One of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early months of being out in the wild. Microsoft is trying to keep this story from repeating itself, saying that everything that works on Vista should work on Windows 7. To gain a little more insight into this problem, Microsoft gave out some very interesting figures regarding driver installation failure rates.The below figures come from Microsoft's Online Crash Analysis and Customer Experience Improvement Program tools, and show the success/failure rates of driver installations during September 2008, on Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 installed.
These figures are interesting, but at the same time, a tad bit on the useless side of things because there's no way to make any comparisons. How does this compare to Windows XP? Windows Vista pre-SP1? Ubuntu? OpenSUSE? Please note that we are talking driver installations here, so drivers that are already part of the base OS are not taken into account. Microsoft has stated that anything above 3% is not good.
Then there is the problem of not really knowing what's causing the failures. Bugs in Windows Vista? Buggy drivers? People trying to install XP drivers on Windows Vista? Crappy driver installation programs? Messy vendor websites, leading to people picking the wrong drivers? Simply the fact that there are no Vista drivers for that piece of hardware? There could be so many things going wrong here, that it's really impossible to blame one single factor - these figures are too skinny for that.
The solution already exists. Microsoft has been frantically at work adding drivers to Windows Update, but apparently, this turns out to be difficult. Right now, they are adding about 50 drivers a week, Microsoft's Chris Matichuk revealed.
Matichuck also stated that the company has a goal of making sure that 90% of systems are fully covered via drivers included on the Windows 7 disk and those in Windows Update. "We're tracking this as a metric, by the time we hit RTM we want to have at least 90% covered. It'd be great if we could get 95% or higher, but 90% is the goal we're going to go for." For all those for-the-sake-of-argument "grandmothers", let's hope they succeed.
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"This is the first real release of Wayland and Weston. Wayland is the protocol and IPC mechanism while Weston is the reference compositor implementation. The 0.85 branch in both repositories is going to be protocol and interface stable. We have a series of protocol changes on the table before 1.0 but this branch marks a stable point before we jump into that." Change is coming to the Linux world. And yes, I get the irony of using this particular icon, but it's the closest I could find.
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Well, this is good news. "Germany will not sign an international anti-piracy treaty, despite having already agreed to it in principal, government sources in Berlin said Friday, February 10." with Germany on the side of reason - for now - we're a huge step closer to stopping ACTA.
"Microsoft today issued a brief statement promising to make 'essential patents' available to competitors at fair and reasonable licensing rates, and promised not to sue companies making products that infringe these patents. The actual patents themselves weren't disclosed, but Microsoft joins both Google and Apple in making recent statements on so-called fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms. Such licensing terms designate certain patents as essential to complying with industry standards, making them available for licensing at (supposedly) lower-than-usual rates." This industry is dysfunctional.
"Like any space opera, the story of information technology is a very simple one. It is played out in a myriad of different ways by a revolving cast of characters, but it always has its loveable heroes, its predictably nefarious villains, innocent civilians to be saved, and bumbling bureaucrats that aren't inherently evil, but begin every story aiding the forces of darkness out of a misplaced belief they are preserving law and order in their corner of the galaxy." He might use Star Wars as an analogy (I strongly dislike Star Wars - Trekkie here), but it sums up very well how I feel about computing today.
"Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units and central processing units on a single chip to collaborate - boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent.""Microsoft revealed today that it plans to launch the highly anticipated 'Consumer Preview' version of Windows 8 on February 29th. The company will hold an event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 29th to launch the Windows 8 Consumer Preview between 3PM and 5PM (CET)." Still haven't seen any indication they've addressed the core issues with Metro (no window management, no real applications). If they don't, this release will be entirely useless to anyone who uses computers beyond Facebook, weather applications, and Twitter."While the file-sharing ecosystem is currently filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology continue to work on their decentralized BitTorrent network. Their Tribler client doesn't require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication. 'The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,' the lead researcher says." In a way, the efforts by Hollywood and the corrupt US Congress is actually increasing the resiliency of peer-to-peer technology. Karma.
"People who have the latest Symbian Nokia smartphones can now update them to Nokia Belle - bringing a fresh look to their screens thanks to the latest user interface. Once you have installed Nokia Belle you will still have the same phone, but it will feel like new, with improved performance." Love the version name."Research in Motion has said the native software development kit for Blackberry 10 will be committed to open source. The firm, which has a history of basing its business on being a closed system, is shifting more and more to open source. Its upcoming Blackberry 10 native SDK will include many open source code resources."
Let this be a lesson. After posts by John Gruber and Shawn King, this happened to Violet Blue. "The misinformation gave a significant number of people fuel to stalk me, attack me for hours at a time, malign, insult me in disgusting ways, threaten me with weapon-specific violent death (an axe), and lead social media attempts to force me to lose my job over the matter. Many referenced John Gruber, and/or his post as they did this. Plans were openly made to make media to attack me - another Angry Mac Bastards podcast." Disgusting story, and sadly enough, this isn't the first time this has happened, as Blue notes in her article. I don't like talking about these matters (you don't want to know the kind of crap that gets thrown my way at times), but I can assure you my inbox has seen its share of pure vitriol after Gruber links to an OSNews piece. It ain't pretty.
