Slashdot Mirror
Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors
twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'
The quotes in the summary explain why Windows XP drivers would not work; they do not state that driver model changes were made right before RTM.
Could we please stop trolling about this? The copy protection on Vista is about the same as XP. The support for existing DRM-protected media is the same if not better; that does NOT force DRM on you, just allows you to use media that some video bigwig thought needs the protection - if it weren't supported at all because MS tried to take a stance against it, then we'd just be complaining about the lack of support. DRM is not magically added to your existing media, though I expect the stupid default behavior dating back to WMP9 if not earlier to add copy protection to ripped CDs remains (as I use neither XP nor Vista, I can't comment for sure).
If you're going to complain about Microsoft and DRM, do it with the 360, which apparently was patched to require HDCP over HDMI for games - absolutely senseless in every sense of the word, and entirely their fault. Vista is no different from XP in the fact that the OS has its own relatively ineffective copy protection, and is compatible with DRM-laden media.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Turn off thumbnail generation. The DRM is only used for playback of protected files.
First off, it's well known that the redone video and audio drivers were required for the new DRM. That right there is a change: pre-Vista, the OS wasn't designed explicitly for DRM. Now it is.
Secondly, the new designs shave a good 10%-50% off performance. Audio acceleration is gone. EAX effects are no longer possible. Recording the audio output of programs is no longer possible. All in the name of DRM.
ALL layers are now encrypted. This, not surprisingly, slows down the OS. By a lot. It also greatly reduces battery life. Where before, playing a music file might involve a single decryption step to send the data to the audio player, it now must be re-encrypted before being sent to the card, then re-decrypted before being converted to analog. All because an enterprising user might otherwise snoop on the bus to "steal" the audio data.
In short, Vista is 10%-50% slower solely to allow for DRM. The kernel was redesigned with DRM in mind, not user experience. Battery life was halved in extreme cases - again, solely for DRM.
It's not trolling, there are simple facts that have been exposed time and time again. Look it up on Google. Vista is much, much, much worse than XP when it comes to DRM.
Maybe I implied something I didn't mean to, so I'll clarify my position a bit.
Internal schedules, release dates, etc., those should always be present. If you don't have any internal dates, there's no motivation for your workers, as they'll just "get it done when it's done".
Published release dates are what can cause the problems. If you tell your employees "We need this by March", that's one thing. That's also something you can pass along to your business partners. But when you come out and tell the public "Our product will be out in March", and the product falls excessively short of expectations, or does not even make it out of the gate, that's when you create a problem, all for the sake of marketing.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html
While it goes into details about a lot of other stuff, there's the explanation of Vista's (apparent) slow disk performance.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Late OS code changes broke drivers...
This reminds me of the painful driver development from NT4 to Windows 2000. A few years before release MS was pushing us to port NT4 drivers to Win2K. We jumped on it quickly and had working drivers, but as the years rolled by changes would be made that broke the earlier work. This rinse and repeat continued to the *very* end. Years of wasted time and resources for no reason.
What I learned from that is to start looking at new Windows driver documentation a few months before release and then wait until the actual release before changing or writing any code. You just don't know what fundamental changes will occur until the discs are on retail shelves.
You sure as hell can't trust what MS tells you as a developer about interface changes and release dates.
Microsoft hashed the release of Vista, but the Linux community of all people has no right to talk about new releases making drivers incompatible. Backwards compatibility doesn't exist in the linux world.
Examples please. All my devices work the same or better under SuSE or Ubuntu.
All my purchased Linux (Loki) games still work.
I can't say that for my $300 Microsoft Office 6.0 purchase under Windows. I can't say that either for the Windows games I've purchased over the years.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.