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Comment by daenney | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who's a bit disappointed by MS's response? I get that shimming would fix it but wouldn't it be more productive if they'd put some pressure on Synaptics to fix it? They might take notice if Microsoft comes knocking. There's a bajimillion Windows devices potentially going through life with this bug as Synaptics trackpads are pretty pervasive. Not saying they shouldn't do the shim, but I'd hope they would go further than that.

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At Microsoft's scale, probably not. Their inability to successfully pressure third-party software vendors to do the right thing is why they developed the shimming infrastructure in the first place.

If they removed the drivers from the installation image so people had to manually install software for Synaptics devices to work, I think Synaptics would notice rather quickly. They are not some obscure vendor that has gone out of business.

It's just another excuse for shoddy quality.

"Installing Windows (10 + 1) broke my touchpad, it was working perfectly fine before! Microsoft can't do anything right!"

What would you have them do?

Your question is probably better directed at the parent.

I had no idea what Shimming was until this article.

Shim seems to mean to build:

>a small library that transparently intercepts API calls and changes the arguments passed, handles the operation itself, or redirects the operation elsewhere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shim_(computing)

A shim is conventionally a carpentry/metalwork/etc. term for a piece of wood, metal, rubber or similar material you stick between two things to get them in the right position relative to one another, to fill some space, basically. This is necessary because the context of installation for many physical building situations are not reliably plumbed. It's also used as a term for things like thin washers used in lens manufacturing to deal with manufacturing tolerance differences when aligning elements in each individual lens.

It is a term adopted here because the "shim" in this case is a small simple thing (driver) sitting between two other components to fix a problem. That's a simpler way of looking at a real life shim: a small simple thing stuck between two other things to solve a problem.

Also relevant is advice[1].

Same technique, though for different purposes. Or you could say that shimming is a special case of advising.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_(programming)

> wouldn't it be more productive if they'd put some pressure on Synaptics to fix it? They might take notice if Microsoft comes knocking.

It's possible that is happening, indeed, I suspect it's likely. The Microsoft developer "Orange" who the blog poster linked to is almost certainly Gov Maharaj (ORANGE),[1] a very prominent member of the Windows application compatibility team who has earned enough influence internally to be able to lean on hardware vendors like Synaptics through the hardware compatibility and partner ecosystem teams.

I used to work at Microsoft and saw Gov in action on internal email lists for people running daily Windows builds. He probably answered about a quarter to half of all the "this program is broken in this build!" emails.

You can see Gov (and perhaps be surprised by his technical chops) on the MSDN "Defrag Show" PC troubleshooting video series. [2]

[1] Origin of the name "Orange": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081021-00/?p=...

[2] https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The-Defrag-Show

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