On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:29:00 PST, David Schwartz said: > Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Remember, the goal is to > allow consumers to know whether or not their system's hardware > specifications are available. It's not about driver availability -- if the > hardware specifications are available and a driver is not, that's not the > hardware manufacturer's fault. My point was "their system's hardware specifications" is, for some popular vendors, a *very* fuzzy notion. You can't (for instance) say "specs are available for a Dell Latitude D820" - there are configurations that specs are available for, and configs that aren't. My D820 has an NVidia card in it - we know the answer there. Do you give a different answer for a D820 that has the Intel i950 graphics chipset instead? Even more annoying, Dell often *changes* the vendor - the line item for the DVD drive says "8X DVD+/-RW" (other choices include 24X CD-ROM and 24X CD-RW/DVD). Mine showed up with a Philips SDVD8820 - but it's possible that some other D820 will get some other vendor's DVD (I've seen 2 C820's ordered at the same time, they showed up with 2 different vendor's "24X CD-RW/DVD"). It's possible that some poor guy is going to get a D820 that has a DVD that we have a known buggy driver for - what do we tell *them*? It's *easy* to do a "semi-good" that tells you if there's drivers for the hardware config you're running the program on. But there's 2 problems: a) You probably already know the answer b) By the time you can run the program, it's often too late.... So given those 2 points, what actual value-added info does this *give*, over and above 'lspci' and friends? I suppose maybe for a install CD, it gives a quick way to cleanly abort the install with a "Don't bother continuing unless it's OK that your graphics/wireless/whatever won't work". On the other hand, the installer should have a grasp on this *already*.... Perfect may be the enemy of the good, but the good is also the enemy of stuff claiming to be good but misses on an important design goal...
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