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Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System
QT writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft is finally trying to do something about PC driver problems. A new crash-report-driven Driver Quality Rating system will be used in Windows Vista to rate drivers. Drivers that rate poorly in real world use by users will lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers themselves. Maybe now submitting crash reports will feel more useful? This is long overdue."
From competitors for the obvious reasons. How to prevent?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
The very first thing I thought of was CD copy protection schemes. Many of them install "drivers" that disallow copying and such. Once these are ported to Vista, and they will be, will these be open to feedback? Who wants to bet that Microsoft will roll over and allow some drivers to be "immutable"?
This could be one of the greatest things ever, or another huge disappointment.
Actually I believe it's you submitting bug reports for hardware that microsoft doesn't controll, doesn't create drivers for and isn't distributed by them. What you paid microsoft for were the ones that come from microsoft, but you can't really claim that you are paying microsoft to be their beta tester when you download a new . So I'm not quite sure what your beef is... other than to possibly anti-m$ karma-whore a bit.
Your abuse line was the first thing to pop into my head. What will Microsoft do when the driver writers start complaining about the architecture and inability to isolate themselves from others drivers and bugs? With this new system, a driver crash can turn into $$$.
In the end I like it because either way, somebody is going to be held responsible. At least if the ratings are easy to understand and not obfuscated or marketdroided.
You pay money for the operating system, and it works (well, you know
You know, I don't really mind testing Linux drivers...but when it comes to an OS I have to shell out money for, I kinda expect it to work.
I can already see it, HP taking the top scores in their cheap multifuncionals and printers.The drivers are being written by OEM and non-Microsoft affiliates. It is unreasonable to think that it is Microsoft's responsability to test and debug third party drivers.
My other OS is the MCP!
Thousands of Vista drivers won't come out until AFTER the operating system ships, and they are written by third parties. Other than guaranteeing that they are bascially functional, Microsoft cannot possibly test every driver for bugs and incompatibilities with every other driver or piece of software. This at least gives users a way to provide feedback about poor quality drivers. This is typical anti-MS bashing. It's so incredibly obvious that the OP though hard about how he could take this announcement the worst way humanly possible. Congratulations... you're right... trying to fix a problem is, in fact, an admission that there *is* a problem. And UI improvements just go to show how poor the XP UI is, and kernel improvements just go to show how unstable Windows is... etc... etc... Don't you ever get tired of whining?
The article clearly refers to OEM written drivers, not MS written drivers. So if you install Vista and don't install any additional drivers, then you can definately expect that to work. If you now install the latest Creative and ATI drivers. You can submit crash reports to MS if those drivers fail. As for the old crash system. OEMs still get crash reports, but there was no incentive for them to fix bad drivers. Now, if they don't fix their drivers, MS will revoke their WHQL status and cannot advertise that they are compliant with Vista. I don't know enough about the system to say whether they have checks in place to prevent abuse.
Who in their right mind would submit crash reports to MS?
First off, you have no control over the data going to MS. I presume they tell you that it is only driver-specific and doesn't reveal anything about you, but do you really believe it? They lied about what their mediaplayer reports when it phones home - they could be lying about what goes into a crash report.
Presuming they are honest - they could still be mistaken, would not be first time that the marketing side didn't talk to the technical side either. It might hold passwords and logins in i/o buffers - it might hold chunks of spreadsheets or any other application data too.
Either way - what do you think the chances are that they do anything to protect the data they receive? Especially if they don't think it is at all security critical? They certainly don't make any promises about using good security practices.
Its entirely possible that MS and/or some big brother like the NSA uses crash reports for espionage - industrial or political. Even if they don't, if someone within MS is able to get easy access to the data, he might be selling it to your competitors - or to credit-card fraudsters in Slovenia.
Sure - your chances of being personally effed over by sending in crash reports to MS are probably miniscule. But the benefits to you are even smaller, so why even bother?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
...and this doesn't solve the problem. The WinTel and LinTel communities have decided, with their pocketbook, that they want "choice", which means a jillion different CPUs, chipsets, video cards, sound devices, network devices, USB and FireWire ports - the list goes on and on. The mere thought of testing relevant combinations/permutations of this makes my skin crawl. Yes, a good driver architecture would help, but hey, if your video card fails, who cares if it takes your system down - your system _is_ down without video.
What we really need are some standard reference models for PCs, and (this is critical) we need hardware manufacturers to stop treating driver interfaces as intellectual property and completely, totally OPEN their interface for software developers. Of course, like I said above, people vote with their pocketbook, and people don't seem to get that worked up about this. They'll continue to buy nVidia or ATI or whoever because the cards really do have great performance, and they'll just suffer with the problems that come with proprietary interfaces. I mean, it's amazing to me - when I buy hardware, it should be OPEN. What you did under the hood is one thing, but how the system interfaces with it - OPEN. My old retro computers came with SCHEMATICS, for crying out loud.
OK, I'm off my soapbox. Just don't think that the driver world will get any better this way, because it won't. Until we're dealing with known, documented hardware and a more elegant driver architecture, a crashin' we will go.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
Considering the near infinite possible configurations of systems out there, there's no way in hell Microsoft could be expected to test them all unlike a proprietary Apple box.
In this circumstance, is it reasonable for fraud to only be prevented to 'some degree'? We are talking about the vast majority of PCs. Even a small degree of fraud will screw a lot of people.
And also, if I've paid for my hardware, I want to use it. I do not want my software vendor to tell me 'sorry, that happens to be crap' and disable it three months later because it's giving them a bad reputation. If they certify a driver, then it cannot be completely unstable and utterly worthless. I can live with an occasional crash because my computer will work 97% of the time (completely made up number, but you get the idea). Should that 3% disable me and put me out a hundred bucks?
This reeks of doubleplusungoodness (++!good). Introduction politics into the heart of Vista makes me shiver.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Come on, a drivers rating system? who even looks for the Windows Logo testing? Fact is that people don't much think/care when they pick up a $15 webcam at wal-mart.
Ok, so I get the premise. If a OEM driver causes a _crash,_ then the crash report will be sent to Microsoft which will include information about the crashed driver. If Microsoft receives enough reports, they may remove the certification status for that OEM drive.
... what? ... dozens of reasons? Hundreds? Is MS going to pore over _all_ this data, identify actual driver problems? OR just send blanket data to OEM and say, "OK, you've lost your certification. Sorry it didn't work out. You'll have to find out why your driver crashes, here are the 7,500 reports. Have a nice day."
On paper, it sounds pretty good.
But, to me anyway, here's why it may not work:
1. It presumes the problem is faulty driver coding. Does it take into account other applications open at the time? What about tricky conflicts? I've been around enough to see MANY applications that kill drivers, like Word causing video driver crashes. Who's fault?
2. Will Microsoft pore over all this data? Drivers crash for
3. Will the data contain enough information for the OEM, who really gets a bunch of MS-formatted data, get enough real information to solve the problem?
4. According to TFA, this only works on the "Premium" edition of Vista. In that version, drivers have to be certified. If "Premium" proves to not be a best-seller, how many OEMs will bother with certification? I still have to click through "non-certified" dialogues in XP today.
Also, I suppose it should be said that this is yet more information that MS will get about users' computers.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
You might be onto something...
Assume two devices are identical, drivers and all. But they are sold under two different brand names with different popularity levels...
The more popular one will recieve more bug reports, therefore, have a higher probability of being considered bad (on multiple levels).
So, in effect, assuming even one bug for the iPod exists, with 70% of the total market (according to wiki) it will be the worst MP3 player!
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
(I'm a university IT tech.)
I've been configuring computers to use the crap OEM wireless config utilities, only because MS's util is even worse. In particular, MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range; instead, it will just pick one for you.
I wish I didn't have to do this, especially on newer Dell Latitudes. With those (can't remember if these particular ones have Dell or Intel wireless) a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby, wouldn't you like to connect? Now, you can turn off the onboard wireless with a physical switch, but that's different from how everyone else does it, so lusers must be Edjumicated. At least I don't deal with PhDs, heh.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
People seem to be suggesting that MS should be making a singular judgement for every driver, whether it is certified or not. Come on, any of you who know anything about software development know that that's absurd, especially since they're not MS's drivers in the first place.
You can't expect any sort of software to perform flawlessy right out of the gate, and this is a convenient way of monitoring a driver's reliability, and forcing some accountability onto those who make the drivers. I think that's totally reasonable, and to somehow try to twist this whole system into a negative is pretty backwards.
The implication seems to be that this will encourage companies to "beta test" their drivers on customers. I think the opposite is true. It will give more incentive to companies to get it done better the first time, since it can't be good publicity for them for their drivers to have a "red" rating.
A much better analogue in the Linux world would be if Linus moves a driver into his version of the kernel and it crashes the system - in which case, yes, Linux (the OS) has egg on its face.
How does this tell the difference between a hardware and software fault. I have seen many systems that would bluescreen in the nvidia or ati driver but replacing the power supply with a better one would completely eliminate the crashes. From what I have seen when dealing with good hardware most crashes are actually related to things other then the drivers or windows itself. Most of them seem to be the power supply, cooling or stuff like the norton suite of software.
I still have not figured out why but I have seen people spend several thousand on motherboard, cpu, ram, video cards, hard drives etc but they will put a $40 power supply in the box and then pissed at windows, ati, nvidia, amd, intel etc etc when the system crashes fairly often. The same can be said of cooling.
The other leading cause seems to be stuff like the internet security programs. Darned if I know exactly how they do what they do but they seem to be adept at crashing computers. There are quite a lot of programs that try to hook into how windows operates, screw with drivers etc. From what I understand most of the copy protection stuff you see tries to hook into the cd, ide, etc drivers to try to enforce what it is doing. So if the system crashes does the cdrom driver get nailed or does starforce or whatever other copy protection that screwed things up get nailed? This kind of stuff is actually a good reason to stay away from the games that have almost any copy protection. It is one the reasons I like the MMO style of games. Most of them have no copy protection at all and they don't try to do weird things to windows, play with drivers etc.
So while I would like to see crappy drivers get nailed I suspect that what will end up happening is that the wrong drivers will get blamed since ati, nvidia etc will play by the rules but companies like starforce and other drm stuff won't.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I know this is a good thing, and it is needed, but I just can't bring myself to submit bug reports to Microsoft. Here's why:
Microsoft is stingy with their knowledge. They release only what they want on their terms in their own way as they please. I can't, in good conscience, participate in that sort of relationship---one where I give everything I have to help them make a better product and they in turn give back just enough to justify charging me for the 'right' to lease (because software ownership is apparently so 90's) their software back. If I'm lucky, the software I've leased back from them may possibly have a fix to the problem I reported or it may not. Depending on the problem, I may never know. It's not like I am privy to their code or even their coding methodology. I will give to Microsoft to the extent that they give to me. And for the record Microsoft never 'gave' me anything. I have no investment in seeing them succeed under their current model.
In contrast, when I submit a bug report to a Free software project, I get the name of a guy assigned to the bug, I can log in and see the bug tracking discussion, the fix is there for me to review, the new version with fix included is given back to me free of charge and free of stipulations. I feel like a real participant in the process. I feel like Gnome's success or Evolution's success is both partly to do with me and directly beneficial to me.
Submitting bugs to Microsoft feel the same to me as submitting CD track info to CDDB. I give them info, they charge me to get it back.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
No doubt you all have struggled with what laptop hardware will work well with free OSs, and you've had to resort to extensive manual websearching and reading of individual reports. But frankly manual problem reporting is a chore, and it begs to be automated. Basically what's needed is a small app that probes your hardware (lspci,dmesg mining, etc.), and sends it to a server. The very fact that the hardware is listed is an (imperfect) measure of how good the drivers are; but we could also poll the user with one or two opinions as well, depending on what drivers don't have a lot of data. The incentive for you is that you get to look at the online hardware database if you're willing to "contribute" in this way. And the contribution is only required if you're running GNU/Linux or another free OS; if you're running Windows or OS X no contribution is required (since we want to encourage you to switch). I think people would be happy to allow the probing to occur, and wouldn't treat it like spyware, if only because the source code of the probing app would be free and you could check if you were being invaded.
When IE 7 is released, it may be a little better than Firefox. Although I don't really see any real differences. The existence of the web developer extension is enough to keep me using Firefox 99% of the time. But in about 6 months, firefox will be all caught up, and MS will still be 5 years from releasing IE 8. Do you remember how long it took between IE 6 and IE 7?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.