Why is the name of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 hard-coded into the Bluetooth drivers?

Comments

• NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The answer:

  The device local name string is specified to be encoded in UTF-8. However, the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 reports its name as Microsoft⟪AE⟫ Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, encoding the registered trademark symbol ® not as UTF-8 as required by the specification but in code page 1252. What’s even worse is that a bare ⟪AE⟫ is not a legal UTF-8 sequence, so the string wouldn’t even show up as corrupted; it would get rejected as invalid.

  Thanks, Legal Department, for sticking a ® in the descriptor and messing up the whole thing.

  There is a special table inside the Bluetooth drivers of “Devices that report their names wrong (and the correct name to use)”. If the Bluetooth stack sees one of these devices, and it presents the wrong name, then the correct name is substituted.

  That table currently has only one entry.

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  • vinnymac@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    While I don’t know this is the case, I can say from experience that in large enterprise organizations compliance departments will and do actively prevent the release of features and even commits if they don’t comply.

    While that’s not an excuse for challenging them, I could definitely see a stressed out mid level just trying to make there manager happy and move on with life.

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    • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Good explanation. Thank you.

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  • ratten@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thanks, Legal Department

    Another reason why I have 0 respect for anyone working in legal departments for businesses. They are unnecessary and make things worse to justify their existence.

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    • phutatorius@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      When I was doing bids for consulting work, our legal department earned its keep many times over.

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• nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Well, there’s plenty of standards-noncompliance out there, but breaking the firmware of a peripheral you manufacture so that it can’t be properly supported by the OS driver you wrote and needs a workaround requires a special type of corporate boneheadedness.

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• floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 reports its name as Microsoft⟪AE⟫ Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, encoding the registered trademark symbol ® not as UTF-8 as required by the specification but in code page 1252” is a sentence that seems to have come straight from unix_surrealism

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• phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Leave it up to microsoft to screw up even something that simple.

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  • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You spelled Microsoft® wrong.

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  • AceBonobo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This sounds like someone said, I only changed some text, we don’t even need another round of testing.

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  • Strider@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    How big is the company you’re working in?

    In my experience that’s just a corporate thing.

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• Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The stupid, old, irritating cycle of: You implement against a standard, and then you implement exceptions for third party users of the standard. 😔

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  • davidgro@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But in this case it’s first-party, and they still had to make an exception

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• Doorknob@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Raymond’s book is an amazing read and full of stories very much like this one.

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