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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."
It's about time the problem with poorly written drivers in Windows was addressed...Perhaps Vista will be worth upgrading to, after all.
From TFA (emphasis mine):
Or perhaps not.
Once again I'm being drafted as an involuntary beta tester. 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.
Also, does the development of this new system mean that Microsoft is admitting the old system of submitting crash reports didn't work for shit? Doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm.
Finally, will this new system possibly be subject to abuse? Will it be possible for rival manufacturers to submit bogus crash reports to Microsoft to poison the ratings of their competitors?
All in all, not good news from Microsoft, but I guess we're used to that by now.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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...
But I always submitted my crash reports when the crash was caused by my own buggy code. I just thought it was humorous I could even send that data in, so I did.
God spoke to me.
They must provide specs.
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.
Do we really need this many articles from Ars posted on /.? Don't get me wrong, I love Ars and it's on my daily read list. It's just that since I've already read Ars, do I really need to see it again? A quick search shows 5 articles in the past 3 days, and an average of ~1 article/day for the last week or two.
What happens if the Driver Quality Rating System crashes? Some kind of infinite loop or stack overflow? Or does your computer blow up like on Star Trek.
Great job MS! Now look everybody, even the big corporations can do something good. Personally, I don't want to hear a single MS bashing post in this thread (even though I know that's impossible on /.) This isn't a perfect world, and as such, it's reasonable to expect some counter-thoughts the matter, but for the love of jeebus, let's keep the bashing to a minimal, shall we?
Why rent drivers the same always and devices are written for THEM? im sick of driver ishues conflicts and etc. Maybe if ppl making proidyucts would make it standard we could do a way with them once and for all*
*and better for linix because it could use standard windows, and no longer not be able to use the same products
- KaOs
When I installed a SATA drive and started booting off it my win2k install's stability when down the tubes.
For the record I'm using a ECS KT-600A mobo with a VIA VT8237 sata raid controller.
I'm running Vista Beta 2 now on the same box with a driver from Microsoft and it is more stable then Win2k was with VIA's SATA driver.
Now that is sad.
Does Microsoft need to be doing more to ensure the quality of the drivers running on their operating system? You bet.
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?
driver quality?
yeah I understand, but where do we submit the
operating system quality?
they keep coming up with lawn mower solutions
and never get to the root or the seed of it do
they?
nuf said...
</sorry for the flame bait>
GUI == Graphical User Interference
Good for them to try to do something like this, but will it work? After all, aren't all major PC manufacturers generally shipping parts by good companies (ATI, nVidia, Creative, Intel, etc.)? I'm not sure this will do much there, but for the end user market it may be quite a bit better. The only question is how you would rate all those companies that sell nVidia cards and just repackage the drivers. Do they get nVidia's rating since it's their driver, or do they get a lower one since they take longer to package updates?
Driver manufacturers can't exactly be trusted though. Read this story I found today on a MS weblog.
I know the modem in my computer is necessary for boot-up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
How will they submit crash reports if it's the NIC driver that's hosed?
Also how long before some hardware company resorts to spyware tactics so people can't click the "submit crash report" button?
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.
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. So what will Microsoft do when their own drivers rate poorly. Will they give back financially for companies that lose money because of downtime? Let's see... MEGACOMPANY=12,000 employees have to reboot because of let's say winsock.dll. Total downtime was 5 minutes (1 minute reboot 3 minutes for Windows updates another minute to reboot after update). 60,000 minutes lost due to non productivity at lets say minimum wage of 5.00 an hour. MEGACOMPANY just lost 300,000.00 unforseen dollars. Thanks Team MS!
Infiltrated dot Net
I will give bad feedback to all vendors that develop drivers which aren't standard / poorly integrated with the OS.
This include any driver which add a tray icon app. Do we realy need that each wireless card vendor bundle its own wireless configuration software?
Yes, I know you don't have to use it, but most people think they do. Try to explain to the average joe why there is TWO icons displaying the status of his wireless connection. Or that changing the color settings of the monitor depends on the video card driver.
When I bought my cheap 3.5'' USB SD/CF card reader, I didn't know that it needed a special software to work. At last in Vista I will be able to mod them -1 bad driver.
Introducing one more administrative layer will change the fact that M$ treats Windoze users as if they are computer illiterates. People are assumed not to understand what a driver is, so why should they know about code quality ? They did not know what a rootkit was either...
good pointz:)
How do we know that some idiot end users aren't just going to get mad at their drivers and file a complaint when their machine can't run the latest FPS any higher than 60 frames per second? Or how can we be sure that nVidia users won't go gang bang ATI's driver ratings or vice versa?
I think that it's a good idea to have developers rate drivers, because serious developers should know whether or not the drivers are bad, or if their own code is what is causing problems.
I think that it's stupid to open this up to end users.
When it comes to this sort of thing, they think that they know a lot, but in reality, they really don't.
I can see ATI submitting fake crash reports for Nvidia drivers, or even employing techniques to induce real crashes.
How long before exploiters cobble together some code that takes advantage of this? How about driver writers also taking advantage of this?
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.
This article doesnt go into much detail about "Only drivers with a "Green" status can be used in computers that are Windows-logo certified" but what if I buy a OEM computer for some reason or another, its Windows-logo certified, and down the line one or more of the drivers it uses becomes "Yellow" or "Red". Now obviously the company who wrote the drivers arent going to be able to fix it instantaniously (unless perhaps they get an early warning from Microsoft) so does that meen those drivers on my computer at that time become unuseable and therefor not allowing me to use the hardware they "drive" untill they are 'fixed'? If so that could cause A LOT of problems really quickly not just for home users (yes i am aware that the "Home" version of Vista wont be affected by this) and for any company that buys OEM 'Windows-logo cerfified' computers to use as workstations. Anyone else thought of this or have an answer to this question?
Wasn't managed kernel code supposed to stop this from happening? Is Microsoft finally admiting that they messed up with managed code. We've had Smalltalk for 20 years, and C# doesn't have half the features Squek does.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
The exclusive provider of the good driver list: search.msn.com
As long as there's rating systems with 3 or more tiers, I don't think anything will work the way people expect it to.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...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.
This seems like more shortsighted tomfoolery on Microsoft's part.
Sure, for performance reasons it may be advantageous to let a driver have free access to the hardware. But I don't see any logical reason why it has to be that way... just as I don't see any law of physics that says memory leaks and buffer overruns are unavoidable.
But, why, exactly, should a faulty display driver, say, cause any fundamental problems? Why doesn't the operating system intervene? Why shouldn't a driver malfunction just cause a brief screen flicker... followed by the OS detecting that something improper has happened, followed by a driver and hardware reset, continue merrily on its way? Yes, I do recognize that a driver that is directly fundamental to a system's own operation--specifically a disk driver--is likely to be more difficult. Still, disk drives are fundamentally unreliable at the analog level, but layers of CRC checking and bad sector remapping hide the problems almost completely. Why couldn't this be true at the disk driver level? So that a bum driver causes only a performance loss and some retries, not total disaster?
As with so much of modern PC practice, this seems to be a case of "because we've always done it that way." It is convenient for Microsoft to point fingers elsewhere, but in the final analysis they are responsible for the user experience. Instead of painting a scarlet letter on bad drivers, why don't they design the OS to tolerate them better?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
cannot advertise that they are compliant with Vista
:)
That might give them more time to develop drivers for Linux.
who upon seeing the heading thought to themselves
"hmm, they're going to rate the users now?" (ie; drivers of the pc)
"Furthermore, to achieve a "Green" status, a driver must have been released and in use for at least 120 days (starting on June 1, 2007), and must maintain its stability throughout time. " "Only drivers with a "Green" status can be used in computers that are Windows-logo certified" So... any hardware requiring new drivers would not be useable in logo-certified machines for almost half a year? What a terrific way to stifle the adoption of new technology! "Furthermore, because "Green" hardware can be re-rated as "Yellow" or "Red" in the event that problems arise, OEMs and device manufacturers will need to look after systems even after they have shipped." Meaning... if the driver for a piece of hardware goes Yellow on them, they have to either sell their current stock as non-logo-certified or swap out all the hardware? Lovely. The article uses the example of Dell having to fix their drivers to avoid this costly problem, but what about OEMs that are using 3rd party drivers, as I imagine most are? If your mobo manufacturer lets you down, you're screwed? Hmm. "This unfortunately won't mean the death of bargain-basement PCs equipped with questionable hardware. OEMs can choose not to have their hardware certified, of course, but it is also important to note that DRQ ratings are only required for computers certified for the "Premium" Vista experience. That is, Vista Home Basic is not subject to these requirements (the only version of Vista not covered by the Premium requirement). While we feel this is regrettable, it does seem to fall in line with Microsoft's intentions to position Home Basic as a no-frills OS." Is this the same "Premium" that requires 128mb VRAM, a DirectX 9-compatible card and a gig of RAM? How many consumer PCs actually meet those requirements? It seems to me that the vast majority of Windows PC customers will not get any benefit from this new program. What a surprise; MS is only worried about quality control for customers willing to shell out extra bucks for higher end hardware and the (presumedly) more expensive copy of Vista. Makes me glad to be a Mac user. Want Windows with good drivers? Two words: Boot Camp.
They can claim that to consumers all they like, if MS doesn't buy it, they can still pull their certification. I'm going to presume MS is going to be smart about this. Crash reports tell them things like what hardware is in a system. So if a failure only occurs with hardware type X, then ya sure maybe that's it. However if lots of people see problems then regardless of their protests, MS will probably yank their certification.
Also I am unsure to what degree, but MS does require access to your driver for debugging to get a certification. I don't know if they require full source code, but you can't just say "nope we won't tell you how it works at all". Ms will say "ok fine, we won't certify it then."
This isn't the government. MS will do as they please with their certification, and that means don'g what they figure makes them the most money. What makes them the most money is making consumers trust their certification. They want consumers to demand WHQL certification of all devices since that's something Linux can never have (they'd have to invent their own system). They don't much care if they piss of a copy protection company.
ATI was lauded in the past for (finally) evolving to a monolithic driver set (catalysts) back in the day, however they still have work to do.
Overall I think this is a fantastic idea. This is excellent motivation for driver manufacturers as the system is no longer binary.
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.
It cant be overrated if it hasnt been rated yet
anyway instea dof modding down how about responding and making a real argument for your point
mods points arenmt to be used to mark down just because you disagree
Yes, because I should totally rely on Microsoft to tell me what's good or bad, no thanks ass holes.
OT, but I recently purchased a VIA-based USB cardbus for a laptop. It seems to only detect USB 1.1 devices that are plugged in to it. Other devices (including, mice, flash drives, and external hard drives) simply aren't detected under Windows XP. (Well, external HDDs locked up the computer without generating a crash report....) I tried on three different brands of laptop with same results. I finally found a site whose advice I agree with: Choose from the list of USBMan Tested and Approved Upgrade Cards by Manufacturer and Chipset. DO NOT buy a VIA based PCI/USB card ...
...FINALLY! something for the marketing managers... todo...
write phony bug reports to submarine their competitors...
I don't know if anyone else has had this problem, but at the moment Window Update driver recomendation sucks.
I've never updated my computer drivers via Windows Update. My boss recently asked me why and I showed him on a spare laptop we had.
First of all, Windows kept saying that there where updated drivers for the onboard Realtek AC97 sound card. Problem was, the updated drivers where for the C-Media AC97 drivers. The sound card didn't work when I updated them to the ones Windows recommended.
Then (the big one) Windows kept saying there was an updated driver for the USB mouse I was using (A A-Open Optical Openeye Wheelmouse). The driver it recommended was a A4-Tech driver or something.
Oh boy, did I have fun after that was installed.
I installed the recommended mouse driver and restarted. Instant blue-screen. So I tried to get into safe mode to rollback the driver. Blue screen while booting into safe mode. So now I have to try and recover (or reformat) this laptop due to a dodgey windows update.
My boss was amazed at what Windows Update had done. Why does Windows say there are updated drivers available that don't work? I know better than to trust WU for drivers, but I still have the average home user coming up to me asking why their computer has gone bad after loading the latest windows updates (I tell everyone who asks, only use WU for the critical windows updates, that's all)
Who is to blame for this? The average computer user has no idea what devices are in their computer (Hell, most of them still call the moniter the computer and the computer "the box"). Why does Windows seem to ignore what's listed as installed and working in Device Manager?
This space for rent
to open source drivers, no?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They're using driver ratings now? Wow.
So this means that in Windows Vista, we should see driver installers with screens declaring:
"Don't like our drivers? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!"
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Prove it or I'm going to assume you're an MS shill spouting bullshit.
Yeah, right. These "ratings" will be determined by marketing and legal pull. You can be certain anything 'Dell' will be rubber stamped A++++ on the day it's released, regardless of:
a driver must have been released and in use for at least 120 days
The fact that Microsoft is publicizing this now means the fix was in at least twelve months ago. Anyone with enough market leverage already has their sundry ratings certified on gilt edge legal stock, regardless of quality.
Microsoft has not revealed the exact methodology for determining
How surprising; zero transparency. You get the rating, not the calculation. Microsoft now has yet another large size hammer with which to club whomever into line. Those who, perhaps, would rather not comply exclusively with:
updates must be made available through Windows Update
Yep. Your Genuine Advantage enabled Windows Update. At what point will it become impossible to boot a Microsoft operating system without a broadband uplink?
It's a boon for PHBs; yet another way to cop out when purchasing. Obsolete, overpriced and 'green' rated? Cha-ching. Hell, why not specify this with amendments to SOX and HIPPA!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Privilege to install driver -> priviledge to do anything with no additional prompts.
Now why did that network driver hook interrupt 2Eh and disable the kernel check for driver hooking any interrupt handler?
Ethernet drivers.
I don't see this working. It seems to me that all a company has to do is pay off Microsoft to keep the Windows Logo certification, and Microsoft will look the other way as driver crash reports appear on said companies's widget.
Also, what about modified drivers? If I had a utility that hooked into a driver (a bad idea, but tell that to millions of Windows programmers) and caused the driver to crash, wouldn't this create a false positive? I can see this happening especially in video card drivers.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Thats Great News!
Too bad I'm never gonna buy vista.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
There's a serious error trying to write data to disk. What do you do?
(1) Halt the OS and warn the user that their drive may be dying.
(2) Ignore the error, pretend it'll go away and continue merrily writing data to the disk, even though you may now be destroying perfectly good data.
Do you *really* want to pick option 2?
Errors reported by drivers can also be caused by hardware (besides the driver itself). There's a DAMN GOOD reason why driver errors are taken seriously - it's the safest possible option, for both the data and hardware.
The OS can't take the risk of ignoring any critical errors. You may not think that a graphics card error is "critical", but the last time my graphics driver kept blue-screening, it was because the fan had failed and the card was overheating. I'm *glad* the OS decided to halt, if it kept retrying it could have fried my graphics card - the fix would have been a new $200 card, not just a new $10 fan.
That code is absolutely terrible and should never go in any production system!
:-)
pass_the_buck() should be inline
If only they did this on the streets, too!
How will this work from a consumer viewpoint? Imagine $user just bought a nVidia card, and when he tries to install the driver, sees that it gets a very low score. So, what is he going to do about it? Download the ATI driver instead? But that won't work with his nVidia card.
So, how are those numbers usefull for the consumer? It's just numbers telling you "oh, too bad, you just paid loads of money for making your system unstable".
Of course if people would check the driver rating for their cards before buying them, things would be different. But as it is now, people don't even check if drivers are available, not even when they know that they're running an OS that don't have drivers for everything.
I fail to see how this tag applies!
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!
It is estimated that Microsoft receives over 400,000 crash dumps in OCA daily across XP, Server 2003, and Vista. Thats 400,000 blue screens people! And all those minidumps and sysdata.xml files are stored in a SQL database. Crazy! It turns out that the vast majority of the crashes are due to Chinese malware and known issues that already have fixes. Guess what, people don't update their shit. The rest are genuine bugs either in Microsoft code or 3rd party driver code.
:)
H .mspx and you can request a link to download the tool by emailing grphstab@microsoft.com (Graphics Stability alias)
OEM's like Dell and HP have access to this raw OCA data through contracts with Microsoft and they have the power to determine which hardware vendors are the most reliable based on install base and crash rate. Want to know whether ATI or nVidia display hardware is more reliable for a business desktop? Ask a Dell TAM. Or better yet, just look and see what video cards Dell puts in their most popular high-end systems. When folks crash, they either call up Dell support and Dell loses money, or they call up Microsoft support and Microsoft loses money. Dell and Microsoft want to prevent those calls! If they can reduce support calls due to Video crashes on systems by switching from nVidia to ATI or vice versa, millions of dollars can be saved! The customer being happier is a nice side benifit
Speaking of Display hardware, have you guys heard of CRASH? Graphcis drivers are notorious for crashing and account for about one in five of all crashes reported to OCA! MS developed a neat multi-threading stress tool to compare the reliablity of various video cards. The whitepaper has been available since Apr 30, 2004 at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/tools/CRAS
and your comment doesn't worth +5.
You pay for the hardware and a piece of it is the software, you paid an OS supported by a company who ensures you the software is functional as you can see Microsoft logo on the box, on the software, on the readme...if Microsoft is not sure about a driver stability, don't sign it!! it is logical, just sign what worths it, but, of course, Microsoft is just looking for money, that's why it signs to anyone who pays enough.
So...yes!is Microsoft responsability, if they don't want to test and debug third partu drivers, don't sign it and say this means a good piece of software.
I want to get money and don't have responsability, too, but it sounds like I'm crazy, but when is Microsoft who does it...everything changes, isn't it?
As a bike rider, and operator of several web servers, I have often thought of doing exactly that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
1. Invasion of privacy
I really don't see a way to compute a ratio of the failing/(total installed) drivers without having Windows reporting back to Microsoft all the hardware (and all the drivers) you have on your computer.
2. Anticompetitive tactics
With no disclosure about how Microsoft computes the final score (and no means for anybody outside Microsoft to assess if a bad score is truly deserved), what's stopping them to arbitrarily assign lower scores to vendors who also offer Linux drivers for their hw?
When you're trying to write a closed-source driver which interfaces to a closed-source kernel, and you have only incomplete and incorrect API documentation at your disposal, it doesn't take a genius to see that it's going to {to use a technical term} go Tango Uniform.
There is only one solution to the whole driver issue, and that is for it to be made law that driver software source code must be made available -- otherwise, the hardware can't legally be sold.
It's already technically illegal for manufacturers to keep this information secret anyway, since the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is by definition privy to any secret that it may embody. But in these paranoid times, when everybody is concerned about bogus "intellectual property", they won't change their ways without legislation. The fact is that their near competitors are already probing their products pretty severely. And they've got better-equipped labs than the average Fred in the Shed.
I'd also incorporate a "reasonable force" provision, granting anybody the explicit right to publish the results of reverse-engineering {which I consider to be a forcible technique, although less so than kidnapping the CEO's daughter demanding the driver source code for a ransom} that they may have conducted on hardware that they own in the event that the manufacturer illegally refuses to co-operate. The onus would be upon the manufacturer to demonstrate that a more benign method existed for obtaining the relevant information.
Needless to say, this would benefit all operating systems, not just Windows.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Yay, Toshiba can burn in hell now. Many Toshiba/HP/Compaq machines have Toshiba DVD drives that have faulty drivers.
They have last been updated in 2004. The machines have been sold in 2005 and even a few now in 2006. They don't allow so many makes of DVD's to burn. Sometimes you burn a DVD and then the drive fails to read that DVD. There are so many people with this problem. I'm glad a new system would pressure on these companies to clean up their act *cough cough, fscking bastards*.
This has the potential for being abused. If I as a driver developer create version 1.0.0000 and get it certified. Then it turns out it crashes alot. Whats to stop me from just releasing version 1.0.0001 without any changes to the code as soon as the error count get high enough to be notified my M$. Count starts over I don't have to do any work. Maybe over time it will be visible enough that M$ won't certify any driver I release, but since money talks...
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
like dell, who seem to think that one driver release for the graphic card is enough for the liftetime of their product ...
... and ati's driver stopped with a cryptic message - had to look for that for two days until i found out, that dell forbids ati to install its driver on dell notebook hardware ... ati could have put a better error message for that into the driver)
...
(i just found after nearly two years, when i wanted to upgrade my gfx driver for oblivion
thanks to the omega driver guy for giving us something, which at least does what is needed for the hardware
- just as an anekdote, for me it was definitely easier to install the driver in linux, than in windows because of that
How bout make all the collected data available to the public in a nice website, together with weekly rankings and a Hall of Fame.
Now that's some motivation to fix your crap =)
i am no native speaker; please explain me again the meaning of the word "certified". Wasn't it originally something like "yes, i checked this specific thing to function". Now it's more like "we are on good terms with the vendor and he paid us money"; the customer should rate the driver; sorry - what exactly is the the meaning of "certified".
As previously reported before on slashdot (too lazy to references), the Microsoft Anti-spyware software uses the same kind of community ratings, and crazy ratings were observed too (some spyware were slowly declassified as spyware, because users kept clicking on OK, just to have their software work).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As soon as it's posted, it's also rated (the rating depends on if you're posting anonymous, on your karma, and on if you disabled the karma bonus). Moderation changes this rating.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The EU lawsuit over network protocols is:
1. Asking for the protocol descriptions, not the APIs or the code. (Hence, MS giving them a bunch of undocumented code isn't what they asked for.)
2. It's about internal details that MS never intended to be used by anyone else. (Note that I'm not discussing whether that attitude is monopolistic or not. Just saying that they never planned to give everyone details as exactly how to talk to a Windows server from a Solaris box.) I.e., I can easily see how something like that in most projects, not just MS, would end up a growing mass of code doing whatever quick hacks do the job, rather than a clean and well designed API.
Drivers are an entirely different dish altogether, and MS has always been actively trying to get OEMs to write their drivers for Windows. I.e., it's the exact _opposite_ of point 2 above. And they've always supplied ample docs and examples of how to do that.
So basically, far from me to keep you from some mindless anti-MS karma whoring, but extrapolating something from a completely unrelated domain as if it had any relevance to Windows _drivers_ is... just surrealistic. I'm sure you can get your daily karma dose in a more believable way than this.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
_If_ some Nvidia fan goes to all the trouble to buy an ATI card, install the drivers, and spend weeks trying to write code that crashes the driver (so he can submit a crash report to MS)... well, as an ATI user I'll thank him wholeheartedly. Any bugs they document that way is going to be one bug that gets fixed in the next Catalyst release, so, heh, they helped raise the quality of ATI drivers. That's mighty kind, I would say even altruistic, coming from a fan of a competitor :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No, it just basically means "If you're an OEM that sells computers, you can only put the Windows logo on your computers if every single component in it is certified." This isn't even something new. I'm sure this is already the status quo.
Will those computers stop working? Nope.
All that will happen is that the OEM has to start using a different card in their future computers, or stop putting the logo on those computers.
E.g., if, say, Creative's drivers are proved to crash lots and Creative doesn't fix it ASAP, then Creative loses the certification. So now when Random J User to Dell's web site to buy a high end gaming rig (hey, Dell sells such rigs, so someone must buy them), now Dell must either sell it without a SoundBlaster or without a Windows logo.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Should be good for everyone. If you were going to make a driver you can still make a bad one but there's a bonus for those who make good ones. Too late for me because I left the platform but my mom and dad will benefit from more stability. It's about feedback and user participation once again and that's so cool, efficient, and makes us all feel like we're being listened to. Yay.
>a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby
There's a checkbox in the settings dialog that turns this off. It *is* shameful, though, that it is on by default and pops up over and over, even if you're on a wired network...
FIXME: Add a sig here
Wow, is ATI going down when the crash reports start being compiled... Too bad this will not detect unexpected behavior!
Damn it, my All-in-wonder Radeon 7500 still doesn't work as advertised after 4 years!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
although I'm sure I'll be in a minority here (y'know MS supposedly useless and all).
99% of all crashes and malfunctions my PC experiences are down to dodgy drivers.
I've had months of fun trying to get my NV4 mobo to play nice with my X2 for large USB data transfers and it's driven me up the wall - wish I'd never bothered upgrading.
I envision a future where I can find a review for the latest graphics card and there'll be a little automatically updating graph at the bottom that tells me how many crashes were reported to MS from people using driver X on it.
In fact this sortof data manipulation could enable you to do fancy stuff, like enter in your current driver config (automatically) and then enter a proposed upgrade - and there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to tell you whether you can expect more of less crashes.
I guess the only missing piece to this jigsaw is reporting to MS when you install a driver (I'd be happy to) - the number of crashes reported to MS is only important if they'll also let you know how many people have installed a driver and not had it crash on them.
Another tangent of thought would allow MS to report to manufacturers crash dumps for a particular combination of drivers/hardware that is proving to be problematic. PCs aren't buggy because of MS, or often from a driver maker alone - but rather than quite gargantuan combination of drivers people have installed (contrasted with say Apple, or even Dell where driver combinations are much fewer and can be tested to death before release).
Why is this post tagged "hotgaysexnow"? I mean, I laughed, but still... :-)
I'm certain that Microsoft can fix this... sure they can...
This is the same company that rolled out a video driver for a Dell GX260 as a 'critical update'. This update broke the video on every 260 out there and months later it is still in the update list!
Our small helpdesk had to remote into hundreds of computers and download the original driver, force it in, and then run Windows Update and hide the 'updated driver' so it wouldn't hose the computer again.
Oh... and they have done this to us before. (Gx240 or GX150?) Now we have them pushing 'Windows Genuine Disaster' (oops, Advantage). It doesn't do anything FOR a single paying customer. It does cause a great deal trouble for some paying customers. Who is the genius behind this?
At least the next version of Windows will be better... Right? (I remember a quote of Bill's from a few years ago where he said "The next version of Windows won't be an operating system. It will be a digital rights management platform." Yeah, it is going to get better! for somebody...)
Does this really matter? How many people walk into a store and ask if 'x device' runs on Windows? Why are companies paying Microsoft to stick MS's logo on their product? Shouln't Microsoft pay 3Com/USR to stick their Windows logo on on a USR box? I wouln't put some 'Windows' logo on the machines I sold unless Microsoft bought that advertising space on the machines.
In the last 2 days Ive been looking for a sub $50 SATA 3.0GBs controller that will work on a G4 Sawtooth for a 160GB SATA drive. Really don't care if it has a 'windows' logo on it or not. If it doesn't work with what I have, then it is useless to me.
In your referene to video cards, I believe I recall 3DFX doing this a few times untill their drivers went open source. I miss 3DFX. They were a good company with a good solid card.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I also NEVER used windows update for drivers. I think a good amount of this problem is because the Device IDs are not unique enough, especially for onboard sound devices. If lookup these codes most of the time they point to the chipset's sound but the board is actually using a different chip. Or the IDs are the same but the drivers are not compatible. This is also why I never let windows autosearch for drivers on my collection of driver cds/dvds.
...lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers...
As if people even pay attention to the logo certification status anyway. If I had a nickel for everything I've installed that Windows warned me did not have logo certification, well, I'd have a lot of nickels. Some of those warnings were even for Nvidia, stuff. Of course I installed it anyway. If people spend money on some hardware or software, a little warning about something obscure like driver certification is not going to deter most people from installing it anyway. And regardless, if something goes wrong, there's always driver rollback and system restore....
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I wish that Linux had a similar system.
That way you would know when a driver (eg. i810 on X11) takes down the whole system.
I'm really sick of this problem and having absolutely no way to fix it.
At least it would bring focus on the shitty driver writers.
Ben
Just type sync and wait for the command prompt ti reappear - then you can unplug your usb without unmounting it, providied you're not running programs off it or writing data to it.
KDE was re-spawning it to try to figure out the drive size, so it could show you the free space, etc., in file view. Worse comes to worse, just CTL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill/respawn the x server (which kills KDE fast), and log in again under another window manager.
Hope this helps.
I don't know why I didn't just kill KDE. I guess I was too obsessed with the problem to remember the bigger thing causing the problem.
I wish I'd known about sync though. I'll definitely remember it next time.
Thanks for the help.
OMFG! BREAK OUT THE TINFOIL!
well, it DID save you time, didn't it? And you won't get carpal tunnel by doing the three-fingered salute.