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Gates Provides Windows Crash Statistic
cybercuzco writes "In an otherwise innocuous article at they NYT (FRRYYY) Bill Gates says that according to error reporting software in windows, 5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day. Gates goes on to state that Microsoft is looking at charging for some of its software updates that it now distributes for free."
Bill is becoming the world expert on increasing revenue without providing value to his customers.
The 5% number is just skewed heavily by the fact that any poorly written app that crashes is counted. Whenever an app crashes the windows error reporting system fires off a log to microsoft regarding the crash. I bet 90%+ of these crashes have nothing to do with windows.
5% may sound like a small amount, but considering HOW MANY Windows boxes exist on EARTH, that is a HUGE number...
bork bork bork!
If that's not a conservative estimate, call me a liberal.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Sounds very slippery, as usual.
Any info on WHY they crashed?
I haven't read the article, but I assume that the Poster meant to type 95%. Its OK, we all make mistakes.
5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day
I think you meant "5% of all windows installations crash two times a day every day"
There's no way to be sure that it's necessarily Windows that causes the crash; it could be some badly installed rogue software, viruses, crappy system administration, or all of the above. Though no doubt the reflexive Microsoft bashers will blame Microsoft anyway.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
That's assuming that your workstation is up long enough to make it through the on-line poll.
HERE IS THE DIRECT LINK : (Doesn't require you to log in!) Thank you, Google News!
My favorite part: Last week, Microsoft raised its revenue forecast for fiscal 2004 by about $1 billion. At the same time the company also said it had no plans to spend any of its $49 billion cash on major acquisitions or increase dividends, despite recent rumors.
Now, If I'm reading this article correctly, they are indirectly affecting their positive cashflow 'problem' by increasing R&D. The article says that Microsoft expects revenue to increase 6-9% (of total revenue) in 2004; They are going to spend 8% more on R&D (8% more than R&D expenses in 2003)... So this looks like one way that Microsoft is going to slow down their positive cashflow. I can't see anything bad coming from Microsoft spending more on R This should be beneficial to end-users as long as MS doesn't spend all this additional research money finding better ways to make it difficult to pirate Windows.
Hmm, I still think that my Linux workstation is less stable then my Win2k Pro.
:-)
Anyhow, at least people will be able to reference this article when they boast about their Linux stability
crashes more then 2 times ;-)
The other 95% of all Windows installations have the reporting feature disabled...
>>Microsoft is looking at charging for some of
>>its software updates that it now distributes
>>for free."
Buffer ovverflow - $15
Firewall Fix - $45
Service Pack 3 - $300
Knowing that no matter how much patches come out, Linux will be more secure - Pricess
doesn't that give MS an incentive to leave bugs in?
Microsoft charging for Windows Updates is analogous to Ford charging their customers extra for basic safety features which should be free in the first place! What if Ford told you that there was a fatal flaw in your seatbelt system that could allow you to be thrown from the car in a crash, and that the problem was a result of poor engineering on their behalf, and that you had to pay out of your own pocket to fix it! If that happened the government would surely intervene and force Ford to provide the fix for free. I can't belive that Microsoft has the gall to even consider charging us to fix the holes in their systems that are there because of their own fault!
Why charge for something they screwed up to begin with? Why use a product if you have to pay for them to fix their own mistakes? I'm going to use an abacus from now on.
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
Nothing to push the masses to Linux/Mac like charging for updates & bugfixes.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Mr. Gates stressed that the company's biggest bet is on the next version of Windows.
;-P
Well duh. The company's biggest bet is always on the next version of Windows!
If they said "Well, we're betting the entire company's future on the next version of Microsoft Bob", they're screwed.
Change "www" to "archive".
Couple of auto-redirects happen. Keep browser window open.
Click on www. link again - no registration required.
Crash more often I assume.
--This isn't a man who is leaving with his head between his legs.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
that according to error reporting software in windows
yeah, but how many people actually use the "report this error to microsoft" feature?. I know everytime I get a crash, I opt to not send the report, and I know i'm not the only one that does this. Also, the only time this method for reporting error is used at all is when customers are on broadband connections, or in office networks (can you imagine wating for your modem to dial to report an error or a crash?), and what about those times when the crash is so bad your entire system needs to be restarted?. From what I can tell, this error reporting software only sends error reports regarding programs that crash, not the OS itself. So... 5% of windows users, who are on persistent connections, who use the error reporting software, who had a crash on an application that doesn't freeze the entire system, are crashing at least 2 times a day... The real number has to be much higher that that.
-K
-K
Shades of Dilbert
How often are the other 95% crashing?
If those 5% of users are running Win2K, then this is interesting. If those 5% of users are running Win95... then no one is really surprised.
Which is it? When did we first get crash reporting in Windows? I wouldn't know, I've only run Windows since Win2K.
(I was also crashing more than twice a day for a long while, due to some issues while in 3D mode w/ my GeForce2MX.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Microsoft has charged for updates for years silly. Just look at 98 SE, ME, and XP. Nothing changes this practice, except we can guarentee that service packs are now going to be rebranded as YP and ZP respectively to go along with the eXPerience.
I don't know about anybody else, but my Windows installation crashes more often at the "Crash Reporting" screen than at any other time. Perhaps this is skewing the results?
- Product Quality. "5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day." Bill concedes his product is shit.
- Support. Updates providing new features could be charged for, but certainly not for fixing existing deficiencies (crashes, security) in features the customer has already purchased.
Conclusion, Bill gets home and corporate users hooked on his product: He's the biggest drug dealer on the planet.Suddenly, I'm really thankful for my Win98 (1st edition) install -- it only crashes 2 or three times a WEEK!
of mysterious windows crash during system build, BEFORE there are any apps to mess it up. I've heard 10% but never seen that high, more like 8% from my view, and I've built 1000's of pc's and servers, and more using our new image process, so these are similar models, with standard equipment that for some strange reason get a variety of errors during the build process. 99% of those go along there merry after a reboot, and the remaining 1% is almost ALWAYS disk or memory errors.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
My own stats on the OSes I run daily:
Linux: 0 crashes per day
OpenBSD: 0 crashes per day
Why would anyone pay money to have trojans uploaded to their computers? Next thing you know L337 little bitches are going to be sending people bills for "updating" their computers with new DDOS trojans.
Sucks to be you.
Guess you should have bought a mac, mines been up for almost 3 months now.
But in all serious, I'm sure the number of people who are having crashes is even larger then what MS is reporting as I'm sure alot of people opt not to send the crash report for whatever reason(paranoia or otherwise).
_______
Death wish, n.:
The only wish that always comes true, whether or not one wishes it t
...how angry this makes me right now. First microsoft produces some really buggy software, then charges people to fix the bugs? WTF? This is the exact reason why microsoft will not likely be around in a few decades.
Lets look at Linux crash statistics for a minute. Wait a second, what statistics? LInux doesnt crash if the user doesnt fuck it up, unlike microsoft software which crashes using the default configuration. 5% Is alot of crashes considering that microsoft holds most of the market share.
Whats up with error reporting software? Why do they need it? Because they cannot produce a stable operating system! If they could do "trustworthy computing" they wouldnt need error reporting software.
~Jmd
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
are still stuck at the "Windows was not shut down properly" screen.
5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day
A very clear distinction is
- Is it the OS falls over two or more times every day (equiv kernel panic)
- A error report is sent to microsoft (so more than 5%)
- Error reports caused by OS falling over?
- Error reports caused by *any* application crashing? (equiv, app seg fault)
I strongly suspect it is the last. I.e 5% of all windows machines send an error report every day that some application or another has crashed. If that's the case, that's not a reflection on Microsoft Windows.
But on to my topic,
Now how many people crash ONCE a day??? It seems odd that he would pick just twice a day to report, what would have looked more impressive would have been Bill saying "Only 5% of our users crash once or more using all of our operating systems."
I know as all you do it would have been a much more staggering figure since just about any Windows PC I see at work crashes once a day, so I can see why he didnt say it.
Glad my linux and OSX boxes crash on an average of once every 6 or 7 months or so.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I was thinking about charging for Windows Updates too. That's so weird! We were both thinking the same thing...wow!
Over 2 years old installation, zero crashes. Nuff said.
Laptop Reviews
If you bothered to read the article you would see that it said:
"Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day."
(emphasis mine)
*twitch*
Re: Too bad half the updates I've ever install make my copy of windows worse.
Thats a good point. Will the money we pay for updates gain us any better quality updates? If not, could we demand refunds if Bill screws up our servers... again?
In news today, Ford motor company announced a new plan to start charging for certain product recals.
"We expect a large revenue stream from this new strategy. Our newest models include gas tanks that could potentially explode. By charging for a replacement, we stand to make over a billion."
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Gates is trying to figure out how to charge windows users for the crashes, too.
The computer industry "experienced a boom that I don't think we'll see again in our lifetime"
This guy has a problem with evolution (640K memory, etc.).
Sorin M
That's ok... it's not like anybody updates their system anyway.
So I pay for a copy of Windows and soon I might have to pay Microsoft to fix the bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place?
I've been considering switching to Linux for a while now and having to pay more money to Microsoft for fixes would cause me to switch for sure. I'm not going to put up with crap like that!
Then there's the rest of us, company networks who have things nicely fire-walled, techies who configure their friend's computers to never contact M$ with 'quality assurance crash reports', installations for people who don't have 'net access (they -do- exist), etc...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
I had to submit this cause I think its funny, even if the site is Mac centric So just how many Wintels are messing their shorts three or more times a day, you ask? Well, we're not entirely sure; Microsoft claims to have 600 million customers, though not all of them necessarily use Windows. Let's make a conservative estimate and assume that 90% of Microsoft's customers use Windows of some flavor. That would mean there are 540 million using Windows, 27 million of whom, by the Billster's own admission, have computers that crash on average at least every eight hours. Meanwhile, Apple claims there are 25 million Mac users worldwide. Yes, there are apparently more Windows users rebooting crashed Wintels at least three times a day than there are Mac users total-- which, in one sense, is pretty sad for Apple, but in a larger sense is just plain pathetic for Microsoft.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I think Dilbert had one (rumored to be based on a true story) where the company decided to offer a bounty for every bug fixed. As usual, Wally decided to "write himself a minivan." I can already see bugs been inserted proactively by employees to boost their stock option value...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You are driving. Unless the cop has it in for people who drive a car like yours, hasn't made his quota, or is having a generally rotten day and feels like sharing.
Choosing resistors for your home electronics projects, unless perhaps you are aiming for orbit, then you better get the spendy 1% or better kind.
Temerature for frying your pancakes on the stove. Actually, that's a pretty superior stove, as most vary wildly on what the subjective settings: LOW, MED, HIGH mean. At least ovens have degrees, but also seem to have their own opinions of 400 degrees.
Fan speed, processor temperature, etc. unless you're already at the limit and a 5% spike in voltage or temperature means you stop reading this text and start fishing out the backup hardware.
It's your annual cost of living increase. Beats 2% or none at all.
Your opponent just went into the red while you kept alive.
5% is not good enough when...
You understated your income tax three years ago and get smacked down for it.
They're mixing chemo drugs to pump into your veins for the next three months. You want it all exact and guarantees, alas, there are none...
The wing is good for 205% and the foam exerts 206% force.
You spend thousands of dollars on equipment, software and salaries and watch it all general 0 revenue while workers wait for a reboot, or spend hours or days recovering from lost or corrupt data.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's just not as funny the second time around though...
*twitch*
Are you telling me that Bill Gates has released statistics that are obviously wrong, that everybody knows it, and that they are higher than the reality ? Do you really think M$ would release numbers not only fake (well this is not news), but numbers that says that W$ crashes more often than it does in reality ?
I'm sorry but however low my respect for this company, I don't buy it, this would be really stupid.
As for the relevance of those numbers, have you counted the majority of users who have disabled that feature ?
theefer
ok, 5% crash 2 or more times per day.
... and here's some for-pay updates to fix that problem, you drooling idiot customer. WINDOWS IS YOUR GOD. WORSHIP IT.
Let's say then, that maybe 10% crash once per day, 20% crash every couple of days, 40% crash once a week, etc. If we only go that far that's saying
75% of windows computers crash at least once a week.
If once a week doesn't sound like a lot to you, imagine how annoyed you'd be if your ISP was down once a week, because that's what we're talking about.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
"I'm going to write me a mini-van!"
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
Boy that is good business policy, he will get away with it, American businesses are that stupid!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I've always wondered how useful that information would be to Microsoft. A lot of the crashes are due to non-Microsoft software. What good would that information do them?
I think it's more like something to make users feel like they can do something instead of clicking the OK button when Windows tells them "Too Bad, I've decided to stop running this program". Maybe Microsoft figured it would reduce some anger on the user end.
If we choose not to pay for a patch, it seems fair that we can send M$ a bill for the money lost due to the flaw.
-n-
Perhaps you should get with the times and realize that the win9x line has been end-of-lifed, making all of Microsoft's operating systems based on the NT kernel. While what you said may have been true about win95/98/ME, it's certainly not true of 2000/XP/2003. Of course, there are still quite a few people using even win95, but that number will only continue to decrease.
I've had application crashes take down X, which is functionally equivalent to taking down the entire machine for the average computer user. Sure, you don't have to spend time waiting for the computer to reboot, but you just lost every GUI app that was running, including anything with important data that didn't have a periodic auto-save.
No wonder you replied as an annonymous coward! You speak of heresy!! Anyway, that isn't "Linux" that's crashing, those are the apps created by 3rd parties. Windows crashes... Period, Exclaimation!
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
The problem with free updates is that users sometimes install them. What's wrong with that you say? Read on to the point where Mr. Gates says that that MS is intent on persuing the growing security market.
1. Make faulty software.
2. Charge for updates so that no one installs them
3. Sell security software to companies that are attacked by hacked windows boxen.
4. Profit
Here's the list:
/proc/tty/driver/serial reveals the exact character counts for serial links. This could be used by a local attacker to infer password lengths and inter-keystroke timings during password entry.
/proc filesystem in Linux allows local users to obtain sensitive information by opening various entries in /proc/self before
executing a setuid program. This causes the program to fail to change the ownership and permissions of already opened entries.
CAN-2003-0461:
CAN-2003-0462: Paul Starzetz discovered a file read race condition existing in the execve() system call, which could cause a local crash.
CAN-2003-0464: A recent change in the RPC code set the reuse flag on newly-created sockets. Olaf Kirch noticed that his could allow normal users to bind to UDP ports used for services such as nfsd.
CAN-2003-0476: The execve system call in Linux 2.4.x records the file descriptor of the executable process in the file table of the calling process, allowing local users to gain read access to restricted file descriptors.
CAN-2003-0501: The
CAN-2003-0550: The STP protocol is known to have no security, which could allow attackers to alter the bridge topology. STP is now turned off by default.
CAN-2003-0551: STP input processing was lax in its length checking, which could lead to a denial of service.
CAN-2003-0552: Jerry Kreuscher discovered that the Forwarding table could be spoofed by sending forged packets with bogus source addresses the same as the local host.
So, were's this "HUGE remote exploit" of which you speak???
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I bet he actually said something like:
"5% of all windows installations are installed on leapyear day and crash two or more times every day...the other 95% of all installations of windows crash only once a day. It has been decided that all computers running windows will have their clocks updated via the net daily to keep their time accurate. This will of course require a restart. We are going to charge $0.75 per restart now."
In other news...Microsoft (MSFT) has increased its' revenue by $410,625,000,000,000.00 or more yearly.
I got nothin'.
Imagine if Gates got a nickel for every time Windows crashed... oh, wait
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I guess people cant think out loud anymore? Not like RedHat does anything like this (*cough* http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/offerings/). I dont think they plan on charging for what you have in mind, people. MS isnt hurting for money that bad.
The only good part of this post is the use of the word "asshat."
I've always preferred to pay for what I get and not what I don't get. $300 for winxp pro and free updates? No, $300 for winxp and updates. So whether you update or not, you're paying for it. A better model would be $150 for winxp pro and $50/year for updates. Similar to RedHat's Red Hat Network, a valuable service. So if you don't update, at lease you're not paying for it.
Yet another boneheaded move by Mr. Gates. Charge me updates for your crappy software? I don't think so. Complexity be damned, I think I'm going to be dancing with Tux soon.
I can.
Micrsoft Bob 2004?
Part Two: We will now begin charging for stability fixes.
hmmmmm....
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
i've had that many of my ATTEMPTS at installing windows crash, or more. And not even due to user error.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
At the end of the day, your approach is sanest. People get all caught up in the methodology without realizing that the end result will always be what matters in computing.
And as a result, all the worms and viruses keep spreading, slowing down the network, and helping spammers. Now they're going to make people pay to download the patches? Imagine some guy rear-ending you on the highway because GM made his car with faulty brakes, and charged money to fix the problem, and the car owner decided he couldn't/wouldn't pay the money. Remember, most of these viruses/worms affect everyone, not just the people with infected boxes. The last thing we want to give people is another reason to not apply the patches.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
according to error reporting software in windows, 5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day.
I interpret that as: "Out of all Windows computers with errors, 5% crash more than once. The other 95% crash once."
Think about it: if they're getting the sample from error reporting, that means that all of the computers in the sample crashed (had an error, whatever). It does not mean that 5% of every Windows computer in the world crashed more than once, it means that 5% of every Windows computer that crashed did so more than once. If it were the former, that's an obscenely high number.
Crashes where the system hangs, or the error is not trapped.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Nice flamebait.
Each time a major OS release comes out of Apple, they charge for it, yes. So does everyone else. Microsoft does it. SuSE does it. Don't let the version numbering for Mac OS X fool ya, 10.2 was a major upgrade over 10.1, which was a major upgrade compared to 10.0.
However, Apple doesn't charge for minor point releases. They're up to 10.2.6 right now in OS X, so you can see there have been several point releases since 10.2 was released, plus a smattering of security updates and individual application updates. Those are all free.
If Microsoft really does start charging for service packs, as the parent article for this thread suggests, their customers are going to revolt. From the Microsoft standpoint, they need a new revenue stream, and they want a way to subsidize the ongoing effort of improving products already in the market (like Windows 2000 Professional, since many users refuse to upgrade to XP).
I'm willing to pay for a major new OS release once every year or two, if the new features are compelling enough and my hardware can support it. But I'm not willing to pay for the vendor's bug-fixing efforts and minor feature fixes/additions.
Not to mention that 2 or more (what 10? 90?) times a day is really a lot and is probably an indication of a really serious problem. 2 to 3 crashes a week is probably my Windows norm and enough to make me want to huge my Linux box when I finally get home.
Quack, quack.
How did this get modded a troll, I thought it was humorus cause before OS X the Mac os DID crash ever 2 hours, I know Im a die hard mac user.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Those statistics are skewed by the prevalence of Windows 98 and ME installations, and don't reveal the fact that Win2K and XP are far more reliable than those stats suggest. Across the enterprises with which I'm familiar that are running recent Windows releases, Windows is widely considered to be a reliable desktop OS. If you were to talk to users about 2 crashes per day, they's ask you what decade you're living in.
What decade are you guys living in?
<bart
A sure fire plan to increase security if I ever heard one.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Thank you, Mr. Twain.
Wonder what the DoJ will think of his plans to make users pay for his bugs. Any other SW company that blatant about it would get slapped.
In the meantime, spin that bitch like a top, Billy-boy. We all know that you're the epicenter of all that's evil in the world; charging for flaws in your software is just icing on the cake.
That Powerbook looks awfully tasty right now. If only they'd drop the damned price.
I have been using W2K for 3 years now and I have third party applications crash the OS daily. One current example is Eve-Online. That game is so buggy that I don't even get the BSOD, it just simply freezes to the point where only a hard boot will fix it. I also get innumerable errors that do things such as cause the sound to stop or some other weirdness that also requires a reboot to fix. And yes I am well aware of how to restart services and kill orphan processes.
Yes, Win9x was worse but not by much.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Funny, when I read "They are going to spend 8% more on R&D" I got a mental image of Bill Gates handing a large sack of cash to Darl McBride in some anonymous parking garage.
"Good things don't end with eum, they end with mania or teria." - H. Simpson
My WinXP Pro isntallation crashes about four times a week. Microsoft does track these. Most installations are configured to create a core dump on a stop error. They use a more detailed mechanism to report these failures. In fact, where as the regular app crash reporting just sends data, the OS crash sends the data, connects to MS in IE and presents information to you.
Most of the time for me, that information is "this was caused by a device driver problem; we are investigating." Once however, it told me, "This crash was caused by a problem which has been fixed in SP-1. Please update your installation."
So, I have no doubt that the 5% statistic is really operating system crashes as the article states. Now, for all those non-connected machines or users that choose to deny the report to microsoft... well.... 5% could be a little low.
im getting a bit sick of the whole ms bad, linux good rubbish! i run ms at work and on some machines at home with few problems - and considering the wide range of configurations that ms runs under 5% failure rate sounds pretty much ok - most websites i know fail on more than 5% of browsers! i love the open source concept - it produces great code based around the best concepts, but i also accept the reality of the market and admire microsoft for getting people to pay for software - and boy do they pay
I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
I may be the only person in this position on the planet, but I've been running both XP and 2k Server for 1 year, and neither OS has crashed once...maybe the odd dodgy app, but the OS is stable as hell for me.
Just for the record, I've had Linux crash (X servers, even the odd kernel crash once or twice). Besides, it's all a matter of opinion where Linux is concerned: how much do you count as the OS? Just the kernel? Everything right up to the X server? If you decide the "OS" is only the kernel, then you're probably not going to have a great many OS crashes.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Based on my personal experience, I'd expect at least one third of all Win95, Win98 and Millennium to crash 2+ times a day.
As for NT, Win2k and WinXP, I'd expect them to crash much less frequently. In fact, I can't even remember Win2k or XP ever BSODing on me "out of the blue" and I do quite a bit of development on them at work. I think a great majority of BSODs on these systems happens due to a faulty hardware (like RAM), or crappy drivers. So, mod me down all you want, but MS got over BSOD hurdle starting Win2K.
That is not to say that there are no stability issues. I bet if I were to count number of times I had to reboot my system after:
a. Applying security update
b. Installing some seemingly innocuous application
c. Having my system become unbearably slow after copying/moving/deleting a large number of files.
d. Having my system go nuts with IE windows coming up dead, apps failing or taking forever to start, windows not repainting properly, etc.
those 5% could easily double.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
This doesn't suprise me How can someone justify charging to fix a bug that should have been there in the first place? Simply, they have peaked in their market and now in order to produce growth they will have to get their existing customer base to pay more for less. We seen this with their changing liscensing schemes. However. ultimately, their own practices are going to lead to their decline. Joe Average is eventually going to catch on. Then, they will be looking for competitor. Linux and Apple just has to hold on.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
So now you're talking about games. Sorry, but they're in a class of their own. Crashes in games that take down the entire OS are not uncommon, because games are accessing hardware at a lower level than most other applications. As well, mostly the problem is related to hardware or drivers, neither of which is under the control of the OS developer. I've crashed Windows 2000 and XP many times simply by playing games, because nVidia's drivers were buggy. I've yet to crash Windows 2000 or XP, or even have them go flaky, simply by crashing something like Internet Explorer or Winamp.
It doesn't matter what "causes" the crash. The OS should be essentially crashproof
But it is theoretically impossible to for an observer (i.e., the OS) to determine whether another program (i.e., the app) will shut down properly.
In computer science, this is known as the halting problem, and it can be mathematically proven.
Tor
"Knowing that no matter how much patches come out, Linux will be more secure - Pricess"
Price[le]ss
And that sums up the problem with Linux at this stage of the game: no matter what you want it to do, there seems to be one little piece that isn't there yet.
There were some major cross-platfrom networking issues that you had to upgrade to 10.1 to fix, but otherwise the OS X's have been pretty damned stable on thier own without the need for a paid upgrade.
My mother has been running a 10.1.2 iMac for about two years now and she's never called to whine about it.
The error reporting mechanism in Windows does not report system crashes (a la those pretty blue screens that say IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL), to my knowledge. It is more likely that two or more fatal application crashes occur daily, and I bet in most of those cases it's because of horrible third-party software. I can't count how many times Macromedia's latest Flash plugin has crashed IE, Opera and Mozilla on me.
How are they calculating this? Are they using an estimated number of Windows installations, or is it only 5 percent of systems which log errors experiencing this? Most people I know turned error reporting off a long, long time ago.
And those Macs are running on adverage 24 hours a day whereas the PC's are shutdown every night since they seem to crash less than when we did leave them on everyday.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
to help move Linux to the desktop. I currently use Gentoo as my os on my desktop, on one server, and am going to move my other 2 servers from Win2k to Linux (Debian or Gentoo) this weekend. Then updates will essentially only cost me my time.
Actually, it says above... 5% of all windows installations... Not 5% of all apps. Your crashing app shouldn't crash your OS. That's a crappy OS for you
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
wait just a gul darn minute ...
I was under the impression the error reporting tool didn't send any personally identifiable info back to MS. How, exactly, is he figuring out the frequency with which individual machines crash?
1. Sell buggy software 2. Profit 3. "find" bugs 4. Profit 5. Goto 1.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
From what I can tell, this error reporting software only sends error reports regarding programs that crash, not the OS itself.
No. Twice, Windows has done a hard, cold BSOD and at the next boot, come up with a msg saying something like "Uh oh. Call home?" in slightly different words. Btw, in both cases the error was reported to be in a driver (yep, I read the details).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Hey, you can't blame them for being true to their own logic. Don't forget... Bill or Steve Ballmer said that people don't upgrade software to fix bugs. They do it to get more features!
I had a sucky sig.
I'd be willing to bet that for ANY desktop operating system, if installed and used by half a billion clueless lusers for several years, 5% of those installations would end up crashing twice a day. 5% of cars probably stall twice a day.
Windows isn't great, but it all the problem. Users are stupid. And now that computers are mass-marketed, we get a LOT of them. Which means a lot of bad 3rd party software, and a lot of worse 3rd party software, and a lot of self-replicating, drive formatting software.
And as someone pointed out, not everyone uses the crash reporting. Most people have become very familiar with the "Don't Send" button.
For me, crashing isn't the big problem... it's the system's penchant for becoming very sluggish after it has been running for over a few hours...
Whenever Bill Gates releases a statistic like that, I automatically multiply it by 10.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So in order to maintain a reasonably consistent revenue stream, Microsoft have organized their product line to maximize how often they can charge you. Their product branding strategy has been to create a "completely new" edition of windows every few years. They want it to look like Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP are all different products so you have to pay a separate licence fee each time. But the reality is the functionality has not changed, only the stability has improved (slightly) and there have usually been a few extra heavily-marketed features that no one wanted (how about those fruity xp themes?)
So now they've decided to make it official, they will charge money directly for the update itself, which saves them from maintaining the lie of packaging the updates in the form of yet another "Windows XYZ".
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
Wow, charging for updates (bug fixes). Let's see.... it's high time they started charging for those IE updates and closed the loop on the whole nasty Netscape thing. Afterall, they've killed the competition.
Microsoft updates often include significant new products. For example I have "Windows Movie Maker" which appears to be some basic non linear editing suite.
Microsoft now has a conduit to your desktop through which it can introduce new products as windows updates, and they're nothing of the sort. They've effectively built a bundling pipeline to most desktop systems in the world. Now with the addition of charges for their "updates" it transforms into a direct P2P sales infrastructure for everything from product updates to new applications with absolutely zero competition.
Even though it's one sentence in the NYTimes article, the audacity of this man to even *think* that he could charge for updates is stunning. Especially since there are so many gaping holes in his product.
That said, MSFT security seems to be good enough for the United States Government...and they would probably cough up maintenance monies (especially if Billy places back-doors, DRM, etc. in Longhorn) to support the 140,000 desktops the big brains at the Department of Homeland Security bought to keep our nation safe: ( Microsoft chosen as exclusive Homeland Security contractor . My favorite part of this "Government Executive" article was, "Microsoft's selection for such a wide range of software products would seem to indicate that officials have found those brands are used and favored by the majority of security agencies."
My God...how many technically clueless people are there in our nation's security agencies?
When I used to use Windows, I considered it a gift from the Gods if it worked for 5 hours straight. I didn't trust it to still be responding when I left to take a piss, for goodness sake.
Since I downloaded/burned/installed Mandrake 8.2, then 9.0, now 9.1, I've had 1 case where Freeciv locked up completely, 1 case where X wouldn't start because my video card burned out (Not linux's fault), and 1 case when the X server got a signal 11 from somewhere and dropped me at a console (1 command and I was back).
I'll take Linux, thank you. It's faster, more secure, more stable, and free.
That would ad 200 dollars a month to the cost of "trying" to run a secure MS machine. They've totally warped your mind. You've become entirely too complacent. That and a newcomer to MS has NO IDEA what they are getting into. If they did, open source would never have gotten as big as it is now, and wouldn't be continueing to spread and grow. A lot of people are sick of "doing business the MS way".
Granted, the word "bugfixes" is not used. However, we all know that Microsoft typically does not refer to bug fixes as bug fixes. They call them "updates" or "Service Packs" or something similar, but never "bug fixes."
However, if you read the description of what these updates are (by reading the descriptions when you point your browser at the Windows Update site, which are provided before you actually install the updates), you would see that most of what they are is a bunch of bug fixes with perhaps a few minor feature upgrades thrown in.
Am I the only person who remembers that Windows 2000 shipped with tens of thousands of known bugs? I'm tired of the attitude some people have that it's OK to ship buggy software as long as there are no show stopper bugs. Because the definition of a "show stopper" can be subjective, and bugs that aren't show stoppers can still be highly aggravating and productivity-sapping.
So let's see. What software does Microsoft give away for free? Microsoft Money and Internet Explorer, sure, but what else? DirectX (an API that most game developers rely on heavily), the
The article talks about how, due to Longhorn's delay (availability in 2005 or later), "important features and updates to Windows XP would be added" prior to Longhorn's release. Clearly, Microsoft needs a revenue generator prior to 2005 in the OS space. Assuming sales for new OS licenses are going to be flat or in decline during the next year, it seems like they have little choice. About half their revenue comes from OS software. (The other half comes from Office, mainly.)
I mean, I suppose Microsoft could just suck it up for a year or two, but investors and industry pundits wouldn't take that very well, hence my statement that they have little choice in their course of action.
ohhh if I had a dollar for everytime I hit the "don't send" button after a fatal crash I might be able to buy some shares of microsoft with which I could then hit Bill upside the head with.
I suppose that the unstability is all the fault of everybody else though, poor MS having to pick up the tab on windows patching to cover everyone elses' shoddy work.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
For work I use both linux (dell with mandrake) and XP (corporate dell desktop) and neither OS has crashed on me (although my linux box's hd died). Sure I get the stupid "an app has unexpectedly quit - would you like to send a report to ms" nonsense(which i never send), but the OS has never crashed. For the record, I use them both for c/c++ development and debugging. My biggest complaint with MS currently is how it still requires a reboot after some config changes or after i install/uninstall a new app. This is why my linux box's uptime will always be better than my xp box.
I don't care what kind of application you're using, the job of the OS is to protect the hardware from access by individual programs, and to protect programs from each other. No app should EVER be able to crash an OS, game or not.
Device drivers are another matter, but still one within MS's control in a way; MS is the one that created the culture of every device having its own drivers, instead of the linux way where drivers are included in the kernel distribution and are written for devices generically. For instance, if you download the newest kernel, there's a driver in there for the RTL3019 NIC chipset. So all cards based on this chipset (which is a lot; it's a common low-cost chipset for NICs) use the same driver, unlike the Windows world where all those cards are about the same from a hardware POV, but the drivers are all different, and some may be better than others. Also, in Linux, the drivers are open-source just like the rest of the kernel, so people are able to file bug reports against them, debug them themselves, etc., unlike the Windows world where each driver is a little black box from the manufacturer, and may not even be supported anymore (common when the manuf. goes out of business). Admittedly, MS has finally, after all these years, started to recognize this problem, and is now trying this "signed" driver scheme to improve their situation.
In other words, they will embrace-and-pretend all crypto standards, buy out RSA, make IE work only with IIS HTTPS, and encrypt all Word documents so it's a violation of the DCMA to reverse-engineer the format. They will also introduce DRM in every Word doc, whether you like it or not, so it can't be read except on a late-model WinTel box with a DRM chip.
You will have to buy your Passport encryption key from Microsoft, and you will have to upgrade it every 3 months when a new Passport security hole is found. Oh -- and Microsoft's digital signature will always be trusted.
I feel safer already.
The last two days I've been visiting a friend who has a Hewlett Packard tower system she bought brand spanking new from Sam's club and, according to her, has been trouble since day one. At first I thought it was typical ME shittiness and began to install win2k, but now I suspect it's either a bad drive or bad motherboard. And it's been having system lock/reboot problems since she brought it home! And in spite of this flakiness she didn't replace it because she doesn't know that much about them and her husband (who knows nothing at all) would love nothing more than to see the damn thing in the scrapheap and NO computers in the house.
Now, not everyone has a controlling husband, but there are LOTS of people out there with absolute shit machines bought from places like Wallyworld and Sam's and even Sears and Radio Shack - machines made from the cheapest, most proprietary pieces the far east manufacturers can cobble together - and so people have come to EXPECT computers to work like this. They don't fix them because everyone they know who they think knows something about computers just says "winblowz suxorz" and so the software gets the blame for shitty, lowest bid hardware that would perform just as poorly running linux, BSD, or any other OS.
Just watch: if those cheap shit wal-mart peecees sell any numbers at all it won't be long at all until linux begins to get the same bad rap as windows...
5% crash twice per day? No way! Windows fanboys have been telling me for years that Windows is rock solid and never crashes. Bill Gates must be lying.
After having been asked to appear in front of a grand jury in relation to the 5% crash article, Bill Gates had to admit under oath, when asked about the 95% remaining installations, that "those actually crash *THREE* times or more everyday, which is not the same."
Think about it. 100 million Windows users. 5% is 5 mil. At 2 crashes a day, that's 10 million transactions. Daily. Not even counting all the less frequent crashers.
.5 day to measure it), the throughput is 500 gigabytes per day, averaging 46.4 Megabits/second.
That's 416,666 transactions per hour, 6944 transactions per minute, or about 116 transactions per second.
If each report is 50K (don't have an exact figure, and I don't want to wait the
*That's* the kind of data processing system I'd like to buy!
-m
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
This shouldnt suprise anyone, it was bound to happen once he felt he owned enough fo the market ( read: monopoly ) to do as he pleases.
What a scam, sell a defective product and charge for repairs to make it function.
Coming next ( soon ) will be a subscription based OS, where if you dont pay your monthy fee, your PC doesnt even boot. Forget the 'read-only' thing in office 2002 when you dont pay your subscription, now you will have NOTHING... zip.. zero.. except an expensive bookend.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Mr. Gates said the company was considering the possibility of charging for some of its software updates that are now made available free over the Internet.
This hits the spot right on. Pure and simple.
You know, I really have been expecting *nix/OSS to grab Mickeysoft by the balls when time arives, and just about everything I've predicted in the last 5 years has happend. I actually allways was convinced that eventually M$ would have to drop it's strong focus on Inhouse-Software only (thus XBox). And I still am. By time M$ will have to change it's strategies as a whole and will have to accept leveraged competition. But with DRM, TCPA and all the rest falling into place and M$ charging for updates that until now where always taken for granted M$ could actually manage to switch their entire revenue generating line to a subscribtion based service in the end. Something I though Red Hat and SuSE where allready way ahead in.
If this Nerd with the screechy voice actually manages to pull that stunt and keep subtantial ground against OSS in the longer future he's gonna earn himself my respect. He may be the Boogeyman of every Softwarehouse in the world but if he can stand his ground with this one he'll be Über-Gates.
But then again, I don't think that will happen. Not if I can prevent it, anyway. No f*ckin' way, man. You may be tough but we're a million and more and we can't go broke. Never. DO YOU HEAR ME, MICKEY$OFT?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If we're talking about a new version of media player (presuming the new version isn't a security patch... ahem), them there's no reason that it need be free.
Microsoft has traditionally used the Windows Update service to push out new products from which they hope to make money. The new version of Media Player you mention may have some kind of DRM that they want to convince commercial vendors to use. If Microsoft charges for it, then it will have a lower adoption rate. Lower adoption means that commercial vendors will be less willing to use it. If they are less willing to use it, then Microsoft doesn't sell them some kind of expensive 'media server' for distributing content. The vendor goes to a Microsoft competitor and maybe even foregoes Microsoft products altogether.
Microsoft has a vested interest in seeing that people update their products and adopt new technologies being pushed by the software giant. Anything to discourage that is a mistake IMNSHO.
But it is theoretically impossible to for an observer (i.e., the OS) to determine whether another program (i.e., the app) will shut down properly. In computer science, this is known as the halting problem, and it can be mathematically proven.
Yes, that's the halting problem.
But that has nothing to do with OS stability. The OS does not have to determine if the program will end, or even shutdown properly. Since the OS is the arbiter of resources, it can make the decision to disallow a program from executing any further, without consulting the program beforehand. It is also the protector of programs, keeping one from trouncing another. All of these types of controls, implemented correctly, should prevent any application, no matter how badly behaved, from causing the OS to fail.
The halting problem is something else entirely.
Oh yes it is most definitely a troll, and one with a beard...
All Apple updates are FREE.
All Apple upgrades - like all M$ upgrades are paid for.
The shame, the horror, the guts these people have to charge for their work.
Now go and write a 100 times
"I know the difference between an upgrade and an update"
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Every six months? Try every year or more. There is no way Apple is releasing a major update to OS X every six months. History alone does not bear this out. With the exception of the move from 10.0 to 10.1, it's been approximately one full year between major OS releases (and when I say releases, I mean "available for purchase in a store") from Apple. The difference between Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2 (Jaguar) is greater than the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, two major releases of Microsoft's flagship OS which you have to pay significantly more money than $129 for unless you get your hands on an OEM copy.
Of course Apple is going to encourage you to buy the major releases by making some features exclusive to the new major release. But they still provide bug fixes and software updates for free which are targeted at older OS releases. (In the case of iChat AV, they're planning on charging users who refuse to upgrade to 10.3/Panther for the final version of iChat AV; this is an incentive to pay for the Panther upgrade, since the final iChat AV will come standard with Panther. But at least people who want to stick with Jaguar can do so and still use the latest IM/videoconferencing software.)
Furthermore, minor point releases from Apple are still free, and will remain so for some time to come. (They're up to 10.2.6 for OS X right now.) Minor point releases are for things like repairing broken features, enabling features that were hidden in earlier releases, and primarily, introducing bug fixes.
What about Red Hat? Define "decent" access? Their code is predominantly GPL, which means they're required to release the source for their contributions. I've never had a problem downloading RPMs manually to get crucial updates, back when I ran Red Hat. And if that fails, you can always bypass Red Hat and get updates directly from the creators of the software packages that aren't unique to Red Hat. (Which is what most of Red Hat Linux is anyway, other people's stuff re-bundled with some value added.) If you're a real cheapskate, you can go download the latest tarball of the kernel source or whatever application you need and compile it yourself, assuming every other means at your disposal fails you. That's the beauty of Linux.
Basically, your entire argument skews actual facts to attempt to make Microsoft look like the last holdout in an industry-wide move to charge for bug fixes and updates. I don't see that this argument holds any water.
I'm wondering which updates exactly,
I doubt it's the security patches, or bug fixes,
but more-so addon junk like Windows Media Player 9... I hope...
Where do you draw the line? With a thriving hardware economy, you can't expect the OS developers to write all of the drivers for every different piece of hardware out there. As well, if you only write generic drivers then you rob the hardware manufacturers of the capabilty to customize their hardware offerings even if they are based on a common platform. Finally, if drivers have to be written by the OS developers, then new hardware is much less attractive. Hardware developers would have to jump through hoops, either getting the OS developers to write drivers or adding some sort of compatibility mode to their hardware, because otherwise you couldn't use the hardware. And that's saying nothing of making drivers open source, since drivers often contain intellectual property. I don't care what you think about open source, but wrong or right, most companies that own some sort of IP are generally not willing to give that away to everybody. If you want your platform to be seen as desirable to hardware developers, you need to keep that in mind.
Microsoft tries to work within these constraints in several ways. Most generic hardware items have generic drivers available from Microsoft. As well, Microsoft tries to build confidence by certifying drivers, as you mentioned. However, since certification takes a while, you'll notice that companies like nVidia, which try to rev their drivers every six months or so, generally have an older version that's Microsoft-certified. You won't be using that version, because it doesn't have the latest and greatest enhancements and fixes.
There's surely a better way to balance between "completely open and generic (and thus unattractive to hardware developers)" and "completely closed black box drivers", but I don't know what it is. In the meantime, gamers will generally accept less stability for more performance in their games, and thus games should be judged separately from other apps in terms of stability.
hahaha.. as if Apple isn't charging $129 every six months for the latest and greatest OS X.
OS X isn't released that quickly, it is on the market for at least 18 months before there is wind of the next update. The Difference between 10.1 and 10.2 was more than just a little bug fix, new features processes were added and better ways to do things were made. 10.3 is the same.
You can knock MS for a lot of things, but they're still ahead of the curve for OS updates as far as Redhat and Apple are concerned.
Yes, there update engine is very complex and overall good at finding the fixes you need. Redhat's is very useful and efficient FOR A FREE OS!!! up2date is annoying is you don't subsribe after your demo period is up. As for Apple... OS X software update, it goes and updates your applications, most never requiring a reboot.
Just bashing is not a good thing, perhaps you should upgrade your Debian kernel from 2.2 or actually read about the OSs you so proudly bash.
Proof Reading and spell check is for losers!
i have 3 winxp boxes and the last time one crashed was four days ago (heat problem I think.. first time its ever happened).. in general they all experience an uptime of greater than two weeks. They usually are shutdown before they have a chance to crash (once every couple weeks) but for the most part it seems to run for an indefinitely long amount of time. Of course this all depends on software and hardware used so.. mileage is definitely varying :-D
In one word, Bullshit! An OS should not let a badly written ap crash the system or other applications. If it does (and I very much expect that some of the crashes that Bill admits to might well be this) then it is the fault of the operating system.
The bttom like is that Bill releases flawed software, software that is so flawed that even he admits that a not insignificant number of users see Windows crash two or more times a day. A decent OS does not crash once a year, on the average. Now he's not satisified with selling bug fixes as a new version every few years (how many people bought into XP just because it was promoted as more stable than the Win98 or Win ME that was crashing on them multiple times each day but didn't really need or want any of the new "features"?), he also wants to sell the very fixes that he should have a legal obligation to provide.
And does anyone think that, if Microsoft sees a new profit center in selling fix updates, that there will be less problems in any fuure release? Would the department that makes it's profits by selling fixes ever let Microsoft release a version that doesn't crash? If anything they will delay product releases to put additional problems that will need fixes in.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day."
Skew things the other way for all the systems behind firewalls and those that have deliberately disabled the crash reporting. That 5% is just the ones they know about, and until XP, there was no error reporting service.
I've noticed that no one is willing to bet the company on the dancing paperclip anymore. I remember when conventional wisdom was all about that paperclip and how it was going to be next big thing, a cautious step into a future filled with punch-me-I'm-Jar-Jar-Binks avatars.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
At least microsoft dosent make cars!
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
remember kids Microsoft isnt a monopoly ;-)
.
Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates, Apache in house.
How much will updates cost me if they leave out the crash-o-matic?
-- Will program for bandwidth
>>But doing it as an AC while telling the mods
:)
>>to Karma-credit the previous post and getting
>>busted: pricless
Since +funny doesn't affect karma, you can take a flying leap.
"Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass."
Source: Click here
Remind me to introduce you to the concept of a double negative sometime. Like it or not, bug fixes *do* add value. Granted, it's value that you should have gotten at purchase, but it's value nonetheless.
To reduce your syntax to math:
(Current Worth) - (-Value) = (Current Worth) + Value.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
folks, the only proper response to this news is:
Ya gotta be shittin me.
-
1. Click on URL, you're redirected to registration/login page
2. Go to URL bar, replace "www" with "archive" in the URL, leaving the rest alone, and hit ENTER
3. The system will bounce you around a few erroneous URLs, before returning you to the homepage
4. All NYT links will now work without registration, thanks to a special cookie set by the bouncing process
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
It just baffles me how and why people sit back and allow this to happen. People *ARE* this stupid, too. They will grab their ankles and allow MS to charge for updates. Where else does MS get this nerve to even so much let a whisper out of an idiotic idea such as this? Give me a break. You can't charge for updates. You can't ask someone to pay for something that didn't work in the first place. No sense in complaining about it though if no one's gonna do anything. Welcome to this idiotic world.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I imagine if people bothered to actually click the "Details..." button, they'd see that most of the alleged Windows faults they're reporting here are actually driver problems.
Give Linux the marketshare Windows has and I guarantee it would be crashing as often, if not more so. But, of course, Slashdot needs a scapegoat that fires up article hits. People fall for it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
When will the NYT learn?
July 25, 2003
Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth
By JOHN MARKOFF
REDMOND, Wash., July 24 -- Microsoft today outlined a new corporate approach designed to allow the company to weather a period of slow growth in the computer industry. At the same time, its executives disputed the idea that the information technology boom had ended for good.
Speaking at the company's annual meeting for financial analysts here, Bill Gates, Microsoft's cofounder and chairman, announced the company's plans to increase its research and development spending this year by as much as 8 percent, to a total of $6.9 billion. The company also said before the meeting that it would expand its work force by 4,000 to 5,000 positions during the current fiscal year.
Despite its aggressive stance on investing in the future, the software company earlier this month dramatically altered the way it rewards its workers, shifting to direct stock grants from stock options. That move was widely interpreted to be an acknowledgment by Microsoft that it was maturing as a corporation and that its compensation packages had to tilt in a new direction.
The company said today that it had already seen some indication that its stock-based incentive plan is helping with recruitment of new employees.
Also today, Microsoft introduced a tier of financial managers that it said was part of an effort to apply new financial discipline to its operations.
Mr. Gates's remarks suggested a new sense of realism at the company that has 600 million customers and whose stock price grew dramatically before 1997, but has since tapered off.
The computer industry "experienced a boom that I don't think we'll see again in our lifetime," Mr. Gates said in describing the Internet boom. He noted that since 2001 companies have been forced to face harsh new realities that have significantly limited new software investment.
But he directly challenged the view -- now held in some technology circles and recently presented in an article in the Harvard Business Review -- that the technology industry is headed for a period of consolidation.
"The debate about what came out of the boom and what these information technology investments mean has really gotten fairly extreme," said Mr. Gates, who is Microsoft's chief software architect. "Obviously we put our money where our beliefs are in saying we disagree with all of this."
Last week, Microsoft raised its revenue forecast for fiscal 2004 by about $1 billion. At the same time the company also said it had no plans to spend any of its $49 billion cash on major acquisitions or increase dividends, despite recent rumors.
Shares in Microsoft fell 45 cents each today, to close at $26.
Throughout the day, a parade of Microsoft's executives summarized each of the company's businesses, describing new products and strategies and outlining competitive threats.
A number of them described the company's overall strategy as "integrated innovation," a reference to the drive to add a continual stream of features and services to Microsoft's Windows and Office software businesses.
"It shouldn't be necessary for people to buy additional products for their secure infrastructures," Mr. Gates said.
Microsoft's plans in the computer security field have created both fear and skepticism in that industry. Its competitors have said they fear that Microsoft will govern that arena in the same way it attacked Netscape and came to dominate browser software.
But despite a concerted effort to improve the reputation of its products for security and stability, Microsoft has been plagued by a series of embarrassing computer security flaws, including a new security hole in a program used to play video and audio files that it made public on Wednesday.
Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day.
But even with my limited experience with windows,
I'm willing to bet your Win2k box was an upgrade
done overtop of a previous version of windows.
Probably ME or 98. I had problems with a Win2k
machine I had to use for a contract recently. Same
deal. All patches. All security updates. Still
bombed 3 times a day. Seems that Microsoft doesn't
do upgrades very well. I wiped the drive, started
over with a fresh Win2k install, and that did the
trick. Now it bombs about once a week. Much much
nicer. Still not anywhere near as stable as ANY
free UNIX workalike I've ever used. Even
turbolinux was more stable and acted better under
load.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Crashing twice a day or more !!? So that's at least two times everyday.
:w!
I remember when I had 98SE and it would crash maybe once a week, and I thought THAT was bad. Even my Dad (who knows nothing about computers) didn't think it acceptable when his computer crashed once in a blue moon.
So if 5% crash twice a day (absolutely horrible): How many crash once a day (still absolutely horrible)? How many crash once a week (unacceptable)? How many crash once a month (tolerable)?
The frank replies to this thread surprise me a little. So let me ask this one very simple question:
Is there really any reason to switch to Linux (my geek friends are always trying to get me to) other than as income-deprivation for evil microsoft? Because I'm using a pirated copy anyway...
Seriously here. Most of my favorite software will not run on Linux. We've already established that it can crash just as often (even if it's not the creators' fault).
So as Joe-Average PC user, give me some reasons. Because I can't think of a single one.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
If your summation of the situation is correct then we will have two internets. The Microsoft controlled one and the other Wild Wild Web. Just what we need MS in control of business and economic communication world wide and free speech for the rest. George Orwell could never have guessed this situation. Do you trust MS with your ideas and information, just ask Corel, Apple, AOL, IBM and all the other victims.....what they think about that! Your business is next. Do not go into the computer/software business there you are the lunch.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
... on the Microsoft board meeting whiteboard:
--Preconditions--- A. 5% of machines crash at least twice a day
- B. "Software Updates" are free and the distribution mechanism is optional.
---Steps to PROFIT!---I was just using the game as a recent example. I've had many crashes from business apps. I've even had wordpad crash the machine. I've been supporting windows at the desktop for over 10 years now so I've had the opportunity to see it many times. And I am a fanatic about having the latest drivers and patches installed.
As far as games accessing the hardware directly, DirectX is supposed to provide access to the hardware through the OS. Sure it's more intense on the hardware, but it's supposed to work.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I see several comments that say an application crashing can't be blamed on Microsoft. I disagree. When there are fundamental flaws in the OS that guarantee crashes, Microsoft damn well deserves the blame. I've seen it. A memory leakage problem in Win NT 4 guaranteed that programs that did certain types of operations would crash eventually. There was no way to work around it.
Not all application crashes can be blamed on the OS, but the number is probably significant.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The problems with Windows are as follows:
#1. The core OS was not sufficiently protected from being "upgraded" by any application that was installed. Microsoft was the biggest offender with Office.
#2. The binary registry has all of the information for everything, users, applications, hardware, security, etc stored in it. If something goes wrong it is a major pain to fix it.
#3. The uninstall feature of Windows does not clear out everything. If I do install a buggy driver for a scanner and I want to remove it so it doesn't affect my system anymore, uninstalling does NOT always clean it out.
That is why, over time, Windows installations become less stable. Crap gets stuck in the registry and drivers get stuck in the OS directories and bad things start happening.
And don't give me any crap about that being the fault of the user. The OS should be able to control itself. Look at Debian's uninstall feature. Debian even has multiple levels of uninstall.
The problems with Windows are because of decisions Microsoft made. Not because of end-users.
Microsoft is going two ways with this. You can subscribe to their update service or pay a higher upgrade fee. That being said, Microsoft could purposely code flaws into Windows in order to make more money and keep people paying for updates.
...but now you pay to get it fixed by tiny degrees, or you just live with daily crashes, and suspect you're just the one out of 20 in your neighborhood who got unlucky.
(Just please don't tell the Department of Justice on us. We couldn't stand having to pay them off again.)
I feel it important to first mention that I have not read the linked article.
If the quote was indeed that Microsoft is considering charging for some software updates that it now makes available for free and that's as specific as it gets, then I'm inclined to believe that it's not what many here are thinking.
I would imagine the stuff they're considering charging for would be along the lines of what Apple does. Take iChat A/V, iChat is free but the upgrade to A/V for non-Panther users will be $29.
iDVD is free with new, SuperDrive equipped Macs but caries an upgrade fee for anyone wanting the newest version.
I think Microsoft has already gone down this path with that recent, for pay software pack that included updated features to Windows MovieMaker and some odd ball features for Media Player.
Shouldn't this move be welcomed? Microsoft charging for such things is better for the competitive landscape as it gives people an incentive to shop for alternatives.
I understand that, but I still believe games should be considered separately because of their unique requirements. As well, aside from games your experiences differ from mine. Granted, I've only been doing Windows development for roughly 5 years, but I've been running Windows much longer.
Of course DirectX abstracts the hardware, but it does so through drivers. If the drivers are buggy, then they can cause major crashes. It just so happens that video and sound drivers tend to be more volatile than SCSI drivers, for instance, and games stress the former much harder than your everyday business applications.
Hi Qbertino. I think that you forgot to take your meds this morning.
The middle mind speaks!
Are you kidding me? That is what it said. And it's not that hard to believe. All the other times when it said the crash was caused by a device driver, it gave me the option to track the progess of their investigation. I didn't take it because it requires a MS Passport ID. But, they obviously have have a way to ID the common crashes.
Heck, mozilla can categorize the why a crash happened with their talkback software. What makes you think Microsoft is any less capable?
"Bill Gates says that according to error reporting software in windows, 5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day."
Is this the sw that prompts you to ask whether to report if an application crashes that he's referring to? If so, how does it run to prompt you to allow it to report your computer has crashed, if your computer has crashed and the sw can't run? My XP installation never crashes so I don't understand. Is this the last thing that works before your system hangs. Doesn't make sense to me. Ive seen this come up from buggy apps, but ctrl-alt-del allows me to kill the app without rebooting the computer.
Vote for Pedro
An application causing the OS to crash is a very serious problem. One of the functions of a modern OS is to control access to memory and I/O and prevent an app crash from effecting the other apps and OS.
Using your words, A program crash that causes the whole system to crash has everything to do with the underlying operating system.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
From the comments it seems people think a 'crash' requires a hard reboot or so. But from what I know it does not mean that the machine hangs (how would you send an error message to MS in that case ?). Rather, it is some sort of 'critical application error' for which you get these little popup windows.
/. seems sooo sensitive when it comes to Windows. Coexist and be happy !
The 5% statistic is a probably a little bit low as well. First, when this 'critical application error' window comes, it asks if you want to submit a report to Microsoft (Personally I never click 'send'. It's an obvious privacy flaw). Secondly, the '5% of machines' is also restricted to machines that are continously networked. So the actual number must be bigger.
In any case, people on
...mod me overrated. Because really, that comment is not funny at all. The only reason it's funny is because it's blatantly obvious that I'm trying to be modded +1, Funny.
And don't even think of modding this one funny, either. Or off-topic. Or troll. Or flamebait. How about "Insightful" or "Informative"? Or even better, "Underrated!"
Bwa-ha-ha! I'm (literally) crazy about the system!
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Microsoft has a utility called "sysdiff" that you might have a bit of trouble finding. Being an OEM, I do not have that same problem.
Do a clean install of XP. Run sysdiff.
Install Office. Run sysdiff.
Compare the output. Look at all the files that have been added or "upgraded" in the system directories.
If you want instructions on how to use sysdiff, please consult the resource kit for your version of Windows. Sysdiff was introduced back in the NT day.
It seems that we've identified the moron in this discussion. Feel free to read up on the available literature next time.
This reminds me of the Star Trek scale... Penny Arcade brought this up in a news post about Star Trek: Nemesis, where we find that a truly bad movie, like nemesis is good, because the overall quality of the line has declined so slowly that we haven't noticed. The Gates scale is where we are all adjusted to mediocre software at high price, so full of bugs and exploits that on any given day in the US 5% of windows based computers will crash (the number is probably higher). We get so used to the booting, and reloading that we don't really notice that despite all of the money we spent on it, it fails about 18 times a year. Microsoft starts out with free updates (everyone rushes to get things out to market, in the current way that we accept programs it's almost expected, and it's par for the course because the computing community, and the gaming community especially, never really does anything about it, like product boycotts or thousands of angry letters), and everyone is kind of happy. Sure they don't really make an effort to keep a step ahead of hackers, and only really put something out when they find out that 8 million people just got a virus because of an exploit in their software. Of course people get frustrated, and Gates goes around and is saying: "Look, we can't keep up with all of these hackers. They're doing things in an instant, and these viruses can increase in such a manner that would give third year math majors a headache to calculate, if you expect us to keep up at that pace, then we're going to need more money. Sure, you paid for the software, but that was just for the basic function that we developed at the time. "There was never any statement that this stuff was bullet proof, and as the economy is and wtih the direction that computing is going, it is very unreasonable to expect us to continue keeping pace with these hooligans, or even to step ahead of them, then we have to charge these service fees. For the kittens." Then of course he would laugh maniacally.
I thought windows was supposed to be getting better. However my new job requires running windows (to run an app) and it is bad. I was running win2000 and it crashed about 4 times today. Admittadly, the app that i was using is pretty unstable, but an app shouldn't be able to crash the system.
Not like anyone read, but I forgot to turn off HTML formatting.
Bill claims 600 million customers.
....roughly $25 spent for every man, woman, and child in the USA.
Let's assume 5% of that number crash more than twice daily (even though many may be on earlier versions without crash reporting, as noted many don't report crashes, either.).
That's 30 million machines crashing at least 3 times a day.
Assume windows takes 1 minute to reboot after crash (now THAT's generous)... 30M x 3 x 1min = 90M minutes, or 171.12 YEARS of reboot time every day. That is staggering.
Now let's look at the R&D number: $6.9B. 280M people in the USA....
And the best they can do is XP?
My head hurts just thinking about it.
I don't know what flavor of Windows they run in the office you work at, but I'm yet to see a WinNT/2k/XP crash at my office, with over 500 systems.
Application crashes, yes. Operating system failures, no.
Err. You must have a good supply of magic pixie dust, because I work with considerably less than 500 NT/2000 machines (no XP yet) and I see system crashes day in, day out. From laptops bluescreening on wake-up from sleep mode, to explorer.exe hangs. My NT boxen had a nasty habit of surviving 7-14 days of moderate work before slowing down to molasses and poping a few VxDs.
On the other hand, my Linux, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX boxes all run full time between scheduled power downs pretty much all the time. Admittedly, the AIX, Solaris and HP-UX boxes generally run headless, but the desktop linux boxes around are rock-solid stable. I never saw uptimes above 100 days for any NT/2000 box, whereas that is minimum uptime for the Unix/Linux crowd.
So be glad of your supply of magic pixie dust for Windows.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
MICROSOFT UNVEILS NEW JOE-BOB(tm) SOFTWARE
story by Andrew Burke
REDMOND, Wash. -- July 25, 2003 -- Microsoft today announced the release of Joe-Bob(tm), a new software package that the company hopes will open up a huge untapped computer market. With the motto "The software for the rest of y'all(tm)," Joe-Bob reaches out to the same demographic group that buys 4x4s, supports the gun lobby, and drinks
Miller Lite.
"Computers have been commonly seen as for leftists and intellectuals," explains Microsoft spokesperson Willy Maclean, "but we've recently seen people like Newt Gingrinch embracing new technology -- the time is right for the rest of America to get wired!"
Instead of a desktop or office metaphor, Joe-Bob(tm) puts the user in a garage. "Click on the Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes, and get a complete
music library in digital stereo. Click on the pinups, and get hooked up to the Internet's hottest gifs," the promotional materials explain.
The package does not include a word processor or spreadsheet, but does have software that keeps track of the football season, lists the best roadhouses between Florida and Nevada, and can even order spareribs and beer at the click of a mouse.
"This is righteous software, man," says beta-tester Billy Grugg. "It thinks like I think." Brad Cunningham agrees: "I take it everywhere," he says, pointing to a Pentium laptop racked under his 12-gauge in his pickup truck. Microsoft is offering desktop users a special clip-on beer holder for their monitors.
"Look at what's popular out there," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
"Four of the top-10 Usenet newsgroups are about sex, and splatter video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat are bestsellers. We're just catering to a demand, that's all."
Microsoft is reportedly distributing badges and bumper stickers saying things like "Joe-Bob: Make Your Disk Hard," "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."
Apple declined to comment.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
What Bill needs to do is think fourth dimensionally. Updates continue to be free. Hell, Windows itself and all other Microsoft software should be completely free of charge as well. Microsoft will instead bring in ten times more profit by...
Charging for each software malfunction!
Microsoft will include special code in its kernels that will be backed up by a legally required instruction in the processor, along with a strong encryption path on the physical electronics that protect this particular instruction. This innovative technology will automatically detect software malfunctions and send a strongly encrypted packet to Microsoft. At that point, Microsoft will automatically bill the luser some set fee, like $20.00 for each occurance of a bug that causes an application to crash, $40.00 for a Windows BSOD, $60.00 for a complete crash requiring a cold boot, and, say, $100.00 for a crash that causes loss of data, including hard disk crashes unrelated to software.
This innovative technology would create tremendous value for Microsoft stockholders and employees of the company. Stockholders would make enormous profits on the millions upon millions of crashes that occur each day, compounded by the fact that Microsoft's software would inevitably get installed on more computers, being free of charge. Microsoft employees would not have to test or debug software as it is no longer a problem if the software malfunctions. This would shorten cycles, increase revenue and fulfill the enterprise integration strategy.
In short, Bill, stop thinking like a hungry beggar on the street trying to get a few more pennies for a beer and start thinking like a CEO of some powerful company.
Hey I've been programming for 20 years and you're quite correct -- programming is hard. But I must disagree with your assertion that just because it's hard means that bugs aren't mistakes. They ARE mistakes. And yes, it's generally somebody's fault when they occur. Level of difficulty doesn't let you off the hook here ... sorry.
You can make the argument that computer programs are the most complex thing created by people, but that does not mean that writing them is the 'hardest thing' we can do, that's just rediculous. It's much harder to work through a difficult math problem then %99.999 of the programming challanges out there. Feh. And bugs are screwups. They are just more tolerable in the computer world because they are easier to recover from, then say in the physical world where it could take much more time to set things back up again.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There are methods for controlling bugs, but they aren't cheap. Think Space Shuttle flight control software. In terms of number of lines (100,000? in the core modules?) it is not a very big program, but they have spend big bucks studying it and being very conservative about making changes. Oh, and there are only 4 "sites" where it is in operation. The Microsoft model is that they probably spend less labor on their flagship products than the Shuttle or say the aerospace industry on flight control systems and autopilots. But they sell it to many more people for a much much lower unit cost and rake in the bucks in a way that Rockwell Collins or Sunstrand can only dream. Their big breakthrough business discovery is that they can sell (relatively) cheaply developed software for the desktop, and people are not going to care in a way that counts.
95/98 died constantly for me, Once a day with my old generic k6 board and once a week or so on my duron with a nice abit kt7-raid. 2k on the other hand, I think has crashed maybe a handfull of times in a few years.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
5% of our tires explode while using them. You can have replacements but we will charge you full price. By accepting our EULA, you agree to these terms. Do you Accept these terms?
No means YES, Yes means YES.
Enough Said
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Check the text, he says "Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day". According to my understanding >2 is the same as >=3 for singular events.
Translation: "Windows-based computers now crash three times or more each day"
It's classical marketing speak, use the more acceptable term ("two") two and qualify it such that it sounds better than the real term ("three") would.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Stupidity. I'm closing the money, governments have to pay for most people who will prompt th e user. Sure, I've found that from application you're trying to his Billy is jump that's say ing that check for a a providing value in user with Opera and Billy is user. But since I fla ws) and hope the Ahh The stability for more buggy driver is them. I Canada turned the reason for NT as you get them go back in the say, but they going to his I'd say it on the licensin g 20+ year old You see, there must be running processes and 12, If MS rearchitects the 20+ y ear "Mr. Gates acknowledged today that modern windows in the on my system errors. If something is US, Australia an d further than Windows XP you just taught a wants us to his own some of Bond Yeah, but Micro soft does in their best interest if he's not by the 09, well be running a than twice and bea t. At least tried out on deep I They use nor free to the say, but otherwise the it. They ARE mistakes. They use Internet via windows Yes, programs.
In what way is this info reliable? I never send a crash report. In fact, I even turn off the error reporting service (on WinXP).
Assuming I'm not the only one that does so, is this 5% sampling a sampling of those that actually *do* report or a sampling of the entire spectrum of windows users? How many is 5%? How many WinXP installs are there? A total of 10% of all Windows Installations?
Come on... I think this info is not reliable.
Thanks,
Leabre
5% of windows machines (that are actually connected to the internet to report crash data) crash 3 or more times a day (>2 is the same as >=3) which means that 95% of windows machines crash between none and 2 times a day. Since the 5% statistic was quoted instead of a lower crash rate it seems likely that a very rough figure of 30% of windows computers crash twice, 30% once, and a lucky 30% zero times per day, that leaves a 5% that just dont manage to boot up at all for totally random reasons.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what makes you think there aren't? Are you an expert at brick laying? I suspect the answer is no. I'm not trying to insult you. I've just learned the hard way that it is dangerous to claim something is easy that you don't really understand.
Harder than anything else in the physical world
Again, I would caution you to be careful about such claims. I'll concur that programming is really, really hard to do well. Lord knows I've tried. But is it the hardest thing in the world? My guess is no. I've done a bunch of programming and other engineering and you know what? The technical stuff is hard but no where near as hard as the people stuff. Trying to manage a team of people towards some productive goal is usually the hardest part of my job. And I'm not even particularly introverted or shy. The phrase "herding cats" comes to mind...
Or if you want a more technical example, how about medicine? The human body is an unbelievably complex entity which we understand far less about than we do digital computers. Do you think programming is harder than medicine? At least you have 30 ways to solve a problem. There are diseases for which we don't even have names, much less a cure. Be glad that your job gives you so many ways to help solve your customer's problems. Doctors often don't have that luxury.
Anyway the point is that there are a lot of activities that are really challenging. Please don't assume that just because what you do is hard, that everything else must be easy. It just ain't so.
It will take more than getting drivers into user space to fix Windows. MS pulled the same trick with graphics.
... real cute.
I had a URL/example (somewhere) that showed how easy it was to get a BSOD with Java by drawing out of bounds. The Java routines called Win32 routines which crashes the Kernel
Microsoft charging for Windows Updates is analogous to Ford charging their customers extra for basic safety features which should be free in the first place!
You've drawn an analogy between a company that makes automobiles (Ford) and a company that makes software (Microsoft). Your analogy rests on the similarity that the products of both companies should include "basic safety features" (and we'll ignore the fact that this term is nebulous and context-dependant).
The problem with your analogy is that there are many, many differences between "automobiles" and "operating systems". You can't drive an operating system (using "drive" in the sense of "driving a car"). You can't run an application on a truck (providing that you're not running the application on a computer that might come with the truck). I can name the differences between these two ideas all day long. I'm sure you can, too.
The point? All analogies are flawed because they make the statement "X is like Y" even though there will be lots and lots of ways in which X is NOT like Y.
If you think that it is unethical for Microsoft to charge for software updates, then you should be able to make your case without relying on analogies that are necessarily flawed.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Boom, instant feedback for application developers. This option is not available for Linux that I know of.
Keep in mind that Microsoft controls the foundation that all these application developers must develop within as well as some applications that compete with software that some of these developers write. Of what benefit is it to Microsoft to send information to Intuit, makers of Quicken and direct competitor to their own software package Money?
It seems to me that this "feedback" that Microsoft gives to application developers would be much more useful to Microsoft as enacting "cooperation" from certain application developers than as some sort of kind gesture to application developers (or, god forbid, actual end users).
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This is true only if you elect to compile the kernel module corresponding to this driver into your kernel. The source for the driver is distributed with the kernel, but it is up to you to elect its inclusion. This mechanism is no better than Windows, because some drivers just aren't included with the kernel sources, just as some drivers aren't shipped in-box with Windows. So you're still stuck with fetching your own driver direct from the vendor of your hardware.
Stock distro kernels typically include tons of drivers in their kernels just in case you happen to have a device needing that driver; in most cases, the driver tries to load and fails to initialize, and unloads itself from memory. In my opinion, this is a somewhat clumsy mechanism, but it works. At install, Windows determines what PnP devices are on your system and installs only the drivers for which a PnP ID has been discovered.
This is just completely wrong. Windows ships with in-box "class drivers" based on generic chipset specifications just as any other operating system does. In fact, Windows ships with a class driver for the Realtek 8139x chipset that works with just about any such card on the market (D-link 530TX comes to mind). The reason you might want a IHV-specific driver for your particular card is that some IHV's enable extra functionality that the class drivers do not support (wake-on-lan, encryption coprocessors, etc). Class drivers are a good way to get support out for devices quickly, but they are much worse at supporting specific features in individual cards.
Again, only the ones included with the kernel are guaranteed to be open source. NVidia's display drivers are most certainly not open source. And you can't assume that all Windows drivers are closed-source, either: Realtek (makers of the RTLxxxx chipsets you alluded to earlier) typically releases source code so that IHVs that implement NICs using their chipset can easily adapt some working code to their drivers. Driver signing has nothing to do with making drivers open source, or eliminating problems with vendors going out of business, so I fail to see the connection there. WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) testing and signing is a method by which Microsoft can provide some basic level of quality assurance on device drivers that they do not directly produce. Poorly written kernel-mode device drivers are still the #1 cause of Windows crashes (according to some press release that I can't find at the moment), and Microsoft is attempting to address this by helping improve driver quality through WHQL and eliminating the need for future kernel-mode drivers (replacing them with user-mode drivers whenever possible, I'm sure).Regardless, you will find no such centralized basic quality control mechanism for Linux drivers. If you sincerely believe that Linux device drivers are of higher overall quality than their Windows equivalents, I have some land to sell you right next to an oasis in Baja. (And before you flame me, I completely understand that Linux drivers often must be reverse-engineered, and that is a difficult process. But while I sympathize with Linux driver writers, this difficulty still doesn't support the claim that the resulting Linux driver model is superior to its Windows counterpart.)
It's quite possible to have perfect code. It's called "formal verification". It produces flawless code -- everytime. It involves theorem provers and mathematical models of the software. Many companies that produce software that will have people's lives depending on it use formal verification.
Exactly. And to a large extent, I think open-source operating systems will be relegated to supplying such class drivers for well into the future for this reason. Class drivers are great for basic functionality, but for anything advanced they obviously suck. VESA video drivers, for instance, are a joke. The XFree86 team has done a pretty good job (using a combination of accepting donated code and outright reverse engineering) of getting functional accelerated video drivers for several chipsets. But they STILL won't live up to the level of features that IHVs can provide, writing code to their own chipset and specs.
What we as a community can do, however, is make writing good quality device drivers as EASY as possible for the hardware vendors. Then they will have no excuse not to write a driver for at least the top 3 platform OSes other than laziness.
It is a shame that vendor-supplied driver support is in such a questionable state for Linux, and I hope this improves with time. I like to see OSes compete on some semblance of a level playing field, but without adequate device drivers for the latest multimedia gadgets, OSes are nothing more than curiosities to most users.
Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks?
A quick google search for "brick bond" gives 161000 results.
Some of the choices are:
stretcher bond
Flemish bond
English bond
American
English garden wall bond
rat trap (or Chinese) bond
Sussex bond
header bond.
Now, I am not a mason, so if I can find this many choices in a 3 minute search, there are probably more than 30 ways to lay bricks. Furthermore, I suggest to you that editing a brick wall is much more difficult than editing software.
Um... Don't you think that if the error reports didn't actually report the nature of the error they would be kind of useless?
You don't really think Microsoft is just collecting numbers so that they can publicly announce that Windows crashes?
Only 5% of their installed systems are "stable"?
How much does MS make a year? Do they need the additional revenue from forcing people to pay for bug fixes?
Last time I checked the only updates I've had to pay is the yearly fee for my Norton Anti-Virus (and yes I know that there are free alternatives to that). I've got quite a few computer games, all of which have patches released, and I don't recall paying for any of them.
This space for rent...
Average user never updates anyway, can't tell you how many desktops I see with the "New Updates Available" icon in the systray.
Of course it'll be hectic for businesses.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I work as a computer tech in a local computer store. It's amazing how often the crashes are a result of one of the twenty programs with an icon in the system tray. It's frightening how much crap some people have running in the background on their Windows boxes (and how much of it is literally crap).
This space for rent...
Take it easy, all the money you give M$ is going towards Paladium, which will make it so that nothing runs well and software without M$ approval won't run at all. Just imagine all your software and music files having expiration dates so you have to buy them over and over. Also imagine pay by the minute word processing on your own computer or being charged to access your own email. Ahhh, where did you want to go yesterday? Really? Why the hell did you buy XP? Free yourself from that hell before it's too late.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
MS Windows is not the problem.
It is stupid people using this OS.
I can give an excuse to millions of people who use Windows and are not tech savvy people, but how do slashdot readers have so many problems?
Want to fix 100% of your MS problems? Stop your kid brother from downloading porn dialers and image viewers.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
But that has nothing to do with OS stability. The OS does not have to determine if the program will end, or even shutdown properly. Since the OS is the arbiter of resources, it can make the decision to disallow a program from executing any further, without consulting the program beforehand. It is also the protector of programs, keeping one from trouncing another.
Hum, my post was in response to someone saying that an OS shouldn't allow any app to crash. This is how I reasoned.
The OS can either shut down suspicious apps after some finite time (a), or just let them run as long as they want, (b).
As we both seem to agree, the OS cannot always be expected to know if an app will terminate properly.
If it does a), then some programs which work fine but take a bit of time will be killed by the OS - which could be considered crashing.
But if it follows b) then some bad apps which ought to be killed will be roaming free, which perhaps also could be considered a crash.
Thus it would be impossible to create an OS which is fool-proof from bad apps.
But frankly, I know more about theoretical computer science than of practical OS considerations and crashing apps. Perhaps the reasoning above is not consistent with the typical definitions of a "crash".
Tor
I don't know enough about windoze junk to know if non-M$ apps trigger this kind of reporting, but it does not matter. The operating system should NEVER crash. If an application can pull the OS down, the OS blows. Every two months or so, something goes wrong with my Mozilla. With all the crappy .asp and other crazy web pages interacting in God knows what way, I'm not surprised Mozilla gets fried once an a while. Mozilla never brings down X, let alone my kernel. Nor do any scripts or funky random programs I might write. This is simply good modular software design, an O$ that does not work this way is not up to it's task.
Not being able to run custom software is a serious drawback. Everything takes debugging and sooner or later that has to happen on a production system. If you can't write your own software to get what you want done, the system is useless. If one little script or custom program brings down the whole works, what use is it?
Yeah, Microsoft themselves suffer from this kind of thing. They have made a dumb one size fits all system with code so spageti coded that you have to have a GUI and all sorts of services running on every machine. Who else would make it so you go through the GUI API to get at a floppy disk? Because there are so many more possible points of failure and any failure can bring the whole thing to a BSoD, is it any wonder that M$ thinks that 60 day up-times are "unheard of" and "insane"? Bah! A "pure" M$ system can blow out just as well as one that's been changed to meet your actual needs.
Don't blame the user. The only thing the user has done wrong is to depend on M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm really not illiterate -- just not the world's most careful editor:
The sentence should have read:
The vendor may go to a Microsoft competitor and maybe even forego Microsoft products altogether.
I got half way through editing it and then got distracted by dinner preparations. Oh well.
Exactly! The question is, though, how do you make it easier? Certainly licensing comes into play. If I'm a major hardware developer with significant investments in IP, I'm not going to want to release my drivers as open source. So, I'll target Windows, and I'll target OS X, but forget about Linux. There are ways around the licensing issue, but they create their own set of problems. For example, look at nVidia. The kernel driver they provide for their cards is rather thin, with most of the useful stuff being done in their closed source driver for X. That means you don't get good acceleration for the framebuffer/console, and it means that nVidia has to manage this more complex approach, and it means that they can't use the kernel's DRI architecture, because that would mean putting important IP in the open source kernel driver.
Driver model unification is more than we can hope for, but accomodations can be made via licensing, and by guaranteeing module compatibility across kernels (at least across minor revisions, like 2.4.x) so that IHVs can decouple their driver releases from the kernel release cycle.
My Windoze 2000 box would crash once every two days or so if I did not reboot it every day. There was nothing special about that computer, so I can believe that 100% of Windows computers that have to run 24/7 crash at least once a week. As the hard drive and incomplete writes errors accumulate, this can only get worse.
My Debian boxes never crash. Ever. Regardless of what dumb things I do to them or what cokeyed program I write, the kernel keeps going. My silly program simply gets a segfault and put away. X and other services are not affected. 5% crashing twice a day? Forget it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
that Microsoft plans to intergrate more and more functions covered by other companies. EG Antivirus when they bought out a leading Linux AV company. Incidentally they also said no further Linux versions would be released.
Yes we know 5% of the reports say that. What about application crashes? And what's the guesstimate of the who userbase not just the ones that report. I would tack another 10% on there at least if not more.
MicroSoft will continue to be a thorn in everyone's sides. I'm surprised there's no much fuss being made about the new motherboards that will have these super security functions. Microsoft is dictating not some group of standards bodies. Once again we'll see a division of computer hardware.
And the next thing you know you cannot access your bank or any government sites without running a MicroSoft approved secure system motherboard and their Longhorn software.
I must think that if 5 out of every 100 Ford Expeditions exploded every day (twice?), that Ford would be very quickly bankrupt, or at least seriously rethinking their design choices.
In any "physical" industry, Bill Gates would be a Hundredaire instead of a Billionaire. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, and few, if any, people ever lost an eye because Windows crashed again.
No excuse though.
I like music
the windows XP standard wallpaper (the rolling green hills) looks strikingly like the view behind the door to room 101 that O'Brien shows Winston ???
Go see them (the two pics) for yourself and you'll see what I mean.
Then ponder it for a while..
It was not long before the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time they were using. They were caught and the Computer Center Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. .. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed ..."
Was the degraded perfromance was a direct result of Gate's activity? Was this really the model Gates grew up on? It surely matches his company's means of using bugs as a means of extorting money out of their users. Microsoft's time is every bit as over as $1,000/hour charges to run a 16 bit PDP-11. Hopefully, the extortion will end with it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I like your uptime I wish I could get that high but I reboot for new kernels since I find them fun to try when I am extremely bored darkshadow:~$ uname -sr Linux 2.6.0-test1 darkshadow:~$ uptime 10:38pm up 7 days, 9:44, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.05, 0.04
Ah, I see your reasoning now. Yes, if someone were to try and prevent any app from crashing, then you would certainly run into the halting problem and difficulties you mention.
However, I don't think that's what the original poster meant to say. Quoting:I believe what Dr. Zowie was meaning was the the OS's stability should not be affected by the crash of an application. I believe this is what he meant by "crashproof". Not that the OS should prevent all application crashes. Just that it should be impervious to any misbehaving application.
I hope this guy burns with all the rest of the evil dictators (like hitler, Saddam, Oprah, and Richard Simmons) I mean, Why give for free what poor computer Illiterate people will blindly open their wallets (and purses, I dont want to insult the feminists)for. Big Brother just has to get all the money from the less intellegent people so he can file lawsuits and suppress the widespread use of the technology that only the computer engineers are lucky enough to possess.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
The interesting thing, of course, is that so few bugs have been found. Imagine if M$ had this policy!
Maybe its not windows, but rather something someone has done to them... Maybe someone ignorant.. I might also point out that NT boxes don't generaly use VxD's, because that is the driver model for 9x boxes. NT/2k/xp use a diffrent driver model. If your having crashes, start by only installing signed drivers. That should make 99+% of the crashes go away. I've made it a personal goal to know why my 2k boxes crash. Every single time so far its been a driver problem. Updating the driver (or in some cases the hardware) has fixed the problem. My home box is a 3 year old AMD, thats been running 2k, and its crashed once! And that turned out to be a bug in an old unsighed the GForce driver, irritated when I installed WarcraftIII. Updating the driver solved the problem. I've accually seen (and own) windows boxes that have never crashed.
Linux 2.4 on the other hand is an entirly diffrent story. Every time I stress it it fails. Few oops but lots of corrupted file systems (just look at the change log for ext3 or the VMM... christ), deadlocks. Modules that crash and the machine slowly falls down around them. Not to many oops but enought that I'm tired of them. I've got linux 2.2 boxes with uptimes counted in the years. Netcraft was tracking system uptimes for a while, i'm not still if they still are but last I checked the w2k boxes had better uptimes than anything but the BSD boxes.
I think this is very mis-interpereted, I doubt MS would charge like that for major bug-fixes, etc. I'm guessing they want to charge for stuff like WMP9, Move Maker, Perhaps even IE...
Just another reason to really look at OpenSource software (In my case Linux). Bill Gates can go count his money but he can't take it with him!
Although the NY Times wasn't actually at the side of the computer when a BSOD appeared, he was on a cell phone with someone who DID see a BSOD. It was simply a small error in reporting who was where, no big deal really.
But really, the person who actually wrote the article is far more competent than the NY Times reporter, and can tell the difference between an app crash and an OS crash, so you can still trust the NY Times as America's Leading Journal of Record (TM).
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Do you work in Microsoft Linux testing department? Or is it the PR department? It surely seems so.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
A machine GUID (in this case a SID) or other unique serial number is still personally identifiABLE, even though it may not be personally identifiED.
This is quite clear in many rules and regulations, like HIPAA (health privacy rules), where identifiable information includes IP addresses, unique cookies, authentication data and various other unique data.
If Microsoft were to raid your shop, and look at the SIDs, they would be able to identify the box and most likely the user sending the error reports.
Regards,
--
*Art
I don't know if you realized this, but writing software is *HARD*. Harder than anything else in the physical world, mostly because there's no one right way to do things. I have, in a binder at work, 30 some odd distinct solutions for the relatively simple problem of how to make the database transparent both to customers and to programmers. Can you imagine if there were thirty different ways to lay bricks? Because it is so hard, software bugs are nobody's "fault." They are not a "mistake" in the same way that recalled car parts are mistakes. The greatest coders in th
Okay. I agree with you, but I have to take exception.
Most automotive recalls are because of faulty design, not faulty manufacturing. Faulty manufacturing is generally limited to small numbers of cars which make it out the door with defective seatbelt latches or other errors before the QA teams pick it up.
Programming *is* more difficult than designing any other kind of system, because just about any other thing you could build is tangible on some level. Not because there are more ways of solving a given problem.
Want proof?
Go to your local auto parts counter and ask how many different kinds of brake calipers they keep in stock. Or, if you don't like asking silly questions of the scary-looking guy behind the counter, wander through the spark plug aisles.
All of these represent different solutions to their same respective problems - clamping a rotating disk to cause friction, or using an electrical impulse to ignite gasoline vapor. Either one is as easily summed up as your transparent database.
Why the diversity? Well, I'm pretty sure that if I spent enough time in the machine shop, I could hack the calipers and rotors from my 1976 Dodge Ram Heavy Half with a class 5 towing package onto a Chevy Sprint. I'm also pretty sure that the extra 45lbs of cast iron in the front of a Chevy Sprint would cause a reduction in efficiency (gas mileage and performance) as well as eliminating all steering control in a front wheel lockup every time I touched the brakes.
As the designer of the system, it is *your* responsibility to figure out which overall design works best for your particular situation, and then see to it that it is executed flawlessly.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Apparently due to some bug in Windows the "0" was left off after the "5" in the percentage report.
It's 50%, duh.
Blue screens simply never happen. The OS never freezes. It's really about as stable as my linux server.
I am under the impression that most Windows crashes are simple DFU bugs.
Did Gates ever concider that the other 95% of that statistic don't send in the error reports beacuse they know that other information it sends.
Where do you draw the line? With a thriving hardware economy, you can't expect the OS developers to write all of the drivers for every different piece of hardware out there. As well, if you only write generic drivers then you rob the hardware manufacturers of the capabilty to customize their hardware offerings even if they are based on a common platform. Finally, if drivers have to be written by the OS developers, then new hardware is much less attractive. Hardware developers would have to jump through hoops, either getting the OS developers to write drivers or adding some sort of compatibility mode to their hardware, because otherwise you couldn't use the hardware. And that's saying nothing of making drivers open source, since drivers often contain intellectual property. I don't care what you think about open source, but wrong or right, most companies that own some sort of IP are generally not willing to give that away to everybody. If you want your platform to be seen as desirable to hardware developers, you need to keep that in mind.
This is not an either/or proposition as you imply. Personally, I don't really care what hardware developers think of any particular OS platform; if they want to sell their hardware, they need to support the OSes that people have chosen. And increasingly, this is Free Software OSes, so hardware manufacturers smart enough to get in on this early by supporting Linux et al will reap the benefits. There's a lot of techies out there who are gung-ho on Linux, and will happily badmouth companies who are unhelpful with getting their hardware supported.
Hardware is indeed less attractive to OS developers if no drivers are provided, but merely providing specs goes a long way. There's a lot of OS developers out there willing to put in the time to write drivers as long as specs are provided. It's a hell of a lot easier that way than trying to reverse-engineer the things.
No one's "robbing" HW manufacturers of the ability to differentiate their product. This is a market economy; no one is guaranteed that their business model will work. If they want to differentiate their product, they can either add capabilities to the hardware itself, or they can write binary-only drivers and suffer the consequences. Or better yet, they can write open-source drivers with great features, and then leverage this contribution to gain goodwill from the community. Companies that help with open-source development have historically been viewed much more favorably that those which haven't bothered.
It's possible for the HW manuf's to write their own binary-only drivers as NVidia has shown, but this is generally seen less favorably than fully open-sourced drivers, for many reasons (practically, it's a pain because the drivers are only compatible with specific kernel versions, making it hard to change your kernel easily when new versions come out). Manuf's can weigh the options here and choose a course accordingly. As far as device drivers containing IP, too fscking bad. Your options are these: don't make your hardware so cheap and crappy that device driver code gives away the company secrets, provide binary-only drivers and suffer the consequences (whatever these may be), or ignore these OSes altogether and suffer one of two fates: users of Free OSes pan your product and company and you lose lots of sales, or someone reverse-engineers your product and writes an open-source driver anyway.
For Free OSes, there is no one solution to drivers; the open source community has no dictators (at least none that reign without popular support), and anyone or any company is free to come up with any solutions it wants. No one is beholden to Microsoft to provide direction for them. The MS user community, OTOH, is. And their direction doesn't seem to have worked well over the years.
I would bet you anything that you'd find similar BS in the US, Australia and Canada.
"Be careful or be roadkill" - Calvin
the error reporting program crashed.
no really that's all..
Are the statistics on how many of the reported bugs actually get attention from M$ developers and are fixed.
Dislcaimer: no i didn't RTFA because i refuse to register for NYT and for the trolls who say "what're you new here? use login xxx/yyy" or whatever, the more you cirumvent and give the traffic the more incentive you give them to use stupid registration practices and restrict information further in the future. (imagine if suddenly they had a huge drop off in traffic cause people got sick of registering)
Well said ...
... so where's the sexium!
Apple have shot themselves in the foot with the naming of their new OS. Using X to represent 10 from Roman numerals was a tragic mistake.
Once Apple move to 11.0, will they call it OS XI?
Same goes for Pentium with Intel
I don't know of anyone who would call nVidia's hardware "crappy", yet they have consistently been able to increase the performance of even older hardware by making algorithmic enhancements to their drivers. You can claim that these enhancements should not be intellectual property, but nevertheless they are, and for a competitor like ATI to get ahold of them would be detrimental to nVidia, its shareholders, and its customers.
I don't share your confidence in the size of the open source community. You might lose a couple thousand sales, but when 95% of your target audience uses Windows, that's what butters your bread. If by chance that would change in the future, then you would have a point, but that's going to be a long time coming (how many years now have we been told that the open source desktop revolution is "just around the corner?). As far as reverse-engineering goes, I'll go back to nVidia. nVidia had been making hardware for years before they decided to release 3D accelerated drivers for Linux, and in that time no one was able to successfully reverse-engineer their product. Sure, it can happen, but even if it does it's generally a sub-par solution (witness the performance differential between Windows and Linux for the old 3dfx cards, for example).
I disagree. Taking Linux in particular, if Linus were to decide that minor kernel revisions must be binary compatible with all other kernels in a series, it would become law. If Linus proposed that kernel modules could be closed-source binaries, it would become law (hasn't that already been done?). The point being that compromises can be made to give IHVs a more favorable impression of Linux, and all it would take is some decisions from the top. Yes, if the decisions were unpopular the kernel could be forked, and that's a good thing about open source, but guess which fork would get the hardware vendor support? You can have your version where drivers must be open source. I'll take the one that provides better hardware support.
Bill's idea of charging for updates has it's equivalent in the car industry where the sleazy dealer sells cracked out jalopies, splits profits and works hand in hand with the sleazy over-charging mechanic just down the road from the dealership.
"But I still wouldn't run my servers on Windows. "
For the record, I wouldn't either. And I've had really good luck with Win2k and NT.
"Derp de derp."
Have you considered installing linux on those 200 Dells then?
Of course, 9x series is another matter entirely. They follow unix model of allowing every device driver to take down whole system.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
What is it with you people? I've been running windows since 3.1 and linux since 1.6, and as soon as someone posts a comment saying that windows XP (or whatever) can be made stable, some zealot accuses the poster of working for microsoft! Newsflash - in the real world, countless large orgs use NT/2k/XP on the desktop, and have managed to evolve stable configurations that do not crash. I've not had XP crash once since I got it with my laptop, and the only time I reboot is for a system update. I've only ever had driver related crashes on 2k. My subjective user experience of Linux (in the 2.2 days, at a large US DOE lab) was that it was only marginally more stable than NT4; at home, playing with kernal updates it is of course *less* stable.
Dan
When one buys Champagne one expects it come from Champagne.
However, when one buys a Swiss Roll one expects a particular style of cake not for it to come from Switzerland.
I think the Commission has every right to protect the names of certain goods.
When one buys a Linux distribution one would expect it to come with a Linux kernel. Imagine if it came with a "Linux compatible" kernel. That's why Linux is a trademark.
Champagne can only be champagne if it is made with grapes grown in Champagne. I'm quite happy to buy Champagne Compatible so long as I'm pre-warned.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If I buy a car I own a car.
If I bought a car from Microsoft I would be buying the legal right to drive that car.
A subtle difference.
But the only defect I can argue about in the latter would be in the licence agreement.
An amazing set of hoodwinks.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If your Windows install doesn't report an error on boot you've forgotton to install everything.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
and the RIAA need look further than the European Commission for THEIR lessons
Well a few of these are already taken care of, champagne and cognac are already trademarked by the bubbly producers organization in the french region champagne and the distilleries in cognac. But ut makes sense from a consumer point of view, if I buy parma ham I expect not only to get ham, but to get ham from pigs that have been fed in a very specific way (which gives it the special flavor), if the canadian ham is the same it's ok by me, but denying the ham producers in parma use of the name is stupid. It would be the same as if someone trademarked the terms "brazilian coffee" or "french roast"
While the name itself provides no value it lets me know (whithout having to do a lot of checking) what I'm getting, and for the sake of consumers it should be resticted who can use it. If I buy "brazilian coffee" I expect it to come from brazil, in if they say it's "french roast" I expect it to have been treated in a certain way
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
Oh, i can't beleive it! This concludes that the other 95% of the winblowz's crash more than two times in the day... It's ms logic anyways...
Crucify me if you wish, but XP is not, nor remotely related to, Win 98.
t m
'Critical' flaw found in Windows
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3092399.s
Microsoft has issued a warning about a critical security flaw that affects most versions of its Windows software.
DirectX 5.2 on Windows 98
DirectX 6.1 on Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7.0a on Windows Me
DirectX 7.0 on Windows 2000
DirectX 8.1 on Windows XP
DirectX 8.1 on Windows Server 2003
DirectX 9.0a on Windows 2000
DirectX 9.0a on Windows XP
DirectX 9.0a on Windows Server 2003
DirectX 9.0a on Windows Me
NT 4.0 using Media Player 6.4 or Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1
NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition using either Media Player 6.4 or Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If I was paying £50,000 for a desktop computer and it crashed once due to buggy code I'd want my money back.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
A lucky 5% has 2 crashes a day, the remaining 95% has 3 or more!
My Stack Overflow user
From the article:
The reporter is simply reporting what Bill said. There is nothing up for debate.
The other 95% just dont feel the need to click the report button.
Reading the threads sparked by this article, there is quite a bit of misinformation and misunderstanding of how Windows works and what causes crashes. I would like to clear up some of this confusion.
First off, there is quite a bit of confusion about application crashes vs. operating system crashes. While I do not know what Gates was referring to when he mentioned the 5% number, I'm assuming it's an operating system crash.
Application crashes are caused when an application causes an exception and does not handle that exception. (Most frequently, an access violation, error code 0xc0000005.) Ultimately, if the OS cannot find another exception handler that the app has put into place, the operating system invokes the default debugger as the last-chance exception handler. Typically, this exception handler is Dr. Watson (drwtsn32.exe), which will dump the process' address space to the user.dmp file.
The currently installed default debugger (drwtsn32 can be replaced using the aedebug registry value) will trap all unhandled *user mode* exceptions.
Unhandled *kernel mode* exceptions cause KeBugCheckEx() to be called, which is the function that throws the blue screen of death, and writes a memory.dmp to disk (if configured) and reboots the system (if configured). The machine may also be configured to report the bugcheck by sending a 64K minidump to microsoft's OCA site when the machine reboots.
I routinely examine memory dumps to determine the causes of Windows blue screen crashes.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that >90% of the blue screens I examine are caused by non-Microsoft device drivers. When a user installs code into kernel mode, there's nothing the OS can do to prevent that code from taking down the system.
Antivirus software, remote control software, realtime disk mirroring software, and hardware device drivers all install in kernel mode. (Want a list of device drivers running on your system? Run pstat.exe from the Resource Kit and examine the last section of the output.)
Yes, there are many known blue screens caused by MSFT software. To date, Microsoft has done an excellent job of fixing these problems, in my opinion. I have personally witnessed MSFT creating fixes for newly discovered bluescreen bugs in less than a week. (That's less than a week between MSFT getting the call about a blue screen, analyzing the dump, determining the cause of the problem, and delivering a fix to the customer.)
I cannot comment on Microsoft's future plans, since I do not know what they are. But in my opinion, Microsoft has done an excellent job of fixing blue screens caused by its products. And as I've said: the vast, vast majority of blue screens on Windows are not caused by Microsoft code. You cannot blame Microsoft for a device driver written by another vendor that does something that is explicitly illegal (according to the DDK) which therefore brings down the system. (Is it the cop's fault when you're pulled over for a speeding ticket?)
Microsoft's primary problem here, in my opinion, is that MSFT is automatically blamed for all blue screens, when in fact only a tiny percentage of BSODs are actually caused by Microsoft code. If Microsoft could close the loop on OCA and report to the users the cause of their crashes more frequently, and users could begin to appreciate how few blue screens really are caused by Microsoft code, I think the collective opinion of Windows' stability would change greatly.
Just to add value to this post, here are some common bugchecks caused by software. Any kernel mode code can cause these bugchecks:
STOP 0x0000000A (0x0A)
STOP 0x1E
STOP 0x50
STOP 0x7F
STOP 0x7E
STOP 0x8E
And hardware bugchecks:
STOP 0x9C (replace your CPU)
STOP 0x1A (replace your RAM)
STOP 0x4E (replace your RAM)
STOP 0x77 (examine your hard drive system)
STOP 0x7A (examine your hard drive system)
Any STOP code that begins with 0xc....... indicates some kind of environment problem, usually you get these during bootup.
I firmly believe that if you use commercial software, you should pay the full price for that software (with any discounts you can legitimately get). The cost of Windows is $$, and the cost of Linux is learning. Really, one must also learn Windows, but it is easy to learn much less if you are content to use it poorly. That, I think, is the difference.
You would also have to clarify what "most of [your] favorite software" entails if you want people to explain how to make the transition. For example, if you're a very heavy Usenet user, I would say that in my experience the NNTP apps under Linux blow the Windows ones away.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
With Windows 95, 98, and ME, one or two crashes per day is normal. Sure, it's the *application* that's crashing, but it brings down the operating system with it. I suspect that 5% probably has a lot to do with people playing games under those persions of Windows, or using other less than stable applications. Or it could simply be certain types of video cards. When I had a Voodoo 2 based card running under W95, I had maybe three crashes a day. I also had about the same number of crashes per day when using Linux with that card (though, yes, only the X server crashed, but that was just as bad).
Since I've been using Windows 2000, I haven't had a single crash. Period. Not one. Even when doing heavy software development (multiple compilers running at the same time, etc.).
Well, I skimmed the article. I am presuming you are the author. If so, you are either the most uneducated person to post such a wide-ranging opinion piece, or you are just a troll. Probably both. Most of what you say is so ridiculous that it is not worth arguing about, but I will respond to one statement which is within my range of expertise: MS Word is NOT a good program. Here is why: A good word processor should be a typesetter like LaTeX. I am not punting LaTeX here. My criteria for "good" are as follows: 1. Most important: something that preserves your data. I want to read papers I write now in 20 years time. And I want them to look the same. MS Word will never achieve that. They change their document format all the time. 2. I want something which looks good. By going for a binary document format MS produced something which will never look really professional. There is just too much computational overhead. 3. The biggest dupe of all is that the user needs WYSIWYG'ness. In fact it should the the opposite. Seeing the final product is distracting. A proper system lets you do your "word processing" in two stages: First you get your ideas down. Then you make it look nice. Anyway, all these problems could have easily been solved if MS had opted for a mark-up (XML style) document format from the beginning. (If you want an example of all this in action go and try Apple's Keynote software. And use it the way it was designed to work by producing your slides first and then formatting them by altering the masters.) So no, I think MS Word is terrible and I have provided ample evidence to back that statement up. I don't hate microsoft, but to think that MS Word is better --- because MS managed to establish an intellectual and creative monopoly on desktop wordprocessing and as a result you have not been exposed to any alternatives --- is just stupid. Whatever
What's high is the 95% of systems that crash more than twice a day.
This is just a very large physiological experiment. Gates and crew are trying as hard as they can to lose customers, but it is just not happening. They are doing everything they can to piss people off, but ~90% are still using Windows. MS just can't lose customers, no matter how hard they try.
The above is not worth reading.
Please don't try to claim that the Windows in general is stable and Linux in general is not. Your personal experiences are fine and might be interesting to everybody else, but they do not disprove the general rule. It seems pretty certain that overall Windows is less stable. Indeed, Windows2000 is relatively better, but it still crashes and not only because of bad drivers. I managed once to BSOD a machine with newly installed Win2000 just by mousing around in the IE Help Viewer. Yeah, sure it was probably the cheap Chinese mouse responsible for the crash.
So personal anecdotes are fine and dandy, but please don't try to sell them as proofs of Windows' stability. And also, don't tell us tales about 500+ uncrashable Win2000 PCs. Nobody is going to believe that, unless these PCs are locked in some abandoned warehouse, and preferably turned off.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
for one call center alone. All Windows (for now.)
5% of 17,000 means that 850 customer reps in our call center are down once a day while the system reboots and looked like jerks if they were talking to a client at the time.
That's NOT good. That's expensive.
I only reboot my Linux box when I upgrade (last time was to slide in a new motherboard, CPU and RAM a few weeks back.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Its not as bad now with XP, which was a beast to install on some of them, but still about a crash a day when you review the logs.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Mars expeditions prefer Linux
Christ I remeber re-writing the dos boot up files all the time to get ONE program to work. With 95-XP Microsoft was supposed to fix that, but guess what they didnt, they just changed how we did it.
Ok granted not every software manufacturer can make sure EVER app works with ever other app, but then its the OS manufacturers dutie to write code that prevents total system crashes and the (blue, grey, or sys.log dump of death depending on the system) to happen frequently.
I have gotten maybe 4 kernal panics running all of the software I do in Mac OS X, that a fair ammount better than before with 1.0 - 9.2.2 where crashes came fast and furious. Im happy, but not content, Apple should do better. I want once a year or less.
Same with Windows users, the problem here is us techs expect that we want Microsoft to improve their software. But most consumers dont so Microsoft doesnt. We are at the mercy of people who dont know it should be better, and a company who doesnt care about us tech guys.
Its a sucky prospect. but how can we improve this???
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I really do like beef. Also, Bill Gates is a genius. He not only begins to admit that Windows9x is a hog, but he then boasts and mocks us, telling us that we will now pay him even more money for this stuff. He is a genius, and a tyrant, for sure.
Many Thanks,
Luke
OK, I'm off-topic here, but this needs to be said.
;-)
After seeing T3 yet again, a friend and I were discussing some of the technical flaws in T3. One of my biggies was the practical infeasibility of having a system as complex as a sentient AI that could distribute itself as broadly as Skynet was able to without people noticing. The closest scenario that I could come up with would be if it piggybacked onto SETI@Home, but that's limited by the low frequency with which SETI accesses the net.
My friend (thanks, Ryan) completely trumped my argument with two words: Windows Update.
It's perfect! The black box nature of Windows would allow `em to push down anything they want ("Security Update"="Updated Nuclear Launch Codes") and Joe User would be none the wiser. Sure ZoneAlarm lets you monitor and block internet access- for everything that the API (published by M$) will give it access to! The only thing that could force it to behave would be an uncorrupted intermediary watchdog.
So please, for the sake of all mankind, if you must use Windoze, please route your `Net connection through a *NIX box of your choice with a packet sniffer! Think of the children!
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
> 5% of all windows installations crash two or more times every day.
Then the other 95% crash 3+ times per day? =)
Let's investigate this idea of "goodwill" for a minute. Realtek makes open source drivers and specs available, but they're considered a low-end company that makes bargain-basement NIC chipsets that can handle 65% of the throughput of the market leaders for 20% of the price. Where is the goodwill? Has the open source industry done anything for Realtek? Their chipsets are already integrated into countless motherboards, and used on some of the most prevalent NICs in the industry; they donated their driver code. But I don't see anyone out there saying, "Thank you, Realtek! You are our favorite NIC chipset maker! We recommend that everyone who runs Linux go out and buy a card with your chipsets!"
And what about wireless? The last time I checked, the only drivers that worked were the reverse-engineered Prism II chipset drivers for the ancient Lucent WaveLAN and compatible cards. Good luck getting your high speed D-link, SMC, Netgear, or Intel card working. Apparently the "goodwill" of the community isn't enough of an incentive for them to release the details of how their MAC layer operates.
What about video? Well, you basically have ATI and NVidia, neither of whom release open source drivers. I guess they're not going to get any goodwill from the Linux community either! Should I sell my stock as a result?
Look, I know I'm being overly sarcastic here, but "goodwill" is no incentive for a real company to release drivers that give out intimate details about the inner architecture of their HW designs. Graphics cards makers will NEVER do this because their drivers are now boiling down to software routines written for GPUs in the equivalent of graphics assembly language. Giving away the code to these routines would give away any optimization strategies that they had spent time and millions of $$ researching and developing to beat their rivals.
However, I have convinced several family and friends to switch to Linux on their desktops purchased for Windows. Part of the motivation was that Windows crashed constantly. Well, guess what? Linux crashes too. They say it crashes less often, but I suspect that is subjective. These machines have non-parity memory, hot CPUs, even hotter graphics cards, and no backup or disk mirroring. These crash-prone machines are generally 3 times the price of a Dell business server with backup (probably due to the high end 3D graphics and sound missing from a business server).
The sample size is small (3 desktop users of Windows and Linux), but they consistently rank OS reliability (on the cruddy hardware just described) like this:
- Windows ME - absolutely the worst. Don't plan to run for more than an hour.
- Windows 9x - better
- Windows XP - a big improvement
- Windows 98 running under Win4Lin - even better
- RedHat 7.3 - the best
As a result, they have all settled down to running mostly Linux and Win4Lin, and booting XP for the occasional Windows only multimedia app that won't run under Win4Lin.Nothing new for me. We have "local leader" here in Latvia. This is our telco monopoly Lattelecom. They do the same thing. Telephone rates increase every year but clients get nothing new since 1993. Mobile phone is now cheaper to use than "traditional" one. Lattelecom looses its customers now. I hope the same will happen with M$ soon.
But the reason it takes so long to fix them is stupid design.
The myth that complexity is only achieved through complicated design is pervasive in computer programming, typified in Windows, and becoming more prevalant in Linux applications as Gnome and KDE become the standards.
The UNIX operating system was highly complex even in the days when it was dominated by small programs that were designed with the The Unix Philosophy. Small programs that did one thing well were the rule and complexity was achieved by utilizing clean well documented interfaces, standard data storage formats (ASCII), and non-captive UIs. The result is that most bugs can be tracked down to a specific small program that can either be fixed relatively quickly by the maintainer, or be replaced with one of a number of equivalent programs (either permanantly, or until the bug is found and fixed).
Windows design is mostly large programs that try to do everything for themselves, although they do share library functions. The result is huge masses of code that can effectively hide bugs indefinately (shatter), cannot be replaced with another program without breaking the OS (integration), and that the company seems to think of as "not our problem".
The issue I have with the desktop environments is that they seem to be following in the footsteps of Windows design, creating a tangled mess of (what should be) unecessary dependancies, huge libraries, and code that no one person is inheirently familiar with. As yet, I am unaware of any security problems inherent in either Gnome or KDE, but I do consider it a bug that installing a spreadsheet requires also requires a sound library to work properly.
Complex ends can be achieved through simple means and complex programs or OS do not need to be complicated.
Read, L
World Domination, probably. ;-)
Thats why with Unix the "one tool for one job" dogma was invented. Works fine. Thank you.
umm,
1) the OS guys don't have to write the driver, anyone who knows how to program a driver can
2) If a company so wanted to, features can be added to the generic one
3) Its not like the hardware company can't write their own driver and do a binary dist.
4) You CAN use non open source drivers under linux
Overall linux device drivers are more robust and stable. While windows ones are horrid. Even thou they force device driver programmers to do thigns their way its still a bad system. INF PNF SYS files and the registry make for one BAD design.
"If you want Windows to improve, you actually have to take part in the process."
An improving Windows means it keeps up with the majority of user's slowly-rising level of what's "good enough" over time. It's been Windows meeting that level that has made it standard, and thus the lowest common denominator in operating systems (to the detriment of all others). If I want to keep using Windows, sure I'd want to voluntarily help Microsoft better their product. But surprisingly, many of us on Slashdot want to give another OS a swing at the big time.
on adverage 24 hours a day
;-)
WOW, so some of them were running more than 24 hours a day?
sorry, couldn't resist
On your second point, I have no intention of changing my signature. You, who can't be bothered to even create an account, want me to change it because of what? First, get a clue and second, get a life.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Flamebait? True, healthy dose of sarcasm...I expected a moderation point of 'offtopic'. Let me guess, one of the guys from europe modded me down? Ok, well then you can't sell burgers, or any other american product over there. Time to throw away your britney spears collection.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
There is no such thing as a software bug. What we call a "bug" is really a mistake or error by the programmer.
Part of the problem in or culture is we call these errors "bugs", as if they had a life of their own, and somehow "crawled into" our code.
Simple errors, like when you do a malloc and forget to add 1 for the null-terminator byte, are not bugs. They are errors.
Same with forgetting that arrays are zero-based, or not checking that a pointer isn't null before calling free().
The first step in writing better code is for programmers to take responsability for their code. This means admitting that we can make mistakes. It also means that we have the power to fix our mistakes (which we wouldn't have if these mistakes really were bugs that crawled into our code of their own volition).
As for your analogy to laying bricks, there are many different ways to lay them, just as there are many different uses for bricks (blocking off sewer conduits, lining access-ways, paving driveways, etc., all require different methods and skills).
In summary:
google for
s /0,114 5,1772,00.html
appellation champagne switzerland white wine
get this
http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Daily/New
Explaining that the Swiss town of Champagne has been making wine for 700 years longer than the french guys. It is a different wine, white and still (not fizzy). There was another link that came up that suggested that wine grapes were introduced to France via Switzerland by the Romans. So now whose grape is it?
Unfortunately with bad brand management (by the Swiss?), Champagne has come to mean white fizzy wine. The French are trying to claim it back as "white fizzy wine from the Champagne region in France", which is a bit rough for the citizens of Champagne in Switzerland. I figure if the French can use the name (for white fizzy wine), so can everyone else. Otherwise the French can licence the name from Switzerland.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
maybe year zero wouldn't be such a bad idea right now.
That would be interesting to watch.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
My bad, I just realized I confused this post with this one. I was relying on my memory of which post was the parent of my comments, and since I commented on both (which were, in content, very similar), the two parents sort of merged in my mind.
But I still think this post qualifies as flamebait, or perhaps a troll.