Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes
Flamester writes "In a ZDNet Australia story, Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own. That is, according to Dr. Watson.
The article also goes into the 'rigor in which MS tests their products before release'. "
So they're saying that a poorly designed application can take down the entire operating system? The OS should be resilient enough to handle application crashes and keep on running, who cares who causes the crash? It's the OS's responsibility to handle it.
Also I would like to see where they got these numbers? If they are using the new 'feature' that notifies microsoft of application crashes then I'd be skeptical... If the OS crashes then the notices won't be sent to Microsoft.
Also, it is likely that MORE than half of the applications run on a Windows box are non-microsoft applications, that would mean that statistically MS apps crash more often than third party apps.
Visualize the world of wine
Microsoft emphasised that products such as Yukon and Exchange Server were undergoing thorough testing -- both internally and via independent third parties -- prior to their release to the market.
Hey, they're TESTING! Wow, they really are taking this trustworthy computing thing seriously. Mr. Chase may have said a similar thing if he hadn't been comped, as reported in the diclaimer at the bottom of the article:
Brendon Chase travelled to Tech Ed as a guest of Microsoft.
Hardhitting journalism.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Memory protection is a good thing.
Microsoft has laid the blame for half of all Windows crashes on third-party code.
Scott Charney, chief security strategist at Microsoft, told developers at the TechEd 2003 conference in Brisbane, that information collected by Dr Watson, the company's reporting tool, revealed that "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code".
Charney's comments come as the company highlights the rigour with which it tests its own products before release. Microsoft emphasised that products such as Yukon and Exchange Server were undergoing thorough testing -- both internally and via independent third parties -- prior to their release to the market.
The company is employing root cause analysis and event sequence analysis procedures to scrub out the creation of sloppy code. The result is that individual developers have a high degree of accountability for the code they produce, while the systems and processes associated with code development are rigorously monitored.
Root cause analysis enables the company to check closely the work of individual developers. "If a developer has written vulnerable code, then we look at what else that developer has written and check it," Charney said
Event sequence analysis takes this further, analysing the reasons why the vulnerable code was written. Charney said it was not necessarily so they can sack whoever is writing vulnerable code, but find out the reasons why and how Microsoft improve their staff with training or more efficient processes.
As Charney made his remarks, Charles Sturt University announced they would be offering a Master of Information Systems Security degree including MCSE:Security industry certification.
Charney's also reinforced Microsoft's message to developers and network administrators that they needed to build secure applications and networks "from the ground up".
The chief security strategist's remarks have come at an unfortunate time, as mainstream and niche media outlets produce heavy coverage of the impact of the MSBlast worm, which has infiltrated corporate and enterprise networks worldwide.
That sure is encouraging. What a wonderful operating system you have when half the time it crashes, the crash is caused by third party code. A properly designed OS shouldn't allow third party software to crash it. No OS is perfect, but half the time is just silly.
sPh
....is undertaken by consultants with the the letters "I" and "Q" and the number 25!
Consultants with too much time on their hands!!!
Suppose we should be greatful they ain't breading
:-]
Jaj
Like it would be someone else's code? C'mon people! We should know better!
I guess MSBLASTER, Code Red, Nimda, SQL Slammer, etc. could be considered 'third-party code'. ;>
Assuming this is true, wouldn't this be an example of how closed source can contribute to programming mistakes? If developers had more access to the OS source could wouldn't they be less likely to affect it adversly with bad code?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Shouldn't the headline read "Third-Party Code Responsible For Half Of All Windows Crashes"? Or at the very least, "Microsoft Code -not- responsible for half of all Windows crashes"? Your bias is showing, guys...
So 50% of all system crashes are caused by 3rd party drivers and the other 50% are caused by Microsoft code.
Sounds bad, but compared to the number of application crashes, the number of actual OS crashes is infinitesimal.
If half of all windows crashes are caused by third party apps, that still means that the other half is solely microsoft's fault.
His conclusions are suspect, and so are his motives. It's elementary, really. Bill G should get Magnum P.I. or Simon and Simon to do this investigation.
And the other half....
That's still an awful lot of crashes.
Actually, it is. It is responsible directly for half of all Windows crashes and indirectly for the vast majority of the rest. A good, modern OS should not be crought down by a program. Thus it is M$'s shitty code that allows that to happen.
Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own.
Ha.....thbbbt!.....Mwaaa haaa haaa haaa haa ha ha!
Heeeee he haa ha ha ha. *sniff*
*snort!* Ha ha ha ha hee ha ha.......
He wipes the tears from his eyes as he says, "you know, allowing an application to crash the OS should not happen no matter how bad the application crash. Allowing that to happen is the fault of the OS."
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
SCO is responsible for the other half of crappy windows code. This is why Microsoft was so eager to buy a license.
... 54% of all statistics are made up on a whim.
taco assumes that since 3rd party code causes half the crashes in windows, ms code must cause the other half? what about hardware problems? or the user doing something stupid?
if you guys were actually journalists...
Or really just One Ring to rule them all? An application in a protected-mode OS (running in Ring 3 of the x86 chip) can't touch kernel space (Ring 0). Now, if an OS vendor does things like put its GUI subsystem in Ring 3 (cough, NT, cough), and you let 3rd party people write drivers that 5uXX0r5, then yes, you can have a case where 3rd party code causes crashes. BUT YOU (MS) PUT THE GDI SUBSYSTEM IN USER SPACE!
If the OS design is so poor, or hacks and compromises are made for gaming performance at the expense of stability, then you can't really complain when the system goes unstable.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What kind of third-party code are they talking about here?
Userland applications or device drivers?
As so many others undoubtedly already have remarked, an application, however shoddily written,
should not bring down the whole OS.
If they're talking device drivers.. well, that's a different issue entirely.
On the other hand, if this is the case, what the heck is that MS certification process for?
I assumed on first reading it that they meant third-party code they'd licensed to include in Windows, like so many of their utilities and whatnot.
The article isn't clear, though.
only half of them? That's pathetic.
When, in the near future, private users are only running MS programs, because the OS scares them with losing guarantee and health and other things if they try to install other apps, they can only crash by MS' program's fault.
Of course, if IE crashes it can still be the web sites fault, when Word crashes it will be a wrong word document's fault...
I don't need a signature.
...Slashdot poll: Is the cup half full or half empty?
Wow, they admitted that their operating system is so bad, that chances are if a program crashes, so will the operating system. Amazing.
They state that half of them come from poorly written code. I bet somewhere they say the other half come from user error. Heaven forbid an operating system to manage the errors without blue screening.
Yesterday my usb mouse somehow died in linux, did I have to restart---no. I just removed the usbmouse from the modules and then restarted it. And it worked again.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
Do they count Office as a "third party app."?
In my experience, third party apps & crappy drivers are responsible for 95% of my crashes, atleast since i switched to win2k. Win95/98 on the other hand..
Maybe its that torn muscle in my shoulder but I found it funny.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Maybe Microsoft will sue SCO for breaking there products...
SCO is likely to have code in the Microsoft codebase, or that's what the will claim anyway
What he just admitted is that HALF of ALL crashes are Microsoft OS related. Every application that runs on a account for more than let's say 5% or 6% of total crashes, but Microsoft still has their full 50% share. That's STUPID-speak on his part. Way to instill company pride by shooting yourself in the foot, and then putting it in your mouth.
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
Was wondering about your SIG, but think it must be a troll for supernerds.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
There is only one way 3rd party software can crash an OS: If the OS is so hopelessly broken that it gives that much control to applications.
Microsoft's bad coding is responsible for 50% of their crashes, by their own admission. Their inherently flawed OS structure is responsible for allowing the other 50% to happen.
(This of course doesn't address hardware related issues--all I can say is that MS software is VERY sensitive to borderline hardware)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So the other half are still the fault of Windows? That's still a pretty piss poor track record.
I was googling for the 4 lines of C code that use to crash windows but came across this
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
rofl at title
Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes
"he's full of get up and go" "really?, he fills me with lie down and die."
Wait a second, we designed this OS to run the Desktop... you know, My Documents , My Music... that stuff. We had no idea you were going to be running applications on it!
This calls for a whole new design phase.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Hospital defends record by stating it only caused 50% of its patients deaths!
I guess we should all stop whining about Microsoft instability then...
"Gates said that 5 percent of Windows machines crash, on average, twice daily. Put another way, this means that 10 percent of Windows machines crash every day, or any given machine will crash about three times a month"
It's the 21st Century, doesn't this seem a little out dated? I reboot my Macintosh once.....once...a month? I reboot my FreeBSD box only when I am switching out hardware.
How can an OS that costs so damn much crash so often? How can this be possible in a world with super-sonic jets, Segways, super-computers in a 24U enclosure, how does that work?
Error 407 - No creative sig found
well this simply implies that the other half of crashes occur because of M$' own faulty code.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Ok would this be 3rd party code that gets installed after MS stuff, or the 3rd party code that MS swallows up as they buy whatever seems nice and absorb it into the mire of their own code?
I've been running XP ever since it was released and I've maybe seen it crash twice. And yeah, it's XP Home. Now I know that the first time it crashed it was the fault of MS and the second time was the fault of someone else. At any rate it's not a big deal and you'll be hard pressed to find XP users who will think that it is.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Hmm... What kind of 'rigor' is that, again? Rigor mortis?
don't forget MS have a handy bug reporting tool that is enabled by default, if an application crashes you get a dialog popup that offers to send the crash data to MS along with a captue of what was running in memory at the time, OS hardware details etc in fact all the data that a programmer would want to debug or identify the problem (even a binary mem grab is saved in the windows directory (debug.dmp) i believe its called, good idea but it would be better if they released the data on request to the offending application manufacturer, MS have the facilities to collect vast amounts of data but its worthless if it makes them look stupid and offers nothing back to the creator so he could fix it.
has Linux got a similar feature or is it a case of "you have to believe me" ?
be good if there was a centralised crash reporting centre (for all OS's) that correlated the info accuratly
Boromir, son of Faramir
For someone who names themselves after characters in the film, you don't seem to know much about it, as you got it the wrong way round.
So I guess all of the crashes that I have experienced with Inernet Explorer can be blamed on the the third party software they stole from the University of California and Eolas Technologies Inc.
Scott Charney, chief security strategist at Microsoft, told developers at the TechEd 2003 conference in Brisbane, that information collected by Dr Watson, the company's reporting tool, revealed that "half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code".
It's worded suspiciously but I don't think necessarily means the crashes are due to windows code. Aren't hardware issues responsible for a significant amount of crashes as well? Are they being counted in the 50% that belongs to driver problems and other third party code or are they counted with the windows problems.
I stole this Sig
Tell that to the folks at QNX, I'm sure they'd be interested.
So, people will be forced to buy programs coded by M$ if they want to keep teir PC running?
This could be a tactic(windows hidden settings
We have eyes to see with, and ears to hear with. A bumble bee does fly. All the Microsoft white papers and theories can not make me discount what I observe in real life.
1944 ... Atomic bomb is dropped ... man sets foot on the moon ... IBM releases OS/2 Warp v3 (Apps unable to corrupt/crash the OS) ... Microsoft finally admits that half of all crashes are their fault
... *nix good ... ... Mac good ... ... yes windows does suck.
1969
1994
2003
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
=)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Are you implying that my hardware is really ok and not responsible for all these crashes? *gasp*
Isn't it an operating system's responsibility to make sure the system does not crash when a process misbehaves?
Except for hardware malfunctions (which I bet are responsible for less than, say, 5%) How can any Windows crash NOT be microsoft's fault?
Half full mug
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Why are they putting third-party code in their operating system?
It's either that or they allow applications to access the OS's memory and that would just be plain asinine AND, technically, still their fault so the 50% statement goes out the friggin window. So it can't be that.
Use Python
The amazing thing is that code this complex doesn't crash more!
Microsoft has a really tough job. Unlike Linux, MS can't rely on all programmers to be 30-40 year old bearded guys with CS degrees. There are people working in software development for Windows that are hiding copies of 'Advanced Windows' by Jeffrey Richter that they crib subs out of all day without really understanding their programs.
The OS is far from perfect, but I'd say that the quality of it overcomes the design issues regularily.
So what if half are caused by MS. Four crashes aren't that bad.
Indeed, the above is meaningless, as is saying half of the crashes are caused by MS.
/. crowd thinks that windows should be crashfree.
At the very least, at least tell how many times it crashed in how many years.
Two crashes a day is worst then a 500 crashes in 10 years.
Or perhaps the
I am not much of a computer nerd and I don't know the reason why my machines crashes when they do. But Windows, mac os x and linux have crashed under my hands. I don't expect a computer to be crashfree - in the far future perhaps - so I like to know too; how many times in how many years.
Well no shit.
A crash is still a crash. I'm sure glad I don't use that crap.
Windows software virtually NEVER crashes while in compact-disc form!
Also if you want a crash free environment all that is required is you shut the machine off and place it in a vacuum sealed container.
.....See Microsoft does make crash free products! you just don't know how to use them properly... anyone that has the gall to use third party applications is spelling their own doom...
I'm currently using Linux, which also gives drivers such low-level access that a bad driver can crash the whole machine. I was under the impression that this was a design decision which couldn't be changed without sacrificing performance.
Try this (as root) on your Linux box: /sbin/hdparm -Y /dev/hda > /dev/null /sbin/cfdisk
Down goes the OS. Granted we're doing something as root, but all we're doing is putting a drive to sleep and then running cfdisk on it.
This actually may be true, but the Microsoft OS products permit sloppy coding, and a buggy and poorly standardized API make it this way. Microsoft has 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, me, nt, w2k, xp and variants like home, pro and servers that make it difficult to have a stable release.
Since the 286 cpu, memory protection has been available but still today on P4's and AMD 64 cpus, memory protection in windows is weak.
Now, Microsoft is saddled with it's OS design mistakes and heading into the future and it is going to get tough for M$.
Or M$ will come out with Microsoft Linux and tell us it is derived from NT.
Ok what about the other half that they are responsible. Never mind the fact that a application should not crash the OS.
Got Code?
The exploit is microsofts fault, the virus is third party. Yea, that sounds like 50/50.
I was driving on the highway and a truck in front of me had a little sign on the back that read something to the effect of:
"Not responsible for debris falling out the back."
And so I guess if something fell out of that truck and struck my car and sent me into a ditch, it would be my own fault for driving on the highway. Because the truck (or its drivers or owners or loaders) isn't repsonsible for being unable to hold on to its own cargo.
Alex.
Yeah, the last distributed denial of service attack was in fact the simultaneous arrival of all the error reports of a whole week.
No where in the article does it say that these are crashes that result in a computer reboot.
.zip file and crashes; Windows keeps running just fine, but that's still a crash. Under XP that will generate an app crash message to be sent to Microsoft to be analyzed and included in statistics like these.
Winzip chokes on a corrupted
Hooray! Remember, no one ever got fired for sending 230,000 Klez viruses.
With Windows 'Innovating' (sigh) and not bug fixing, third party code will be the least of their problems, infact, with undocumented 'features' and system calls and closed source code, how can anyone be expected to write drivers and such that never crash?
Hmm.
I know I'll get modded WAY the fuck down, but I don't care...
This whole thing is flamebait. The article title "Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes" should have been "Thrid Party Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes"...or is it that only anti-MS articles get posted? So much for having any integrity, Slashdot.
It would probably help, but the fundamental problem is the design of the operating system. Running everything in kernel space, without memory protection, is begging for problems. This is aggravated by the complexity of many types of drivers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Microsoft waited to release these figures until after MSBlaster had spread significantly. Before this worm, the problem was more on the order of 90% Microsoft's fault, and 10% third-party. What with computers crashing the minute their connected directly to the Internet now days, the figure has balanced out.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Gee! Bill is in the middle of a duck shooting contest.
I am running for cover.
Boromir is Faramir's elder brother. Their father is Denethor. It is entirely possible that Faramir and Eowyn could have named a son Boromir after Faramir's dead brother.
Uhhh, dude...
For someone who names themselves after characters in the film, you don't seem to know much about it, as you got it the wrong way round.
For someone refering to the film, when it's based on a book, you don't seem to know much about it, as they where brothers
When I tried it out, my Windows programs crashed even more often than they did under Doze, but OS/2 itself kept chugging along.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I have had zero system crashes since I started using Windows 2000 over two years ago. So Microsoft would be responsible for exactly...zero of them.
I think in the last day, the number of crashes due to Microsoft code has risen to 75%.
I wonder if they have any conclusions about who is responsible for Linux crashes, oh wait, it doesn't crash...
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
The headline has been twisted to suit the audience
After drivers, I wonder how many crashes are caused by bad hardware, especially bad memory.
And I notice that this is the figure for "MS Windows" crashes. I wonder how much better Windows XP would fare just by itself.
Having been doing software testing for about 10 years now, I can pretty much guess that Microsoft is like most other software places in that lots of things are discovered in test that still make it out the door. I'd like to hear from someone in the test organization at Microsoft to see what *they* think about the quality of the product they test, and how much pull they have in making decisions. I am betting that it is just as much as anywhere else. Most places have no problem in shipping out code that doesn't meet with QA's approval. I've seen it, I've been a part of it. That's business baby. Quality software will get trumped by some promised deadline every time.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I thought you guys were smarter than that... geeze! They said "code" not "applications", most crashes ARE caused by 3rd party CODE, 3rd party DEVICE DRIVER CODE that is! What's that comment about memory protection??? Have you ever written a device driver?? GEEZE! The OS can't be responsible for a device driver screwing up, device drivers are what controls the system! It's like blaming a car for a stupid driver that drove off a cliff! OSes can protect against bad applications (and windows does!), but no OSes can full protect itself from bad drivers! Whenever I get a BSOD, which is really rare, I always debug the crash and 90% of the time it's caused by the video card driver (3rd party), 5% usually some other drivers, or in the case of my old server, 5% of the time, due to some hardware failure.
So, they fully admit that the other half is caused by Windows programing. That is still pretty bad.
Think about it, if 50% of Windows crashes is caused by the possible 1,000's of other programs. That means the other 50% is caused by a handful of MS programs.....thats not a healthy ratio.
Makes you wonder.
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
From the article:
"half of all crashes in Windows are caused not by Microsoft code, but third-party code".
That's not the same as saying half of all windows crashes. The key words here are 'Dr. Watson', which does not track OS crashes, Watson tracks application crashes.
Second, learn some math. 50% of all crashes in windows are caused by third-party code. Does that automatically say the other 50% are caused by Microsoft code? Absolutely not.
Since we're making up numbers, I would put 35% of all crashes on faulty hardware.
Why not?
Number of Windows machines x frequency of crash x man hours lost waiting for re-boot x 1/2 = many^lots
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Like Apple test MacOS on Apple hardware, or Sun test Solaris on Sun hardware, or IBM test AIX on IBM hardware.
... there is no Microsoft hardware. Sounds like a perfect excuse to blame the hardware aswell ... Problem is Netware/Linux/BSD doesn't crash on the SAME HARDWARE ... so it must be the applications ... like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Excel, Word, etc.
Wait a minute
It's not a clear statement to say who is "at fault". How do you judge? A poorly written web site crashes Internet Explorer and thereby the entire operating system, then the crash is being caused by the "third party code", i.e. the HTML or javascript, but IE shouldn't allow a bad page to crash it, and WinXP shouldn't allow IE crashing to take it down.
Now, hypothetically, what if it causes the crash because the HTML page doesn't cohere to Microsoft's IE standards, but let's say the page does cohere to W3C standards? Then is it the "fault" of the HTML coder for not cohering to IE standards, or MS's fault for not cohering to more general standards put out by W3C? (I know, HTML is so simple it's a bad example, but the principle works for other things too)
On the other hand, contrary to what people are saying, half of the crashes being cause by "third party code" does not mean the other half being caused by Microsoft code. It could be hardware failures or a user deleting some file they shouldn't, or some stupid thing. Then who is "at fault"?
It's always the other guy who's "at fault".
Could we relate this to the glass half full or half empty? it depends, are we drinking or filling.
Its one thing to say that half the errors fall in Microsoft and everyhting else is other. But if we looked at lines of code (or Chances of error) causing the errors, what percentage of microsoft code is problem vs percentage of other code. Would that be a better indication of how they are improving?
What we realy need is a historical comparison, so we can see how much microsoft (or other) is improving (or getting worse).
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
In other news, the sky is blue.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
...I would have to agree.
Uhm, anytime Windows crashes, it's a problem with Windows. A bug or crash in a 3rd party application should have no bearing on the stability of Windows, at least that's how MS Marketing describes Windows capabilities, and that's the way it should be.
This looks like a big verbal foo-pa that IBM/Sun could drive a truck load of marketing through.
Wouldn't it be Microsoft's responsibility to look at third party contributions that they've elected to include in their codebase?
I think I'd do that even if the 3rd party agreed to do their own code audits.
It's just common sense, like looking at your lug nuts after a tire rotation and before you speed up to 80 mph.
If MS doesn't do that kind of internal quality checking, then maybe customers ought to look at competitive product offerings for their PC besides what Microsoft offers.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
MS was going to post a detailed breakdown of all the crashes, but the crash report database server went down when it kept trying to send reports to itself.
A MS driver is equivalent to a Linux kernel module. Linux is not any better at this because a poorly written kernel module crashes Linux, too. It just seems that Linux kernel modules are better audited (by the kernel developers) than the average Windows driver.
At the beginning was at.
Doh, you fail it, too. First, the guy's a troll, and uses that sig to piss people off. he knows who they are. Second, Boromir and Faramir were brothers, not father and son.
If 1/2 of the microsoft crashes are results of 3rd party code then this statement is true If someone writes some bad code the HP/UX server will bluescreen and reboot.
>> Boromir, son of Faramir ... you got it the wrong way round.
> Uhhh, dude
Uhhh, dude... you're both like totally wrong.
Faramir is Boromir's brother, they're both sons of Denethor, Steward of Gondor.
Now go read the books.
--Azaroth
I actually loved the program back then. It honestly ran my DOS games faster then they ran in Dos, I could not believe it. My 386/40 was screaming, and I was in heaven. My only complaint; few native apps.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Microsoft code is at fault for the other half of windows crashes
1/2 of all crashes are directly attributed to Microsoft. That is not so bad, depending on how you look at it. Some would say that 50% is better than OS X where it is probably 80% or higher.
I wonder what it is for the other major OS' out there? I am thinking higher, as the OS is seperated from the app better, so _if_ it crashes, it is almost always the fault of the OS.
Then we have to considers hours of operation per crash, uptime, number or processes and/or services running, etc.
Sounds like the basis of a real test for someone to run...
In other news, it has been found that sun is responsible for at least half the outdoor lighting during day time.
Fortunately, there is a patch for this "windows" crash problem, click here or here.
The announcement and subsequent article imply that 1/2 of all crashes are not Microsoft's fault. Assuming that Office, Money and other MS apps are written "better" than 3rd party code - we can assume that they cause say, 30% of the MS responsible crashes.
/. when I first red it. However, after reading the article and running the numbers (with my assumptions) the rewrite not only seems acceptable, but even neccesary to uncover the underlying truth behind the numbers.
Based on those assumptions 35% of *all* crashes are based on operating system specific code. Based on Dvorak's estimation of crashes/day means 24.5 million crashes per day are due to code withing the operating system. That is not a very good number, esp. considering that this is code that other developers have no access to, and can't work around.
It is the basis of the closed-source model that anything that I can't see works, the black box theory. You tell it to do something, the black box whirs, beeps and spits out a number. If you start to assume that the box will crash then the theory no longer works. The solution, accept the fact that it will crash and make your application tolerant to crashes - save early, save often.
The rewrite of the headline from "Microsoft criticises third party code for Windows crashes" to "Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes" seemed a bit unfair, and typical
-Coach
"Never upset a goalie, getting hit with a blocker is an unpleasent experience - facemask or not." -Me
The article talks about "crashes in Windows" -- NOT "Windows crashes"!
There's a big difference there. Basically the numbers are inflated to the point of meaningless by badly coded greeting card & educational software. Badly coded software crashes--news at freaking 11.
What's of interest to people is how many of the applications and OSes we actually use are badly coded. This article provides none of that information.
Besides, if you talk to a Microsoft person about Windows crashes, they'll ALWAYS assume you mean application crashes. Only when you specify that the OS bluescreens or reboots do they say: 1) You should upgrade to XP, 2) Already have XP? You need the latest Service Pack, 3) Already have the latest Service Pack? It's a driver problem.
He beats me less than 50 percent of the time.
If they claim that half of all crashes are due to third party code then they are admitting that the other half is because of M$ crappy coding. Still means their testing/coding is useless mostly!!!
Come again, what was the point M$ was trying to make here??
I think MS' definition of test is, "Does it compile?"
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
how microsoft determines responsibility for crashes:
3rd party code makes windows API function call->API function bombs ->3rd party code bombs as a result ->3rd party code is responsible!
TallGreen CMS hosting
... your posting. When a 3rd party driver crashes, it probably will take down the system as well, since it runs in ring 0, and can walk over kernel resources (and probably did).
When Windows gets read-only mempages (IIRC win2k3 has them) for kernel processes, this will be ended, until then: the 3rd party drivers are mostly at fault.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The fact that Microsoft crashes less than linux?
:If Microsoft won it would be 5, funny, and not -1, flamebait.
Note about moderation
ignore the fact that any hacker can bypass the login security with the aid of a bootable floppy.
ignore the fact that any password in windows can be found out in under a minute.
ignore the fact that by downloading a user plug-in with wierd sniffing capabilities for your system, and the ability to tell anyone who cares.
as i recall, the main entry of choice into windows is its tcp/ip interface using any variant of 'look-out', 'internet-exploder', and 'x-delta'.
i'm reminded of the urbin legend, "before the greek gods make you fall, they first give you the gift of 'pride'".
damn, good luck m$, you made some very interesting enemies.
Saying it's the video drivers isn't an "excuse", it's the truth, gleaned from interpreting the information from the dump, from the log, and even from the Blue Screen of Death.
The Blue Screen of Death, btw, is the OS saying, "Something really bad has happened in the kernel memory space, and instead of just randomly freezing, I've managed to catch it and shut myself down." Other times you aren't so lucky, and the kernel gets hosed badly enough to freeze your system.
They could make video drivers run in user mode (IIRC they did, for NT 4.0 or 3.51 or something, but then decided to move it back later in XP) but it comes at a big performance cost about like you'd expect.
Anyone else notice how the article talks about headline of the article blames third-parties for half, and how slashdot headlines blame M$ for half? Interesting... ;-)
If we were to assume there are close to around 50,000 third party firms who develop for Windows and there are around 1 million distinct Windows core dumps per version then there would be 20 incidents per third part developer and HALF A MILLION Crashes thats still owed to Microsoft..
So what were we saying again...
Rapid Nirvana
Scene: Microsoft HQ
Present: Emporer Gates, DBallmer
Emporer Gates: Darth Ballmer, it has come to my attention that we do not possess 90% market share in certain aspects of our operation. Your performance diappoints me...
Darth Balmer: Ook.(1)(2)(3) [Hooo...haaa...hooo...haaa](4)
Emporer Gates: Our code causes only 50% of crashes, yet we control 95% of desktop computers...can you explain the ineffectiveness of our operation? Why are we lagging in this area?!?!?
Darth Balmer: Ook. [Hoooo...haaaaa...hoooo...haaaa]
Emporer Gates: Please put your army of flying monkey dark Jedi to work on this problem immediately. I expect results, Ballmer. You will not fail me in this, or you will be looking for bananas in the sodomy pits of the Hutts!
Darth Balmer: Ook! [Hoooo...haaaaa...hoooo...haaaa]
GF.
(1) Monkeyboy
(2) Librarian
(3) I'm aware that it should be "Ape-boy" if the Librarian is an Orangutan, but if you don't tell the Librarian, I won't.
(4) Darth Vader breathing sound
Lots of petrified grits
still experiences 100% of all failures.
Oh well, what the hell...
pick up a refurbished 2.4 pentium if you'd like, they're 400 bucks right now at pcmall.com. As for your mac shittiness you're experiencing, buy a new one, G4, G5, I on't care, hell no one does excep you. It sounds like you need a new computer, stop using netscape, stop using OS 9, move out of the 90s.
feeding the troll or not, this was too stupid to offer some only slightly flamish advice"
btw, a 17 meg file takes about 3 seconds for me to copy on an old ass iBook with a 400mhz g3. get a new computer.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
The article's headline (both on /. and ZDnet so no blame to /.) says "Windows Crashes", which implies that the OS actually crashes. However the quote in the article says "Crashes in Windows" which implies that some application running under Windows crashes, not necessarily the OS itself.
Which is it? I am confused. The latter isn't the fault of MS. But no application failing should be able to crash Windows, it's the OS's job to make sure it can handle failing programs.
TROY
That 5% graphics driver performance gain in Ring 0 which was important at one time when computers were slower is coming back to bite Microsoft in the ass.
I have a dual processor workstation with the lot.
Corsair ECC memory USING the error checking.Tyan motherboard powered by an Antec 430W true power. WD HD with 3 year warrany (they are very good) etc.
Every driver I use is MS certified I have tweaked Win 2000 heavily, but applications can and do something which slows down my computer. I've never had a blue screen, but many times I've had to reboot to get things back to "normal".
Unfortunately some of the applications I use are not available for MacOS or Linux so I'm stuck for the time being.
What I will be doing however, depending on how good the G5 Macs really are, is moving as many applications to MacOS X to minimise my exposure to MS and all it's products.
Big difference.. I would say 99.9% of all crashes in Windows 9x are Microsofts fault. NT,2k,Xp,2k3 are FAR more stable.
With the numerous posts about drivers and hardware really causing all the crashes, it makes one think that maybe the hardware maker should also make the OS. hmmm. Doesn't some other company already do that?
Drivers are the weakest part for every OS out there. I have seen drivers crash everything from PalmOS to Linux, and just about every other consumer type OS out there. I think anyone who has done tech support can attest to how many poorly written drivers there are out there. I like that MS has this signed driver thing going on, because it does add some checks and balances into the system. As much as Open Source? No, but at least it does add some.
After Microsoft Bob died, his remains were moved to the beta test lab for a "postmortem". Unfortunately, the temp assigned to check him out had already cashed out his MS stock and moved to Belize.
So Bob sat. And sat. And sat. Until nobody else in the test lab questioned his presence. To all the temps, Bob was just another one of the guys.
One day Bill Gates, after learning that his company would actually be forced to pay their temp employees for the 80+ hours a week of overtime he expected from them, came up with the brilliant idea of giving Bob a new lease on life by having him handle all of the beta testing for the company. He immediately fired all the human temp employees formerly assigned to the task and, using automation as the key to profit, assigned Bob the new title of Bill's Automated Systems Tester And Research Developer.
Almost instantly, Bill saved millions in salary and saw his company's stock price jump another three percent. Bill's wife Miranda, a kindly soul still deeply wounded by the harsh outcries her contribution Bob had caused in her husband's user base, was immensely happy. All looked right with the world.
Unfortunately, Bob, being buggy, had acquired some nasty habits during his tenure in the beta test lab, surrounded by donut eating, salary deprived temps. Designed to help steer frightened computer users into the light, Bob began to feel sorry for the frightened computer bugs. Out of a now perverse sense of binary sympathy, Bob began to ignore the "minor" bugs that would make computers safer. In his mind, computers needed to be easy, not safe.
I say we hang him.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I'm wondering why the news:
Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own.
turned up side down..
Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes
(Yes, I am joking)
I'll probably be modded off-topic, since a story like this on Slashdot is nothing more than MS-bashing flamebait, but I'll try anyone.
First of all, the article says "crashes in Windows," not "crashes of Windows." So it's not entirely clear to me if they are counting application crashes which don't impact the whole system or just the ones that bring down the OS (as most of the bashers in this thread seem to think).
Second, if this is based on error reports, it's skewed by a lot of things. For example, I send the reports when I suspect it's MS code at fault, and I don't send them when I suspect a third party app. I figure MS can't do anything about the third parties, so why bother. The point is, lots of things can skew these numbers.
But most importantly, the bulk of the article, which most Slashdotters seem to be ignoring, is about tracking root causes of bugs. There is no silver bullet in software quality, but this approach is a good place to start. It's something that should be taught in CS courses, and it's something we experienced programmers should be training our juniors to pay attention to.
When you fix a bug, do you ask yourself how it got in there? Where else in your code a similar bug may appear? How can you avoid making the same mistake in the future. How you could have detected the bug sooner? How did the test cases miss it? These are powerful questions if you take them seriously.
It's a mindset all programmers should have. Ironically, I learned it from a Microsoft book, Writing Solid Code by Steven Maguire. Buy it, read it. Pass a copy onto your peers.
In 2 years time, I've only seen 1 blue screen of death, and I've been using many different computers using with XP on them and I've installed in many times over that two years.
In 2 years time, I've seen NO blue screens of death, and I've been using many different computers with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux on them and I've installed them many times over that two years. ;-)
Goodyear. My Goodyear tires are at fault for my car horn not working... Those blasted 3rd party developers.
That 50% is down to one team (windows) and the other 50% are all other manufacturers, one can only come to conclusion that much is still needed to make windows code healthy enough...
Let's see... umm... A MS basher is someone who believes that half the bugs belong to MS. A MS apologist is someone who believes half the bugs belong to somebody else.
Of course if you want to avoid emotional implications when describing the glass, you say "it's 50% water and 50% air". Likewise for this, except...
If half the *code* in your system is written by somebody else, and they are responsable for half the bugs, then that tells you that you and the other guy are equally competent.
Of course, you can spin those statistics anyway you like to suit your needs. Some programs are historicly more difficult to write than others. You could evaluate binary bytes, LOC, or number of binary files to get the spin you want.
I'm willing to wager that MS and its partners are equally competent, since they draw on similar pools of talent. If there is any significant differential, things will tend to regress to the mean of proportional bugginess. For example, if a given vendor always writes buggy code they will eventually be replaced. If MS can't write something, they will eventually buy a company that can.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
causes the crashes because they don't use the proper way to do things.
why?
because M$ won't tell the third parties how to do stuff so M$ looks 'better', faster and shinier!
Of course there are some bits that M$ don't know either which is where companies like OSR (ww.osr.com) make their money on both counts.
Half of the crashes are due to non-microsoft code...Therefore one could *loosly* assume that the OTHER half of the crashes are due to microsoft code...
From the Doctor Fun Archive, see "In his secret lab deep beneath Mt. Rainier, Doctor Watson "detects" another error."
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Cowboy Neal is full of it, whatever it is.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
...they also point out that half of all car accidents involve sober drivers.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
and it was good enough for right now."
Right the problem couldn't be one OS for the people? Remember, for linux's questionable stability, (my 2000 boxes have never crashed, my old 95 hasn't crashed in oh years, and I reboot it maybe once a month with a change or new program) it's got a relatively easy job, vastly more people programing or willing to, and far less devices, programs, and people to support.
It's about expectation. MS users expect everything to work perfectly out of the box, and you know what? They're almost always right. Linux users expect to build it fresh, and if they screw it up, they expect to fix their mistakes. If for some reason it's not their mistake, they hope someone fixed it, and try to figure out where to go to get it.
Not only does MS's popularity make them a tempting target, it also means that any fly-by-night tiawanese hardware firm with a breadboard is whipping their gear out for windows first and probably last, thinking about the ever shrinking bottom line much more than quality, reliability, or customer experience. Not to mention the bitches at hotbar, or bonzibuddy (honestly, they should be addicted to heroine, and set adrift in the pacific with a gun, and one bullet without a primer).
Hell the last thing that crashed on my buddies xp box, winMX, seems to have trouble rebuiling a database for 20 odd GB of porn (maybe it was just "drained"). The only thing I have that even does a good job of crashing on my 2k box is MOO3. They've got a nice memory leak going. But that was Microsoft's fault since they created C. Wait, they didn't! Those crafty bastards!!
When your friendly neighbourhood Jim crack head can write com items what the hell do you expect! Alowing system calls that mod the OS is just plain stupid, and the main reason for windows crashes. It does not matter how good the OS code is it will wind up in conflict with something or other over time. So MS Dr Watson we should only trust code from MS is that the message is? Sounds like you want Redmond to be the only place where Windows software can originate from. Eat my shorts (I have been wearing them for a week!)
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Then explain to me why I can do a 2k install on several identical dell machines with all latest MS HCL certified drivers, installing nothing but 2k + SP3, Office 2k + SP, and certain hotfixes for 2k, and Visio 2k and within a few days of use I will begin getting lockups and STOPs ?
If I install Visio first, then Office + SP, then install SP3 + hotfixes it's fine.
There isnt's a single non-ms product on these boxes and we've had Dell send us 2 replacement machines.
What kind of crashes does this Dr. Watson program meassure? Application crashes, OS crashes or both? And are all crashes logged or do some types (like out of resource errors or kernel panics) go by unnoticed.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Now that's a design issue!
An OS is an accessory, only there to abstract the user to a point where they can be productive. It's overhead should be low and it should be efficient and as bug free as possible. EVEN IF Micros~1 is only liable for 50% of crashes that is PATHETIC. Think about it.
arsehole
Its incredibly interesting there are references to Third Party Software which seemingly implies MS/OS causes rest of the crash events. Frankly, since an OS is supposedly bulletproof in guarding system resources, could it be the undocumented APIs used by the MS Software Group that - in conjuction with third party use of dated API documents - is leading to these crashes?
... oh damn!
Its DOJ To The Rescu
Anti-Microsoft Pessimist: Microsoft code is responsible for half the OS crashes!
Engineer: There are twice as many crashes than any OS should have.
philcrissman.com.
The article also goes into the 'rigor in which MS tests their products before release'. "
When I install MS products, my computer goes into rigor!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Do they admit that the spread of outlook vbs viruses is 100% Microsofts fault? or is that 100% 3rd party code?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
letting anonymous third parties install ring-0 software is asking for trouble really.
It is a design fault, just like root.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I think MS should set up a LAB where testers install lots of third party hardware and software for a couple of weeks, and then see where the instabilities come from and report them to the manufacturers.
Nah, they pay for an investigation that proves it's the third party s/w and h/w manufacturers fault.
Actually you're more likely to get modded up for these kinds of comments so you can be made a target for abuse.
That's why they used to put the pillaries in the center of town, right?
I was going to submit a bug to MS but Windows just crashed and took Dr Watson down with it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Um... where in the article does it say 3rd party code brings down the WHOLE O/S? In my experience the robustness of Windows has improved dramatically with every version (nevermind ME :-) I see individual applications crashing -- about 2 or 3 times a month. In fact, I typically go weeks and months between reboots (generally only when applying patches). There are plenty of things not to like about Windows, but the bad days of blue screens is a fading memory. Of course there are exceptions for odd hardware configurations and out-of-date drivers, but I've seen the same or worse problems with Linux support for oddball hardware.
BTW -- you may have noticed that sometimes when an app "hangs", and displays a "not responding" message in Task Manager, it is actually still running just fine (though chewing up a ton of CPU). Depending on the problem I may wait it out until the process finishes or simply kill it. One of my gripes with MS is that sometimes I have to use a third-party tool (sysinternals.com) tool to kill runaway processes -- Task Manager is not always able to kill it. Not perfect, but it works.
I think all of this applies to Windows server configurations also. I run IIS/ASP servers with dozens of users and applications. When configured so each account runs in its own memory space, with CPU utilization limits, NOBODY is able to bring down the whole web server with bad code -- just their own site.
The fact is, most of us are so bigoted about our O/S of choice, we are unwilling to learn enough about the "enemy" to use it properly.
Is this sig nificant?
How about moving the GDI to ring 0 for performance reasons, allowing a printdriver to crash the OS.
Help fight continental drift.
SlashDot has never, will never, have a reputation for integrity. It's a forum for foul-mouthed bigots with no knowledge of what they're critcizing.
Microsoft does have a suggestion box. (web form for feedback)i on.as p?LCID=1033
Hehehehehe. Use it.
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggest
That's ridiculous. It's the operating system's fault for 99.9% of the crashes. The other .1% being reserved for hardware mishaps which may cause crashes. Any processes running on top of the operating system should not be able to do anything which would cause the operating system to quit unexpectedly. That's in "Writing Operating Systems For Dummies" I'm sure of it. I don't know why I'm still amazed every time Microsoft says stupid things like this publicly. They push the blame on their 3rd party developers, and I'm sure most people will read it and believe it. Pathetic.
If the third party developers are to blame and assuming that all third party developers are of the same quality, why don't Unix systems being hacked because of the poor coding of the third party developers?
Yes, sometimes it is difficult to ensure that the quality of the codes of independent developers, but the design of the OS should at least protect the computer from being hacked due to poor coding. Usually third party developers and vendors for custom applications have only a small timeframe to complete their jobs and they may not have all the test cases completed. It is the fact of life for most programmers nowadays.
This kind of "root cause analysis" only finds out which program is suspect to being hacked, but usually it does not consider the design of the infrastructure. The analysis only finds out which program is at fault and WHO codes the program, and then they blame the programmer of not being able to program correctly under a limited time and cost. It is very irresponsible for a big software and OS company like MS who blames other programmers without considering the whole picture.
At least theoretically, shouldn't WHQL-certified drivers alleviate the "driver-related crash" problems? Granted, most of the latest drivers are not certified prior to release.
:)).
But I would guess that application crashes are the result of Microsoft not discouraging users from running as Administrator, or too many programs installing as system services or running as NTAUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Without elevated priveleges, a "user-level" crash might knock out Explorer.exe, but a crash of an app with elevated priveleges would be more likely to take out a neighboring process (like RPC
The standard Microsoft weenie excuse for instability in the past has been "it's the drivers!", blaming the video drivers is a favourite.
Unless it's an ATI product, in which case you can be 100% assured that it *is* the video drivers.
In my experience, you can bring any Windows 2000 or XP machine with any model of All in Wonder to a screeching blue HALT by simply doing such outlandish and unreasonable things as
And for those who really like fun, try an ATI All In Wonder Pro on Windows 2000. A couple of years ago, I deployed a couple of hundred of them at a Toronto TV station. A year later, they asked me to upgrade all their systems to Windows 2000. Constant random lockups of the whole system, requiring not just a reboot but a power cycle. Needless to say, they were not very pleased - you spend $300 on a video card, and you kind of expect that they'll provide drivers for at least a couple of years. ("They've been around forever. Besides, they're a good hometown company! Their headquarters are just 5 minutes from here, up the 404 in Markham."). Their news department almost did a story on crappy software but it was vetoed because news is supposed to be impartial.
As for ATI, I will never buy another ATI product ever again, for myself or for anyone else.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I wanted to test my Windows system for reliability but I got hacked and taken down.... Hey, they are right! It is third party developers!
Microsoft is responsible for half of the crashes, and the rest of the software industry is responsible for the other half.
At Microsoft we were going to tell you who was responsible for the other 50% of the crashes but then our sql server database crashed on us.
Computers are so comparatively powerful now, we can afford to trade time performance for stability.
Drivers should be moved out of kernel space where possible. Even then, with some effort it could be up to the admin whether drivers run at kernel level or at user level.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
"I think they are talking about drivers. With the current windows design any driver that crash have a good change of taking the os down with it."
It's fun to sandbag MS Windows but Linux drivers also run in kernel mode. Therefore, a buggy Linux driver is just as likely to crash a Linux system.
"...So much for having any integrity, Slashdot."
Did you just say 'integrity' and 'Slashdot?' And '...so much for having...'?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
MSCE is a ponzi scheme, passing the EIT and Prof. Engr exams are akin to passing the Bar exam but, more difficult. You don't have to have an engineering degree for say, I know several folks with physics degrees that became engineers, but it's no cake walk.
......
No one can take a 6 month course (i.e. MSCE) and
'Become a fully licensed civil engineer' or electrical engineer
MSCE is akin to the old Novell certification. If
you pay the company money ( MS or previously novell), take a few simple exams and you are an
MSCE......
Which means you spend all day reading the MS site and applying patches to buggy and unsecure software.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
A poll at CNN here here shows how sometimes no matter what MS does a huge amount of people will be leaving themselves open to problems.
" How are you planning to protect your PC from the LoveSan Internet 'worm' affecting Windows-based PCs?
Going to load a patch from Microsoft 19%
Have already loaded a patch from Microsoft 39%
Doing nothing 41% "
Laptop Reviews
If any non-kernel, non-driver code causes the OS to crash, then that *IS* the fault of the OS. Hands Down. A good OS should be able to survive accidentally bad (or even maliciously bad) application code.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
is it appears MS is proud of this percentage. Along the lines of "only half the total failures of our software are our fault" so look how good our product is. After this many years I really expect to hear that 90% of crashes are due to third party code and that Windows is finally what has been promised for all these years. No question XP has lived up to a lot of it's promise, but it's more than obvious security and stability have miles to go. This is just plain sad.
I can see the headlines now...
Microsoft Denies Responsibility for Security Issues, Says Developer Did It!
if poor code writing is one half the errors and MS has implemented a process to correct this..
The what happens to the other half of errors produce by poor Kernel OS design decisions?
Seems tome if there was poor design deciosns, no amount of systematic coding process will rease the system erros and security flaws associated with those design problems unless the odl kernle is completely thrown out in the trash and they start anew..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Having been doing software testing for about 10 years now, I can pretty much guess that Microsoft is like most other software places in that lots of things are discovered in test that still make it out the door.
Testing only tells you if the software does what you designed it to do. Whether they find/fix extra bugs during testing or not, I would submit that Microsoft's problem is that their design is flawed. In their mad rush to ACTIVE-ate and DYNAMIC-ize every product they sell with data-embedded scripting and network connectivity, they decided the doors and windows should be wide open from the get-go, whether the bug-screens are in place and working or not.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
someone proves MS is crap and linux is the *fix to any desktop woes. It is about time....oh wait...you can crash linux with drivers? Where the hell did you find drivers for linux? :P
Microsoft actually contacted us about one of our applications that was occasionally crashing, and talked to one of our developers about where the problem was (what api functions were being called incorrectly).
If MS doesn't open the source, they can say whatever they like. It's up to the users to believe or not believe them as proof doesn't exist.
A crash can be caused because MS's update causes existing things not to be API compatible any more or MS's documentation is not up-to-date causing the third party not to be able to write good software.
Both would be MS to blame even though DrWatson (whatever) tells the third party software isn't good.
i bet the half windows code is stolen from third party programms... ;)
so the numbers seem quite correct
teenkitten
PS: congratulation to the great rpc security hole
*applaud*
Houston Chronicle article on court case.
Novell wins one in Illinois.
The National Society of Professional Engineers doesn't want riff-raff.
IEEE Computer Society sasy NO, at least in Texas.
ACM editorial saying we shouldn't call it engineering anyhow.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
That's exactly what the resident MS weenie on a forum I frequent says.
'Weenie' is not the word, he's otherwise smart. Just up MS's arse.
I've also been using a 9700 All-In-Wonder with Windows 2000, for at least three months now. I haven't had a single BSOD.
I agree. This whole article is a troll or flamebait. I'm a true Microsoft hater (have been since Win3.11) and I still think this article headline is over the top. As some have pointed out, it's simplistic to assume that if 50% of crashes are from 3rd party, the other 50% are from MS software. The original article is so vague, it's possible that hardware problems could be responsible for a certain percentage of crashes as well.
This is actually the real problem. The article linked to by slashdot is so weak on detail, all discusion based on it is moot. I realized that after reading comments on this page for a while. It finally dawned on me: kernel space or user space... yes of course this difference matters, but there seems to be no way to tell which one the original article is really referring to. It's true that it shouldn't be possible for a user-space process to crash the kernel. But it's my understanding that it's often considered permissable to grant a user-space process direct access to the input and output devices (usually for games). If you do that, and that program then gets "wedeged", but doesn't actually crash, you can be in a situation where you're stuck unless you can telnet/ssh into the computer from another computer.
Previously, I had moderated one of the comments and I'm now intentionally undoing that moderation with this post. (Sort of a "moderation recall".) I don't think that post needs that "+1 Funny" all that badly. I think this entire article and all the comments in it are a waste of time. Including this one.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
just like with any os, badly behaved kernel drivers can trash your system totally..
for example, reading from a null pointer is enough to blue screen nt,xp,... when it's ran at ring-0 level (kernel)
I've had kernel panics occur a lot because of a bad NIC kernel module.. just like I have had tons of blue screens caused by ATI & nvidia display drivers.
At some point or another, the code has to be bug-free, no matter how many exception handlers the OS provides to trap errors, when your display adapter has a bug, there's very little the OS kernel can do about it.
So is Microsoft saying code developed by a third party is bad? I use nothing but third party code in my Linux operating system, and everything's rock stable.
Maybe the issue isn't who wrote the code. Maybe the issue is how the code was written.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
"Microsoft Code at Fault..."
Is that a Freudian slip or what? :^)
Heh.
"Doesn't cause death in over 90% of people!"?
It's more like saying:
"Doesn't cause death in over 50% of people!".
Bill
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Very half glass full take on this from a /. point of view.
Yeah, but that was an unstable release. (2.1.something.) It's equivalent to an internal beta of Windows---why on earth would you run it on a production system? The unstable series are for testing, not for running on a system you're not willing to fry!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Mathematically, of course, if one half the problems are not my fault, that leaves the other half firmly in my court.
You're right. But you've misclassified this particular case. It's not an example of the above math. Half the problems are third party code. Some portion of the other half will be MS code, no doubt. And some portion of the other half may be hardware faults, entirely unrelated to anything that could be addressed in code. Crappy motherboard timings (unreleated to BIOS), for one thing. The world is not as black and white as you paint it.
This is somewhat OT for this article but in line with the comments that are being made. I recently had a lot of problems with my Highpoint 404 card in one of my 2.4 Linux server. Loading the driver instantly added 1.0 to my system load. I didn't even have a drive mounted yet that used that driver. After a couple weeks of use I'd come home to find the volume mounted but claiming to be empty. I'd umount the volume, unload the hpt374 driver, reload the driver, and remount the volume to make things right. This last time things didn't come back up correctly. Unloading the driver caused the load on my machine to breach 50. The volume couldn't be remounted because of superblock errors (or so it claimed). Reloading the driver made the machine act in a VERY funky way (cpu load very erratic). Finally I upgraded the driver and all seemed to fix itself. Even Linux can have driver woes.
Of course they're testing! Microsoft's classic move is to push newly developed and still buggy software onto the consumer, who then proceeds to "test" it for them! Patches soon to follow.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MS says half the crashes users experience are because of 3rd party code, so all of a sudden its 3rd parties who are responsible for crashes and not MS?
Let's look at the half-empty side: MS is still responsible for half of the crashes that occur. That's still way too many crashes due to MS code IMO.
Consider also that MS is a single company vs. how many 3rd party developers from the good to the bad to the ugly?
And what kind of access do they have to the API's and OS vs. Microsoft?
And who's developer tools are those 3rd parties using anyway?
yet all over the world there are many windows systems affected by the latest virus and windows is failing maybe they missed a few things in the rigerous testing
With the help of Intel and the "trusted computing initiative" only MS certified objects will be alowed to run on your computer. The fritz chip extentions are already in place for this in the p4 and up, so when you install Longhorn you will effectively surrender control of your computer to MS, the RIAA, Hollywood and the Government. But don't worry the trade off is you will not have to worry about worms and viruses anymore sucker! Unix systems are not attacked because to install an executable you need to be root, and any user that knows squat uses a decent pass word mine was dos_booty until just a few minuites from now when I will change it again.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Half of the crashes are third-party code, we are told this. By deduction, the other half of crashes are first-party code, Microsoft's code, and second-party code, your own code, assuming you're a developer.
;-)
Though how Microsft would know what you're developing is beyond me. Must be all that spyware.
A good book to read on this subject. And not all the faults can be laid on the shoulders of the engineers.
Jesus! The clumsyness of some 3rd party programs is amazing. You _have_ to run _everything_ as administor, which is one of the things that really upsets me. Grrrrr.
"Way less severe" than what? WHOPPR? What's a serious flaw? One where the software launches nuclear missles?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"2. Everyone who teaches a technical course in an engineering program has to have a PE. Advanced Power Distribution EE5013? Has to be taught by a PE. Differential equations? Has to be taught by a PE. Technical writing? PE. Ethics? PE. If your relevant professors didn't all have PEs, in the eyes of the law you got your sheepskin from a meaningless diploma mill."
I don't see that as quite the bad thing you do. It's imperitive that those who teach the subject matter have practical experience, as well as book smarts.
"4. PEs are prohibited by law from accepting anything less than market rates for their work. Want to design a new audio system for a church as a gift? Too fucking bad. The church has to cough up $75/hour for your time."
Here's what I did to get around that little problem. They pay me like usual. I then turn around and donate money back to the church (remember it's legally MY money). Since for tax purposes, churches and other religious institutions are considered charities. I can take a write-off come April 15. Win-win for everyone except the people who come up with these silly laws.
The rest is spot on.
that always seems to hang up my computer trying to debug things for me? I dunno... he's never really solved any problem for me except for the one where i'm thinking about pressing the reset button.
what do they blame all the viruses on, I don't run a virus protector on my linux pc.
Case in point: Abit routinely offers to fly journalists to exotic locations. I would wager that, from the tone of this article, that Abit offered to pay for airfare and/or hotel, if not the whole kit and caboodle.
Intel routinely flies in journalists from all over the world to IDF. Are they biased? Did they just accept airfare worth hundreds of dollars from a supplier? Yes.
Next time you're at a trade show, ask the booth muckety-mucks about how they treat Tom's Hardware and ome of the other foreign "journalists".
They could always push driver developers to open source their code. Then Microsoft or any other user could audit and fix the code.. of course if they did that there would suddenly be a lot more devices supported in MacOS, Linux, BSD, etc. Whereas Apple and the Linux community lack the power to convince most companies to release their driver specs and source I'd imagine Microsoft has plenty of power to convince them.. if they wanted to.
Nobody has yet to convince me on the downside of releasing specs and source. Any trade secrets held in there must be pretty lame if that all that sepperates their product from the competition.
In fact I think we need a driver definition language that can be compiled into some abstract form (bytecodes) and put on each device. Then the OS could use a single known method (similar to PnP) to download those drivers and compile them into real code that will work for the given OS. Obviously driver updates would be written directly to the devices themselves and the OS could keep a cache of the drivers that are already known and current. They already have tools to make driver programming portable.. you'd just have to make it standard. For old devices without the ability to contain their own drivers you could just have them available as normal excepting that they'd work for any OS.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
> Out of all the professions, engineers have the ability to kill the most people in the least amount of time through incompetence.
Incorrect. Pilots, for example, or bus drivers, or demolitions team leaders, or soldiers or firefighters all have higher risk-to-public exposure.
> But, a guy who is an "engineer" and doesn't know hiw head from his ass can design a house/dam/building/bridge/etc. that can kill rather a lot of people.
I do hope you realize that none of the things you describe are designed by a single person in any case. Therefore, a single person's incompetence is very unlikely to cause grave injury. Certainly it's possible, but it happens so seldom that it's front page news. To give you proof, out of thousands of dams built over the last 100 years, how many have failed due to design flaws (as opposed to natural disasters or warfare)? I can only think of one. Therefore, while I agree that you're right about engineering credentials being very important, it's not for the reasons you suggest.
Virg
Charney said it was not necessarily so they can sack whoever is writing vulnerable code
Uh, yeah...I believe that...
-ted
"Linus delayed at least one kernel release because a root user who opened a disk drive and scribbled on it _could_ cause the OS to crash"
: /dev/random > /dev/kmem /dev/zero, or a file / device of your choice)
Well, you can try this as root
cat
(or
Sure the whole box would crash, I tried once (knowing it will crash). It didn't hang, the box just instantaneously rebooted.
So, root always can crash the system, that's why drivers running in user space (if I remember, QNX does this) is great.
That's why Windows is genuinely unsecure : lots of apps need privileges to run.
The multitude of third-party companies that make software, the thousands of companies, are responsible for 50%, but then ONE COMPANY (Microsoft) is responsible for the ENTIRE other 50%. Hmmmm
That's how Bill sees it. (of course that actually refers to his piggybank)
If half of all windows crashes are the fault of third party programs then that means that half of all windows crashes are the fault of Microsoft.
I love the spin the editors put on this article.
Half of the MS crashes are the result of third-party software. That's a positive.
Half of the crashes are MS code. That's the negative.
Let's use the negative spin! We don't like MS here. Remember?
http://www.intelligent-io.com
it's too bad it didn't take off like it was expected to.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
1) I know what you mean. It totally sucked.
2) It's lots better now. Version 7.9 of the MMC toolkit and drivers is much more robust and overall seems to be a genuinely functional part of windows NT, and in particular, DirectShow (it requires directx 9!)
BTW, that card is your common Brooktree 878 chip. You could have used hacked Hauppage drivers, or better yet, btwincap.sourceforge.net's bt878 open source drivers for Windows (top notch!). I got excellent performance with the latter coupled with DScaler after being disgusted with ATI.
But recently I downloaded the update for deploying on a new machine I built, and I was pleasantly surprised. I've used it for hours without issue.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
50% of all crashes come from 3rd party code. This means Microsoft is the largest vendor causing crashes on Microsoft system. I'm assuming the 3rd party code is split amongst many companys but 50% is not split but owned by Microsoft.
Thus, they still have the largest work to do to ensure system stability. Now, if they could say 90% of system crashes are due to 3rd party code now we're talking about something!
W2K == fragile?
W2K == weak memory protection?
Did you miss the checkbox that asks: "Run this in a seperate memory space?"
What, if any, similarilty does Windows NT 5 share with 3.11 or Me, for that matter, aside from a compatibility API (ala Wine)?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Oh wait, I want to spend my money on applications and porn sites. Damn, I guess I'll have to find a stabler OS and do research on what hardware is well made.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
remember it's legally MY money ...at least the part you didn't have to pay to taxes.
Early version of NT (up to NT 4) had GDI and user running in user mode (the graphics subsystem and windowing subsystems)
But drivers always ran in kernel mode.
All that moving them into the kernel did was to make the system faster. If GDI/User crashed when they were in user mode, the system would bluescreen, if GDI/User crashed when they were in kernel mode, the system would bluescreen.
Wow,. When you stop and think about how many 3rd party programs there are compared to how many Microsoft programs there are.. That's a small percentage of crashes caused by 3rd party programs..
A few years ago I was playing with fork bombs (Allocate 10k memory, attempt to open a file for read, and then fork this thread 10 times) and was able to consistently freeze any linux box even when I only had a simple user account.
If you have still have an interest in this sort of thing, you might want to try sticking a "ulimit" command in the appropriate startup scripts. I think Linux supports limits on both the number of processes a single user can spawn and on the amount of RAM a single process+children can allocate. I don't think it'll be enough to prevent a malicious local user from hobbling your system (if you give your user fewer than 50 processes they might hit that limit with idle processes honestly, but if you give him more than 20 processes they can probably squeeze you out of 95% of scheduled timeslices by hogging the CPU with everything) but it might be fun to experiment with.
See subject. It was the infamous "turkey" 2.4 kernel that corrupted filesystems. I remember the Slashdot discussion that day. People were stumped as to how that kernel was ever let loose in the first place.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Just pointing out that it's poor journalism to assume that all of the other half must come from the same source (M$).
Just because 3rd party code is responsible for half of all Windows crashes doesn't necessarily mean Windows is responsible for the other half. Bad drivers could be at fault, bad hardware, or perhaps user error.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
> Si vis pacem, para bellum
.sig)
Plus honestates in agro arato bene est quam in agro sanguine madido.
(The following is just my
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
...for some 30 hours now under Win98SE, without a single crash, with my kaaza and direct connect downloads running and surfing the net and reading mail using Mozilla. But this install seems especially faulty - I need to mess around with M$ apps like Word or Explorer and within 10-15 minutes I get a crash. I've been VERY cautious not to touch them over last days and it works.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I look at the story title:
"Microsoft Code at Fault for Half of all Windows Crashes"
I look at the paragraph under it:
"Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own."
Anybody older than the age of, say, 10 should see that these are two very different statements. To assume that Microsoft is automatically to blame for the other half of OS problems completely ignores what everybody here should know is the #1 source of computer problems: User error.
If you want to lament the lack of quality conrols involved in Microsoft's "Made for Windows" branding, fine. If you want to conjecture just what that other half really is, also fine. But you can't print painfully obvious logical fallacies like this and hope to be taken seriously as a source of news.
At least they let the 3rd parties know where the crashes are happening, so they can fix the problems. Windows Error Reporting for Developers
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
I know, this is redundant and maybe even off-topic. But I keep on wondering all my days:
How can anyone waste money on an OS? Especially if it CRASHES?
I fail to find any reason except for people who use software which cannot run on any other OS and which has no substitute (and/ or whose developers cannot be emailed in request for supporting free OSes).
It's a good thing I kept half my water in a redundant glass!
Ah, gee. And no wonder. That would make sense that so and so a percentage of crashes is caused by third party software because MS doesn't provide the info to software developers which they need to make their software work like it's meant to on windows. That point was mentioned in 'The Court Case' and hasn't really changed, to the best of my knowledge, since.
The company is employing root cause analysis and event sequence analysis procedures to scrub out the creation of sloppy code.
If this stops the creation of sloppy code what happens about the 20 year legacy of crap programming before they started using it?
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
The other half are my wife's fault, I guess.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
It's a Radeon 7xxx with all-in-wonder.
No WONDER it's fucked. Not only is the 7xxx series fubar, but the all-in-wonder makes it worse. My friends were all like "The All-in-Wonder is teh bomb" and I'm like, "Fuck that. I'm getting a Osprey 100". Now where are their AIW cards? That's right, the garbage.
I read the DV and immediately thought of the external box with S-Video and firewire adapters. My bad.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Many things in windows run in kernel space, like video drivers. This is fantastic for speed. However, if they crash, the system crashes.
Honestly, Windows rarely crashes for me, like every couple months. On the other hand, Red Hat crashed twice on me in two days.
This is interesting? Bwahahaha!
Anyway. Read up on Code Access Security and let me know whenever Java gets anything similar to it.
Then take off your tinfoil hat.
Java is not the problem I run it in Linux and have no trouble.The problem is the MS stupid .NET framework, or whatever they are calling their com system nowadays. If you can get your user and root, (administrator) password hash checked and hacked by script kiddies in windows ware thats your problem not mine. Just keep remote log in turned off, oh sorry you do not know how you are a Windows user, and besides there are trojans to get around even that! Just let MS dictate to you what you can run on your computer and everything will be fine, patch your server and call me in the morning.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Fine, I'll call you on your statement.
My Win2k box has not been hacked in over 3 years. Yes, that's right. NOT hacked.
So what was that you were saying about "stupid Windows users" ?
MS definitely isn't telling me what I can or can't run. They would probably have a case to do so if I was working at MS, but I'm not.
And oh, just because you call something stupid doesn't mean it's stupid.
I agree that even if you take out MS software from the equation you are left with a lot of crapware out there. Yet I just can't help but feel that a poorly designed and architectured operating environment that lets applications do things to said environment that they damn well shouldn't be able to plus simply just the use of "powder keg" methods like a central registry and dll's (especially system dll's) that are updated and overwritten by applications should be factored in better. Then we get into the issue of shared resources and compartmentalized running environments.
So I divided by zero... oops. Yet why should that effect the system unless of course I am updating certain system resources (like drivers)? Of course when you see how MS "integrates" (read: embed and lock in) things like IE it is no wonder these problems do not surface as often as they do. I should have to try real hard to make my application take down the entire system.
I can't help but remember how when OS/2 bragged about its separate core memory partitions and inability to take the entire system down from app crashes that MS had just finished purchasing a particular software package that it "upgraded" * and released that magically caused OS/2 to crash. Then they stupidly (MS) pointed and shouted "look, look, look... they aren't infallible after all!"
Crackers and script kiddies brag about that shit too... guess we know what MS's philosphy is, don't we?
Thank you Mr. HAL 9000.
In other news, communications with the Jupiter mission are expected to be interrupted occasionally during the next few days as work is done on a failing AE-32 unit in the antenna control system....
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Sorry about the flame it is just that the fact that your MS password hash can be visable is a huge piss off and one hell of a potential hole. Obviously you know how to keep the whole closed. Sometimes I wonder about pining ports wonderland and how many of the non-malicious script kiddies do get in to MS servers. If you watch what they throw at you if you leave a port open deliberately it is always some password hash hack tool that only works on Windows. The occasional VB trojan or if they are the really creative ones a keystroke logger. It is just amazing that the default install security settings in MS servers is to none! As far as security goes Gates is just blowin' smoke out his ass, all these issues could have been resolved years ago. However what they really want is not to resolve them so that the totally secure Fritz chip Longhorn will take over. The problem with MS is that it cannot support any of its NT and Dos derived software much longer and expect to grow its business. Their sales become stagnent in 5 year cycles so it is time at the end of next year to bilk the users again. This time it is with software that will be secure for the first time, the longhorn .NET drama continues.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Analogy: You own a pizza parlor that delivers. You can buy all your drivers sports cars or Nissan Sentras. If the sports cars fail to run properly and consistently you loose business. If you must pay for either a repair man to be on call or you must shut down or reduce Pizza ops for car repair then you loose money. In the end you decide to go for the Sentra next time you buy.
ATI talked a lot of crap about admitting their past sins in driver quality (to a degree) yet they still have not learned it seems. Their CEO was interviewed just prior to the the release of the first Radeon chipset. He claimed that, "...you can not expect good drivers when the system interface (hardware) of the product is bad in the first place. Drivers only drive, they do not fix bad hardware problems."
So, what is it this time? HW, SW... both? I am tired of ATI crap not working under Windows and ATI blaming MS for DirectX, the vendor for the product and the world for OpenGL. Funny thing is that it is widely accepted that ATI has crappy OpenGL support yet they sit on its board. Hmmmm. I shouldn't have to turn OFF HW acceleration to get an app just to run "properly."
Then there is Linux support. Geez, just check the dizzying array of questions and answers about ATI products there. One man's solution is very much a hack and just does not work for others. Check Gentoo's boards, it is actually entertaining. One guy just can't seem to figure out how and why his card works with a particular version of ati-drivers and XFree. I don't blame him. I don't mess with GUI much and that is why.
not just rewrite... redesign. The architecture itself of Windows is flawed. Admittingly it would take a bit of genious to both fix the problem cheaply plus provide efficient backwards compatability and roll over systems... and MS is not about genious of innovation but of marketing and legal.
I don't know. Maybe 'cause it's difficult for MS to get people to upgrade to more secure/stable versions of Windows?
Have you taken a look at Win2003 server btw? It's a lot more secure than previous versions (even if you count MSBlast).
Great title, the NYTimes acknowledges that M$ distributes vulnerable code:
Microsoft to Change Distribution of Vulnerable Software
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Problem is it still can catch a cold from VB scripts, you can bet that some script kiddie will find it's Achilles heal soon enough. Longhorn btw is just a code name for the security features that are going to be added at the processor level. Certificates are the big MS buzz word check it out, they really are out to lock down everyones ability to write code! First you will need to be circumcised and get a compiler that can mark your code with your security permission, which you can have revoked by MS of course. Have you really studied the method that Trusted Computing is employing. In reality it will kill innovation and independant software! If MS had taken the security route a long time ago we would not have the problems we are having today. They could have but they cheaped out! They deserve what is coming when Joe User just snub Longhorn like some kind of disease. Which it is. There is no excuse for computer viruses and blaming the user is going to backfire, people are slow to react but when small business gets together and gets pissed enough MS will get one hell of a big come-upance.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Have you actually *taken* a look at Longhorn? It's nothing like what you're describing, at least from the publicly available info.
/. to wear tinfoil hats in response to everything MS says or does. :-)
Though there's this tendency on
You mean MS is backing off its much touted trusted computing initiative or that Roman sounding catch word Palladium? I hardly think they can. Senator Fritz would have kittens. Intel backed off the extentions on the P111 but I think you will find that they are in the latest P4s. Why do you think there is no external access security code locks coming in Longhorn? MS is really big on real security now and will come to dictate how, and by who code is written. The MS part of the internet will be locked up. I just hope the rest of the real internet survives. If .NET code is only readable by MS software what does that mean? If only security stamped .NET code can be sent through MS servers then what does that mean. 1984 is happening and people do not even believe it, what a piece of handy work. Sen Fritz is on the same level of American politico as Joe McCarthy was, a real Nazi!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Sounds to me like you need to get some new testers, if that is all they are doing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Quite interesting seeing so many pro-MS articles modded upwards, while the replies that are the stock & staple of Slashdot being scored as 1. Am I missing something here?
http://signull.com/~mikes/win2k-wormedition.jpg
since they don't do anything resembling "the practice of engineering" (or the practice of programming for that matter)