regardless of storage, except for string-types.
So - now - let's say you store your numeric types any which way you think is great. How do you represent them for calculations? BCD, I suppose.
Actually, here, we store data in the SQL currency datatype.
Interestingly, not being part of the banking (or other) financial system, Amazon can store the prices of items any damn way they wish. You did read that, didn't you? PRICES OF ITEMS ?
So, aside from the risk of you financial guys doing arbitrage on the price of Kindle's, why would Amazon bother with the overhead on how to display or calculate pricing other than in the most efficient way possible? The 100th's of a cent error? Rounded up or down in a business - and the final value, that which is billed, is the relevant value.
As for "real" programs - I'm from the world of arbitrary precision values - scientific things, such as modeling, can iterate something tens of millions of times - and something rounded off in the precision of the 24th decimal place can come back to haunt you.
But here's the deal - unlike contract-software made by-the-book (or by the regulation), it was up to us to determine when the overhead was worth the price. Even considering the CPU's native bit-width (16 or 32 bits, then).
Your solution is mandated. When choice enters the matter, the real decisions are made from knowledge and experience as to the best tools for the job.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quote: First, none of what you said explains, in the least, the original premise:
I wasn't explaining the original premise, I was explaining why storing currency as FP is a bug.
Quote: As for "real" programs - I'm from the world of arbitrary precision values - scientific things, such as modeling, can iterate something tens of millions of times - and something rounded off in the precision of the 24th decimal place can come back to haunt you.
Good for you, I was a research scientist for 7 years and worked on multiple different research projects at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. I already know what FP is and isn't good for. I was explaining that FP being used for currencies is a bug. I also spent more than a few years writing embedded software that fell under munitions regulations in all Western countries, most of African and Middle Eastern countries, and all the larger Eastern countries, specifically, software to control detonators and detonations
That's right, I was literally a goddamned rocket scientist. And in the embedded world, using FP is also considered a bug until it is formally motivated (and the motivation is accepted) on a case by case basis.
Quote: Your solution is mandated.
When all the different authorities across the world on banking and currencies, and all the data storage experts (MSSQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, etc) all agree that storing currencies as FP is a bug, you'd have to be a real moron to claim that it's only because of a mandate that it is a bug.
Quote: When choice enters the matter, the real decisions are made from knowledge and experience as to the best tools for the job.
And yet you thought there were only two ways of storing currencies - your experience is on display with that post you made.
You could have avoid appearing the way you do by simply searching google for 2m to determine why storing currencies in FP is a bug.
You can still do that - can you find even one link that agrees with your assertion that storing currencies as FP is the correct thing to do? Just one, authoritative, known expert in either programming or banking will do.
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