One more for the "proprietary drivers bad" file
One more for the "proprietary drivers bad" file
Posted Mar 30, 2008 23:54 UTC (Sun) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)Parent article: A creative example of the value of free drivers
Vista-capable lawsuit paints picture of buggy NVIDIA drivers: "NVIDIA drivers were identified as the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged."
Posted Apr 1, 2008 2:39 UTC (Tue)
by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
[Link] (1 responses)
When programs grovel into undocumented structures... I know, I know! It's a MSDN blog page, but Raymond Chen's three anecdotes only seem to highlight the problem of how proprietary software lends itself to unreliability. Some of the back-door, sneaky techniques the ISVs pull off just to get their software working in Windows seem utterly surreal (C'mon, reaching up the stack? They're just begging for a segmentation fault or a blue screen!). I suppose NVIDIA's "bugs" are equally their blame as Microsoft's, because certainly it's behavior like that described on Chen's blog--relying on undocumented ABIs/APIs--that hardware companies and ISVs put in their Windows-based software. Back to Creative, I personally think their PR and marketing staff should be shot for publicly blabbing that their sound cards were intentionally crippled just for Vista. Talk about driving prospective customers away en masse!
Posted Apr 4, 2008 15:05 UTC (Fri)
by gouyou (guest, #30290)
[Link]
Drivers and 3rd-party vendor software bugs
Drivers and 3rd-party vendor software bugs
A lot of the problem is also due to the last minute driver model changes that happened before
the Vista release ...