A machine claims that 1072890218 seconds after the epoch, Ignatios Souvatzis wr
ote:

> On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 04:51:30PM +0200, Jukka Marin wrote:
> 
> > Not related to this problem, but if the USB devices really are as buggy
> > as described on the NetBSD lists, how come I can plug almost any USB
> > gadget to an XP box and it Just Works (TM)?  I've got cameras, CF card
> > readers, a DVcam etc. and they all work without special drivers.  How can
> > bill gates write such drivers if real programmers can't?  Not trying to
> > start a flame war, just curious..
> 
> Maybe Gates' programmers write to the real behaviour of the devices,
> contrary to what the official specifications are?
> 
> Variant of this: misinterpretation of the official specifications.

After going to a few PlugFests and speaking with a representative
on the USB-IF, (in 2000/2001 at least) I found out that while there
were a bunch of checks for devices, there were no checks for hosts,
so I asked him if I could take a host to the PlugFest that had some
sort of fiber connection, call it USB and fail every device that
came to my booth for compatibility testing.  The answer was yes.

The way to get the USB logo on your product was to goto the plugfest,
and pass the "Gold Suite" which was often more unreliable than the
devices being tested against it.  Mostly electrical system tests,
and plugging your device into a chain of 5 hubs with 5 meter cables
and seeing if it could talk to Win98. Then, go around to every room
you could and test your device against their system.  In every case
I saw but one, this consisted of a machine running Win98 or Win2K,
sometimes with a few hubs and other devices on the bus, sometimes
not, and making sure there were no blue screens, and the second
device didn't corrupt the first.

The one exception was when Sun had one of their UltraSparcs there
and were testing their Solaris drivers.  They passed everyone if
they worked or not, as they were trying to test the host, and didn't
want to fail anyone like in my hypothetical question to the IF rep.

Now there are a few testing companies that are supposed to check
things, so you do not need to go to a plugfest for testing to get
the logo on a product, but I don't know how good they are.

Jon