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.'
All the more reason to avoid release dates. Whether it's completely arbitrary, or it's an estimate given by a developer, release dates only result in two things: Making people rush, and making products late or not as advertised.
I can understand a statement such as "We hope for our product to be ready by [date]" or "We're aiming for a possible launch window of [date]", but to say "Our product will be available on this date" only puts pressure on those lower down the totem pole, and can result in a lot of lost features or quality assurance.
Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Sorry, I disagree. The design had a flaw, but that doesn't mean the design overall is bad, nor does it indicate "horrible project management." People make mistakes, people miss things. Sorry, it happens, but to act like YOU would never have it happen to you is pretty silly. No one is perfect.
If ndiswrapper can run XP drivers in Linux, then surely MS could have run XP drivers with no problems at all.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Perhaps, one day, when competition re-emerges in the OS marketplace, microsoft will have to clean up their act. Until that day, and as long as people keep giving microsoft their money, nothing will change.
/. are the people who laugh at those who do ...
It is too bad that so many people who would benefit from reading
We're not talking about the odd video card or printer. We're talking about shutting out a lot of older hardware, and then, rather than admitting a fuck up, basically blaming the manufacturers (though I'm sure there's plenty of blame to heap there).
The fact of the matter, and this is only getting driven home ever more with these revelations, is that Vista was released prematurely, before adequate time to test and correct various issues could be taken. Microsoft and the manufacturers needed to get this beta operating system to market to try to force new computer purchases. The unholy OEM alliance between the big manufacturers and Microsoft is coming home to roost.
Not only that, but it's a gas to watch the chaos that surrounded the final months before Vista's premature birth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I just looked through the article. DRM and "digital rights" searches both turned up nothing. What the hell are you talking about?
Oh for fuck sake, how many of the XP targeting virii that you've heard of lately have been due to holes in the video and audio driver model? This isn't about improving security for the customer, this is about locking down content through poorly implemented DRM. We could have kept our existing driver model instead of changing it YET AGAIN. How many changes in the last 20 odd years have we had? DOS drivers, Win 3.11 drivers, 95 drivers, 98 drivers, 2000/XP drivers, and now Vista drivers. What a waste of goddamn effort. Bad design is an understatement. Get it right and move on for fuck sake. We don't need a dozen incompatible driver models by the time I'm old.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The reason I ask is because it's possible that Dell's contracts with Microsoft did, in fact, obligate them to promote Vista by the stickers on computers. For instance their bulk discounts are tied to various deals, such as having "Dell recommends Windows Vista" on their website.
Also worth noting is that many OEMs were shipping systems with "Vista Ready" stickers long before Vista was finalized. They had no way of knowing how well Vista would ultimately run on the machines, other than what Microsoft was telling them. Still, the OEMs share the blame to the extent that it was irresponsible of them to trust Microsoft and put stickers on systems without being sure that their claims were correct.
Purely second-hand, but...
My father does a lot of video work, and any time he tries to access or move a video file he has crazy wait times while Vista chews on something.
What the hell changed between XP, which he has since gone back to using, and Vista that so radically changed the handling of video files? From his reading on various websites (none of which I can vouch for) the OS is checking for some sort of signatures in the files to figure out if he has permission to perform the selected task.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but either way, he had to ditch Vista and return to XP in order to do things like edit the video he shoots of conferences and events.
So the DRM issue has at least some anecdotal evidence in its favor. Either that or Vista is completely incapable of handling files over a certain size with any sort of grace.
If you don't notice a significant flaw in the security or driver model during 5+ years of development and testing then yes, you are incompetent. At the very least your testing is incompetent.
We're not talking about a broken link on a web site. We're talking about an OS that goes on hundreds of millions of computers. Make a few mistakes in the some of the details, but don't fsck up the model.
Developers: We can use your help.
I'm sure that if MS dropped DRM support there would be an uprising the likes of which have not been seen since /. deleted the Scientology post.
Are you serious?
Yes, I mean Jesus Christ, can you imagine how mad I would be if playing back an simple audio file didn't eat up 15% of my CPU (up from 0.5% in XP)? I know I might lose the ability to play back HD movies that I can't play back anyway because media companies still don't trust me.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
You've got it backwards. If Microsoft never supported the DRM, the RIAA and MPAA wouldn't have put it on the disks, because of the lack of support. It's not the customers that would be complaining, it's the "media partners." And those bastards? They can have some cheese with their whine.
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall.
It may have to verify all the files are patchable, but it most certainly does not have to do that before it displays the dialog box. Normally something like that would be done with a progress bar inside a dialog box.
There is no good reason to not give the user an indication of what is going on. If the system design requires that, then the system design is faulty. Faulty system design is not a 'good reason'.
Code or be coded.
Nice strawman there.
What has been said, is that stability and security should not be compromised to provide backwards compatibility. Drivers are not usually at the high end of security risks (that's for charming things like ActiveX).
With the fast hardware and cheap RAM we have now a days, there's no reason to start moving to a VM model, allowing for compatibility *and* security. But Microsoft and its unholy OEM alliance with manufacturers are not interested in that, but rather in forcing upgrades of both OS and hardware. Microsoft and the manufacturers don't give a shit about the customer, but only about the bottom line, and Vista is an example of that self-serving attitude finally catching up with them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Progress is bumbling along from one model to another, wiping out compatibility for tons of hardware along the way, only to alter course in five or six years. That isn't progress, that's just chaos. Surely Microsoft's engineers are just as capable of picking up hardware industry rags as anyone else and getting a decent idea of how things are going to look over the next six or seven years, get a feel for the kinds of processors, components, hardware and interfaces that are going to come down the pike and develop a tenable, efficient and extensible driver model.
This is why monopolies are so damned bad. There's nobody for them to reasonably compete against, so they have their own market ecosphere which doesn't have to make any damned sense at all save from the marketers and bean counters point of views. Everyone keeps telling me how the best and brightest end up in Redmond, and yet over and over and over again we keep seeing the same bad architectual decisions that keep biting everyone in the ass in the same way. We see the absolute lack of forward thinking, of at least trying to create a development model that can accomodate security, utility and extensibility.
I don't think anyone expects five year old hardware to run the latest MS operating system (although, ironically, you can often do that with Linux and FreeBSD), but there have been hardware problems with stuff that was a couple of years old when Vista was released. Yes, the manufacturers deserve a lot of the blame, but Microsoft has handed the perfect excuse for engineered obsolescence. The manufacturers are only reflecting Microsoft's own disdain for doing right by the customer.
Yes, they've got the average consumer by the balls, but the average consumer isn't the big profit center. It's all those corporate installs, with their hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of licenses for XP and Office. They're the ones that don't want to have to partake in massive upgrade or replacement programs for two year old computers, replace three year old printers, and then go through the retraining and administration unknowns that come along with this new operating system.
I work for a smaller company, but we've put off any consideration of upgrading from XP until 2010, by which point it's possible that Windows 7 will be out. By that point, supporting old hardware won't be much of an issue, and retraining won't be, because all those poor suckers who bought their Vista machine at a big box store will hopefully have learned the basics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No it's not. It's just more Microsoft marketing-speak. For example:
The new video and audio drivers have nothing to do with DRM.
Reasons include moving as much software out of kernel mode as possible thereby minimizing bug checks (in layman's terms "BSODs"), developing an architecture to make debugging audio problems in applications easier, and supporting a whole new generation of Digital Rights Management (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx) Vista is not 10%-50% slower. Of course, none of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than 2x slower than the most current builds of its older sibling. Either Microsoft supports it, or Microsoft can kiss all high-def media good-bye.No, if Microsoft doesn't support it, we can ALL kiss DRM'd high-def media good-bye, and good riddance. Microsoft had been a key supporter and booster of computer DRM despite their customers' distaste for it. Don't try to pretend they are anything but complicit partners with the studios in this.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy
This one is quite simple - it's digital signature checking. Before UAC shows that dialog box, it does a digital signature check of the installer .exe file. Well, that file is 400 megabytes. This digital signature lets it warn you if you're trying to invoke an unsigned program with high privilege.
The reason it takes so long is that it maps the entire file linearly into memory to hash it. Such a large mapping gets demand-loaded, which for a linear scan is very slow.
The workaround is actually quite simple. Run Command Prompt as Administrator, then run the installer from there. The signature check will be on cmd.exe instead of a 400 meg file.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager