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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...
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.
I can see it already. Six months after Vista ships the iPod will be flagged as the worst device and lose it's windows certification.
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.
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.
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!
Interesting idea for a poll...what percentage of Slashdot users submit crash reports? I never bother.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
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?
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.
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.
There is a good question. Is this going to be like the Apple store where you can rate 3rd party products but all Apple products automatically get a 5/5 and that can't be changed?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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.
But they're already certified by Microsoft, which is supposed to mean something. Since they're asking you to submit bug reports on drivers they've already certified, it makes you wonder just what the point of driver certification is, if not to ensure driver quality.
No, most drivers are written by 3rd parties. And exactly how are these involuntary? They are user-submitted!
Go read up on Watson and see how many times it has been cited as being one of the main drivers of improvement of MS products. By your logic any new version of any new software is an admission that the old one didn't work.
Good point, I guess we'll see, but I imagine there will be some kind of fraud detection. This is a similar issue to the one of click fraud with any major search engine
Improved quality of drivers is not good news? Umm hmm
I can see ATI submitting fake crash reports for Nvidia drivers, or even employing techniques to induce real crashes.
The drivers are being certified by Microsoft. It is not unreasonable to think that it is Microsoft's responsibility to test and debug third party drivers that Microsoft certifies.
Don't know; Don't care; Don't ask
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.
First off, winsock isn't a driver, it's an OS component. Drivers "drive" hardware, I know it's complex, but think about it for a few days, you'll figure it out.
So what will Microsoft do when their own drivers rate poorly
I've rarely had a device driver from Microsoft crash. Actually, I can't think of one in the past few years, not since the XP beta actually.
So, secondly you're blindly assuming that Microsoft drivers will rate poorly. Unless you are using 100% generic components, I DOUBT you'll have any major devices using a Microsoft supplied device driver. (Possibly your mouse, unless you like running your video in 800x600x32k for some reason)
Now, since you obviously have pychcic powers and can see the future, can you go predict the lotto numbers for this weekend? I could use a few extra bucks.
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?
What if those who don't submit crash reports don't answer polls, either?
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
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.
I wish I got paid $5 a minute, but I don't. If you fix your math to reflect that, it comes out to 12,000 * $5/hour * (5/60) hours = $5000 ... still greater than zero, but not as big a deal.
...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.
Most Windows-based intranet applications are designed to use the Windows Sockets API, which is optimized for use by Windows-based applications. Microsoft provides a WinSock driver for each Windows operating system, and some third parties provide their own implementations. ... Microsoft provides a WinSock driver for each Windows operating system No need to think about it for more than a minute.
Infiltrated dot Net
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 ||
There's only so much you can expect with a certification for compatibility. Compatible and rock-solid stable are mutually exclusive.
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.
So Microsoft isn't responsible for third-party drivers, even if they are certified? OK, but I don't want to hear any complaints about Linux drivers (or lack thereof).
But I'm currently running eight instances of bash, you insensitive clod!
who upon seeing the heading thought to themselves
"hmm, they're going to rate the users now?" (ie; drivers of the pc)
Oh yay, a technicality, the second-to-last resort of the troll.
RTFA, it's about device drivers, not low level components.
Since we're going to be technical AND troll at the same time:
1. Your math works out to $5000, not $300,000.
2. It's spelled unforeseen.
3. You forgot a paragraph break between the quote and your text, a question mark after the word poorly, not to mention the lack of visits from our friend Mr. Comma.
4. You missed the required "OMG M$!!!!!" at the end of your message.
5. No lottery numbers.
I'm disapointed in you.
"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.
Hey if the company who made the OS does not release the source code so the driver company can build a proper driver then the blame falls back to the OS maker.
I don't see this system working at all. First, who would trust MS to provide accurate data? Does anyone really think MS will bit the hands that feed them? Maybe for small OEM's MS will release valid data about how bad a driver is. However I have my doubts that MS would publically release data about how crappy ATI drivers are, or how crappy some the drivers are for an HP All-in-one, or...
I agree about not wanting to waste time being a beta tester for MS. I don't mind testing, submitting bugs, etc for Linux because I own Linux just like everyone else owns Linux. When I buy a copy of MS Windows, I don't own that copy, I am only leasing that copy. So exactly why should I spend my time (which is worth $) to help MS when I don't get anything out of the deal?
Is it just me or does MS constantly mess up all thier community efforts? The corporate monkeys at MS really need to hire some geeks to teach them what drives a community effort. I can give MS a hint. Ownership. All of MS's community efforts that I know about do not allow any community ownership. So IMO, they will never reach their potential.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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.
I believe (I could be wrong) that the certification involves only certifies adherence to the published api, it doesn't certify quality of driver code. What a driver does or how it does it doesn't matter only how it gives the result of it's work back to the OS.
Personally, I don't want to hear a single MS bashing post in this thread (even though I know that's impossible on /.
You want the impossible and then admit it is impossible! You, sir, are an idiot.
If I can't bash M$, then I'll just bash YOU!
I have nothing to say.
I agree ... the abuse by competitors bit was my first thought.
But what about drivers that worked fine, then started crashing after an update? Why should they be penalized for something M$ screwed up?
the certification involves only certifies adherence to the published api
If a driver is certified to adhere to the API, and still crashes the system, the problem lies in one or more of three possible places: the certification is bogus, the API is flawed, or the underlying OS is buggy.
Microsoft is responsible for all three of those.
-- Alastair
Microsoft can justifiably be expected to certify that a) the driver acts as they are told it should (eg: supports features X, Y and Z, but not P and Q) and b) the driver conforms to the documented specs of their API (ie: isn't making any calls to undocumented functions).
They can not be expected to certify driver stability on arbitrary combinations of hardware and software.
They can not be held responsbile for a driver that behaves differently during the certification process than it does on a user's system.
The driver company doesn't need the source code to the OS to "build a proper driver". Indeed, it's far more likely to end up with a *worse* driver that depends on undocumented features and/or breaks with every minor OS revision if they *do* have the source code.
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?
Since when does any certification mean anything when it concerns Microsoft?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Make the third option "I don't answer to Cowboyneal's polls". Oh, wait...
ISO certified == THX certified
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.
so if i'm a user of peripheral 'x' who *doesn't* have crashes, just how do i get counted towards the 'non-crashing' systems ratio? unless windows now sends device ids of *everything* plugged in at *any* time to my computer regardless of any crash reports... or is it a voluntary process, in which case vendors will now have to rely on people submitting hardware details to microsoft just because they 'feel like it' to avoid losing certification... hmm...
Thats bull shit, if the API requires my driver to take an X and return a Y I could do this public X SomeMethod(Y yVar) { System.Crash(); return new X(); } (Fear my psuedo-psuedocode).
Doesn't Windows Update send hardware info to Microsoft? I could be wrong, but that could be one way for them to get that information.
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
So what you are saying is that if I have a Linux kernel module that I create, it adhere's to the API and it crashes the system it's Linux's fault? You obviously haven't done any programming and have no knowledge of what an API is.
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
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.
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
You very likely, however, paid for the device being driven, and you can be quite certain that some part of the price you paid went towards the development of the driver. I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying that drivers are not free - unless they're free and open source. As long as someone is getting paid to write them, the consumer is paying for them.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
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."
That code is absolutely terrible and should never go in any production system!
:-)
pass_the_buck() should be inline
No, that doesn't give them information on what drivers are used, nor does it give them information on how much or often drivers and the computers are used.
Perhaps a crashed system sends data on all its hardware. If they know which driver crashed the system then they also know which ones didn't.
No, he means that a certification based on adhering to the API is bogus, and since Microsoft created the certification, it is their fault (assuming that's what it's based on).
If only they did this on the streets, too!
Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) certified
Those are the drivers that'll come under this rating system, Microsoft is paid by the manufacturer to test and certify that his hardware and drivers run fine on XP and Vista. I am sure that if MS does manage to catch some bugs, he'll have resubmit the corrected driver and pay the certification fees again
read the article first,
and have another entire configuration tested by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) for logo certification
which means MS is saying if their lab fails to catch the bugs in driver during their testing phase for the certification, hmm, you are supposed to report the bugs that slipped thru.
To summarize, You pay MS to use Vista, the manufacturer pays MS to test and certify that his drivers run fine on Vista. So incase the goofs at MS did not catch the bugs, YOU THE CUSTOMER, who paid for the OS, and the little premium for the "Vista" certified hardware over the non-certified one, are supposed to do that for free and report to MS that the f**cking driver is crashing and making you go mad. MS then kicks the manufacturers ass, who had also paid MS in the first place to test and certify the driver before it was passed onto you.
Either ways, MS make more money.
Not really sure what you're on, but the Apple In-Ear headphones have a 3/5 right now.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
I don't want to flame apple, but ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice is a fucking blight to everything it shares the usb bus with. I've seen it cause problems with mfp printers on both mac and pc platforms. Granted, these were shitty drivers that were coded by indians (shouts out to all the folks in canada doing mac HP MFP support, I enjoyed weekly unemployment cheques for quite some time because of you ;), but still...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I fail to see how this tag applies!
Anything that gets CREATIVE to release and IMPROVE their f'ing drivers is a good thing.
Unfortunately, they'll probably still be very very late out the door with anything, just like in the past.
This Driver Rating system must be great -- now you can add it to your signature, with your 3DMark, RenderMark and Aquamark3 score.. "My drivers have a rating of 94%, Biiaaaatch".
I'd agree to Driver Ratings being a good thing IF I could install unsigned kernel mode drivers in Vista x64.
To the original poster; Crash Reports do serve a function, although you as the user is not told about its effect.
(And I wont either..)
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
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!
1. They stick a MS logo on the product. Once this logo is on the product, MS is in the same boat as OEMs over product quality. If the driver is no good, why do MS accept the cash that OEMs pay for this log... oops.
2. Do OEMs have the access to MS internals that are required to develop good drivers?
3. Can MS not in some way improve the OS driver platform to ease good driver development?
If MS wants a good end-user experience, and at the same time allow for a plethora of hardware, it is up to them to ensure these objectives are compatible.
IIRC, RedHat & co do not sell server solutions on any old hardware, so when you buy this from them, you can expect hardware to work.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
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
Well, it's been a long time since I wrote any C code, so bear with me if I'm misremembering or this has been fixed, but try this:
int main (void)
{
for ( ; ; )
{
fork();
}
}
Like I said, the syntax may be off, but without process limits in place something like that will spawn processes until the system overloads and is unable to spawn any more. In that situation, you can'teven log in to fix it, let alone run kill...
Furthermore, I've had X lock up hard on me several times in the past. Sure, the underlying OS may still be functional, but when it's the only machine you have there's no way to ssh in and kill it, so it might as well be completely hosed. (For that matter, when the Windows UI locks up it may be that the underlying OS is ok, you just can't ssh in to tell...)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
No kidding, for a program I use once a month (to transfer audio books to my ipod), it sure makes a nuisance of itself. I wish apple would understand that not everyone that has an ipod believes their pc is nothing more than an iTunes interface. I actually do real work on mine and would appreciate the option to only load those drivers when I start their program.
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
Yes it would, but considering the only known 'managed code' OS and kernel in existence is a R&D protype OS made by Microsoft.
Since current managed development outside the MS test OS do not meet the performance needed for OS kernel levels, why would you think Vista would be all managed code?
A managed code kernel 'consumer' OS is about 5-10 years away.
PS What does your comment on Smalltalk have anything to do with this? I think you don't fully understand object or safe code vs managed code.
As a bike rider, and operator of several web servers, I have often thought of doing exactly that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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!
What about the systems then that never crash due to drivers... Like for example all my systems. How do they get counted?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
Ehm, you can:
Alas, I do not know what effect disabling iPodService has. Back when I tried it, it wasn't a real service. I had no iPod either (I only have a Shuffle anyway). For me, I leave both processes running: they do absolutely nothing to my systems stability. They both eat up about 3.5MiBytes according to Windows Task Manager. That's peanuts when you have over 1Gig RAM or more (as nearly all my systems do...)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They don't.
This is about hardware drivers, not interoperability standards. These things are not relevant.
I wonder how they are going to address the marketing exploitation.
Vender B submits hundreds of reports against product supplied by Vendor A by finding a bug and then spending the money to buy multiple machines with Vender A products, configure them and then beat the system into submission with many, many bug reports.
Well said, mod points expired the other day unfortunately. The complexity of development pretty much ensures that there will be these issues, there are so many parties involved. I think we whould try to look on this as a feature and one which may help push companies into dealing with driver issues more quickly.
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 =)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
you need to include some headers and possibly
//to get rid of warnings
:(){:|:&};:
you also may as well use a while(0) or while(1==1) or even while(fork()).
as there is only one statment in the loop, you can remove the brackets
so you get:
#include
int main(void) {
while(0)
fork();
return(0);
}
I prefer this version though as you dont need to compile it and it looks more innocent:
[weapon@weapon]$
Weapon
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 ]
An attempt at a joke can be a driver itself?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Not true. Allow me to demonstrate.
void main_driver_entry_point() {
SomeValidAPICall();
1/0;
SomeOtherValidAPICall();
return;
}
The driver adheres to both of the valid API calls, but still crashes the system when it's called.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
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.
Interesting idea about how to measure product quality. I am *definitely* happy that you are not in charge of car safety standards.
Can you see the point of gathering actual, real life data on quality issues with cars, even though they have passed a zillion internal and external quality controls prior to launch?
Please tell me what company you work for. I'd love to buy your products since they obviously come with a complete guarantee that they will be flawless under any and all circumstances.
_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
Good question (proceeded by good points).
I was seeing this as another point of failure and potential abuse by Microsoft towards/against the manufacturer.
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.
IPodService.exe allegedly is part of Quicktime functionality these days, and is also used to share an itunes library acrosss your LAN.
>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... :-)
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
*cough*MCSE*cough*
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
...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
And what did YaST Online Update ever do to you?
-- Linux user #369862
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.
Ok you write your drivers to work with a black box. I will work with the source code to write the driver. Who do you think will write a better driver or who should write a better driver?
Just incase the OS maker wrote shit for code.
this has been fixed in that there are ways to enforce per-user resource limits, including the number of processes, pipes, file handles, disk/memory IO, memory use, etc. Whether these are always enabled in default config on all systems, I doubt.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
well, it DID save you time, didn't it? And you won't get carpal tunnel by doing the three-fingered salute.
You're confusing me, and I am a "native English speaker". We're discussing Microsoft here. In "native English" when you discover somebody who is acting strangely, erratically, or generally causing fellow human beings worry, fright, or inconvenience then that somebody is a candidate for certification. You need a doctor for this. The said person is said to be "certifiably insane" and it is the (medical) doctor who provides the certificate.
As for the money angle, its simple. When the ambulance has arrived and the two large gentlemen in white coats have gathered up the certified person and taken him/her away (to the funny farm, where life is gay and life is beautiful ALL THE TIME ); it is polite to buy the doctor a drink.
Hope this clears up the meaning of "certified" for you, in English and in the Microsoft context and explains why it costs money. Keep smiling !
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Microsoft is responsible for all three of those.
Ah, right, thanks. For a minute there I thought Microsoft was doing something right.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If the OS crashes because of a zero-divide, it's buggy. There are ways to trap that sort of thing.
(Heck, as coded in your example, the compiler should catch it!)
-- Alastair
So what you are saying is that if I have a Linux kernel module that I create, it adhere's to the API and it crashes the system it's Linux's fault?
;-)
You left out the certification step. If you hand off your module to the kernel developers and they're happy with it and include in a release (whether mainstream or a distro), then yeah, it's Linux's (or the distro provider's) fault.
This is one reason that the kernel maintainers won't help you if you're using binary-only modules -- effectively, they are "uncertified".
You obviously haven't done any programming
LOL! Too many years of it. And designed APIs. Add up my salary over the timeframe and I've been paid over a million dollars to do programming. (I just wish more of it had stuck
-- Alastair
I don't think that it's necessarily reasonable to expect Microsoft to go through and completely thoroughly analyze the code of every certified device driver to ensure that they're all playing nicely.
Why not? If they don't want to do the work, don't certify the driver. But hey, Microsoft is a big, innovative software company -- you'd think they'd have some automated tools for this if it's so much work. (Or, more likely, just bill the vendor for the certification.)
You can't expect any sort of software to perform flawlessy right out of the gate
Define "out of the gate". If you mean "hot off the developer's workstation", then perhaps not. If you mean "out of the shrinkwrapped box", you damn betcha I can expect that. (Well, okay, realistically perhaps not, but I should be able to.) And since you refer to "any sort" of software, I damn well expect real-time critical system software to perform flawlessly. And what the heck else is a driver? (For some values of "real-time" and "critical".)
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.
That part of it I don't have a problem with. I have a problem with software that doesn't work getting certified in the first place.
-- Alastair
While Microsoft actually verifying the complete correctness of driver code would be great, a system where they do that for every single driver is totally unrealistic. Certifying a driver doesn't necessarily have to mean "this driver is totally flawless and will work perfectly" in order to be worthwhile and provide useful information. A certification that says "we don't guarantee that this is without flaws, but it generally functions properly and is relatively stable," while not ideal, requires a more reasonable amount of work on MS's part (considering they're not the driver writers), and is still very useful, because it still seperates good drivers from more broken ones.
If you really think that MS could feasibly certify that all the drivers were perfect, then why not get angry at the driver makers themselves for not doing so, since they'd only have to do it for their own drivers?
As far as I know, other OSs don't have this functionality at all, so it seems to me like you're criticizing them for doing something new and useful because they don't do it *perfectly*.
Sure, my example was simplistic in the extreme, however I'm sure that our driver developers are quite capable of screwing things up in much more devious ways.
And the fault does lay with them. My computer used to crash daily because of shitty dlink drivers, eventually I switched to alternate drivers made by another company that use the same chipset and it's rock solid now.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.