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.'

Comments

Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[CronoCloud]

Par for the course for Microsoft I think. If my memory serves me well.

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[peragrin]

actually it's not. The previous version was from internal Microsoft memo's. This one is from Dell.

This means even the vendors putting Vista ?Ready sticker son computers knew those computes wouldn't run Vista all that well.

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[Machtyn]

When OEMs were releasing their Windows XP computers with 128MB of RAM (256MB with SP2), I always said it was criminal. I repeat the sentiment with PCs being released with 512MB of RAM for Vista installed PCs. 512MB of RAM for Windows XP SP2 is only acceptable.

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[ma1wrbu5tr]

Sorry, that memory address was reserved for Aero and could not be serving you well.

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[misleb]

Par for the course for Microsoft I think. If my memory serves me well.

All 640k of it!

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[piojo]

When OEMs were releasing their Windows XP computers with 128MB of RAM (256MB with SP2), I always said it was criminal. I had a computer with 128MB ram that came with windows 98. I installed XP on it, and was much happier with XP than I had been with the previous OS. Sure, it was a piece of crap (speed/memory was not the worst of its problems), but I liked XP on that machine. I agree that a customer that bought a computer with 128MB ram and XP was probably getting a raw deal, but in that situation, I would have preferred XP to any prior windows OS.

Re:Hasn't MS always done things like this?

[bhtooefr]

I would've preferred Windows 2000 in that situation...

(Generally, with less than 512MB RAM, I find Win2K's lower memory footprint makes up for it being not nearly as optimized as XP.)

But why?

[microbee]

I am wondering what went wrong to force Microsoft to change kernel and break drivers at the last minute. Because of a design flaw that compromised security? Or DRM?

Re:But why?

[jandrese]

I wouldn't be surprised if holes were found in the DRM and had to be patched up at the last minute.

Re:But why?

[Firehed]

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.

Re:But why?

[ushering05401]

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.

Re:But why?

[wampus]

Turn off thumbnail generation. The DRM is only used for playback of protected files.

Re:But why?

[webmaster404]

So, why then is Vista so much slower then XP even with all the extra eye-candy and features turned off? Either MS can't program a decent OS which could be true, or there is some hidden thing going on such as DRM or WGA. So there are two logical choices, MS can't program so don't use Vista or MS is using DRM so don't use Vista either way, Vista is a failure of an OS and you must agree with that.

As for lack of support, where else are the media companies going to go if MS says no to DRM? People aren't going to take "No support for PCs" as an answer with Blu-Ray boasting a 50 gig capacity for storage. It isn't like the media companies are going to abandon MS for Apple, as it seems to be the perpetual underdog (and honestly I don't think Apple would be doing too well if it wasn't) and as for Linux it would be cracked in a matter of minutes, so the answer would be little to no DRM. Even if it was a third-party application that was required to view movies, at least MS would support its customers in saying no to it.

Re:But why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could we please stop trolling about this? The copy protection on Vista is about the same as XP. Yes, can we please stop trolling and claiming that the Vista DRM is "just like XP"? Because it is not and anyone who has used the OS knows that.

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.

Re:But why?

[ivan256]

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).

What is the point of this statement? It is completely unrelated to this discussion. A strawman.

The assertion here is that backwards compatibility support for XP drivers was broken in order to eliminate a DRM exploit. In other words, they're not saying that DRM is forced on you, or unsupported. They're saying *drivers* are unsupported in order to have better DRM support. They may have preferentially chosen to break support for their customer's hardware to pander to the media distribution industry.

Re:But why?

[tomthegeek]

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.

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?

Re:But why?

[Firehed]

We've seen numerous problems with file handling in Vista, and nothing to suggest they were DRM-related. Very large files and large quantities have both proven problematic. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest it's related to the intended use and then removal of WinFS, but I don't have anything to back that.

Anyways, signatures don't give you permission to deal with files, they just state their origins. No different than in real life - stuff with my signature on it passed by me. Embedded metadata, of sorts. With DRM, you've got an encrypted version of the file wrapped with a few bytes that provide enough information to decrypt the data with the right credentials. A lock and locker, basically (except the locker is made of hardened semen from Zeus and the lock is a hundred-rotation, thousand number jobbie so brute forcing it would take an unfathomably long time).

So again, let's not attempt to blame everything on DRM. Most of Vista's faults result from standard Redmond incompetence.

Re:But why?

[mickwd]

"So, why then is Vista so much slower then XP even with all the extra eye-candy and features turned off?"

Not sure, but I found the following, from Microsoft themselves, astounding:

From the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Release Notes:

Installation Issues - Windows Vista

Setup dialog box fails to appear:
The verification that occurs under User Account Control (UAC) with all installations delays the appearance of the initial setup dialog box. Delays of more than one hour have been reported.

Re:But why?

[Firehed]

As for lack of support, where else are the media companies going to go if MS says no to DRM? People aren't going to take "No support for PCs" as an answer with Blu-Ray boasting a 50 gig capacity for storage.

That's my whole point. If MS blocked all DRM from existing in Vista, they would only be harming themselves. Media companies would take the "fuck you, we still have standalone players" (and lots of them) approach, and would-be customers would whine continually that they can't play back tons of media. As it was, the media companies made certain demands, and you can't reasonably blame MS for not wanting to kill off their entire media center thing, especially with the install base of the 360 and its functionality as a media center extender. Take your pick. Everyone at Slashdot is all too busy compiling the latest Linux kernel to be bothered with MS software anyways, and is only posting to kill some time :)

The storage aspect is irrelevant. DRM is on movies, not the discs themselves. It's not like I'm adding CSS protection to my DVD backups. Why on earth would Blu-Ray change that?

Re:But why?

[man_of_mr_e]

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.

Re:But why?

[jandrese]

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.

Re:But why?

[man_of_mr_e]

There's actually a pretty good reason for that. The sevice pack is not a typical service pack. It's a patch. It patches existing files, rather than replacing them. It can take upwards of an hour because it has to verify that all files are patchable before it begins the process, then it backs up your files, does transactioning so that if something goes wrong it can rollback and not leave a semi-functioning installation.. all that is very intensive, particularly because VS2005 is several Gigabytes in size for everything.

They could have made it a lot faster, but it wouldn't have been as robust in failure conditions.

Re:But why?

[rhdaly]

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.

Re:But why?

[void*]

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'.

Re:But why?

[chgros]

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
If it wasn't supported by Windows, they wouldn't do it. As you may be aware, Windows is a very large proportion of the market.

Re:But why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The new video and audio drivers have nothing to do with DRM. The new driver stacks are both moved to user-space from kernel-space so that a failure will not bring down the OS. Audio acceleration is gone because audio drivers are not permitted to access kernel resources directly, which prevents EAX, but also prevents them from causing a BSOD.

No layers are encrypted. The only encryption/decryption applies to protected media, which is already encrypted and requires decryption. If the media is not protected there are NO encryption or decryption steps. The system works exactly as it did in XP.

Vista is not 10%-50% slower. The kernel wasn't redesigned at all, let alone for DRM. Vista uses largely the same kernel that David Cutler took five years to design 15 years ago. Microsoft doesn't rip out and rewrite kernels for shits and giggles.

Battery life is decreased due to Aero, not DRM. More intensive usage of the GPU drains power resourcs. When not playing protected WMV, HD-DVD or BluRay, DRM isn't in use at all. This DRM is required to display HD-DVD or BluRay on a computer; no OS is immune, legally. Either Microsoft supports it, or Microsoft can kiss all high-def media good-bye.

It is trolling because your "simple facts" are not facts at all, regardless of how many times shit-eating fucktards like yourself keep posting it to forums so that they become Google hits. Repeat it as often as you want it does not become true.

Re:But why?

[rtb61]

For a fact I saw the Vista DRM in operation. There was a service that monitored the Hard disk drive contents (assumed copyrighted contents) and if the service was shut down, Vista immediately went into reduced functionality mode, re-enable the service and Vista went out of reduced functionality mode (minutes after that the hard disk was reformatted and a different OS installed).

As for the major patch the occurred very soon after the release of Vista, I was likely a DRM patch, to fix a typical M$ failure. Whilst they had spent lot of time money and effort trying to secure the DRM so the public couldn't break it, they did nothing to protect it from false activation hence a major security flaw.

of course M$ really doesn't care about other peoples content, DRM for them was to be a two step process, first pay to protect your copyrighted content, and then in a future version pay to allow your content to run. This of course was a way to allow them to shift to a free OS ie., you pay for the OS by paying a tax upon every bit of content you play and for every application that you use and of course it is designed to specifically target FOSS.

The reason of course the go to so much trouble trolling forums, blogs and websites, about the DRM in Vista,is that it is all so extremely monopolistic, leverage their existing monopoly to establish an even more severe and exploitative monopoly.

Re:But why?

[Machtyn]

I don't have Vista, otherwise I'd do this myself. Can someone tell us the result of the following test.

1. Take a large media file and copy it from one drive to another.
2. Rename said media file in the original location so that it does not appear like a video file.
3. Copy the renamed video file to the same drive.
4. Measure how long it takes to process both scenarios and report which took longer.

Re:But why?

[ozmanjusri]

Can someone tell us the result of the following test.

I don't have Vista any more, but I tried it for a few months on a video editing machine.

I don't think it would be possible to run the sort of test you've suggested because Vista performance is so variable. At any time, it'll stutter, slow down or appear to hang for no reason that's apparent from the usage pattern. You'd need to shut down a heap of stuff to get consistency, and if you do that you won't be getting typical results.

Re:But why?

[log0n]

Vista applies DRM to .mov/Quicktime files. I don't know exactly what happens, but saving or writing (copying) Quicktime files wraps them in a 'secure' layer (filename changes to green - it's now 'secure'). Once this happens, a lot of restrictions are placed on how the file can then be moved, copied, deleted, etc.

I don't use Vista for anything media production related so I haven't delved into this.. but it caught my eye a few weeks ago.

Re:But why?

[thejynxed]

I'd rather keep my support for accelerated audio and EAX affects and run the risk of BSODs than lose the kind of sound I am used to in my games. I'm sticking with XP until XP is no longer supported in games, and then, I guess I'll stop gaming. Honestly, I'd rather go without than use something that is going to be arbitrarily crippled because MS wants to be the sole gatekeeper to all digital entertainment in the home.

That being said, Vista is a stinking turd-pile of code that will never sully any computer in my possession.

Re:But why?

[Z34107]

As other replies have mentioned, Vista had problems with copying files - large or small quantities. Microsoft seemed to blame that on how the little scrolling bar dialog was updated, but whatever.

I've been using a beta of SP1 (heard about it from hear, nonetheless!) and that issue has been fixed. Purely anecdotal, I haven't done benchmarks or anything, but moving a GB of files around no longer takes a lunch break.

As others have mentioned, turn off thumbnail generation. Don't know how to do that off-hand - I have a beefy rig, and I like that feature.

As for "file signatures" and "permissions", those are things standard in the NTFS file system that have been there since NT; they're called "access control lists." Think of it as chmod on steroids - you get to set what users can access which files in what way. It's mostly for business environments, and doesn't have any real performance cost.

It could also be that the computer doesn't have enough memory - the "Vista Ready" thing. I have 2GB in my machine, but if you're editing video you probably want 4. Make sure you have a dual-core proc, too.

It could also be that the Vista driver for your hardware is crappy. I run x64; I know the pain.

But, it's not DRM. That DRM is only for decrypting any HD-DVDs or Blu-rays or whatever new-fangled "disc"-based format that comes from a shiny platter instead of the tubes.

Re:But why?

[delus10n0]

Audio acceleration is gone. EAX effects are no longer possible.

DirectSound3D hardware acceleration is gone, yes, but in today's world of CPU power it doesn't really matter. And "EAX" is still possible-- you can use the "Creative Alchemy" software, which translates EAX calls to OpenAL calls.

I like Valve's approach-- don't implement any "hardware specific" features. Perform all the effects in software, so everyone gets the same experience, regardless of how much money they shelled out. Works fine for me!

Re:But why?

[JFitzsimmons]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Lets all go back to software rendered 3d engines too!

Re:But why?

[rice_burners_suck]

Delays of over an hour are no problem for me. I come in to work in the morning, 9:00 AM to be specific. According to my company's rules, I must be on time every day or else risk having my pay cut by a significant amount. So I'm at my desk on time every day, at 9:00 AM, and I push the power button on the computer. It begins to load, and the disk crunches, crunches, crunches, and crunches some more. By about 4:59 PM, it finishes loading and the various spinning wheels and hourglasses stop. Finally, the computer is ready to perform the next operation. At this point, I click "Start," followed by "Shut down" and leave the office. I think it finishes shutting down sometime around 8:55 AM. Vista. Where do you want to avoid going today?

Re:But why?

[recoiledsnake]

Uhh? How many people watch bluray movies on PCs? 0.0001% of the number of people who watch it on the PS3? Heck, how many watch DVDs on PCs? 0.01% of the number of those that watch them on standalone players? The media companies would say fuck you to MS while they keep the DRM and Sony and other electronic companies would thank MS for increasing the sales of the PS3 and standalone players.

Re:But why?

[recoiledsnake]

I've to call you out on that one. Do you have any proof like screenshots or reproducible steps to duplicate this behavior? Or were you just karma whoring?

Re:But why?

[nosfucious]

Don't know about blue-ray.

However, on a recent train journey between Hannover and Basel, I saw plenty of suits watching Movies/TV on the Laptop. Presumably a DVD.

Per carriage? About 10 ~ 15 Dell, HP and Lenovo running full screen video.

I've had the same experience in airport lounges. Suits filling in time watching videos. Occasionally listening to a CD (and seeing Windows Media Player "visualisations").

I'm guessing these 2/3rds are business computers, the rest personal. This is purely based on suit vs jeans. A friend of mine was watching "The OC" for a communications paper on the previously mentioned train journey.

I think that a lot more than 0.01% of people watch DVDs on PCs.

Even I loaded up some Family Guy and Simpsons for business trips to the UK. (Ripped to hard disk, no physical DVD. Now THAT might be 0.01% of users).

Re:But why?

[Remusti]

To be honest, DRM support does not bother me, however, Microsoft being able to pull the plug on a device I might buy to be able to watch high-def content bothers me a LOT.

From this page - A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will no longer be fed anything considered to be premium content. What this means is that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all premium content-handling ability for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found. To quote the content-protection specs, "Vista will [...] revoke any driver that is found to be leaking premium content [..] if the same driver is used for all the manufacturer's chip designs, then a revocation would cause all that company's products to need a new driver". If it's an older device for which the vendor isn't interested in rewriting their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices enter "legacy" status within a year or two of their replacement models becoming available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unable to handle premium content. If that's not OS level DRM, what is?

This is basically my problem with all High-def devices, from what I understand very similar things can happen with Blu-ray drives, once a defect is found in a device, any new movies released can be modified to refuse to play in full definition with that player, turning that very expensive Blu-ray player into nothing more than a glorified DVD player. (excepting of course, movies produced before any weakness was discovered). Whether or not it will actually be done is of course yet to be seen, but I personally will not buy something if it's primary purpose for existing can be removed at a whim.

Re:But why?

[drsmithy]

So, why then is Vista so much slower then XP even with all the extra eye-candy and features turned off? Either MS can't program a decent OS which could be true, or there is some hidden thing going on such as DRM or WGA. So there are two logical choices, MS can't program so don't use Vista or MS is using DRM so don't use Vista either way, Vista is a failure of an OS and you must agree with that.

Or (c) it's not actually slower at all.
Or (d) it's doing things that have nothing to do with DRM.

As for lack of support, where else are the media companies going to go if MS says no to DRM?

"Oh damn, we'll just have to cope with the standalone appliances that 99% of people use for consuming their media."

DRM is a non-argument against Vista. Either you don't have DRM-encumbered media, and the presence of DRM is irrelevant, or you do have DRM-encumbered media and its presence is an advantage.

Re:But why?

[log0n]

I tried recreating steps on my MBP but I have Vista Basic which doesn't appear to have Encrypting File System support. The machine that did this was a Dell 530 with Vista Business.

In lieu of that, this is what would happen. I would download a .mov file or would export one via Sorenson Squeeze - pretty much the only way I had Quicktime files under Windows - and without any direction or intervention on my part Vista would automatically encrypt it.. end up with the green file title.

I didn't know what the green text meant and it wasn't until I tried copying one of the Quicktime files to a USB key that Windows popped up a dialog saying the file would be copied without security/encryption(?it's been a few weeks, I forget the wording?) as the target device doesn't support it. From there, Google was my friend.

I did not have any other common media type on the computer (no mp3, wmv, avi, etc - it was a work machine) so I don't know if this was specific to Quicktime. The only thing I do know was this encryption was applied to EVERY .mov file I had on the machine and it was done without my request.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/102501-encryption-disable-enable.html
http://www.webapper.net/index.cfm/2008/1/24/Vista-Annoyance-File-Encryption-and-Apache (guessing, but looks like another random file encryption)

Security

[truthsearch]

Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.

When rebuilding a system from the ground up for security, these issues need to be hashed out first. The fact that the security and driver models were changing significantly shortly before launch is a sign of bad design. Or at the very least horrible project management. If Vista was in the works for over 5 years, and it was designed properly from the start, 3rd parties should have had plenty of time (years) to conform to new models.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

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.

Re:Security

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Security

[Nikker]

I don't know where you work but if you were developing on a project that was going to be deployed to over 100+ Million workstations for a multi-billion dollar company and I was getting paid in the ball park they are getting paid in well you can put the rest together.

Re:Security

[syousef]

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.

Re:Security

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Security

[wampus]

So you've never had an XP machine bluescreen from a flaky video driver? My work PC does it fairly regularly. Since they moved the video drivers to userspace this isn't even possible on Vista. Stability, not just security.

Re:Security

[Hemlock Stones]

Contrary to the attempt to blame "security" for the audio/video driver issues I have another explanantion, DRM. According to a very well researched, written and circulated document (sorry, no URL, and I lost my copy of the PDF document), DRM placed unprecidented requirements and workload on the device drivers for these and other "IP" related devices and services. I suspect one of the main reasons for the lack of Vista device drivers, especially for older equipment is due to some manufacturers believing that there is no way the return on investment is worth the massive effort required. Microsoft appears to acknowledge this when they say that some updated Vista drivers may never be written. You'd think that they could easily spare some "pocket change" to incourage these driver updates, but obviously for whatever reason they are not going to. Personally I hope they continue with this policy as it shows what they really think of their customers, big and small.

Re:Security

[Tony Hoyle]

Clearly you've not used vista. Bad video drivers can and do bluescreen it just like XP.

Re:Security

[wampus]

I've tried pretty hard to bluescreen my own box, all I ever get out of it is a little text bubble by the clock telling me my video driver crashed and reloaded. My own experience indicates that Vista works at least as well as XP in this regard.

Re:Security

[EvanED]

It may be, but for video cards, it's more likely the driver. Crashes caused by the video card drivers accounted for at least a sizable minority, and perhaps even a majority of XP crashes reported to MS through the crash reporting mechanism.

They still run in the kernel in Vista; I'm not sure how that jibes with Wampus's comment above about it restarting the driver. Audio drivers, however, are moving into userspace.

Re:Security

[Vegeta99]

Ya wanna explain the burned in STOP screen on my old-ass CRT TV that got there when Vista crashed due to the nVidia driver goin kaputz then?

Re:Security

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Security

[Blackhalo]

I would argue that Microsoft DOES need incompatibility in many things beyond drivers. They need developers to migrate their applications over to the new OS in a way that forces users to upgrade the OS. Otherwise, XP is good enough, adoption rates are minimal and Microsoft is left with an OS that does not have enough critical mass that developers drop support for the previous one. If a core application has support on both the New and Current OS Microsoft loses control and DRM is dead in the water, as no-one will leave XP.

Re:Security

[ozmanjusri]

The design had a flaw, but that doesn't mean the design overall is bad, nor does it indicate "horrible project management."

It does indicate "horrible project management" when errors like this jeopardise a multi-billion dollar, 5 year project.

Besides, there's plenty of other evidence of horrible project management of Vista.

So that nets us an estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. The feature? Vista's shutdown menu...

Re:Security

[syousef]

Well perhaps if manufacturers only had to build one driver instead of 6 for their hardware to work we'd have stability too. Or do you think newer drivers are going to be less buggy???

In any case, I was talking about security, not stability. Shift the goal posts somewhere else.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

Sorry, where did I say it wasn't their fault? I'm merely stating the OP is hold MS to a standard that no one could attain and still release a reasonably priced OS. As far as rushing goes, its entirely possible that is the fault of the manager that jumped ship to google. If you have an offer on the table with expiration dates, are you going to miss it so you can get that one last project out the door? I think not.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

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.

Right, because the driver model was being worked on every day for five years. I'm sure it wasn't worked on, finished and had some initial testing then left. Certainly, it wasn't testing again toward the end, when the flaw was then uncovered.

Your statement is so asinine I can only assume you've never worked on a large piece of software before.

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.

Again, I can only assume you've never worked on anything really large and complex. If you had, you'd realize that yes, smart people can overlook something important because no one thought of that one particular angle which the model breaks down.

I also suspect that if MS did nothing and a vulnerability was discovered you'd be bitching how they did nothing as well. But please, when you really design something large and complex and you get it right every single time, let us know. But be prepared to let us know who the experts are that reviewed your code so we know its true and not just your overinflated ego.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

One link its "plenty of evidence?" Maybe to you. I sit here typing this using Vista Ultimate, and I actually like the simplicity if the shutdown menu. So while at the bottom it looked like things didn't work, it seems it did come together at the end.

Not that the link describes an ideal situation either, but the author seems to have been relegated to a team that they didn't want working on anything else. Seriously, a whole team for the shutdown menu? He even admits most of the code to shutdown the computer was going to be written by others. Maybe his team was just incompetent?

You have your speculation, I have mine. Neither of us were there, and unlike Joel, I'll not run off an make a big deal about one blog post.

Re:Security

[DataHiker]

DOS drivers? Damn, you're already old!

Re:Security

[Chris Mattern]

I'm merely stating the OP is hold MS to a standard that no one could attain and still release a reasonably priced OS.

Free seems pretty reasonable to me.

Re:Security

[truthsearch]

I have worked on large software projects that lasted years. You apparently haven't. If the security and driver models were designed and tested from the start, as they should be for such a project, it would not take 5 years to find a major flaw. Apparently the flaws were big enough that they had to change the design at the last minute. Again, we're not talking about one poorly implemented function call, but the fundamental model upon which everything else is built. Part of the project manager's job is to make sure nothing big like this slips through the cracks.

I also suspect that if MS did nothing and a vulnerability was discovered you'd be bitching how they did nothing as well.

Of course it's preferable to fix the flaws. But letting those flaws go unnoticed until just before release is a sure sign of incompetence. And then blaming 3rd parties for not conforming to the recently changed model is disingenuous.

Re:Security

[drsmithy]

When rebuilding a system from the ground up for security, these issues need to be hashed out first.

Vista wasn't rebuilt "from the ground up" in any way, shape or form.

The fact that the security and driver models were changing significantly shortly before launch is a sign of bad design.

Or a policy change like, say, "64 bit Windows won't be allowed to load unsigned drivers".

Or at the very least horrible project management. If Vista was in the works for over 5 years, and it was designed properly from the start, 3rd parties should have had plenty of time (years) to conform to new models.

Amazing how some vendors managed to have working drivers, though, despite these "last minute changes". Taking that into account, I know where I'm pointing the finger at "bad design".

Oh, and Vista wasn't "in the works for over 5 years" in any technical (ie: relevant) sense. The "Vista reboot" resulted in an actual development time of 2-3 years.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

Well, fortunately in the US when one makes a product they are free to sell it for whatever they want.

Re:Security

[plague3106]

I have worked on large software projects that lasted years. You apparently haven't. If the security and driver models were designed and tested from the start, as they should be for such a project, it would not take 5 years to find a major flaw. Apparently the flaws were big enough that they had to change the design at the last minute. Again, we're not talking about one poorly implemented function call, but the fundamental model upon which everything else is built. Part of the project manager's job is to make sure nothing big like this slips through the cracks.

Sorry if I don't believe you. You see, if what you were saying is true, and you really know software development, you should know that all your statement means is that there are no vulnerabilities that you have found. That doesn't mean there aren't there, and it doesn't mean one of these may force a redesign.

Of course it's preferable to fix the flaws. But letting those flaws go unnoticed until just before release is a sure sign of incompetence.

Again, if you know software development, you know how silly this statement is.

And then blaming 3rd parties for not conforming to the recently changed model is disingenuous.

I'm sorry, where did I mention my thoughts on this at all?

Vastly Different Models

[Anonymous Coward]

The driver models for audio and video in Vista are drastically different than they were in XP. Microsoft is trying to push towards a more microkernel-ish model where these drivers are intended to exist in user-mode. The entire Vista audio stack is user-mode and the video stack is divided into two portions where a good 90% exists in user mode and the rest remains in kernel mode for performance reasons. Microsoft is also trying to force hardware scheduling to prevent a single accelerated application from hosing an accelerated desktop, which is currently a problem in all accelerated desktops, Compiz and OSX included.

The driver situation wasn't any better when XP was launched. If anything it was much worse because all of a sudden consumer-grade hardware vendors had to jump to supporting the NT kernel rather than the 9x kernel, which finally locked down the memory isolation so that a user-mode app could not access kernel resources. It took years for the big companies like Creative Labs, nVidia or ATI to get half-decent drivers out for XP. The situation for Vista is already much better than it was for XP.

Re:Vastly Different Models

[makomk]

So you reckon Vista has better hardware support than Windows XP did at launch? I reckon that falls under "damning with faint praise".

(Windows XP hardware support sucked at launch, and not just because of the switch from 98's driver model. I seem to recall reading warnings about various Windows 2000 drivers that should in theory work not actually being compatible with XP. Sound familiar?)

Re:Vastly Different Models

[andydread]

"The driver situation wasn't any better when XP was launched. If anything it was much worse because all of a sudden consumer-grade hardware vendors had to jump to supporting the NT kernel rather than the 9x kernel"

That was not our experience when we had to load 210 PCs with XP-Pro-corp when it came out. There was a plethora of win2000 drivers for those same devices that worked on Windows9x before XP was released and those drivers worked very well in XP. I remember we had to resort to the Win2000 drivers in many cases and those drivers saved us from having to hunt for and replace much hardware back then. This time around this is not the case even with fairly recent hardware. The fact is win2k drivers for the most part worked pretty well in XP compared to this forced hardware obsolescence fiasco we are faced with now.

Re:Vastly Different Models

[MightyMartian]

I had a pretty mixed experience with Win2k drivers in XP. Some worked without a charm, some I implicated to BSODs, and some did load but were quite unstable. I had an older UMAX SCSI scanner that was pretty iffy. I had a proper SCSI card, so the problems can't be traced to that.

It was much the same for Win2k. Some NT4 drivers worked, some did not, and some were shaky.

Re:Vastly Different Models

[margretli]

NT was one of the more stable version of Windows. XP might have had a rough time at launch, but things has been ironed out and the OS isn't all that bad to use. What I don't understand is, why change the kernel yet again? I come to expect nothing really works perfectly out of the box with Microsoft, but why on earth they can not stick to something that is at lease "half-ass" working, instead, they have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Re:Vastly Different Models

[adolf]

It is worth noting that with Vista's firm preference toward user-mode drivers, such problems as you experienced with your scanner should be eliminated.

Drivers under Vista can still certainly crash, but that crash should no longer be system-wide.

More reason to avoid release dates.

[oahazmatt]

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.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[imaginaryelf]

You find me customers who's willing to shell out dollars or plan their dependencies for some nebulous release date.

Or you can try that when you have to pay your bills, "Yeah, we'll make our best effort to pay that mortgage on the 10th."

The world doesn't work that way.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[Firehed]

Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released.

Especially since we've recently been given an estimated release date.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[mikeabbott420]

There are only two kinds of software: released too early and never released at all.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[Jeff Carr]

Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released. Oh, it will be. I expect all bots will be running a standard AI package, and it will have full VR, including smell and touch, plugged directly into your brain through the jack you had installed at birth.

It'll be awesome when it's released April 1st, 2054.

Of course, It'lll probably still be running the goddamn Lithtech engine.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[oahazmatt]

Or you can try that when you have to pay your bills, "Yeah, we'll make our best effort to pay that mortgage on the 10th."

The world doesn't work that way. Except that paying bills, an obligation to having and continuing to have a service or receiving goods, is not the same as marketing software.

Yes, having a firm release date may snag more customers, but you have to look at the end product and decide if the backlash will outweigh the praise.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[moderatorrater]

When coordinating with the CD presses and the OEM's, distributors, and other companies (like NVidia or ATI) that rely on the release date, that's just not possible. For smaller projects, you can pull stuff like that. For one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, you need to plan ahead.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[iluvcapra]

Remember, though, MS had sold all those software upgrade contracts with the stated timeline of having the new version out before they expired, this is why Vista was released to business before the user version was available.

Delivering an item on time and not "when it's ready" can be worth gobs more money to people who like to be able to contain risk. Look at how poorly Apple fares in the business market, for many reasons, but a big one is that they're pretty secretive about their development roadmap and you can't make million-dollar decisions based on Apple's stated trajectory (notice the recent deafening silence over the Xserve RAID EOL and iPhone SDK delay).

Not to say secrecy doesn't pay dividends in consumer segment, but consumers have always been the barnacle on the MS ship.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[imaginaryelf]

Ok, here's a more concrete example.

Let's say you decide to start a company building a great product.

Do you know what the absolute drop-dead release date is? It's the day your funding runs out (whether it be personal or VC).

You think you can ask your mortgage company, your phone company, your VC to essentially extend you an indefinite loan because your software is not ready to be sold yet?

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[oahazmatt]

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.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[tzot]

Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released.

Especially since we've recently been given an estimated release date.

I wouldn't call it a release date. The whole issue reminds me of falling towards an event horizon.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[Naughty Bob]

I like your thinking, and it works up until the point where you have shareholders.

Shareholders means 'people who own the company', and they get to demand answers to trifling questions about when the company is actually going to start selling new products.

By law, this information can't be kept secret.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[$random_var]

Microsoft's obligations to hardware manufacturers are arguably much more important than its obligations to customers. Reasons: they sell most of their software to OEMs, and one of the main advantages of Windows (over Apple) is that it works with a very wide array of hardware. As such, Microsoft has to fill certain obligations to manufacturers in order to protect that relationship. RAM manufacturers began planning, researching, and designing their productions lines years in advanced to accommodate the increased RAM requirements for Vista - suppose Microsoft decided to delay for another year? Millions or billions of dollars worth of inventory would have gone obsolete and would probably have been destroyed to keep from tanking the market price of memory.

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[dlockamy]

notice the recent deafening silence over the Xserve RAID EOL and iPhone SDK delay

hmm, i guess all those sarcastic stories about "Apple finally sets iPhone SDK release date" (salon.com) or "Ah, there's the iPhone SDK, coming along the road(map)" were just whispers...i guess if slashdot had covered it that would have been audible. but all these damn sheep just refuse to criticize apple

Re:More reason to avoid release dates.

[rtechie]

It works right up to the point where you have customers.

Customer A says to you "We need feature X, when will you have it?" you say "Sometime in the future." and they say "We'll go with one of your competitors then."

Not forced, no technical reason

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You can always provide some sort of compatability environment for drivers. There is no reason why they did not provide an XP driver support mechanism.

If ndiswrapper can run XP drivers in Linux, then surely MS could have run XP drivers with no problems at all.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[MightyMartian]

I don't understand it either. Why not build a wrapper and sandbox it? If there are security concerns, that ought to solve it. Sure, it might rob some performance, but on a bloated monster like Vista with its processor and RAM hunger, I can't imagine that this would have wrecked the experience that much.

You know, everyone goes around saying "open source only copies, never innovates" and yet you have an (admittedly kludgy) solution to the problem of driver availability that have been forced by uncooperative hardware vendors that does work and does allow older hardware to function. Microsoft has all the kernel sources at their disposal and doesn't have to reverse engineer to get something like ndiswrapper running, and yet instead they shut out a lot of older hardware in one fell swoop.

There just doesn't seem to be much logic to what Redmond does. I can understand the vampiric murderous monopoly that wants to destroy any and all competition, but the design choices they make are bizarre. It's not as if Windows is some elegant masterpiece that they don't want to clutter kludges to keep older things running. Christ, the operating system has been like that since Windows 95.

The really sad thing is that it is closed source, so no one will ever be able to create that sort of an environment to get this hardware working.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[EvanED]

You can always provide some sort of compatability environment for drivers. There is no reason why they did not provide an XP driver support mechanism.

Um, besides it's extra engineering that they have to do. And given the types of drivers they are talking about -- e.g. audio drivers, which ran in the kernel in XP but are now largely pushed into userspace in Vista -- a good bit of engineering.

Yes, ndiswrapper exists. However, if it's so reasonable to expect MS to provide a compatibility layer, where are the wrappers for other kinds of drivers? Where's the wrapper that lets me run my TV Tuner card in Linux?

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[MightyMartian]

First of all, FOSS developers often have to reverse engineer the Win32 driver model to create something like ndiswrapper, and it's pretty amazing what they can do. I'd love to see more compatibility layers so that uncooperative manufacturers can be bypassed.

Microsoft doesn't have this particular problem. They do have the XP kernel sources in hand, and for them building a compatibility layer would be much much easier than for some FOSS developer. And why shouldn't Microsoft? They're the ones pushing this bloody operating system.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[spisska]

Yes, ndiswrapper exists. However, if it's so reasonable to expect MS to provide a compatibility layer, where are the wrappers for other kinds of drivers? Where's the wrapper that lets me run my TV Tuner card in Linux?

Chances are there is no wrapper because the tuner is already supported natively by ivtv (for hardware-encoding MPEG-2 cards) or v4l (for framegrabber cards).

If your card isn't supported, blame the manufacturer and get a supported card instead. I recommend the Hauppage PVR-x50/500 series for SD and the HDHomerun for HD -- QAM or ATSC.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[EvanED]

It isn't supported, at least last I looked. I chose the card because it had the best quality in the price range at the time of purchase.

And yes, I blame ATI. However, whoever's fault it is doesn't change the fact that I can't use my TV tuner in Linux. I don't really use it anymore anyway, but for quite some time this was actually a very annoying thing.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[wizardforce]

There just doesn't seem to be much logic to what Redmond does.

that's the beauty of a monopoly- there doesn't need to be any logic- the users will be forced to use it anyway.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[UncleTogie]

It isn't supported, at least last I looked. I chose the card because it had the best quality in the price range at the time of purchase.

That's like sayin' ya bought a WinModem 'cause it was cheap, and it's the fault of Linux that it's not supported...

Out of curiousity, what make/model is your TV card?

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[ratboy666]

The wrapper for your tuner is called VMware....

Seriously, though, NDIS is contained, but a tuner card interacts with the multimedia stack. Not anywhere as contained. It could be done, but the "wrapper" would carry the bulk of WINE with it.

And, it would have to wrap something -- the current multimedia architecture in Linux isn't stable enough to target.

Yes, I would have expected Microsoft to have a compatibility layer -- given that such a layer is the ONLY way to use certain devices moving forward. After all, you don't have source to port forward if needed. Nothing would have prevented the inclusion of the old interfaces.

As an example of doing this the right way, look at the Linux transition from a.out to elf, or oss to alsa.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[EvanED]

It's an ATI TV Wonder Elite; it's driven by the Theatre 550 chip.

I did give some thought to Linux compatibility when I got it, but the card was pretty new when I got it, so I figured there just wasn't time for people to reverse it yet, and I expected a few months to go by and it would be working. Oh well.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[TheRaven64]

I don't understand it either. Why not build a wrapper and sandbox it? If there are security concerns, that ought to solve it. No idea about the specifics of the situation, but in the general case this will not work for drivers. If your driver can issue a DMA request to the device, it can access anywhere in your physical memory. If you want a safe, secure, sandbox, then you have to send all device register write writes via something that validates them. Since every device has different DMA commands, your sandbox needs special code for every single driver it runs. At this point, it's cheaper and easier just to rewrite the drivers.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[hairyfeet]

Then why not give users the choice? Why not let me check a box that says "Yes,I know that using this driver will not allow me to use DRM media-run it anyway".But I personally think it is because they still hope to turn Vista into "The Apple of Video" which means the DRM is the most important thing,not the consumer. I just wish they would give the consumer the choice of whether or not they want the right to run restricted content.But as always my 02c,YMMV

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[EvanED]

Then why not give users the choice? Why not let me check a box that says "Yes,I know that using this driver will not allow me to use DRM media-run it anyway"

This is already the case in 32-bit Vista; loading unsigned drivers is possible, but it disables the DRM mechanisms.

I don't think this is true in x64 though, which is a shame.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[rice_burners_suck]

I'll tell you the logic behind what Redmond does. Used to be this dude named Bill Gates ran things. Yeah, say what you will about every OS from DOS up to Windows XP, but at least the technical decisions made sense (not to mention the business decisions made a LOT of cents, and dollars too). They maintained backwards compatibility, which means that most DOS programs from 1980 can still run in a DOS box in every Win9x-based system, and heck, I think even in the NT-based OSes up to XP, for many DOS programs. Things didn't normally break THIS badly from one OS to the next, and even with all the cruft and unnecessary junk cluttering up these OSes, at least this stuff was coherent and made sense. Then Bill Gates goes on to do other things, and it seems that everything in Redmond is slowly falling apart, and the big whack was this Vista disaster. It's like a free advertisement for Apple. People are cramming into Apple stores like there's no tomorrow because they have to upgrade from XP and the upgrade path is to get a Mac! A huge company like Microsoft can absorb this kind of fsck-up for a while, maybe even a long while, but unless something changes and some better technical decisions are made SOON, they're not going to be in the OS business for long. The solution to the immediate problem lies in doing just what a bunch of people here are saying, make up a sandbox environment that can run drivers and programs from XP as if they're actually running in XP. And to do another thing that people here aren't saying: Merge all the 6 different versions of Vista into 2 different versions: Standard and Enterprise, just like XP. Standard would basically be Vista Ultimate and Enterprise would be, well, Vista Enterprise. Get rid of the confusion. And lower the price. $99 for Vista Standard, $69 for Vista Standard Upgrade, and a sky-high price for Vista Enterprise. And, dare I say, make it easy, with one click let's say, to revert to the classic Windows 95 theme without all the graphical junk that bogs everything down. Do all this stuff, sell it for the next five years with occasional updates and patches, and use that time to solve the deeper problems that are sending so many users away at warp speed.

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[hairyfeet]

Yes,but will it let those drivers have direct access to the hardware? Will it let me run my EAX or my capture card? Losing my Soundblasters EAX and my capture card not working were a couple of the big PITA when I used Vista for two months.Finally,between all the bloat,bugs,crashes,non usable hardware,etc I just went back to XP on my gaming rig.Maybe since they brought in the Office guru to do Windows 7 it won't suck like Vista.If not,I hope like hell Wine gets at least fully functional DX9 (and hopefully 10) so I won't have to worry.But since I built a new pc last week for a client and it actually came with 2K/2K3/XP drivers I'm hoping I won't have to migrate as long as I keep building my own.But as always my 02c,YMMV

Re:Not forced, no technical reason

[aztektum]

In a perfect world those uncooperative manufacturers go out of business because people are only buying from cooperative ones.

Microsoft...

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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.

It is too bad that so many people who would benefit from reading /. are the people who laugh at those who do ...

Re:Microsoft...

[LDVA]

I think (and hope) that day is nearing. Consumers may be stuck with Vista, but the big enterprises aren't budging. In my job, I get to talk to bigwigs at the major PC makers. And each time I do, I ask, "How are sales of Vista into the enterprise?" To a person, they say nearly nonexistent or something reasonably synonymous. Like many, I tried Vista and ended up "upgrading" to XP, and blogged about the miserable experience. The last entry was "Vista Begone! My XP Upgrade" (http://www.pcdoctor-community.com/pcdblog/2007/10/02/vista-begone-my-windows-xp-upgrade/. It was a harder decision than one might thinkg because, as our company's marketing guy, I wanted to show customers that we were ready for Vista from Day One. Our app worked fine. It was the other business apps in my personal stack, tho, that crapped out.

Vista: Windows 7 Beta

[sacremon]

From TFA:

According to the e-mails made public this week, Microsoft will apply the lessons it learned with Vista the next time around. "There is really nothing we can do in the short term," noted Joan Kalkman, the general manager of OEM and embedded worldwide marketing, in a message written a week after Sinofsky's. "In the long term we have worked hard to establish and have committed to an OEM Theme for Win[dows] 7 planning.

"This was rejected for Vista. Having this theme puts accountability and early thinking on programs like Capable/Ready so that we make the right decisions early on."

The crippling of Vista isn't something that they will fix, given that they are already working on Windows 7. So take the experience of how not to develop and launch a multiyear/multibillion dollar project and hope not to do the same again next time.

Summary completely misleading

[Keeper]

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.

Re:Summary completely misleading

[Keeper]

Yeah, better to focus on the one piece of correct information and ignore remaining 90% taken out of context. TFGTPDF.

Or...

[Squarewav]

Dell and the like could just keep shipping systems that they know can't run aero with windows XP and don't use the Vista capable stickers on them?

This is the part that bugs me about this. It might be true that MS considers vista without aero to be fine when they shouldn't. However no one is forcing dell to use the stickers, Dell and the like used them on computers they knew couldn't run vista fully. They do it because they knew people would buy the computer thinking it would run vista.

When it turned out vista was crippled on the machine insted of Dell going "Ooops sorry, heres some store credit" (or whatever) they went "Don't look at us, MS made us do it! blame them!" As if MS was the one who built the computer.

Re:Or...

[JustinOpinion]

However no one is forcing dell to use the stickers Do you know that for a fact, or are you just assuming?

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.

Re:Or...

[Archangel Michael]

Hindsight is 20/20. Requiring Vista Stickers on Computers before VISTA was finished is non-sense, and I'd blame both Dell (HP, Acer .....) and MS on this one. It is a marketing deal that was false. Dell (or whatever) didn't have to sign the deal that put stickers on computers, and they knew that Vista wasn't stable in development so they knew that it was possible (and should have known it was likely not to be able to run VISTA).

However I knew that none of the machines that said they could run Vista was ready for it, because I remember Windows 95's requirements resembled nothing like what it actually took to run it. I wouldn't run Vista on anything less than 64 bit with 4 Gigs of Ram and 500 GB HD, and a monster Video Card. Why? Because that is what it NEEDS after all the necessary bloatware that needs to get installed to make it useful.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Re:Or...

[BlackCreek]

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. This talk about OEMs not knowing how Vista would run is wrong. Vista Beta's were already available a couple of *years* in advance for the OEM, and big corporations using Windows. I know that because the university I used to work at, had copies of Vista to test in advance.
I bet a lot was still changing, and that perhaps those copies were lacking Aero and what not. But still, if a university had copies of Vista Betas in advance, I can only suppose that OEMs like Dell, HP, Intel, could test the whole of Vista with Aero and everything. They could not know for sure how well it would run, but they had a very good idea.
But what is an OEM supposed to do? Ship without the stickers? When everybody else was going to ship with them?
3 laptops on sale next to each other with similar price and specs, 2 have a "Vista Ready(tm)" sticker, 1 doesn't. Which computer do you think would /not/ get chosen? TFA shows that they kept changing things until the last moment, b

Re:Or...

[stony3k]

No no no.. It's "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

Re:Just what we suspected...

[wampus]

I just looked through the article. DRM and "digital rights" searches both turned up nothing. What the hell are you talking about?

My Postmortem on Vista

[jellie]

Dell's postmortem...

Company managers and executives also did their own postmortems on Vista... Maybe I watch too many crime dramas, but I originally thought the article was writing off Vista as being as good as dead, since they're already talking about Windows 7. Though I can't say I disagree.

FYI: Postmortem also has an informal definition meaning "an analysis or review of a finished event".

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[MightyMartian]

It's pretty fucking sad that barely a year into Vista, and Microsoft is already demurring to Windows 7. It's a tacit admission so far as I can tell that Vista has been an absolute disaster.

Sure it'll sell just like Windows ME did, purely because of OEM licenses. They'll use that to inflate sales figures, even where people are downgrading back to XP, but we now know just how fucked up things were in 2006.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[Shados]

If Windows 7 comes out next year (thats a big if), it will be 3 years apart (a bit less depending on the date Windows 7 comes out...if it comes out at the very end, it will be about exactly 3 years).

Thats consistant with the pre-Vista fuck up day (and Vista's original intent), even if we don't count NT. 95, 98, ME/2000, XP, Vista's original schedule... all 2-3 years apart, give or take. And back then, a few months after a windows launch, the next one was hyped. Heck, its that way in the Linux world too, you hear about the next version of Ubuntu almost in sync with the latest version hitting the servers.

Really... I guess people liked the impossibly slow launch schedule...considering how quickly they forgot the fast paced one of old.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[realmolo]

I wouldn't say Vista is a *disaster*, but it's obviously a work in progress. There are so many obvious improvements to be made, and so many little bugs to be fixed.

Much like Windows 2000 was what NT4 should've been, I expect "Windows 7" to be what Vista should've been. Of course, an argument could be made that even what Vista "should've been" isn't what we actually WANT. Personally, I think MS should bite-the-bullet and just abandon backwards compatibility as part of the "base" operating system. Just run everything in a VM, much like Apple did with the Classic MacOS.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[MightyMartian]

He's trying to make idiotic comparisons. Considering that I don't have to pay a dime for Ubuntu, it works pretty well. I simply don't have the same expectation for a free product as I do for one which costs hundreds of dollars or is forced upon me if I buy a new box.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[MightyMartian]

I don't ever recall NT4 being that big a problem. I only started working with it in the SP3 days, and I do understand there were some problems.

Windows 2000 was a lot more polished, but coming from a *nix background, I really didn't give a damn about polish.

Re:My Postmortem on Vista

[dbIII]

I'm not sure about that. I seem to remember a lot of "Longhorn will do everything better than Apple can" comments when XP was still new.

Re:Just what we suspected...

[ColdWetDog]

They should have bought VMware and integrated a virtual machine with a full copy of the appropriate WindowsXP (pro for pro, home for home)to run all the older "mission critical" software in "classic mode."

Nice idea, too bad it would not have worked. There are thousands of poorly written but business critical apps that run under win32 / MFC / ActiveX / Com and whatever else has dribbled out of Microsoft's faucets over the years.

Trying to support all of that nonsense in a VM would be a nightmare for smaller shops and on more marginal equipment. This isn't somebody just running an old version of Parchesi on a three year old laptop. It's business installations with dozens to thousands of PCs and some pretty dodgy apps.

They would just stay at XP.

Wait ...

2 minute Vista install

[ed1park]

This user had a particularly clever way handling the driver compatibility issues of his "Vista ready" system.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno

Yes, this is a new example of old behavior.

[twitter]

The NYT coverage and their analysis are both news from the Vista capable dissaster. With a jerk around like that, it's no wonder that the whole industry has revolted and it's nice to see the word getting out to a wider audience via papers like the NYT. Their analysis is also interesting, though I'd love to see where "Otter" beat them to the punch. Didn't happen did it?

Here are some older examples of the same kinds of behavior:

• Apple and Lotus 123
• The DRDOS Case, 1991. Court proved malice and PR lies to cover it.
• Backup software. There's a reason it's hard to back up M$ systems.
• OS/2, software they helped make and then killed because it was better than what they owned.
• Netscape, 1995. Court proved malice and lies to cover it. People still claim Mozilla suffers from "memory leaks".
• Word Perfect. Another victim of the DOS/Win3.1
• Audio players, software and hardware

The list goes on and on. On the chopping block today are ODF, Linux distros, AV makers and a host of competitors that just won't die like iPod, Play Station and Mozilla. The only way out is to avoid Windows and stay away from M$ and other non free software vendors. The further away you are, the better off you are.

Re:Yes, this is a new example of old behavior.

[gallwapa]

Ahem.

Wordperfect is alive and well as Groupwise :p

Re:Give it up, dude

[dave562]

Cash... free software? Where do I sign up?

Three Kinds

[Archangel Michael]

Uh, there is a third kind, which VISTA is in. It is the "Released, but never should have been".

Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this one. If they were going to break Windows, they should have broken it completely, and wrote a new OS that resembled Windows, but didn't have a single thing in common. IBM had a similar situation in OS/2 (and PS/2) and screwed it up completely, by marketing OS/2 completely wrong (Windows on Roids).

If I had 100 Million Dollars startup, I'd have a complete OS and New HW platform to run it on, without any legacy code bloat, ready (beta or RC) in 3 years max. I'd design everything from scratch having HW and SW teams working together to design tight integration of both WITH planned expandability and adaptability.

Year 1, mapping out what is needed, early designs
Year 2, Early Implementation and Refinement of Design.
Year 3, Standaridized APIs and Programming / Developer Tools, bug squashing.

I'd have three levels for licensing of all the products and specs.

1)Open Source Open HW (free to all)
2)Shared Source, Open HW (Cost for people who'd like to sell their source, to run on any HW)
3)Closed Source, Closed HW (BIG COST for people to have their own version of Source and Proprietary HW)

I'd sell tools and services as a core business model once the products are released. I'd also have planned and phased obsolescence for both HW and SW, meaning that after a set period of time (5-10 years) NEW releases won't have backward compatibility so that as the system evolve, that newer versions of SW (and HW) don't have to retain backwards compatibility. Major Version numbers would indicate a certain set (Final OS 1.0) such that each version would NOT be backwards compatible (BC).

Why not plan obsolescence?

Re:Three Kinds

[SuiteSisterMary]

If I had 100 Million Dollars startup, I'd have a complete OS and New HW platform to run it on, without any legacy code bloat, ready (beta or RC) in 3 years max. I'd design everything from scratch having HW and SW teams working together to design tight integration of both WITH planned expandability and adaptability.

Be called, they'd like their (failed) business plan back.

I wish...

[Aegis Runestone]

that they had thought this through more carefully. XP was stable and working, if they needed to release an OS, why did they change so much that almost nothing is decent backwards compatible.

Or maybe I'm just whiny. :P

how dare it not be perfect pre launch!!

[timmarhy]

yeah wow thats why it's not launched yet, shocking.

It's not just drivers

[bogie]

They fiddled with several key underpinnings of the OS. For example, rebuilt the network stack? Why? Why do that and add more features when the features you want to implement are reliant on running on a stable feature complete OS in the first place?

Dogfood or not, this really seems like a case of the left hand not knowing what the ride hand was doing. Or they overshot. Or they tried too hard and failed to copy OS X. Or they just need to start over. IMHO Sandbox XP->98 apps and start fresh with a whole new OS. They HAVE to do that sometime, why not now?

Re:Slashdot hypocrisy in full effect!

[MightyMartian]

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.

Needless to say, the article exagerates

[NSIM]

I've been running Vista since the early beta days and it's my main desktop system and also powers my mediacenter. The only XP drivers that definitely wont work are video drivers, drivers for things like NIC, disk controllers etc all work fine. On my main system, Only HP and Microtek (prinet and scanner respectively) have yet to provide fulle Vista drivers for my system, and the XP drivers work just fine.

Re:-1 Overrated?? Moderation Abuse

[Wolfier]

Has it occured to you that probably the ultimate motive of moving drivers from kernel space to user space is STILL DRM?

Namely, to prevents developers from creating unauthorized audio/video drivers that can create analog outputs to all media.

train wreck

[wardk]

what a joke. I don't think I've seen a story like this about lacking/bad drivers since the OS/2 days.

good thing "no one on the Internet knows your running Windows NT"

cause they be laughing

Deja Vu

[Sponge Bath]

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.

bullshit

[tuffy]

Open source drivers get updated as the kernel gets updated, and old hardware continues to work long after the original manufacturer can no longer be bothered to support it. The notion that open source OSes don't support old hardware, or software, is completely and demonstrably false.

Re:Vista: Windows 7 Beta

[Maestro485]

If they hadn't been saying that very same thing for the past decade it might actually be believable.

kernel space is not an issue.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You can still provide a userspace environment that provides the kernel APIs.

The extra engineering might pay off. People with older (or even current) machines with XP drivers might have bought Visa. hardware vendors would have had an easier job and the whole anti-Vista wave might not have happened.

Re:kernel space is not an issue.

[EvanED]

The driver can issue instructions that aren't valid from user mode, so you would need either some sort of software translation to ensure that this doesn't happen (like the way VMWare handles kernel code), or the ability to trap and emulate (which is hard on x86). At this point it's more like the user mode portion is a VM than just a set of entry points to places in the current OS. (This even assumes that the functions map easily between the versions, which isn't a sure thing, especially in the case of the audio drivers, which by my understanding have been substantially reworked.)

Would it have sold enough copies for it have been worth it for MS to put the engineering into it? I don't know. But it's entirely possible the answer is no. In any case, HW compatibility is one of only many things people complained about, so I doubt it would have been lessened all that much. (In fact, given how much criticism was coming from people running on underpowered (by Vista's enlarged standards) machines, people with older machines trying to run it could have even hurt.)

Re:-1 Overrated?? Moderation Abuse

[ozmanjusri]

This comment is -1 Overrated?? It's a direct, ontopic factual response to a wrong claim.

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.

Re:Pot and Kettle

[NullProg]

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,

Re:Give it up, dude

[Anonymous Coward]

What orthodoxy?

The one where somebody can be labeled a "Microsoft shill" for criticizing Slashdot. Not supporting Microsoft, not bashing Linux, just criticizing the conduct of Slashdot's editors and top contributors. Or have you declared Slashdot perfect, complete, and incorruptible?

how to advocate free software

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter, please read this carefully. Following this advice will make Slashdot a better place for everyone, including yourself.

• As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.
• Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims at all costs. It's unprofessional and will result in unproductive discussions.
• A thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a posting will not only provide insight for your readers, but will also increase their respect for your knowledge and abilities.
• Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.
• Focus on what Linux has to offer. There is no need to bash the competition. Linux is a good, solid product that stands on its own.
• Respect the use of other operating systems. While Linux is a wonderful platform, it does not meet everyone's needs.
• Refer to another product by its proper name. There's nothing to be gained by attempting to ridicule a company or its products by using "creative spelling". If we expect respect for Linux, we must respect other products.
• Give credit where credit is due. Linux is just the kernel. Without the efforts of people involved with the GNU project , MIT, Berkeley and others too numerous to mention, the Linux kernel would not be very useful to most people.
• Don't insist that Linux is the only answer for a particular application. Just as the Linux community cherishes the freedom that Linux provides them, Linux only solutions would deprive others of their freedom.
• There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy

Re:CTP

[LingNoi]

People say the same things about Ubuntu, it's not Microsoft specific. If MS can't handle complaints that all OS developers get then maybe they should get out of the business.

Digital signature checking

[Myria]

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.

They remade NtCreateProcess for DRM

[Myria]

Microsoft actually remade a critical system call, NtCreateProcess(), explicitly because of DRM. Translated to the UNIX world, this would be like redesigning fork() from scratch just to protect VLC from being debugged.

Prior to Vista, NT had a "create process" mechanism differing in design from most other operating systems. NtCreateProcess() creates an empty process with nothing in it other than the new .exe file and ntdll.dll. No initial stack, no main thread. The parent process actually uses the debugging API to inject them into the new process. Even the the environment and current directory are injected this way.

This worked well until Vista. In Vista, their DRM system had a problem: they didn't want anyone to be able to debug audiodg.exe, but the parent process had to be able to debug it in order to start it. The solution? Redesign the entire process creation system such that the kernel does all the initial process creation procedures so that the parent does not have control over the child if it is a "protected process". Hence, NtCreateUserProcess() was born.

For those that don't believe that this change was for DRM, I offer proof in the form of a Microsoft kernel developer on video explaining it.

Re:Pot and Kettle

[ledow]

This is just blatantly not true.

I use Linux BECAUSE of its backwards compatibility. I recycle old machines into computers for schools, etc. and if Linux weren't backwards compatible none of them would even boot. As it is, you can still run Linux on a 386 with ISA cards (is MCA still supported, I can't remember?), the same can't be said about Windows which blatantly removes old architectures in order to force upgrades (ISA support disappeared in XP, even though you can still hack it a bit to make it work perfectly). I'm not saying there's not a justification for not supporting ancient systems but the fact is that Linux does it for as long as ANYBODY with coding experience cares, not just the Microsoft pencil-pushers.

Not only is Linux backwards-compatible, but it supports things I've never even heard of, and things I absolutely no need for, everything from ten-year-old watchdog timers to the latest and greatest datacentre interconnects. It's also sideways-compatible in that, if you're feeling sadistic, you can run Windows NDIS drivers on it without modification.

Linux has always been backwards compatible in virtually all senses of the word. I can still load ext2 filesystems, a filesystem over fourteen years old, and that's not even the weirdest or oldest FS that I can use! I can still use ancient hardware for which drivers don't exist past DOS or Windows 3.1. I can still use programs that were written for Linux 1.0, so long as I have the right libraries in place.

Now OVERALL compatibility may be slightly worse than Windows (I don't believe it, given the things that Linux supports that Windows couldn't do in a million years) in that it can't use EVERY scanner, printer, etc. because of rubbishy, propreitry protocols from companies where nobody even remembers how they work any more, let alone document them or write a driver for them. But to say Linux isn't backwards compatible is like saying that your average Windows driver from a £10 scanner is stable.

Re:-1 Overrated?? Moderation Abuse

[wwahammy]

I've gotta agree with (the oddly named) Adolf saying that Microsoft did this ultimately for DRM seems odd considering the similar move in Linux. I think moving drivers out of the kernel, especially drivers that are less reliable, is good for reliability. I've had video drivers crash a few times on Vista. All that happens is the screen goes black for less than a second, then displays exactly as before with a small notification on the bottom right saying something about the video drivers crashing (not those words). Did Microsoft do this in part because it made DRM "better" in their minds? Absolutely. But to say it was the ultimate reason without any explicit confirmation seems like a stretch.

Again, did MS hired amature grads who failed?

[cheekyboy]

Is it that hard to seek to frame offset at 1% and if its not 90% white or black use the thumbnail. How about some time based smart code that says
If this operation is taking >200ms, fricking give up and pick a random frame 2% to 5% in thats a keyframe. Friggin store it in filename_thmb.png or something or cache it.

Sounds like too many OO layers with out any smarts of knowing what the user is doing, just lots of automatic operations that assume will happen in 0ms.

Re:Again, did MS hired amature grads who failed?

[afedaken]

No it's not that simple. You have to know whether or not the frame in question that you're selecting is a keyframe. If it's not, you're getting only the updated pixels, not the whole frame.

Worse yet, if it's not a valid keyframe, you'll need to track back to the previous keyframe, or forward to the next one, neither of which is a simple matter, especially when the copy subsystem is locking portions of the file.

And that doesn't even take into account malformed container files, or non-standard codecs. Some particularly badly encoded mpeg4 variants,and some of the streaming optimized video don't even have keyframes. How do you expect to get a meaningful thumbnail out of that?

Now if *I* were writing the thumbnail routines, I'd have them generated AFTER the copy completed. , not in the middle of I/O intensive operations. IMHO, that's the real WTF factor here.

QA testers loved it for the work $$ hrs.

[cheekyboy]

No QA contracter reported this as a bug because it meant more cash in their wallets each time testing.

Common MS coders, get a clue, store a sig for the first 10meg at least, so if that FAILS, the whole stupid ass thing will too.

Note to MS, hire people with a clue, or that at least used computers before 1990, not these post ps2 gameboy jocks.

The CPU design is to blame

[master_p]

It's the fault of CPU designers. Current ISAs do not provide in-process modules, and therefore O/S designers are forced to work around the problem in various ways.

I've posted a related comment in the recent discussion on Microkernels.

I also sent an email to Tanenbaum asking him to put a request for CPU designers to provide in-process modules (which can be done without sacrificing flat address spaces). He replied that the cost would be prohibitive...I strongly disagree: all that it requires is another cache of translations of memory addresses to modules...

Re:-1 Overrated?? Moderation Abuse

[Wolfier]

And, they had the chance to improve this kind of stability in Windows 2000, where it was a major redesign and it was obvious that putting drivers in user space is a safer practice. Well guess what, they didn't do that.

So why all of a sudden in Vista? A video driver is a video driver - I HAVE written a video driver for Windows, fact is, even if the driver is in user space, it's still possible for you to write a driver to totally F* up the machine to a point that a reboot is _almost_ inevitable - without the driver/kernel even crashing - thus undetected by Vista.

By saying _almost_ I mean you could connect and may be able to restart the video driver remotely (yes even under Windows it's a possible setup) but how many consumer machines are set up this way, you have an idea. Screwed-up video driver usually == reboot, regardless whether the driver is in Ring 1/2 or Ring 3.

So given that putting video drivers (the usual cause of BSOD in XP) in Ring 3 usually does not decrease the need to reboot, you have to question the ultimate motive in spending the amount of resource to make the change.

Re:-1 Overrated?? Moderation Abuse

[rtechie]

A video driver is a video driver - I HAVE written a video driver for Windows, fact is, even if the driver is in user space, it's still possible for you to write a driver to totally F* up the machine to a point that a reboot is _almost_ inevitable - without the driver/kernel even crashing - thus undetected by Vista. Have you written a driver for Vista? They made it a lot harder for a driver to fuck up the machine in general. And even if it's not perfect, as you pointed out THE major cause of BSODs in Windows XP was video drivers and if this change only reduces SOME of those crashes it will still constitute a MAJOR improvement.

The main reason to take the drivers out of the kernel was stability. Read the MS mailing lists if you don't believe me. Or are all the MS developers engaged in an elaborate deception to push DRM?

Re:Pot and Kettle

[Eskarel]

I didn't say backwards hardware compatibility, I said, backwards compatibility. Kernels change dramatically. New drivers won't run on old kernels, old drivers won't run on new kernels. Software which depends on kernels is exactly the same way. If it's not being updated by someone it won't work anymore.

Yes in the open source world you can fix things that get out of date, but there is absolutely no concern as to what will go out of date or what impact that will have on things.

Re:Pot and Kettle

[NullProg]

Kernels change dramatically. New drivers won't run on old kernels, old drivers won't run on new kernels. Software which depends on kernels is exactly the same way.
Without getting to technical,

I think your having problems distinguishing between user and kernel space. Applications (games) run in user space. They call libraries that wrap the calls to the kernel so thats its transparent to the programs. Guess what? That Linux 2.2.x kernel that provided an application access to /dev/dsp for sound back in 1999? The newer 2.6.x kernels still provide access to /dev/dsp. Only the underlying implementation has changed.

Thats also how your Windows 3.x games still work in Windows 9.x Its also how (most) of your windows 9x games/programs work under NT (2000/XP etc).

Enjoy,

Re:Pot and Kettle

[Eskarel]

You may note that I mentioned drivers and software which depends on kernels(which is what the software which Microsoft has broken is). This doesn't affect userland, but none of the apps on this list are userland.