Intelligent devices: stupid user or cluless designers?
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Appliances around us becoming more and more "intelligent". They make more and more "decisions" on their own and we have less and less say as to how devices handle things. I know it suppose to be a good thing (well, kind of) but I often find myself being very frustrated by so called "intelligence". To be precise, I am frustrated with the way "intelligence" being implemented. Here is a few examples: Vacuum Cleaner that shuts down when filter gets too dirty. Good feature, right? Not really a necessity, but I can kind of see the point, don't you? Well, the trick is that it shuts down for 30 minutes and will not start until 30 minutes are up. It doesn't matter that it takes 1 minute to change the filter. It just forces you to wait for 30 minutes before you can continue cleaning. Why? Why can't they just detect that I changed the filter and let me keep going? InkJet printer that detects when ink is out. Useful idea, kind of... Except, it doesn't really account for the fact that ink can evaporate in the air or that it could be a little less ink in the cartridge that they anticipated. So as a result after a couple of changes of ink cartridges the ink detection feature is completely out of wack. It ether lets you print when there is no ink anymore or doesn't let you print when ink is still there. Last one is especially frustrating, because you actually have to trick the printer into "thinking" that you are replacing the ink before you can go on printing. My last example is implementation of ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) in Windows 2000 and XP. It suppose to be that great thing that beside all the other things makes our lives easier by auto-selecting which IRQs are assigned to which devices. I assume, that it is very useful for majority of people, especially if they have no clue what IRQs are and know nothing about hardware. I only have a couple of questions: why, oh why did they remove an ability to override what IRQ goes where? "Plug and Pray" auto-selected IRQs by default but at least I could override the auto settings if I needed to get some stubborn device to work. Second question is this: so Okay I cannot override selection of IRQs, but why oh why if my system has 5 available IRQs all of my devices get assigned to IRQ 11? Is there something very attractive about this IRQ? I have a couple of devices that really don't like to be sharing IRQs. There is no easy way of disabling ACPI in Win2k or XP. You have to pretty much reinstall OS and select Standard PC HAL instead of default ACPI HAL.
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Appliances around us becoming more and more "intelligent". They make more and more "decisions" on their own and we have less and less say as to how devices handle things. I know it suppose to be a good thing (well, kind of) but I often find myself being very frustrated by so called "intelligence". To be precise, I am frustrated with the way "intelligence" being implemented. Here is a few examples: Vacuum Cleaner that shuts down when filter gets too dirty. Good feature, right? Not really a necessity, but I can kind of see the point, don't you? Well, the trick is that it shuts down for 30 minutes and will not start until 30 minutes are up. It doesn't matter that it takes 1 minute to change the filter. It just forces you to wait for 30 minutes before you can continue cleaning. Why? Why can't they just detect that I changed the filter and let me keep going? InkJet printer that detects when ink is out. Useful idea, kind of... Except, it doesn't really account for the fact that ink can evaporate in the air or that it could be a little less ink in the cartridge that they anticipated. So as a result after a couple of changes of ink cartridges the ink detection feature is completely out of wack. It ether lets you print when there is no ink anymore or doesn't let you print when ink is still there. Last one is especially frustrating, because you actually have to trick the printer into "thinking" that you are replacing the ink before you can go on printing. My last example is implementation of ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) in Windows 2000 and XP. It suppose to be that great thing that beside all the other things makes our lives easier by auto-selecting which IRQs are assigned to which devices. I assume, that it is very useful for majority of people, especially if they have no clue what IRQs are and know nothing about hardware. I only have a couple of questions: why, oh why did they remove an ability to override what IRQ goes where? "Plug and Pray" auto-selected IRQs by default but at least I could override the auto settings if I needed to get some stubborn device to work. Second question is this: so Okay I cannot override selection of IRQs, but why oh why if my system has 5 available IRQs all of my devices get assigned to IRQ 11? Is there something very attractive about this IRQ? I have a couple of devices that really don't like to be sharing IRQs. There is no easy way of disabling ACPI in Win2k or XP. You have to pretty much reinstall OS and select Standard PC HAL instead of default ACPI HAL.
I agree with your points about (un)intelligent features. About ACPI... I haven't tried this on NT4, just 2K so far. But, you can disable it without suffering a performance hit and/or reinstalling the OS. Pull out all of your peripherals except video in any available PCI slots. Start Win2K, go to the Device Manager and under Computer delete the ACPI drivers. Restart the machine. Shutdown. Put your extra hardware back in, and restart. Power will no longer be regulated, but sometimes you need this if you have power-intensive devices - like realtime video capturing. As far as assigning IRQs, you have a get the BIOS and Windows to agree. Select a non PNP OS from the BIOS settings and do what you want within Windows. You have to reinstall some drivers it refuses to let go. IRQ sharing is down to overcome the limitation of available IRQs versus the amount of hardware people like to use nowadays. Number 11 is one that's not reserved for any special purpose by the system and Windows likes to use it. Therefore, you'll find plenty of hardware that is Windows compatible that is happy with it too. Jeremy L. Falcon Homepage : Sonork = 100.16311
xenophobic Xanthippe – xerophthalmic Xanadu Perseverance pushes past painful promenades - providing precious peace. Surely some striving souls survive symptomatic stress? Maybe my mangling might misguide malicious miscreants? -
I agree with your points about (un)intelligent features. About ACPI... I haven't tried this on NT4, just 2K so far. But, you can disable it without suffering a performance hit and/or reinstalling the OS. Pull out all of your peripherals except video in any available PCI slots. Start Win2K, go to the Device Manager and under Computer delete the ACPI drivers. Restart the machine. Shutdown. Put your extra hardware back in, and restart. Power will no longer be regulated, but sometimes you need this if you have power-intensive devices - like realtime video capturing. As far as assigning IRQs, you have a get the BIOS and Windows to agree. Select a non PNP OS from the BIOS settings and do what you want within Windows. You have to reinstall some drivers it refuses to let go. IRQ sharing is down to overcome the limitation of available IRQs versus the amount of hardware people like to use nowadays. Number 11 is one that's not reserved for any special purpose by the system and Windows likes to use it. Therefore, you'll find plenty of hardware that is Windows compatible that is happy with it too. Jeremy L. Falcon Homepage : Sonork = 100.16311
xenophobic Xanthippe – xerophthalmic Xanadu Perseverance pushes past painful promenades - providing precious peace. Surely some striving souls survive symptomatic stress? Maybe my mangling might misguide malicious miscreants?Thanks, Jeremy. I have actually used a similar "trick" to disable ACPI under Win2k on one of my machines without reinstalling it. However, I still yet to figure out how to do the same thing with XP. It refuses to even install with Standard PC HAL... I'll figure it out at some point, but it just bothers me that all of my pains could be avoided by simply allowing me to override the IRQ assignment. I know that IRQ sharing is a good thing and we will not be able to run as many devices as we are capable of running these days at the same time on the same machine without it. Unfortunately, not all the devices and/or their drivers work well with IRQ sharing and it seems to be a common sense that maybe sometimes somewhere someone would like to override the default setting. And I know just the person... :((