Very helpful, thank you. But it does remind me of that Yzma quote in The Emperor's New Groove: "Why do we even have that lever?"

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delta_p_delta_x 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why do we even have that lever

For plug-and-play devices with multiple configuration knobs. It is nice to be able to click through a printer wizard to configure how one wants to print their documents. Likewise with an audio interface: loopback settings, codec, sampling rate, gain and volume of channels, etc. Or consider a USB CNC mill; configuring things like milling revolution rate, setting which bit is installed, what lubricant is used, etc. Or consider the Nvidia/AMD control panels for their GPUs; things like colour depth and space, resolution, scaling, anti-aliasing, vertical synch, power settings, etc.

Some of these settings are device- and even manufacturer-specific; one might argue these are more than a driver or the platform can or should provide. That being said, this stuff should go into a user-mode driver...

That LG have exploited this functionality to install adware is on them.

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miki123211 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For audio interfaces, HDAudio lets you do most of this. What the extra software gives you instead is often some crappy DSP that increases latency and messes with sound quality.

For years, Dell's / Realtek's software had an unpaged memory leak somewhere. If you were using a screen reader (I guess they must interact with audio devices in some very specific way that Realtek hasn't accounted for), your system would eventually run out of RAM and BSOD. They didn't fix this until Microsoft and a few screen reader vendors intervened. "Don't buy Dell" was a standard recommendation in the blind community for years, which didn't help if you had a work PC with no local admin.

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nottorp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is nice to be able to click

You said click. This happens without clicking anything.

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Brian_K_White 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If there is a system where someone smashes through your wall to deliver you some food, and we ask "why do we even have this guy-smashes-through-wall system?", "So we can have dinner" does not answer that question.

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Saris 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh definitely, it's more a question of why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access or do anything outside of just configuring the hardware.

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tremon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access

Firmware updates for devices are not a thing in your world?

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Saris 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like windows update should handle distributing the verified new firmware file if it is also distributing the driver utility to avoid any issues like this post talks about.

	▲	tremon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That would be a good idea actually, but I'm not sure how viable that is within the current Windows Update instrumentation. Allowing local binaries to fetch random URLs through the Windows Update API is no different from them using the HTTP Service unless there's some kind of whitelisting/validation happening there. The alternative would be that Microsoft uses their own Windows Update cdn to host random firmware files that they're not able to verify themselves. Both cases sound like maintenance overhead for Microsoft without benefit to them.

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VorpalWay 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is no reason we need a badly coded vendor control panel to install firmware upgrades though. On Linux https://fwupd.org/ is a database for vendor firmware, and you use one shared open source took to install upgrades for all devices attached to your system.

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darig 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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szundi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]