Tag: update

Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan says that Eskom has come up with a detailed winter plan that includes several possible scenarios.

Gordhan said the first scenario was if no load shedding was implemented.

“In this instance, we will ensure that unplanned outages or breakdowns are kept to less than 9500MW and that planned outages are within this range of 3000MW to 5000MW, so that we have some flexibility.

“In scenario 2, if outplanned outages go beyond 9500MW, a maximum of 26 days of Stage 1 load shedding (will take place) throughout this whole five month period,” he said.

There was also the expectation that the coal plants, Medupi and Kusile would soon be able to contribute in a more significant way, hopefully by the end of April.

The media was also told that power plants generally performed better during the cooler conditions in winter.

Gordhan along with Eskom board chairman Jabu Mabuza was briefing the media on the state of SA’s electricity supply.

This follows a previous briefing about two weeks ago.

At the time the country was in the midst of Stage 4 load shedding, which lasted for several days.

The power supply was so constrained that Eskom also implemented Stage 2 load shedding during the night.

Gordhan could not say then when load shedding would come to an end, but said they would know more within 10-14 days after the technical review team had had the opportunity to access the power plants.

Eskom has previously blamed ageing power plants and insufficient maintenance, among other things, for the spate of load shedding.

Last week, Microsoft started distributing the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, to Windows users who manually checked for updates. The company has now halted that rollout after many reports that installing the update is causing serious data loss: specifically, deleting the Documents, and perhaps Pictures, folders. Microsoft is also advising anyone who has downloaded the update but not yet installed it to not install it at all.

The exact circumstances causing data loss aren’t clear; the handful of reports on Microsoft’s forums and Reddit don’t have any obvious commonalities, and people report seeing only one affected system among many when upgraded. There will need to be some amount of investigation before a fix can be developed.

This will be too late for anyone that’s suffered data loss; although file recovery/undelete tools might be able to salvage the deleted files, the only reliable way of recovering them is to restore from a backup.

A data-loss bug is bad. Data-loss bugs are the worst kind of bug that Microsoft could ship; for rarely backed-up home users, at least, they’re worse even than a security flaw—who needs hackers and malware to destroy your data when the operating system does it for you? This bug is sure to raise new doubts about Microsoft’s testing, pace of delivering updates, and dependence on the Insider Program to find and report such problems.

Making this worse is that the bug does appear to have been reported. Numerous reports in Feedback Hub, Microsoft’s bug-reporting tool for Windows 10, complain of data deletion after installing preview releases. None of the bug reports appears to have many upvotes, and the reports generally lack in detail. So just as with the more recent reports, they make it hard to pin down the root cause. But it’s obvious that, at the very least, something was going wrong and that it was important enough that it should have been investigated and addressed.

Compounding this issue is that Microsoft’s rollout of version 1809 was already unusual. For reasons unknown, Microsoft didn’t release this update to the Release Preview ring, so the most realistic installation scenario—someone going from version 1803 to 1809—didn’t receive much testing anyway. And all this is against the longer-term concern that Microsoft laid off many dedicated testers without really replacing the testing that those testers were doing.

Microsoft issues a fix

Microsoft has fixed a bug in its latest Windows 10 October 2018 update that deleted files en masse for some users.

The software giant was forced to pull the update over the weekend due to the data deletion issues.

Now, the update is back online, but Microsoft says it is only releasing it to members of the Windows Insider program before making it available to the general public.