Microsoft Begs Hardware Makers To Take Support Seriously 543
Banana ricotta pancakes writes "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista. 'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them. Better hope that testing goes well."
Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.
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Whatever. I'd rather use an OS that is supported by >90% of the people, than some other OS. I've already been down the road of non-standard computers (Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Macintosh Quadra) and while I loved all those machines, I did not love seeing my IBM PC friends running programs that I could not run. (The "Mac version coming soon" problem.) I like being able to run virtually any program I feel like running.
>>>...public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009
Good. Maybe I can buy Win
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You just don't get it, do you?
No I didn't know that. So I have to wait for Windows NT 8 for a working OS? (Same way I skipped-over M.e.)
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Windows 7 is just Vista in sheeps clothing...
Wait a minute. Microsoft said they were entirely rebuilding Windows 7 from the ground-up, trying to get the kernal to run more-efficiently. That doesn't sound like mere window-dressing (like M.e. was merely Win98.2). That sounds like a complete overhaul.
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But it's apparently worth your time to post and come back to check for responses.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
Some browsers no support having more than one window open at a time. You might try to get one of those.
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+11 on the irony meter, dude. Respect.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that the lesson here is that hardware support is very variable, on any OS.
I bought a digital TV card for my box at home, running Kubuntu, and it was the simplest installation of anything I have ever done. Pop it in, it just worked. No driver installs, no nothing.
I also bought a cheap webcam. On Linux, plug and go. On Windows, even the supplied disk of drivers failed to install (Error -1: Could not configure driver or some such nonsense), and then the drivers from the website regularly cause BSOD.
On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.
It is nice to see that some hardware makers are beginning to actively support Linux, or at least allow Linux developers to actively support their stuff by supplying test units and documentation.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Informative)
As the original article points out, it's a pretty meaningless statistic. Hardware support only matters to users when it's hardware they own. Linux supports an obscure SCSI card that only three people own - great if you're one of those three people, irrelevant otherwise. FreeBSD supports all of the hardware (with the possible exception of the modem - I don't have a phoneline, so I've not tried it) in my ThinkPad, so do I care that Linux and Windows support more devices in total? OS X supports everything in my MacBook Pro, so do I care that Windows supports more devices?
I used to have a gaming mouse that was supported by Linux but not Windows (it shipped with drivers for Win98, which didn't work with 2K and the manufacturer never supported 2K). Did it matter to me that Windows supported vastly more hardware than Linux at the time? No, because it didn't support my hardware. Same with my VooDoo 2 - Microsoft changed the driver model with Windows 2000 to prevent 3D-only cards working. I could still play GLQuake under Linux, but not under Windows. Again, the fact that 2K had better support in general meant nothing to me. Only the specific cases of failure mattered (and the fact that Linux didn't support my NIC or modem at the time was equally frustrating).
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
The Year of Linux on the Desktop is at hand!
Make it measurable (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're joking, but there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop until there's a clear definition of what it actually means. If it's not measurable, there's nothing to aim for and it'll forever just be a joke.
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Serious measurement means it's arrived (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering that actually measuring the real use of Linux on the desktop would be an expensive proposition requiring real data collection (as opposed to sales figures), I would guess that if someone has the commercial incentive to pay for such data collection, they already believe that the results will be useful to them commercially. In other words, Linux will already have made a serious penetration.
Kind of like relationships, sometimes: you already know it's over before you get the message explicitly...
Re:Make it measurable (Score:5, Funny)
If it's not measurable, there's nothing to aim for and it'll forever just be a joke.
Crap, he's onto us guys! Everybody grab as many memes as you can carry and hop down to the bomb shelter!
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
MS doesn't have the power to coerce decent drivers out of the manufacturers ("Hmm, I see here that your latest wifi chipset driver has 37 unresolved trouble tickets. If you ever want your silicon to run on Windows again..."); but none of the device manufacturers have anything to gain from manipulating perceptions of windows. If one device vendor makes horrific drivers, consumers will blame windows; but OEMs will just drop that vendor. MS has a bit of power, with their driver certification stuff; but driver quality mostly comes down to the battle between the desire to save money by skimping on engineering and the desire to actually be able to sell products that don't ruin your reputation completely.
If MS were out there, begging vendors to write drivers for Windows, that would be a role reversal.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot) and they do have the power to maintain a public knowledge base of third-party driver problems (stick).
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot)...
What? MS would have the same problem as Linux does, just to a lesser degree. HW manufactures would have to provide specs to MS, something they haven't done for Linux. The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
"You create a device, you write the driver" seems like a perfectly reasonable policy to me, at least for manufactures that don't open their specs to all.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
Whilst saying "You create a device, you write the driver" is perfectly reasonable, it's less reasonable to say, "We're releasing yet another version of Windows. We need new drivers for all of your hardware. Go away and write them for us".
This means a lot of extra expenditure for the hardware manufacturers every time that Microsoft release a new version of Windows. Is it surprising that they might be a bit reluctant to comply?
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The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
That kinda implies that the barrier for Linux drivers is the lack of devs willing to sign an NDA. AFAIK, that's not often the case. In fact, from what I remember hearing, there have been quite a few developers willing to sign an NDA in order to get documentation -- but manufacturers just don't want the help of the OSS community. MS has the upper hand because 1) they're a corporation, not a random collection of developers and 2) they have money.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Microsoft supposed to be the poster child for things like this? "You can't get drivers on Linux because of NDAs, etc." If you _can_ get NDAs and you _are_ filthy rich, and would like to make a superior product, go out and DO IT. Not whine and beg.
MS at least could do it if HW vendors would cooperate, which many would. But at the same time it's not like MS could just dump money into this and have it be sustainable; maintaining drivers for all the HW out there they want to support would be an enormous effort.
Making a wild guess, I wouldn't be surprised if it'd double the cost of Windows. (I seem to remember driver code being at least about half of the size of the Linux kernel, so this guess isn't completely out there.) HW would be cheaper, but basically people who buy little and/or common hardware would be subsidizing the cost of driver development for people who got more exotic hardware. I think it makes far more sense to tie the cost of developing the driver with the HW that it's for.
Also remember the "you create a device, you write the driver, we change the API, we beg you to update all your drivers to the latest beta API, with all nifty DRMs and UACs."
There's a new version of Windows issued what, every 3 years on average? (At least now that 9x and NT have converged.) Let's see, NT 4 was late '96, 2000 was 2000, XP was 2001, Vista was very late 2006 or very early 2007. 4 versions in 10 years, so just over 3 years is about right. (Windows 7 is scheduled for late 2009 or early 2010, which is about another 3 years.) The driver model changes even less frequently. (E.g. my impression is that you can use basically the same code for 2000 and XP.)
Not only that, but the changes for Vista were largely rather for the better, with MS trying to push most drivers out into userspace (where they can't cause bluescreens).
Contrast this situation to Linux, which almost has a stated goal to NOT have a stable driver API. This works fine for them, but if what you want is a stable kernel interface Windows is about as stable as you're going to get.
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They could also take the long hard road. Realize this next version of windows will take a hit and force all drivers to be signed to be installed. Do the signing for free, but be very selective on what passes as quality.
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Or better yet: they could demand all devices conform to a set standard and then produce drivers for standard hardware only.
There is no reason for printers to all have different ways to talk to the OS. Same goes for scanners. This could all be standardized.
I suspect the reason they haven't done this before is that having 1000 devices all needing different drivers is a huge advantage for the incumbent OS. Unfortunately for Microsoft that incumbent OS is XP not Vista so it's all come back to bite them.
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This approach has worked very well with USB mass storage devices. The same driver talks to my camera, external hard drive, memory stick and Ogg Vorbis player. It doesn't seem to have stifled innovation any.
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What kind of innovation are you expecting in a mass storage device? You write blocks to them and read blocks back. There are a few things that can be improved - for example allowing the device to re-order requests for more efficient transfers - but not a huge amount.
Now, compare that with graphics cards. We actually have a standard for these, the VESA BIOS Extensions. This defines a way of initialising the framebuffer, setting the resolution, and even some acceleration functions, such as Bit Blt, off
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I may just have bad luck... but Microsof
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Microsoft Intellimouse optical: The driver in the link doesn't recognize this mouse... What's really funny is MS's Mac Intellimouse driver works perfectly. This is a rather old mouse, it was one of the very first optical mice available($70 back in the day).
Huh? This is my mouse of choice, and I have never had any driver troubles with it under Windows. Windows comes with a driver that Just Works, what more do you want?
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Note: I'm not even joking here unfortunately
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When XP came out, didn't Microsoft end up writing drivers for a boatload of Logitech hardware?
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition, they no longer have hardware manufacturers over a barrel. The hardware manufacturers now have the power to control the public perception of Windows, rather than Windows controlling the perception of hardware.
How did you come to this conclusion? The number of Windows users is still growing. OS X is taking a small percentage from that share, but their software is still restricted to their own hardware, making it very uninteresting for hardware manufacturers.
It's the fact that Windows is open to any hardware that makes manufacturers prefer this operating system. Also, the two factions live in symbiosis since none would exist without the other. Basically, Microsoft wants their software to work well and the manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
MS isn't going anywhere; but they face a real risk of getting bogged down in their own backwards compatibility. With Vista, they ran into the nasty trap of not being able to muster enough customer enthusiasm to drive support from hardware and software vendors, and not having enough support from hardware and software vendors to ensure safe upgrades for their customers. Vicious circle time. They'll pull through; because they have the bulk and the power; but that isn't a pretty dynamic.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Funny)
That is been becoming more obvious every year. ;-)
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Apple now have, what, 20% of the laptop market by volume and rather more by dollar revenue? I'd say there's a strong argument that a significant demographic --- young, affluent, university educated, pick any two --- has already left town. I lecture occasionally at a University which is amongst the UK equivalent of the Ivy League, and have a friend who is a full-time lecturer, and both of us (me CS, she English) are under the
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Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Funny)
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Now that Microsoft are feeling the pinch of competition
Too bad a large segment of that competition is made up of their own operating systems.
The only trouble Vista ever had was that XP worked well enough for everybody and didn't offer any incentives to upgrade.
But it's not like Apple is taking over the world any time soon.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize what they're really asking... they want OEMS to spend $250K+ of their OWN MONEY so that EACH device they've ever sold works nicely with Windows 7 and MICROSOFT looks good.
All the Linux detractors really think about that...
Now think where linux would be if hardware manufacturers spent 1/10 that much contributing drivers to Linux for each device they sold versus the zero they contribute now.
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Funny)
They'll have to pry my Wang from my cold, dead fingers!
Re:Seems to me like a bit of a role reversal (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.
All the geeks that made Microsoft the behemoth that it is today are gone.
Ballmer and co are all that's left and it has been showing.
Serious case of inept management syndrome (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the biggest sign of Microsoft's impending fall is the fact that idiot business guys are in charge now.
It's interesting you'd point that out. I was thinking something similar. Mostly in the way the request was worded. I've spent some time around inept managers and you can see a lot of the same in the summary:
"urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release" - Translation: Get on the ball and do our work for us.
"to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista" - Translation: Our failures are not our fault. They are your fault. Get on the ball and fix it.
"'There is not another WinHEC planned before Windows 7 is released,' Microsoft has warned them." - Translation: We have you by the balls. Don't make us squeeze. We want you to do things for our benefit, and we're unwilling to wait, or even to ask nicely.
Now, in contrast what they should have done is this.
Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.
Engage us as coder geeks, and we would be far more happy to comply. Speak to us - geek to geek. Let us know why Windows 7 is exciting. And admit your mistakes with Vista, so you have some credibility when you try to engage us.
Of course, inept power happy managers would never say such a thing. And it's the product that suffers. I've seen it before, just never quite on this scale before. Treat your developers like peons and they will abandon you. Programmers tend to be a little rogue in their perceptions. I can see a great many people reading that press release and thinking "well screw that crap".
I certainly would.
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No one saw the fall of Rome
Are you kidding? Alaric was garrisoned outside Rome for OVER A YEAR before the emperor betrayed him and negotiations for a piece of Switzerland (a la the governorship of Judea) broke down.
On the other hand, declining military drill as Goths and Vandals joined the Roman military was a contributing factor to the decline of the Roman empire.
Why bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.
Ya, that's likely.
BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!
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The Year of Linux on the Desktop
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
let's just spin that a little, the 21st century will be the century of Linux on the desktop
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
let's just spin that a little, the 24th century will be the century of Linux on the desktop
There, fixed that for you.
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What was that slogan? "Plays for sure" It's a long way from that to begging hardware manufacturers to play along nicely.
Yes, I know they are not related... just seemed appropriate to mention it here having read what has been said already.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is with all these Slashdot users who "lost the driver disc"?
The first thing I do with any driver disc (or any other software, for that matter) is copy it to my install respository that sits on a RAID array and is backed up regularly. I pretty much never clean that up, so I have drivers for hardware I don't own anymore.
A quick check shows I have Soundblaster drivers from 14 years ago.
Despite being such a pack rat, and literally keeping everything there (like install source for the last 3 versions of MS Office, every game I've ever purchased, etc.), it only takes up 330GB, which is less than $50 worth of disk space.
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OK, so you don't install the device at all, in which case drivers don't matter.
Seriously, if I download newer drivers, then the same thing happens to them...they get stashed away. And, when it turns out that version 2.4 of the driver screws up the hardware, I can always revert to version 2.3 (or 2.0, or 1.8, etc.). It doesn't matter to me where the hardware came from...the driver gets saved away.
And, if I bought hardware that didn't work regardles of the driver, it gets returned. So, I wouldn't have had
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Microsoft should do what the Linux community does. Work with manufacturers to get the drivers written and then maintain the drivers for the manufacturers forever.
Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft? Plus, for any device supported under Linux, the hardest part of the work is already done... figuring out how to communicate with the device.
And don't whine about driver signing, if a large OSS group came to MS with a large body of updated drivers for x64, they'd take them in a heartbeat, sign them, and even stick them on the next Windows CD if we let them.
BTW - I own two webcams now. Neither work under Windows since I lost the driver disk (and those drivers were useless under XP64/Vista anyway), but they both work just fine under Linux. What's the world coming to?!
The difference is the manufacturer abandoned the hardware a couple years ago for Windows, while they never bothered to support Linux at all in the first place. So the community stepped up for Linux, because that was the only way it was going to happen, while the manufacturers did a passable job long enough for the hardware to be non-mainstream enough that most people really don't care.
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Yes, why dont they? There are obviously far more Windows users out there to be affected by antiquated hardware.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly we don't because of things like this:
Creative Goes After Driver Modder [slashdot.org]
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the community should just step up and write them? I mean they do it for Linux, why not Microsoft?
'Cause it's Microsoft. Really, there's no other reason than that. Why should we reward their reprehensible behaviour by adding valuable functionality to their systems?
If they don't have developers, their operating systems are useless. : D
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy.
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At least this is what I hear
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I assume you've filed a bug report or two, right?
People really do want to know about this stuff.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course he has filed a detailed bug report.
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Linux has no concept of change control for the most part, you have to upgrade everything or nothing, stuff changes whenever it suits the developers to do so. I know I'm not the only person who has noticed this sort of thing. Xorg has changed the way it handles peripherals a half a dozen times in th
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I'm thinking Microsoft has wised up after the Vista debacle with hardware support. Once Windows 7 hits beta, MS will do their best to keep the APIs the same. My company does some driver development and support for some MS Server services and we like to start at least testing with new OSes as soon as possible so we have an idea of what kind of work is going to be needed to get our stuff to work with the next version of windows.
Also, for everyone that bitches about Windows changing their API so regularly, y
I can't believe Vista drivers don't work... (Score:4, Interesting)
After all the runaround with drivers for Vista, they completely changed the driver model again?
What kind of idiots are they employing?
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"well, if you designed your driver in a way that doesn't fit the model the Linux bigwigs want, there is little to no way it will be accepted"
So, uh, design your driver in a standard way that's compatible with the kernel development model. Or stop whining if you choose to make life difficult for yourself.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
you do realize that much of the "hardware" we have today is little more than application specific instruction processors (ASIPs) and memory on a board (or SoC). For these hardware devices, much of the development work is in the firmware running on the processors. Oh, and much of that code was probably written by the processor vendor, and likely was obtained under a license agreement that doesn't allow you to release it. Now, if the hardware device contains flash or an eeprom, this isn't really an issue, as the code for these processors can be stored on there. However, many store the program data in the driver. This has a couple advantages, it's cheaper to manufacture the device (fewer components), more reliable (fewer components to fail) and if a bug is discovered in the ASIP code, the manufacturer can release new device drivers that automatically update the firmware of the device, without forcing the user to manually update it. Seems like device manufacturers would have to be stupid not to upload binary blobs to their devices. These binary blobs can't be open source for the reasons outlined above, and thus the device driver cannot be added to the linux kernel.
Phil
Should it be Microsoft problem? (Score:2, Informative)
Should Microsoft insure that its software compatible with hardware? After all software is a wrapper that allows a comfortable use of hardware.
Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
HID is a double edge sword. Take USB Mass Storage as an example, if there wasn't one, we might have file system tailor made for Flash memory now.
But now Mass Storage expose everything in simple linear blocks..., it's just not possible.
Well, I know the price might probably be much higher with much low adoption rate without Mass Storage HID...
Talking about Printer, there are actually PostScript standard which work reasonably well, except that you will lost some bells and whistles like Printer maintenance stuff. Microsoft also wants to push its XPS standard, which might be a good HID support candidates.
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All we need for the flash solution is a revised HID standard that does expose raw blocks. It can still be standard and uniform, just lower level.
Put it like this. If mass storage did not have the HID abstraction and wear levelling circuitry (primitive though it may be), Windows would have absolutely soiled every flash device out there with its uniquely bad IO layer. At least the raw device is slightly protected from Windows by the standard.
Re:Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know exactly why the printers actually available(particularly the cheap ones) have resisted standardization so sharply; but the state of the market is terrible, as you note, despite their being good ways to do it. It isn't like the bad old days of USB webcams, where everybody rolled their own because no standards existed, people seem to be actively doing the wrong thing with printers.
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Switching printers when the ludicrously overpriced cartridge is empty would be way too easy if you didn't have to install new drivers and support software?
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Postscript just doesn't make sense. Back when laser printers were really expensive it did - you'd buy one fast CPU in the printer (or print server - I used to have a dual P3 box that was made by Xerox and originally just ran a PostScript interpreter and some drivers for an expensive printer). Now, however, you will have something like a 50MHz MIPS chip in the printer and even a slow handheld will have a 200MHz ARM chip - a desktop or laptop will probably have a 2GHz CPU. When you print a PS file, you hav
Why take support seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't, why should hardware makers?
Hardware support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is concerned about hardware support?
OK, I can guess that they caught a lot of flak for the recent drivers situation with Vista, but shouldn't they be more upfront about software support?
Of all the computer problems, how many of us are impacted by hardware? Yes, the hard drives die, and occasionally something will hiccup, but for every one of those issues, there are 10 "my computer is running slower now than a week ago", or there is a crazy file that I can't delete, or "I'm getting notices to buy a spyware cleaner". For all those issues, who do people call? Not Microsoft... Pfft, they call Dell, HP, or whomever they bought their box from.
So then Dell and HP in turn end up doing Microsoft software support. (Unless they just forward you to Microsoft's call center in India.)
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The biggest problem when Vista was released was shitty Nvidia and Creative drivers. Nvidia drivers were responsible for 50% of vista crashes when it first came out, hence people thought vista was unstable and crap. MS doesn't want a repeat of this for win7.
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Yeah I like the one where you right/drag a file in XP SP3 and a new window comes up first asking if you wish to copy or move the file and then you need to once again select if you wish to move or copy the file.
That's a fun one to explain. User friendly my A**.
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"my computer is running slower now than a week ago", or there is a crazy file that I can't delete, or "I'm getting notices to buy a spyware cleaner"
People need to know there's alternatives. I've been running Mac OS lately, and I'm not wanting to go back. All the power of a full Unix shell with an interface that's miles better than either Windows or Gnome+Compiz. Of course, Ubuntu is definitely getting there for your average person, and it's free.
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The very definition of an OEM implies that you're packaging the product and providing support... If I make an application that uses PostgreSQL, sell it, and the user has an issue with the database, they'll call me. Thats just...normal. Dell and HP do the same, just with hardware and software together. Thats also why if you buy an OEM version of Windows (or virtually any software), and you have issues, you can't call Microsoft, because YOU are support. If you buy a boxed copy at Bestbuy though, then you have
This is the problem with MS (Score:2)
Yet all the support is farmed out to the manufacture, which farms it out to the call center,
Re:Anyone that understands the underlying architec (Score:3, Informative)
And ANYONE writing drivers on a professional level with Windows actually HAS the code under their shared licensing program. ANYONE can sign up for it and, probably, get access to the code as needed if they are willing to sign the NDA.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:4, Funny)
Copying files to and from a network was excruciatingly slow - how did that get past Microsoft's QA?
What QA?
Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft needs to take support seriously. (Score:5, Interesting)
Its an application like any other that can be killed, move, restarted, or even removed.
Except, of course, for the fact that killing the "root" explorer.exe ends up causing you pretty ugly problems.
For example, when you kill off the explorer.exe process controlling your taskbar and system tray, starting Explorer again usually leaves you with a mess, since the running tasks don't go back into the tray. Then, too, everything that was in the various "autorun" places gets run again because Explorer is too dumb to figure out this isn't the first time it is being run.
Basically, because Explorer is the display shell and hooks into so damn much, but it isn't really the root process for your login, the whole setup is so fragile that the only way to make sure everything ends up right is to log out and log back in.
hrrr (Score:5, Insightful)
We first take the chance to declare you the cultprits of the vista fiasco, bad hardware makers!.
Now please be a good boy and support Vista 7 right away, we know this is a sudden move with so few months left for the beginning of 2009 and you are still trying to support Vista. But now we decided to release another OS, so bitch please support that one already, thanks.
Linux Drivers are more important. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft begs hardware OEMs to write drivers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Intro: "Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista."
Interesting.
Meanwhile, Linux driver developers are begging to write drivers (at no cost) for hardware OEMs.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6669895837.html [desktoplinux.com]
As a hardware OEM, you would have to be thinking that it is going to cost you way, way less to get a working driver for your new product written for Linux.
If I was a hardware person... (Score:4, Insightful)
...I'd be already over this after just having had to do it all on Vista. Now they're going to have to go through the same thing immediately, which I suspect most of them won't bother doing, thinking "oh, it's years away from release".
I don't know if Vista driver support has improved significantly since its release (surely it has; I'm still happily running XP), but I suspect there's still a lot of consumer demand for certain/older driver fixes for Vista that are still on the TODO list for many hardware developers.
Microsoft is contradicting themselves (Score:3, Informative)
Just FYI, they very recently claimed this:
Microsoft: Moving to Windows 7 Easy for Device Makers [pcworld.com]
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Hardly. Everyone with half a brain in the PC market takes Microsoft seriously as it is, they don't need to beg. It's foolish not to take the vendor of the standard OS seriously, after all.
It's funny, though, the position Microsoft is in. Being the industry standard, they have the luxury of letting vendors write drivers for them (unlike the Linux folks). But as they're finding out, this also puts them at the mercy of the vendors. Delicious irony, I'd say. I wonder if this will lead to Microsoft writing drive
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How's Linux's 0.91% market share feeling?
Christ. You make the rest of us who use Linux look bad.
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