Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

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It absolutely is Microsoft's... well, not fault, exactly, but the way the ecosystem has evolved has been driven largely by choices they've made. If the ecosystem allows for buggy hardware driver releases to screw things up for customers, it's because MS made the choice, possibly by default, not to run an Apple-like ecosystem.

The reason I don't blame MS entirely for this is because it's clearly a trade-off. In return for the risk of unreliability, they got a vast increase in the number of hardware manufacturers willing to play in their ecosystem, precisely because MS can be fairly hands-off. This drives prices down, and increases the size of the market-place.

Where I do take issue with MS directly is that despite consciously being in the driving seat of an ecosystem like this for so long, it's taken them years to successfully isolate the user from buggy drivers. They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user. It's not a foregone conclusion that a screwed-up driver must inevitably lead to a bluescreen, or anything like it.

>They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user.

Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time. As you stated, the decisions Microsoft took got them to their throne.

I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years. I was shocked to see it changed appearance in a screenshot in an article about Windows 8. And the "upgrade" to Yosemite has completely destroyed my wifi stability, made the system sluggish (Safari even decides to stop smooth scrolling after a few hours), boot time has pretty much doubled with the same amount of apps installed (SSD too).

>I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years.

I can reproducibly blue screen Windows 8.1 with the latest ATI drivers (as well as every driver for the last year and a half) by watching hardware accelerated Flash movies on an ATI HD 7770 GHz Edition. Swapping the card to a different ATI card fixes it. Swapping the card to an nVidia card fixes it. Swapping the 7770 GHz for another 7770 GHz does not fix it.

This only happens in Windows. It does not happen with the ATI drivers in Linux.

> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.

Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

> Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

...

> There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

Which of these arguments would you like to keep? You can't have both; or at least, they don't refer to overlapping time periods. And I'd take issue with either: in the first case, MS always had the option early on of carving a controlled niche rather than trying for wide appeal. That's exactly what early Apple did, and I'd argue that MS could have done precisely the same on PC hardware, if they'd chosen to. As regards the anti-trust argument, why don't we see that being levelled at Apple? An MS which chose to drive a more closed ecosystem probably wouldn't have been so utterly dominant as to run the risk of antitrust accusations, and again, that was their choice.

> They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

Again, that was their choice.

> And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

I'd argue that this sort of problem affects either sort of ecosystem.

I've been running Win7 on a Dell Optiplex 980 for years, and have never had a BSOD. Except yesterday when I pressed Ctrl-Up arrow/Ctrl-Right/Ctrl-Down in Visual Studio. That was just asking for it :o)

(Ctrl-Up flips the screen).

I've been running Debian Wheezy Linux for years. A few minor issues in Word 2010 (it always opens on my top screen!) and playing GTA4. Never had a BSOD. :)

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