Friday, March 9. 2007Small things to help free software: Device IDsComments
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I appreciate you pointing this piece of information out. But what I would really like to know is why there does not seem to be any systematic gathering of such data.
It seems to me that a program could be written which performs the steps you listed-and prompts the user to type in model specific information(such as found in the users manual or written on the packaging material). This program could be called automatically anytime hardware is detected which was not already accounted for. And this program could be integrated into, for example, a freedesktop.org package which could become standard among distros(ie. kind of like a desktop service-perhaps using dbus/hal). The point I am getting at is this: why is it that we do not already always compile all of this information ?- and by this I mean- why is their not a central database and a mechanism for our systems to phone-home all of the devices which are actually in use coupled with user-inputed descriptions ? (via CLI clients when no desktop is running, via a python-GUI when running a desktop environment) ? What I would love to see is that when I do a new install such a program would record all of the available hardware-show me this list and ask me to fill in more specific information- and then when this is completed the information would automatically be transmitted to a central database(without requiring to much effort on the part of users who do not comprehend/yet understand why such is necessary. After install, whenever new devices are detected this program launch, I would recieve a desktop notification concerning newly detected hardware-if I click on the notification this program would be launched and I would be prompted to enter additonal information. If the data is collected anonymously this process would not even really need direct user input- if all of this data was automatically collected, even without additional information, enough users would voluntarily give such additional information-provided that they were prompted to. Given that there are 1000's of devices in use for any given identification acquired through hardware detection, if only one person filled in additional information for each device- the database would "know" what the device is by pairing the description with the already acquired date from hardware detection probes. This information is so valuable, so indispensable, it should not be up to individual users to voluntarily commit. How many millions of hours per year are lost by developers and users trying to identify hardware correctly and tying contextualized solutions(via bug reports or forums posts) to solving their own hardware problems or in improving software support for such hardware ? If people have privacy concerns: put up a disclaimer letting people know the information is being gathered and phoned-home and only if they refuse(by click "do not perform automated hardware detection and reporting") be able to prevent such from happening.
I understand your suggestions, but please note that I'm in no way affiliated with those projects. So if you would discuss such efforts, better directly contact them (and probably other projects like smartmontools that collect hardware information).
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Hanno hat bereits vor einiger Zeit einen Blogeintrag geschrieben, dass man mit dem Eintragen von Device IDs enorm mithelfen kann. Oft sind die DeviceIDs von alltäglicher Hardware nicht in pciids verzeichnet. Auch bei meiner Hardware waren zahlreiche Devic
Tracked: Aug 29, 13:37