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Windows 2000 Has 65,000+ Bugs
According to a story on ZDNET, Sm@rt Reseller got an internal MS memo that says Windows 2000 has 63,000 "defects" (if you read the article the number goes up to 65,000+ bugs), and that's the same Windows that will be out on Feb. 17! Is this what MS suggests putting on people's workstations and installing on production servers? What do you think?
Actually, I've used Microsoft's internal bug tracking system, and it's basically just a cheezy little database comments type frontend they wrote themselves, much like Bugzilla. Of course, it's windoze software, not a scalable, web based thing like Bugzilla.
Bugzilla actually is somewhat better IMO, though the two are about equivalent in most respects. Actually, they're nearly identical in practice. Bugzilla has far superior bug dependency tracking, with the dependency graphs and such, which puts it on top.
Microsoft's "advanced statistical analysis tools" for their bug database are also pretty much describable as "a cheesy excel spreadsheet with the database link business." Nothing fancy or anything.
hmm... Think about this...
You are the Sys. admin of a big company, and you decide to install Linux with kernel 2.3.42 in a production server (note: this is a development kernel!). Now go ahead and tell that to the upper management. You'll be fired in 60 seconds...
Unlike your example with Mozilla (or in my example - Linux) - those bugs are NOT being published. MS doesn't tells you "ahh, with IIS 5.0 we got this error and that error" - you'll find that when you have BSOD or your system won't work well..
In Mozilla or Linux - you got a bug list (in the Linux example - check Alan Cox TODO list to see what I mean) - so you know whats right and whats wrong. With MS Win 2k - nada.
And this, my friend, is the difference..
Hetz (Heunique)
From my past experience, I know that MS underestimate bugs, so I really think that "potential issues" are bugs. Maybe not a serious ones, but still - its bugs..
Hetz (Heunique)
Not to be predictable, but yes, it *can* crash without a BSOD. I'd be willing to bet that he has a driver problem. I'd also be willing to bet he's not overclocking (who overclocks their corporate desktop?) and as for IRQ conflicts... he said at the office, most offices have fairly competent tech staff setting up machines initially. But you're right, we're all zealots, and crazy and w2k has no problems. just like Linux has no problems and can't crash. uh-huh. whatever.
----------------------------
- Pending bugs: 13413
- Forwarded upstream bugs: 1084
There are 702 grave, critical or important bugs (subset of pending) the rest ``normal'' or ``wishlist''.This illustrates one more reason free/open software and processes are nice. We can find out just what is wrong with Debian, how it will effect our actuall use, and where we might help in fixing it.
In the case of MS bugs, the 65000 number is completely meaningless. Are their bugs show stoppers, or are many of them due to someone not liking the shade used to color a menu? Will the bug really hurt our use or are the applications we use uneffected? Is there any way to work around or fix these bugs, now today and with out waiting for MS? All these questions go unanswered.
But, I guess I am not saying anything new here.
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Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Its getting *real* old already...enough please.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Ah, and here again is the difference between a closed source company like Microsoft and an open source project like Linux. If someone finds a severe bug in the Linux tcp/ip stack, the world knows about it immediately and the problem gets fixed. Do we know anything about the nature of those 65,000 bugs? Can someone from Microsoft provide a report of how many bugs there are per Windows sub-system and post it on the web? As a buying customer, I want...no, *demand*...to know what bugs are in the system I am using. If you are unwilling to provide that information, then I simply refuse to buy any products from you.
Again, a single bug in the memory mapper is a hell of a lot more costly than 100 bugs in write.exe Without actually releasing the list and seeing the context of those bugs, then that number if completely useless.
(If the list is available, then someone please post a link to it and I'll shut up.)
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I think this is obvious flamebait and offers great opportunities for Microsoft-bashers to get their daily fix. Everyone knows Windows has lots of bugs. Do we really need a story to tell us that? Furrfu. I consider this type of story a massive troll on the part of Slashdot. "Shocking NEWS - Windows Sucks!!!" Show of hands; who didn't already know that? Shame on you.
Well, you asked. :)
-- TM, thinking that 64k isn't really so many, considering that's about 1 bug per 700 lines of code, and that for every known bug there are hundreds of unknown ones, the discovery of each of which will be yet another Slashdot troll.
haha..
why can't I have moderator points on the days I want them?
I agree, that was really funny.
But all the moderators are dead. I don't get it, he posted it at "2", the moderators should be able to see it. Oops, it wasn't part of the first 50 posts.
Is that in the moderator guidelines yet?
Oh well.
If you can read this, moderate the parent comment up! Sure, read it first, verify that it's really funny. But just do it, you freaks!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Does this surprise you? Of course, Microsoft wants the profit without having to take responsibility for their product's shortcomings, so they write provisions into the license agreements to codify that. Doesn't come as a surprise to me, quite frankly...
That's why the claim of many people that they "like commercial software because if it fails, you have someone to sue" is basically moot - with new legislation that's supposed to make clickthrough licenses enforcable, that makes it even more pointless. They don't have anyone to sue. They've AGREED to a license that says as much. Oh well, it's their own damn fault, I guess.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Well, the 65000+ bug count applies to the FINAL release (which went gold late last year) and so, if you buy Win2k, all those bugs are in the product you will buy.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Ok, your claim here proves you don't understand the concept which you're using...
You're comparing a count of KNOWN bugs (65000+) to an estimate for the total number of bugs (which obviously is not known - we don't know all the bugs, and there's no way to)... Also, consider that you're talking about code that's supposed to have been rigorously tested and debugged.
When you think about it that way, 65000+ <i>known</i> bugs may not be so good.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Saying that the product shipped with no showstoppers doesn't mean very much, unless there's a really hard and fast rule about what constitutes a showstopper and the people with shipping responsibility have absolutely no control over the indicated severity). It's very common for something to be marked a showstopper, but then people start asking questions such as "is there *really* no workaround?"
While the 65000 bugs sounds outlandish (and is probably somewhat low but in the ballpark, given the number of lines of code), I agree that it probably overstates the severity of the situation. Nonetheless, saying that it shipped with no showstoppers (which is more or less true by definition) doesn't mean very much either.
If a customer reports a bug, the presumption should be that it's of critical severity until the customer stipulates otherwise. If beta testers (and W2K "beta testers" are a fairly general population) are reporting things, the onus is on Microsoft to handle the situation, but calling it "niggling" is inappropriate unless the tester/customer says so (and customers will happily admit that something isn't important if that's what they really think; a lot of people like to report everything on principle but will happily characterize the importance of the issue because they understand that development time is limited and they want the software).
And yes, if a customer claims a misspelling or something is a serious issue, I'd be inclined to accept it as so on first glance -- note, for example, the infamous Chevy Nova ("no go" in Spanish). That doesn't mean that it absolutely must be fixed to ship, but if a customer says that something is important it should be treated as such.
Win 98 = Win 95 + bugfixes + MSIE + some few odd fiddlybits
Sounds like 'paying for the service packs' to me.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
28,000 bugs in the code,
28,000 bugs,
fix one bug,
try it again,
28,001 bugs in the code.
--
The problem isn't that there are too many bugs in W2K, but that there are too few. To understand this consider the following Microsoft algorithm for bug tracking (patent pending).
unsigned int bugCount=0;
for(int i=0; i<LINES_OF_CODE; i++)
bugCount += isBuggy(line[i]) ? +1 : -1;
Most developers would be satisfied with a bug count in the low hundreds for a project the size of W2K. Microsoft, however has outdone itself. W2K actually has a NEGATIVE NUMBER OF BUGS: hence the underflow of the unsigned bugCount.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
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Does anyone think the lemon law could be used here? (for those of us in the U.S.)
It's slow, and it's way buggy. Programs that are usually stable like FreeAgent and Napster crash all the time. And not just a "pop, they're gone" crash, they could bring down the entire system. I was rebooting it at least once a day. I finally switched back to Win98 which I find to be far more stable.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
FWIW, the japanese versions of all MS products has always had this issue. Not just peren's either, like entire lines of text and the [ok] and [apply] buttons in the display properties for example. (This only happens if you have an english-language display properties "enhancement" program loaded)
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I, and others, have had Win2K running for months without a reboot. Furthermore, I've not been able to crash Win2k. With NT or 9X, there were certain things you could do, especially in code development, that you knew would bring down the OS. I yet to have Win2K crash.
Finally, remember that there are only 28,000 "real" bugs, and we don't know what MS means by "real." Does it mean the OS will crash? If so, that sucks. But perhaps a "real" bug is something like:
If the user opens up the Control Panel, right clicks on Multimedia, and then right clicks on the Sounds tab, the dialog box will close.
While that wouldn't be too much fun for the person who enacted these three steps, it is not a serious bug, and very few people would run into it.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I'm not saying that Debian isn't more stable, more intelligently designed, etc. What I am saying is the the pure number, while quite large, doesn't seem so bad when you consider the number of bugs in Debian, something I think we all consider to be one of the most stable, well-tested OS's around.
Cheers.......
I'm no MS advocate. In fact, narry a day goes buy that I don't wish evil thhings of MS and all of its employees.
However, I must say that I have been using Win2K for about a month now and I have had fewer OS related problems with the out-of-the-box version of this OS than I had with the patched and upgraded versions of NT 4 and 98.
This means one of two things, either 98 and NT had far more "bugs" which is entirely possible, or, the 65,000 "bugs" are so minor and unnoticable on the user end that they may as well not be there. For example, they may consider redundant interrupt requests on startup a bug, but this happens so quickly and has no effect once the system has started. They may also consider problems with the provided drivers to be "bugs" as well and, though I hate to say it, these kinds of bugs cannot always be blamed on MS as many of these drivers are provided by the hardware companies. For example, I know for a fact that there are problems with the Initio SCSI controller driver provided with the OS.
So, despite the abundance of "bugs" in the Win2K OS, I'll still take it over 98 or NT 4.
All this talk of MS OSes is making me sick.
LINUX ROCKS!!!!
That's better.
be seeing you,
doc
Q*bert (whoever he is)for Mayor!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Go back about 5 years, replace "Win2000" with "Windows 95", and we have the SAME EXACT situation all over again. (Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.)
Please tell me how 3.1 was better than 95. Granted, I imagine initially there were problems due to hardware, drivers not being written for 95, etc... but 5 years on, I know which I would pick. Of course, I'd take 98 over both. No, really.
I own a 1993 Eagle Talon.
Even so, how many parts are inside my car? How many functions do they perform? How many things can go wrong? The show stoppers are the ones that I really care about.
Well, you all make good points about driver issues
:) )
etc. My point is, NT and now Win2k aren't supposed to allow either:
a) Bad drivers into the OS
b) Allow running software to crash the machine.
This appears to not be the case though.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a crazy linux fanatic, but I don't appreciate rebooting twice a day.
Linux has bad drivers sometimes (or none), but it's not an OS supported by the driver manufacturers, more often than not it's some guy who wrote it so the device he had would work.
Win2k is supposed to be Microsoft's best and most stable OS to date, it's not. NT was more stable. I should be able to install a million poorly written Win32 apps, and Win2k shouldn't bat an eye. (I know in an ideal world
Thanks for the reponses to my previous post though, points well taken.
Newman!
That's funny, I run Win2000 RTM at work, and it crashes on me twice a day. Not BSOD, but just hangs. I ran Linux at work for 3 months, and it didn't crash once. We run FreeBSD on our machines, and it stays up for over 100 days, with over 2 million hits a day on it. Windows 2000 sucks, and I only have it so I can run things that need NT, but don't want to lose my USB mouse.
Newman!
One of the protesters commented, but preferred to stay anonymous. "Well, Microsoft told us that this Windows 2000 thing would be totally revolutionary and all, but it still seems to be based on code. Come on, Microsoft, is this how you innovate? Software has been made from code for decades now, isn't it time for something new?"
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http://www.debian.org/Bugs/
http://qa.debian.org/
'nuff said.
--
Memory fault -- brain fried
Actually nova doesn't mean "no go", which would be childish grammar. It quite literally means "It doesn't go." :)
-END COMMERCIAL-
RF: Were back, our friend here has just used his 50/50 life line, eliminating BSD and MacOS, leaving behind A)Linux and D)Windows2000. What is your answer?
BG: I'll go with D) Windows2000
RF: Are you sure, the crowd sure doesn't
BG: Yes Regis, that is my final answer
RF: Are you sure? your answer has 65000+ things wrong with it
BG: Yes, Windows 2000 is my final answer
RF: I'm sorry but.....*whisper*(Hmmm? what? who bought disney/abc?)*/whisper*.....THAT IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!!
BG: ho hum
RF: You win a million dollars, what are you going to do with it?
BG: Why, buy another senator, or perhaps that GWBush I've had my eye on.
RF: Here's your check. That's a lot of zeroes
BG: What the frick? Where's the novelty oversized check? This looks like a regular check.....*grumble*....
-COMMERCIAL-
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
sammy smith oatmeal stout. it's beer that drinks like a meal.
beer and oatmeal, how could you go wrong?
"Here's 50 bucks, take this in case I get drunk and call you a bitch later." - Ricky (Vince Vaughn)Made (2001)
Hopefully microsoft will ship a service pack CD to at least fix the insecure index servers. Anyone recall the exsploits in gold that got pressed? =)
Let's hope a script kiddie won't be able to use these exsploits, because now with a well known about DDoS you'll see copycats.
If microsoft didn't ship service packs and I was say yahoo, and I got DoSed because of know holes unplugged - I would have to file charges...
-- this isn't a sig --
The ____ part of the ____ is the ___.
Umm, honestly I don't know. My hosting setup is not the greatest (ok, ok, it's hosted on my workstation in the office). But things should generally work. DNS issues, I don't know what that'd be about. I'll look into it.
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There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
On the main link, or just for story moderation? That's altogether weird.
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There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Interestingly, for anyone who cares, that error is what happens when you try to install the sourceforge code. My site doesn't use any php.
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There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Forget about slashdot. Submit them to kuro5hin.org, and let the people decide whether they're interesting or not. Hint: You can moderate the submission queue.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Some of these points of confusion sound as though they are API related. Do you know how frustrating it is to work out after hours of stuffing around that the API documentation is wrong?
Very colourful language occurs.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
But on the plus side: Notepad is unbundled from the OS, and now availble for only $99 from local retailers.
Or as the only application that's easy to make with Visual Studio for a mere $400 (ish)
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
All of this is EXACTLY right.
I was a QA tester in the Office Group in Microsoft and did specification based testing. The guy next to me did more freeform type testing. My test lead did have a helluva lot experience. 15 YEARS to be exact. This guy knew exactly what needed to be now fixed and what should be revisited later and knew how to find bugs in the product that the team otherwise never would have found. I have been of the frequent opinion that our component was one of the better parts of Office 2000 simply because of him. Just shows you how important good leadership is.
Why, it appears Microsoft has cleaned up there act a little. Why, the amount of bugs for Win95-Win Millenium must number in the millions by now. Thank god for the hard working, dedicated Quality Assurance boys at Microsoft who have worked so hard to keep the number of bugs in this latest product under the 100,000 mark. This just shows that Microsoft isn't the greedy, capitalistic, hoarding company that puts its own agenda before the user. Thank god they have hired professionals to patch up, what is at best a bunch of spaghetti code. A company like Blizzard has the Audacity to delay their product because of a couple of bugs. Other companies should look at the shining example that is Microsoft. Who, will sacrafice a shoddy product just to meet a release date, so Bill Gates can look down upon his deciphels from his big giant video monitors and annouce "Let their be bugs!".
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Insert Witty Sig Here
for the sake of some degree of objectivity let's assume there are 20,000 actual "bugs" in Window 2000
...
This is in spite off the resources they are claiming they have used to beta test the product!
Note that one thing you will get from an extended (>1 Year!) beta/QA cycle is a large number of detected bugs and other issues. When you pay a large number of testers and have several thousand unpaid testers, you'd better have a pretty big database after the fact.
The important thing is that we don't have a metric to compare the 65,000 or 20,000 number with -- We don't know how many 'open' issues exist in Sun's Solaris BugBase or IBM's OS/2 BugBase, or even RedHat's internal BugBase. 65,000 could be a small number in comparison (depending on methodology, etc.)
It's like saying that the Linux kernel only has 23 bugs because that's all Alan Cox bothered to write on the back of a cocktail napkin when someone asked him after a few rounds -- the number is purely dependant on amount of effort put into finding the number.
Send an army of QA testers at RedHat or Debian for a couple years, and see what they come up with, then start talking numbers (And don't forget to pay bughunt bonuses like MS does!) I know that I can find about 30 little UI glitches in 15 minutes in front of a Linux OS.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yup, reading down the page, there's apparently 10,000 items in Debian's list. However, does that mean that Debian has 2x to 6x less bugs than Windows 2000. (I can't say because Debian won't install on my machine and Win2000 [and Mandrake] will -- and I haven't logged it as a 'showstopper'.
Note that Open Source uses a different (and IMO, better) methodology than Microsoft. If I find a bug in a particular package, I'll probably report it or send a patch to the package maintainer and let him/her deal with Debian. Debian/RedHat/etc are primarily concerned with the packaging issues, and aren't intended to be a be-all-end-all like MS's database.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Even if you double the total bugs in the codebase to 130,000, your still talking 1 bug in every 230 LOC. I don't think, even as the product goes live, the bug count will double. So 1 in 230, if that is the final number, still is pretty good. Obviously, you can never know all the bugs in the code. But perhaps they know about so many because of how extensively tested the product is. I have been using it in a number of situations now for over a year, and it has been rock solid. Also, there bugs in a lot of cases, as the memo states, are trivial things such as "this button is off 1 pixel to the left on this form" kind of stuff. Some of it is new feature request! I don't know of anyone else that would track a new feature as a bug in current product.
Software production generally yields about 1 bug per 100 lines of code. Windows 2000 is ~ 30 million lines of code. Using 65,000 as the bug count, then MS has 1 bug per 461.5 lines of code in W2K. If you are more conservative on what you call a bug and use 22,000 for the bug count, MS has 1 bug per 1,363 lines of code. Looking at the bug count numbers in this fashion, it would be fair to say that MS has done a tremendous job removing defects from W2K based on commonly held software engineering rules.
W2K, like all prior versions of NT, is architecture independent except for the HAL and a couple of other small pieces I cannot remember. W2K was produced for Alpha until Compaq pulled the plug when W2K was at Beta 3 stage. I just through out my Alpha betas. Also, there is no way they would have snuck more Intel only code into the codebase anyway, when they have to transition the code to Itanium anyway.
I was at Netscape in time to get a Zaroo Bugs t-shirt when we shipped 4.0. My brief life as a worker bee in a big software company taught me the following... every commercial software package ships with hundreds of bugs. More lines of code... more bugs.
Win2000 is a totally new code base. Of course it has tons of bugs. It's probably just as usable as Win98, though. (take that for what it's worth)
Lots of bugs are things like "dialog so-and-so not up to spec"... "menu items in wrong order"... "need new icon for blah"... "hard disk reformats on key-down event". Only a few of these are serious.
The goal is to not ship a product that can cause data loss. If you don't have any data-loss bugs and your feature check list is mostly done, a profit-motivated company will yell "ship it!" and sort the rest out later.
If Gnome developers and testers cataloged their bugs as rigorously and with as much gusto as Microsoft, we'd probably have seen thousands of open bugs in Gnome 1.0.
With all that said, I don't plan on installing W2K.
Actually, when you pay redhat $80 for their software, they're claiming to support the whole shebang, not just the packaging.
Note the comment by bero-rh, earlier in the thread.. where he says that gcc is even included in Red Hat's bugzilla.
But, you're right, when you say that open source does lead to quicker bug responses.
hah just when we all thought y2k had come and gone ... microsoft has the real bug and will relese it upon the masses on feb 17th 2000
music the paint
dancefloor the canvas
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
and with some exceptions, only makes sense when it's networked together with other Windows 2000 machines.
Does this bother anyone else? This just sounds more like the crap that Microsoft trys to do with making sure that you can't run anything except Microsoft crap. I can't even send someone a wp8 document and them be able to open it in word 2000. Why not? I can open almost any word doc in word perfect. It is this kind of deliberately being incomputable that makes me hate m$.
ArsonSmith
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
If Netscape had made a version 4 of their browser which rendered pages properly and didn't crash under Linux all the time, then someone leaked a memo detailing thousands of thousands of bugs (of course, not detailing the nature of said bugs, like whether or not a certain device won't work with it), it wouldn't make me stop using the browser just because I didn't have the source. I'd rely on my own personal experience of using it, combined with that of others to judge the seriousness of such a detail-free memo, to decide whether or not it's worth using. Win2K seems to be faring extremely well in this department.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
They didn't put out a Service Pack before it's been released. They're planning one for June, partly to correct some of the legitimate smaller bugs that still remain (and any big ones that crop up before then), as well to play to the "I won't buy it until they put out a Service Pack" crowd. If there were any biggies left, they'll do what they did for the Index Server security hole -- release a hotfix, just like any other OS vendor.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Not to mention that the 65,000 number doesn't refer to bugs, but also requested enhancements and optimizations that haven't yet been implemented, even the 28,000 "real bugs" sounds pretty bogus to anyone who's been using Win2K heavily since RC2.
Since there are just sooooo many thousands of bugs, I challange ZDnet and Slashdot to name even 200 of them.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Microsoft already has named some of them. If ZDnet, however, wants to play the FUD game with completely false headlines that they admit as such in the body of the article, then lets see them do a little more informing of the reader beyond obtaining leaked memos.
Better yet, ask ZDnet why their publications have given Win2K such high reviews while trying to convince people how defective it is. Another low point for computer journalism...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
aha.. now i get it. :P
sorry, misinterpreted "has a negative number" and "underflow" to mean the opposite of what they were supposed to.. clever.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Now *really* this isn't flamebait- how many of you all have actually used Windows 2000? MS has made it available in full form to its MSDN members, and we have been using it at work for several months, with *no* problems- we are still going through auditing it security-wise.
now to the specific point:
What do Unix admins/users know about Windows? I mean really, look at it the other way- do you listen to what Windows users say about linux? I mean come on, this subject is more than a little tired. Common sense and wisdom say that if you are unfamiliar with a topic, listen and watch. We can all sit and poke fun at NT4 together, just as I did/do at 95. Microsoft *is* a business, and they will do what they can to grow and survive. I am not sticking up for MS per se, but since when do we hold a separate set of standards for OS'es? based on elitism? BeOS for example, is really really cool- but the number of things (apps and hardware) are very, very narrow- but are there a zillion posts on how much it sucks because of it?
Hopefully this isn't zero'd, and hopefully I can see some cool, thought out repsonses =)
Well I guess ZD no longer fears the wraith of Microsoft.
Only a few years ago ZD wouldn't have reported a story like this or would have put the best spin posable on it. Why? For fear that Microsoft might respond by cutting them off. Now such a threat dosn't seem to bother ZD.
Yes even to my Linux Zelot eyes it dose look like ZD has put the worst spin on this. 65k posable bugs.. maybe? We don't know if they exist or if any of them will be in the final code?
That is still a lot of bugs to fix.. It should be resonable to presume some will be missed.. That is presumming there really is 65k bugs... Yes I'm having a hard time picturing ANY code having THAT MANY bugs... even a Microsoft product...
65k issues... thats beleavable... "I don't like this font"... But then 65k issues are asthetic and not real problems.
This has that FUD like feel to it... I'd have said it was prompted by Microsoft if it wasn't for the fact that Win2K isn't compeating against Microsoft...
I don't actually exist.
Here's the key: all three (OSR 2 has some huge flaky bugs) are so-called "gold releases", which M$ touts as being "low defect".
So let me ask you, do you want to recommend to your IS masters that they install an OS with 28,000 announced "larger" bugs, just to assist the beast from Redmond in perpetuating a tradition of shoddy bug fixes?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Seriously though, after my experience with Win95, I'm not surprised. The short story is that 95 trashed a disk it wasn't even on, the so-called stable version didn't work with newer motherboards, and the OSR-2 release (yes, the OEM version), required me to completely reformat my hard disk in order to install. That doesn't count the fact that IIRC at least one of the service packs cost additional from M$, didn't it?
So when the next great Linux version comes out, or I change hardware, etc.? Rebuild the new kernels, config changes -- the point is, I am in control, and if there are bugs, they get fixed and tested before M$ can even blink and charge me for a partial fix to their so called "gold code" -- complete with 65,000 bugs - 28,000 serious.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I agree with your assesment however... 65K of these bugs? There's gotta be some that are not cosmetic in nature. What does MS have to say about those?
;)
Maybe they are "features and NOT bugs!"
nick
--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.
I thought w2k wasn't going to have service packs?
I was recently flying out of Manchester airport, and observed that one of the displays showing the passengers flight information, instead of showing this information had a Blue Screen Of Death. I thought to myself "Thank God they don't use Windows in the tower.... they don't, do they?". Bugs are only important if you expect to deploy in mission critical areas. I don't care if some telemarketer's desktop PC crashes, but Micros~1 is trying to move into markets where bugs will literally kill people.
Joe Mainusch http://www.weber-amps.com
Who cares how many bug's anyone claims, counted or uncounted. What matters is what people think when it starts sitting on their desk. Not the people that are paid to say nice things, average user.
I was playing cards on the net, my opponent mentioned she was using WIN2000, and it crashed more often than NT4. Now that had a profound effect on my view of what is about to happen.
Ok I will wait a little longer, but if that is the general view after the release date. No way.
But even if it is better than NT4, you have to ask the question however, why would you spend $500 when you can have a better internet solution for free.
... But 65,000? I can understand a couple dozen, but this is ridiculous. And the Windows consumers let it all happen, without a fuss.
Comparing W2K to a Linux distribution isn't a good comparison, however. Linux distributions contain all kinds of application software that not even Microsoft would dare to call part of the OS.
On a related note, it does make me curious how many of those W2K bugs would disappear if they dropped some of their blatently application software *cough*IE*cough* from their distribution.
I am sure that they are working on supporting the Itanium (IA-64) architecture, as more than just a 32 bit OS. Anyone w/ hard facts?
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
i must agree, much like the questions that were asked a couple of days ago about breaking up Microsoft. Very biased.
Also, didn't Microsoft say that they weren't going to release a service pack for Win2K? How then, can they fix this?
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
Actually, having ONLY the right parenthesis obscured is actually an improvement on the current situation with Win98J... some dialog boxes have controls pushed off the box, or are have many characters obscured. Of course, I doubt they've actually tested a majority of apps with Japanese, as otherwise the bug count would most likely be MUCH higher... Too many programmers have very little clue about i18n.
Of course one of the funiest bugs I've run across was the install of one of the patches for IE under Win98J... The 'accept' button for the 'license' of theirs was pushed almost all the way off the box (you couldn't read the text on the button).
-- JHod, weirdness for hire
.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/c ars/problems/recalls/recmmy1.cfm
Do a search for your car - maybe it's got more "bugs" than you think...
Your '93 Talon has a potentially fatal flaw in it's "programming"....I suggest you call the "programmers" and get a "patch".
---------------------------------------------
NHTSA CAMPAIGN ID Number: 98V069002 Component: POWER TRAIN:TRANSMISSION:AUTOMATIC Manufacturer: CHRYSLER CORPORATION Mfg. Campaign #: 780 Year: 1993 Make: EAGLE Model: TALON Potential Number of Units Affected: 42214 Manufactured From: MAY 1989 To: FEB 1998 Year of Recall: '98 Type of Report: Vehicle Summary: Vehicle Description: Passenger vehicles. Lockup of the transfer case can occur due to insufficient lubrication. This condition can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash. Dealers will inspect the vehicles for adequacy of the transfer case oil volume, transfer case oil leakage, and operational degradation of the transfer case mechanism. If oil volume is insufficient, the appropriate amount of oil will be added. If there is transfer case oil leakage, affected components will be replaced. If the transfer case shows operational degradation, the transfer case will be replaced. Owner notification began July 6, 1998. Owners who take their vehicles to an authorized dealer on an agreed upon service date and do not receive the free remedy within a reasonable time should contact Chrysler at 1-800-992-1997. Also contact the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Auto Safety Hotline at 1-888-DASH-2-DOT (1-888-327-4236).
----------------------------------------------
-Yert
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
I get that on my win98 box :P
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You mean like Netscape4.x for Linux?
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The article points out that "Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems." The headline makes it seem much larger than that, while in fact some of the "bugs" are just reports of confusing controls or feature requests. This is not to say that 28,000 real bugs is a small number, however.
bill g and stevie b are going to make Larry A. and ESR a whole lot richer! Windows 2000 is being shot at by everyone right now, it seems. Pah! Take that Darth Gates!
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
spokeswoman says 750000 beta testers received
W2K but only hundreds will "sign off on the
incredibly high quality and reliability" of it.
Hmmm, I'm glad I did not beta tested this thing.
Cheers,
Zac
No, the word you're looking for is innovations.
Don
According to a ZDNet story, an internal Microsoft memo seen by Sm@rt Reseller claims that Windows 2000, shipping this Thursday, has "63,000 potential known defects". 21,000 of these are "postponed" bugs, which the memo claims could be "real problems." A Microsoft spokeswomen explained that "bugs are inherent in computer science," and that Windows 2000 has been more heavily tested than any other product in Microsoft's history.
Sorry, I needed to do that. I usually don't complain about grammar issues, but this was just too much.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
And, of course, MS will charge for the fix. It's a perfect business model. And when you spend that much on attorney's, your business models do *not* have to be legal.
In the last 4 years, I've not seen Microsoft charge a penny for service packs. You, sir, are spreading FUD.
Oh wow! it's an anonymous coward. Guess I should have realized - FUD === AC.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Perhaps you've neglected to remember Windows 98 or Windows 98se?
Windows 98 SE - all those patches are available as "Windows 98 Service Pack 1" which is available for free. You don't get the internet connection sharing or any of the new features -but you get the bug fixes.
Same with Windows 95 - you can download the service packs for Windows 95 for free from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com - you'll get more features by upgrading to Win98, but you don't have to.
Now... about that crack rock you were smoking..
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Yes, Win98 Service pack is available for download, BUT only if you are using Win98 and only if you are using whatever version of IE they feel like requiring. For someone who has to maintain a large number of computers, doing this for each one is a hugh burden. Downloading a single service pack (some *.exe or *.zip or even *.cab) file would be far easier. But, I can't. This hardly counts as free to me. It's a hell of lot of work.
Then order it on CD rom for $4.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
If we want to encourage Microsoft to behave as well as the Linux community does and acknowledge its bugs, we can't jump on bug totals like this. Yes, I know Microsoft did not intentionally release the figure, but it's not going to encourage them to do so in future if we treat any such admission as some sort of weakness.
Besides, what does it mean to have 28,000 known serious bugs? How many does BSD have? How about Linux?
If we don't want Microsoft to behave better but would rather that they die in poverty and are eaten by dogs, then that's fine...but let's be clear on our goals.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
What is this Active Directory thingy that seems to be getting so much marketing hype? On the surface, it's just a network-aware directory system right? Does it do anything that NIS/NIS+ can't do?
- jonathan.
Remember that "Win2K" is the end result of an 11-year development cycle. It started development in 1989, as "Cairo" - with a codebase completely independent from the at-that-time windows source tree, whereas win3.1/95/98 have all been forks off the same tree, likewise with NT3/3.51/4 (with the kernel src from VMS...)
Cairo was (I dunno if it still is) supposed to be "from scratch" - although I'm sure they carried over stuff from VMS. - so 65,000 "defects" in what is effectively an 11-year-old version _ONE_ release... doesn't suprise me.
It can't possibly be worse than NT4, at least in terms of bugs. I don't even want to think about how many reghacks/serviccepacks/hotfixes/patches I've applied to NT boxen.
I'm not defending M$ here, but I'd be surprised if even 1/10 of 1% of those bugs resulted in BSOD's
This says a lot about MicroSoft's bug finding techniques. That many bugs would be hard to find, especially with so many likely to be repeat reports.
Does anyone have any idea as to the ratio of found/unfound bugs in MS software on releases. By how much does the bug count increase just because of more use?
Lets try a little sarcasm, shall we?
I have a memo here which says Linus Torvalds bought 10 copies of Solaris because he likes it. I have another memo here which says Alan Cox shaved. Another memo in my possesion says my roommate has a smiley face tatoo on his left testicle.
See where I'm going with this? Unless I see the memo, I don't believe it.
(Of course, I expect Win2K to ship with bugs. Lots of bugs. Just not 65k of them)
--------------------------
It struck me as odd, but the fact that their report had named MS employees confirming the level of bugs/defects they were reporting certainly lended credence to the question. If the report was based on rumor and the question said "...an OS rumored to have over 65,000 bugs?", that would certainly be biased.
---- Politics: Kissing ass and pointing blames.
Just so it's out - I'm actually a beta tester for Microsoft - and have been for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000 (basically, all the major new Windows') and I have to actually completely agree with this poster. On the "betatest" newsgroups, there are literally thousands of posts with testers posting what they consider "bugs" which, in my opinion, are nothing but "niggly" things that doesn't deserve any attention.
... well, I'm sure people on Slashdot know where I'm going with that one...)
One problem, though, many of these people also post "real" bugs - freezes, crashes, any other odd occurences - that end up in the final product. Microsoft isn't always able to reproduce these problems, and so they're not solved - thing is, these problems will (and, obviously have) popped up on various people's systems. In Windows Millennium Edition (the new title), for example, I can easily count 50 or so real "bugs" and more then that in "wanted fixes" myself alone that Microsoft hasn't ever touched yet - and most likely never will. These is the same thing that happened with Windows 2000 - but to be nice to Microsoft, it's impossible to fix every single problem there is, especially if you're never able to reproduce it in-house. (see, I'm also a programmer, and if I were able to fix these problems MYSELF, then
Moonshine! It's the only open source whiskey ;-)
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
This is true. penis lickage is goinon here.
blah
if (Linux_community == (creationists ||fundamentalists)){ ;
/*
you = CSICOP
}
i was one of those 25% that windows wouldnt work well on. then i found linux does everything i need and more. maybe not as easy but it's geting there.
*/
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
Where can I get an opperating system that dosn't take control of my computer and data?
1) Put in a blank disk.
2) Hook up a microphone to your soundcard
3) Turn on computer
4) Yell at computer
If it feels like it, it will perform your commands. Be forewarned though, computers are fundamentally lazy devices and will seldom work unless something takes control of them.
Don't you get extra "points" if your post includes the word "troll" and you still get angry responses?
I remember that from my first excursions into Usenet.
While the original poster was correct in using "affect", you're wrong about the rest. Both words can be nouns: to effect something is to bring it into existence, and an affect is a deliberately assumed quirky behavior.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
65000? Hmm, might there be more and they just used a short integer? ;-)
>if (Liunx_community & (creationism | fundamentalism))
:)
:)
Hum.. Does it mean that Linux_community exist !?
I Think you are wrong again
Let's simplefy:
you = ((Linux_community == creationism) || (Linux_community == fundamentalism)) ? CSICOP : you;
That's, i think was waht he means..
Regards..
--
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
If you've ever worked with a large scale app development, you would know that high bug counts is quite normal. Mozilla, everyones favorite Open Source development project, currently has 1800+ bugs marked "new". The browser is supposed to be in beta in two weeks, yet you don't see news on Slashdot ridiculing the development.
Why is that? I'll tell you why. Whenever there's a potential negative news about Microsoft, objectivity is thrown out the window and people start ranting about how "see! this proves Microsoft caused cancer, AIDS and killed JFK".
Microsoft is a company that makes software. Their quality is not quite at the levels we would expect it to be, especially as it holds a monopoly position. They have used very unfair tactics against their competitors (or potential competitors). That's all there is to it. There's no need to destroy them, there's no need to spend half of your life trying to dig up dirt about them and there's no need to post biased and unfair stories about them.
You could have mentioned that the internal memo also showed a very positive attitude about putting serious effort into driving the bug count down to zero. You could have mentioned that Microsoft will not allow any code to be checked in to the next versions of Windows until all the current bugs are fixed. But you chose not to mention this, and instead focus on making Microsoft look stupid. Pathetic.
no no no. its 65,000 features for Windows 2000(TM).
I am impressed! way to go Microsoft! They trimmed it way down. I would of though alot more than 65000 . man that is one piece of work I have to buy it now i mean only 65,000 blue screens i mean come on! isn't that the best! I can't wait!
65000 bugs in NT,
65000 bugs...
You patch one down,
Pass it around...
64999 bugs in NT...
"In the end, I suggest people use the product for a change, and see for themselves that it is quite stable"
No thanks I have no desire to part with my hard earned money just to see if some OS is stable when I can get a stable OS for free.
War is necrophilia.
"So, anyways, moral of the story: Try to tone down the hypocrisy a little - every third story I see on slashdot is something about MS' FUD tactics. How is this -any- different than what MS does?"
Here is how it's different. Nobody is being paid to spread lies and fud. The people spreading FUD about MS are doing it because 1) They genuinely love Linux 2) They are idiologically motivated or 3) they genuinely hate microsoft and all their crappy products.
People spreading MS FUD are being paid they most likely don't acutally have any feelings one way or another. they are just doing their jobs being the good little cog in the evil empire machine.
War is necrophilia.
That's the first time I've ever heard "Pah!" on slashdot! In fact, I didn't think anyone ever said it until now...
I smell a recall!
Now wouldn't THAT be justice for ya?! Hehe!!
This brings me to one of my major complaints with shrink-wrap licenses. I understand the previous posters comments that not all bugs are created equal. Some are trivial and some are rare that only occur under some special circumstances. But, shouldn't the buyer be able to review the list to determine if the bug is going to be fatal to his application?
Almost every software has a clause in the EULA similar to:
Microsoft expressly disclaims any warranty for the SOFTWARE PRODUCT. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT and any related documentation is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, the implied warranties or merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. The entire risk arising out of use or performance of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT remains with you.
If they are going to disavow any claims of warranty and place the entire risk on me, they should provide a list of known bugs so that we can make an informed decision.
This clause, plus the one prohibiting reviews and benchmarks, means that they want you to buy a pig-in-a-poke.
I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
I still can't decide if that would be good thing or not. I mean we already have a hard enough time competing with buggy, overpriced windows, what would happen if a smaller OS only M$ was created an then released a smaller, faster version of windows that actually didn't suck? ;->
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
They likely won't have service packs, but special Windows 2000 Plus! packs put out a couple of times each year availble only at CompUSA for only $99!
;->
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Yeah, at least they are known about. This just means you won't have to roll the dice and hope your Linux server doesn't have some odd anomoly at the worst possible time.
Of course you could find three bugs in Linux faster. It's one of the wonderful things about Open Source.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is where those bugs are located. I really doubt that all 65,000 of them are in the IP stack, so where else? Well, Windows being "integrated" with all sorts of "unlinkable" applications, it's probably the case that a decent number of bugs are in the apps that come as part of Windows.
Imagine how many might be a result of inextricably tying IE to Windows...
Error 503 forbidden.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
You also fail to see that, although plenty of bugs are found in Linux, the Linux kernel is not released "STABLE" with 65,000 known "defects."
The development model that Microsoft uses, even for a commercial closed-source development model, is in no way the best. However, this could be forgiven if they released their products after they had squashed any bugs that they knew about. In this case, however, they sent the product to their distributors 3 months before it was scheduled to be released to the general public. This is time that could have been spent squashing these bugs and making the system more efficient.
So, not only did Microsoft know about these "defects" when they released the product, but they also sent the product out the door long before it was scheduled to be released to consumers. They did not have to do this at all.
Consequently, the criticism they recieve over this is justified. If they had not known about these bugs but released the product for consumption by the general public when they thought it bug-free, they could only have been accused of being ignorant, or having unqualified programmers. In this case, however, they are being irresponsible and even malicious.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
The last time they patched an OS they called it Windows 98 Second Edition and Sold it to everyone.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
My Problem with Microsoft's Response wasn't just about the 28000 real bugs, but that there is a code freeze until they fix these bugs...
Why wasn't this the case with Win9x or NT when these products mattered?
Nice Try Mickeysoft.
Bite Me.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Operating systems ship with thousands of bugs.
Some reasons:
Applications often end up relying on operating system bugs. Sometimes this is done intentionally to improve performance. Documentation might say "don't do this", but in the real world making the application better wins out. This means that bugs can never be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility.
Stabilising such a large piece of software will inevitably lead to some modules being in a rotten state. From the perspective of the stability of the entire system, it's easier to hack a few client modules than fix the bug in the server module and potentially break all the client modules.
At some point in time, you need to ship the product. After critical bugs, there are many minor bugs which could be fixed if time permits. But the marketplace prefers software now rather than the same software with trivial changes in six months.
My perception - as pretty much an outsider - is that it seems more important for the loyal Linux writers to add capability and refinement rather that ease of instalation and utilization for us ignorant sorts. I'd sure rather be wrong about this.
Well, but mozilla is not production software. It is barely alpha. So no one's really expecting it to be not-buggy. In fact, the mozilla team maintains that you shouldn't be using it yet unless you are a developer.
Do you have a URL for this? And is this the potato version, or the current release?
If microsoft says that Win2K is the most stable release of their server OS to date, and that the 63,000 bugs are `few' -- then how many bugs does WinNT 4 have? 100,000? A million?
Even on systems without heavy user interfaces, such as the ones I code each and every day, the QA of our code often turns up duplicate errors over and over, or contain error reports that actually are stemmed from one particular error -- in other words, fixing one error will likely fix several or dozens of other errors.
I cannot imagine that Microsoft's QA process would be any different. However, on a product that has been in development this long, with this much fanfare, and this much complexity, shipping it at this point and then saying "Bugs Happen" is a dangerous philosophy for Microsoft to be following. They seem to be staking, at this point, a huge amount of their future profitability on this one product, and if it doesn't meet client expectations, or causes undue hardship on the client base, Microsoft is going to watch themselves die to a competitor without the DoJ having ever needed to step in.
The clients have been waiting for so long for this product that I doubt they would have minded waiting a couple more months.
Here's hoping that out of the 20,000 "real" bugs or so out there, that none of them are show-stoppers.
I will almost have to feel sorry for Ballmer if there are.
"We must cultivate our garden." -- Voltaire
That's easy - just try using Netscape. More bugs there than a pre-alpha from MS *grin*
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
You now have the chance to experience the stability of the windows on your unix machine!
just execute the following shell-script as root
----
while true;
do
kill -9 $RANDOM
sleep 60m;
done;
---
The ads say "Windows 2000 is coming. Online or off, a standard in reliability." Well, we all know how Microsoft sets standards:
$Win2KDocumentation =~ s/bug/feature/g;
"Online or off" is a particularly interesting choice of words. "My computer is offline right now, but MS says that's standard behavior...What? your Linux machine is still on line? Those Open Source hackers are dangerous, the way they reject industry standard behavior."
Having done QA for a major software vendor, I'm sure that lots of the "bugs" are trivial, and a count of "potential issues" doesn't say much about the stability of a product. Forget the "potential issue" count. I'm basing my expectations for Win2K on past experience with MS products...and sticking with my Mac and Linux machines.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I'm not impressed by this particular write up. "what do u think?". Come on.
Generally you can expect a bug per 100 to 1000 lines of code written by wage slaves/Dilberts. So with 20,000,000 LOC, you are looking at 20,000 to 200,000 bugs.
Every Microsoft product I have used has had bugs that have inconvenienced me. But they don't do this by accident. They would rather release function with bugs sooner than release later with higher quality. Mostly it doesn't hurt them. 'Worse is better' because worse gets to market sooner.
This strategy does not work in the enterprise critical server market, because downtime is unacceptable. It will be difficult for Microsoft to make the culture change required to really compete in this arena. 20 years of 'near enough's good enough' doesn't change overnight.
I understand that there will never be a bugfree product that does not have anything which the user would like to have changed, but the point of this, I feel, is that they are shipping this product to customers and making money from selling a product which they know is buggy.
It doesn't take a whole lot of "real" bugs to annoy users. I mean, the ALMOST have NT 4 running so stable that it is at the point where it should have been shipped. The amount of code is not a valid excuse for a poorly debugged product. Seems like they forgot that even if you do solid testing, you actually have to fix those things found for the product to improve. Testing without fixing doesn't buy you a whole lot of cookies... (or, if you are running a monopoly, you'll get away with it).
The issue I feel is most pressing is the fact that major companies might want to change to this due to "marketing issues", when it might not offer them more and also introduces a whole new set of things to worry about.
BSOD should not be possible, by design of the system, but it is a fact of life (but why the heck can my soundcard kill the OS, did they forget why CPUs have the ability to run processes at different levels ????)
Oh well, that's my $2 worth (more than 2 cents, I feel)
"We got a copy of [Windows 2000] Gold from one of our [elite hacking friends]. We immediately realized that there were [numerous] bugs, and in particular, they were very easily exploited to make the computer send out as much marketing information as it could to any Unix user. We simply told them that Yahoo runs FreeBSD. They did the rest on their own."
Market analysts have said that if this is true, it could be disastrous for both Microsoft and Unix users alike.
Security experts have confirmed that Windows2000 does, in fact, flood other operating systems with advertisements, consuming a large part of the resources available.
"It's probably the reason Windows2000 needs such a fast processor and so much memory. The machine overloads itself trying to create and send out as much propoganda as it can."
Microsoft denies the allegations, stating, "We do not flood people with marketing information, and even if our operating system did, it would be a feature. But our next release will have abolutely positively zero bugs."
-----
-----
"A man is judged by his every word." -RW Emerson
"They misunderestimated me." -GW Bush
Sun's developer connection reports 9342 open bugs for java. Sun's Java has also been around for a while.
Bugzilla reports 5422 open bugs for mozilla. Granted mozilla is only alpha, but still.
Now if Microsoft really integrates everything into the OS as they claim, this bug count should include bugs for IE and their version of java as well. ;-)
Thats the point.. there are alot of bugs in Linux too but they get fixed. More than likely about 80% of bugs have been in the windows kernel for many years, and have been discovered. Microsoft like most close source companies believe that if noone knows about it why fix it? This is why I will never run a high priority server on a platform that doesnt come with he source.
SIG
Even if Linux has as many bugs as Win2k, the real
problem is that in Win2k you're paying for them.
So why the hell should I pay for a supposed OS which is a 600MB bug farm?
Linux has bugs too, but mainly because a big part of the applications are always in development.
./TheMask
Not quite. Linux is always under intense scrutiny through the "development" code branch (version numbers with an odd middle number such as 2.3.x). Moreover, we don't have to wait for someone to leak confidential information to find out about Linux bugs. It's all there for anyone to see; check the kernel lists. BTW, I couldn't help comparing the MS memo with a recent interview by Alan Cox, where he despairs with the number of lines of code in the Linux kernel. This demonstrates just how profound the difference is in how seriously MS and Linux developers take the quality of their code.
Although it would be interesting to know the bug count for Linux (and anyone could find out if they wanted to), I don't see the relevance of that for this article. This is an article about the Microsoft's Windows 2000 product. It's very interesting indeed to realize that Linux causes so much worry among Windows fans. Or maybe Linux already is the standard OS against which other OSs should be compared?
I fully agree with you! I am frankly tired of all the bashing that goes on. It streotypes Linux users as angst ridden youth. Windows has its fall outs yes. 98 back had alot of faults, I would not dispute that, but i would not bash the damn corporation either. Especially if I did not know what I was talking about like most of you. I have used Win2k professional corporate preview for over a month now. I have used it a minimal of 8 hours daily doing anything you could think of from word processing to networking to graphics development. I have had NO problems whatsoever. NONE. Not one error. Not one bluescreen. None whatsoever. And this is just preview! I cannot see where the final release is gonna be too bad off. I am sure in a month of using Win2k I should have run into some error out or these 25,000+ "problems" wouldnt you think? All I am saying is know what you are talking about. And also even if you are right, it is no reason to know people. You only give your supported OS and and yourselves a bad name. And if you ever want Linux to overcome Windows, or even Mac, the magic word would be "user friendly". Thanks.
~~Dilate
I fully agree with you! I am frankly tired of all the bashing that goes on. It streotypes Linux users as angst ridden youth. Windows has its fall outs yes. 98 back had alot of faults, I would not dispute that, but i would not bash the damn corporation either. Especially if I did not know what I was talking about like most of you. I have used Win2k professional corporate preview for over a month now. I have used it a minimal of 8 hours daily doing anything you could think of from word processing to networking to graphics development. I have had NO problems whatsoever. NONE. Not one error. Not one bluescreen. None whatsoever. And this is just preview! I cannot see where the final release is gonna be too bad off. I am sure in a month of using Win2k I should have run into some error out or these 25,000+ "problems" wouldnt you think? All I am saying is know what you are talking about. And also even if you are right, it is no reason to knock people. You only give your supported OS and and yourselves a bad name. And if you ever want Linux to overcome Windows, or even Mac, the magic word would be "user friendly". Thanks.
~~Dilate
The best geek alchohol would be Zima. We all love it, just deny it to 'cool' people though. Sitting at home on the computer compiling some source or downloading some mp3's, nothing quite tickles the brain like a nice cold bottle of Zima. Can I get an ameeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!
~~Dilate
Just as a sanity check here, my install of Win2K professional contains the following:
;)
625 executables totalling 50 megabytes
2230 dynamic libraries totalling 317 megabytes
for a grand total of 2855 executable modules and around 367 megabytes of binary (non debug) code.
And that isn't even the Server version.
What is classed as the operating system here is far more than just the kernel and associated drivers. How many of these defects are user interface glitches in Minesweeper and Pinball do you think?
I have to wonder, if there was a system that tracked all reported bugs, annoyances and imperfections in every RPM distributed with RedHat, how many "defects" the equivilant database would contain.
Now I guess I'll go get my asbestos underwear
The joke is that the statement "65,000+ bugs" was meant to mean "the number of bugs was more than 65,000", but kaphka interpreted it as "bugs in storing numbers over 65,000", which would be more likely to occur in a 16-bit program than in a 32-bit program.
--
The shareholder is always right.
I'm using W2K pro as a workstation.
I use the machine for programming, web browsing, FTP serving, and Q3 and Half-Life. Check it:
G:\WINNT>uptime
Uptime - system uptime utility for Windows NT
by Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com
This computer has been up for 14 days, 10 hours, 12 minutes, 43 seconds.
G:\WINNT>
That's not so bad, now is it?
Assuming the memo is genuine, this might actually represent progress for M$. Who know's how many bugs they (internally) admit to Win98 or NT4 having. Not to mention Office . . .
We really don't have a frame of reference. Any Anonymous Cowards from M$ care to comment?
Call up support -- while Win2000 may be somewhat less stable than a Unix, I've used it, and it certainly doesn't crash that much. You probably have some kind of driver problem. Even Win98 usually doesn't crash that much.
In my personal experience (Win2k RTM on about 3 different machines, each fairly new & powerful) it's very stable for personal desktop use. I've used it on one machine for about 3 weeks so far, and have never had either a hang or a BSOD. I may get flamed for this, but from what I've seen I'd have to say that Win2000 is the best OS currently available for business & desktop use. (BeOS is very nice too, but lacks applications.) Developers & experts are probably better off with linux or BSD. From my experience, it IS way too unstable for server use.
MS might be ignorant and not fix these "bugs" before the public release, but service packs -will- come out out that address them. They're ignorant and think people won't notice/care(hah)/believe until they start getting numerous requests for the same things. They'll fix them, but they'll wait as long as possible before doing so.
i dont know how you code but one bug in every thousand lines is more than a 0.1% chance of an error.. sure if all 60million lines of code only did one thing that would be correct but think of everything it has to do and using functions & procedures means the bugs will occur more often. i do however think that this may be Micro$ofts most stable OS so far.. but i'll reserve my judgement until i have tried it.
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
Can you list the 63000? can you provide this internal memo? Can you prove it ever existed? don't talk without foundations
There is a post that accurately reports that the boxes used to launch the recent DoS attacks were *nix boxes, not Windows boxes. It's slashdotted out of existance and then pulled.
... it takes a leaked internal memo for this to come out?
ZDNet posts an article with NO proof or a shred of evidence (do you HONESTLY think that MS, after what's happened with the DoJ and how much is riding on W2K's release) would, whoops, accidently let anti-MS ZDNet get sight of an "internal memo" that exposes 63,000 "bugs" (I'll skip how even that is a huge deviation from what I, a programmer, consider a bug to be) just a week before release?
I know this is Slashdot, I know anti-MS is popular and I'll be moderated into hell but, I couldn't not write. Honestly people, you do not have to like MS to take a moment and use your brains and think: Gee, doesn't that sound incredulous? W2K was in public beta with 750,000 people and is currently used to run 10,000 web servers and IBM is rolling out 300,000 units in the next 6 months and it is already running huge huge e-commerce sites (on beta code originally!) AND NO ONE NOTICED 63,000 bugs? I'm sorry, but one itty bitty bug in IE and the slashdot has headlines, 63000 bugs in a system reviewed by 750,000 and
Please people - promote your choice of OS, piss on MS if you like - but to believe in such utter nonsense really destroys credibility.
My $.02 - you can moderate this down but you WILL be metamoderated l8r.
db
The bug reports and feedback MS garners from RC code does not actually make it into RTM code. Rather, that information is fed into the "service pack 1" product.
This is what I was told from an MS developer.
My Advanced unix professor once joked that the difference between a bug and a feature is documentation.
It might be easier for microsoft to document the bugs.
"When the user does nothing wrong the program will reward user with a colorful and artistic blue screen of death"
Once M$ Marketing gets ahold of this, there will be 65,000+ enhancements for Windows 2001(TM).
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
unfortuantaly notepad was not unbundled from the OS. you can't even delete or replace the damn thing. it just comes back!!!
j'ai la final release
ca fai 2 semaine que je travail avec
mais hier j'ai eu mon premier blue screen
0*000007(.......)
STACK_KERNEL_ERROR...
evidament depuis 10 jours le probleme est sur technet soit un virus dans le boot disque ou bad sector
j'ai ni un ni l'autre
j'avais deja eu un probleme semblable avec la beta
solution rc2
se matin j'ouvre mon ordi et
No NTLDR
CTRL-ALT-DEL
demain je fais un recovri
si sa marche
--
mais pourquoi sortir un produit si il est pas pret
linux sont kernel on sais se qui marche et se qui marche pas avant et non apres
c'est pour ca que le kernel 2.4 tarde a sortir
certaine parti ne sont pas prete .
microsoft va paye de ses gaffe
1. The fact that they can even organize a list of 63,000 bugs is a testiment to the planning and foresight at Microsoft. God knows I could never manage it.
2. "No software in the history of Microsoft development has ever been through the incredible, rigourous external and internal testing that Windows 2000 has been through." You hear that! Both internal and external testing! Has such a thing even been done before?
3. 63,000 lines of code. Sure, it sounds like a lot. But just think: at around 60 million lines of code, that works out to one bug in every thousand lines of code! Why that means there is only a 0.1% chance of an error!
(Steps aside to allow next volley of silly Microsoft jokes to pass.)
KeyLargo
I work for an Internet start-up which uses MS technology. We converted our production web server over to Win2k in mid-January. When I heard we were going to do that I thought I'd be out of a job within a few weeks -- due to Microsoft's dismal showing in 1999 when they tried to host a "crack our server" contest on a Win2k machine and it crashed so often that no one had a chance to crack it. You can't crack a box that isn't running.
Over the past month our company has also converted an in-house test server and several developer machines over to Win2k, all of which were running a full copy of the website, including SQL Server, Site Server, Commerce Server, CyberCash, and Taxware.
I/we have been suprised that Win2k has held up rather well. Much to my surprise, none of the Win2k boxes have crashed yet. No blue-screen-of-death.
So, the bottom line is... Win2k really does seem to be more realiable than any previous version of Windows, just as MS says -- even if it does still have x thousand outstanding bugs.
This doesn't mean that the same can be said about the software running on top of the OS. Big Bill's whole "zero administration" push doesn't seem to have made it to the Site Server department at MS. While Win2k, by itself, can be cloned and copied onto new machines, don't try that with Site Server. The MS documentation explicitly states "Do not use computer-cloning software to create a Site Server computer". This is due to the fact that Site Server installs "computer-specific information that cannot be cloned". The result of this is that every single developer or test box that needs to be setup with Site Server on it has to be setup manually. Which in turn means that all of the file permissions on all of the files on the entire website have to be setup manually as well. I just converted my developer box to Win2k last week. Win2k installed fine, but manually installing all the other software, manually configuring it, manually setting the file permissions on all the files in the website, etc, etc, etc took a full two days to complete and trouble-shoot -- all thanks to Site Server's inability to be cloned.
So, Big Bill, what happened to "Zero Administration" anyway?
We're still waiting....
> I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of our production machines at work.
Pardon me!!?!
You're running Win2000 Beta in a PRODUCTION environment? What kind of fools let you do this?
Or does the term 'production environment' mean something completely different in your line of work? (In mine it means gambling with or flat out losing huge amounts of money each hour the system is down.)
The numbers are from a Microsoft memo, so ask them to name some of those bugs.
The only reason a car manufactorer would get sued would be because they would have injured or killed
a person through their own negligence. I know Windows is bad, but it isn't that bad.
(cue seizure from badly written microsoft program)
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
This article is pure FUD. The media has to dig up something to discuss to increase revenue, this is a fine example. It is no suprise that a product is released with bugs. Even with Open Source projects, each 'finished' update is released with Errata. I would imagine if you put the current Linux kernel under the intense Lab testing/stress you would come up with an unimaginable list of issues.
Most of these will be trivial, and only occur under extreme conditions. Some of them would be due to architectural difficulties. Some would be due to user error, design 'error', etc.
Microsoft did not release Windows 2000 as a busted flaky operating system. The company is smart, they know they have one hell of a Product and they know that we the public are going to love it. They would not release something so broken that they would have to invest more in supporting the product than profit would supply..
Nothing's Perfect. There are probably a bazillion bugs in it, A bazillion in Windows 98, A Bazillion in Linux, a Bazillion in FreeBSD, A Bazillion in MacOS. They exist, its part of Software. Too bad.
My Twenty Cents.......
Umm. OK.
The difference is (that) no software in the history of Microsoft development has ever been through the incredible, rigorous internal and external testing that Windows 2000 has been through."
Yeah! Because every OS from M$ has lacked sufficient testing; including this one, it would seem.
First off:
.deb file and the bug is fixed. Is this a serious error, maybe if you can't go 2 seconds without a bible quote, but the debian systems I've installed do not require you to speak in tongues for them to work.
I wouldn't trust windows2000 to flush my toilet.
But:
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/ix/summary.html
do a wc -l on this page and you'll see debian has approx. 10,667, open bug reports. Quoting a figure of total # of bugs and using that as some kind of qualitative measure of software is stupid. What matters is what kind of bugs there are, like if the DNS falls over, can it be restored from backup? NT4.0 can't, you have to reinstall. Or does W2K have premptive multiprocessing? I don't know. I don't care. No matter how good they claim it is its closed source, which is in itself a very good reason not to care.
A debian bug pick at random is:
Debian Bug report logs - #30863 verse: should not depend on bible-kjv
I think verse is a program that randomly picks a bible quote and displays it when you login, or maybe in sig files (don't know, don't care. I'm an atheist). Verse has its own bible-quote-database, but the Verse package thinks it needs
bible-kjv-text to run. Fix the
This really is just wacky FUD, I mean this would imply Windows2000 is only 3 times worse than debian! Although microsoft deserves ridicule, lets use actual facts when doing so, it just makes you all look like Linux-moonies or something.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
No! Nearly 30% of those features are really enhancements.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I'm using Windows 2000 and IE 5 right now. No problems whatsoever. I just installed linux on a computer at work. It wouldn't recognize the cd-rom so I had to do an ftp install. Took up 375 megs. It boots up but its so slow, its hardly usable. I "only" have 32 megs of RAM with PII 266mhz. What was that you all keep saying about bloatware, buggy code, and resource hogs?
OS/2 subsystem? I thought it is gotten rid of ALREADY!!! Nobody that I know runs OS/2 apps on NT. Keeping it there = keeping a lot of buggy, unmaintained, unused bloat. WHY BOTHER. I'd delete the while OS/2 syscall layer without a second thought.
Enough rant. I think some bugs are corporational policy - like, in IE, you can't switch off ActiveX without seeing the annoying dialog "the web page may not display correctly" shit.
I like an option to "I don't want to see this dialog again in the future" added to all confirmation dialogs.
Damn, I guess we'll never get it in any version of Widoz.
Ever read the book 'Diceman" by Luke Rhinehart? As Mark E. Smith of the Fall said "Listen to our song, it's much safer". The premise of the book is that a shrink gives his Psychoanalysis technique a jolt by bringing in "Diceplay" where you roll the dice and follow pre-set options. It soon sweeps America as people get to explore new sides of their identities through "Dice Therapy".
Microsoft is applying similar theories to this exciting new software package where these "bugs" should be seen as zen-like chance options wherein we get to explore exciting new mileus. These lessons of patience and resourcefulness will teach us to be like Caine of the old "Kung-Fu" series.
So turn that frown upside down and explore an exciting new era in operating systems!!
Hey, you think your house is cool?
According to an internal Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) memo viewed by Sm@rt Reselle
So now they're putting marketspeak in their internal memo's? You really are paranoid, aren't you? (That's probably a good thing btw.)
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
my question is, what's the first SP gonna be, a new OS? Will it be Windows 2000 3rd Quarter? If Feb is the release and they have that many bugs, I say Gates needs to sit back down and close all those functions right.
----------------------------------- baddmutha: just one of the Gen Xers -----------------------------------
I am aware of a few more bugs in Microsoft - mainly the trillions of strands of DNA in Gates. -Mr. Macx
*Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?* *Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies out of the t
You have to look at this relative to previous OS's released by Microsoft. How many bugs were in Windows 95, in NT? I hope MS has at least reduced the number of bugs.
While I'm the first to admit that 64k is a number best left for describing video; the thought had crossed my mind that maybe this is one of those situations where Anti-MS sentiment is going to get the best of /. 'ers . The more critical questions that comes to mind are
1. what is MS criteria for labeling something a bug
2. how many degrees of importance do they attach to their bugs
3. which bugs are the ones which are left unfixed?
Everyone will agree that a typo should carry less weight than problems with Winsock implementation, which should possibly have less priority than a BSOD regularly occuring from using one of the accel keys. To be fair, I'm willing to give them credit for the line about "Bugs are inherent in computer science," she said. "All software ships with issues., and would even go so far as to agree that The difference is (that) no software in the history of Microsoft development has ever been through the incredible, rigorous internal and external testing that Windows 2000 has been through." . These are fair replies to the question and are (excluding that last part) certainly as true for Linux as well. What remains to be seen is not whether MS will patch things (they will!) but when, how often and will duress be needed? Truthfully there really isn't a choice for those who are already MS-shops, as they eventually will need to move over, 20k+ bugs not withstanding. I think it likely that they will maintain current installs of NT for as long as possible but still migrate over eventually. If for no other reason than because the costs associated with switching over to a competing platform such as Linux are still much higher than having to deal with those bugs. And don't forget- MS bugs have spawned an entire industry all on their own, so doubtless some CEO somewhere has begun to count his unit sales already..
--Brett Glass
Mozilla is still obviously in development. Some of these bugs are extremely minor (e.g., doing this sequence of 15 actions causes image timing in animated GIFs to be off by 53 ms or something like that). Mozilla is not expected to be released in a few days; no, try >6 months. It has far fewer bucks behind it. And how many of those bugs are ACTIVE?
Ken
Try viewing the ZDNet page in Linux, then Windows. The following is straight out of "View Source":
- linux.css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles - Linux">'); . css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles">'); - ns.css" TITLE="ZDNet Planet Styles - Netscape">');
if (OpSys == "Linux") {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
} else {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
if (isNav4PC) {
document.write('<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/graphics/styles/planet
}
}
In many ways the Linux community acts too much like creationists/fundamentalists, no matter what science comes up with there's a knee jerk "oh we're not all monkeys you devil worshipping bastards" reaction.
Linux zealots being equated with Christian fundamentalists? Yeah! I like it!!!
Elderfelder
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
- Jim Elliot
linux is just a kernel, win2k is IIS, MMC, COM, Win32, DNS, oh and a kernel.
and they have more bugs, ya think?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Now when Win2K hits the public it will go through this aby period where new bugs will be found and service packs will be realeased, if you dont like the number of bugs then wait till a souple of SPs have come out, and the codebase evens out. Win2k is a huge step for M$, and there is a lot of new stuff, you will have to expect some bug. It is akin the linux rewriting the kernel from scratch and expecting the firt release to be prefect ... come on people. M$ is making NT do things it wasnt supposed like DirectX.
On the other hand you can quite whining and use a real server OS like FreeBSD.
Oh well bring on the flames... :)
this is my sig.
...we have no way of knowing that they will be fixed!
The eternal Devil's advocate for Win2k dons his asbestos suit
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
er, that should read "will not be fixed."
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
oh yeah baby!!!
#############################################
# exoduz : escape while you can.
#############################################
--
# I have no brain
Given the size of the installed userbase for Windows, and the thousands (if not millions) of programs, any rewriting will break some apps that made unfair assumptions in their code.
Yes, this is a strong argument for opening source - to fix the app that was misbehaving, or fix the OS that isn't working right. But we shouldn't get self-righteous about this.
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
You've got to remember that Windows 2000 is basically Windows NT 5.0, not the next version of Windows 98. Windows NT was written for 32-bit processors from scratch -- thus there won't be any 16-bit code in there in the first place.
If you're going to gripe about a MS product, make sure the gripe actually makes sense.
I'm rather sick of people getting moderated up just because (so it seems) they're bashing the "Slashdot psychology." Look, Slashdot is (generally) pro-Linux. If you don't like that, leave. (Yes, I know this is belligerent, but I am quite *****-ed off)
Ok, first, a point I want to make. If you can't make a big program bug-free, what do you do? You chop it up into a bunch of little programs and debug those. Sound programming sense. *n?x does this to some degree, and Windows doesn't.
Second, Linux does have bugs. I'll be the first to admit it. But X Windows is not Linux. Neither is EMACS, Vi, GNOME, KDE, Bash, csh... Get the idea? Good. Back to my point. Linux does have bugs, but they generally aren't major system-destroying bugs. And they're patched fast. You just have to keep things up to date.
As for service packs, as has been said before, they break more than they fix. At least patches for Linux tend to at least move towards stability.
Finally, RedHat 6.1 did have bugs. As I've said, I'm not pretending that Linux is perfect. But, from what I remember, a LOT of those bugs were in programs. Linux != Distro_Programs. Also, RedHat != Linux
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Yeah. This is one of the things that seems to be a problem with the random-moderators thing. Then again, its also produced some excellent results, so it can't be all bad. And one just has to filter comments in one's own head as well as getting the Slashcode to do it.
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
I am not knowledgable enough to judge W2K on server merits, but my roommate runs it as his desktop OS. Win2k does a lot of little things better than 95/98/NT4 in the interface. It also has been very stable for him afaik.
Whoa, I want some drivers!
known, effects, track (drinking Corona)
Areyou're talking about the beer? Corona is good... another good one to try is Presidente. It's Dominican. A bit stronger but (at least IMNHO) worth it.
This brings up an OT question:
What beer/liquor is the prefered choice of geeks?
Personally, I prefer scotch (Chivas Regal).
q
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
Yeah... tried that stuff once. Got FUBARed.
q
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
(Where the next release is just six months away.) Makes you wonder why their customers don't just say, "OK, when the one with zero bugs comes out, then I'll buy it."
("Meanwhile, I'll try this Linux thing I've been hearing so much about ....")
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
there are 10 more you don't. just like cockroaches.
16 bit code overflows somewhere a little over 65000, doesn't it? What if their bug counter overflowed and there are actually alot more? On second thought, maybe its better for them to run 16 bit software -- what you don't know can't hurt you.
From Bugfest ! Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'
I'd be interested to know if anyone has a rough estimate for the number of man hours spent on "improving reliability" of Linux distrobutions? The Borland Developer July 1999 Main Survey Results counted 5656 respondents involved in "System development (OS, kernel, desktop, etc)".
500 person-years testing is impressive for a closed source application, but the input from the Linux developer community is surely more than that? Over two years (98 to 2000), 5k5 developers putting in only 2 hours a week would give more than 500 person (working) years. That does not include other users who provide bug reports, patches etc., but wouldn't bother if the product wasn't Open Source.
my apologies if this has been brought up before, but i didn't see it in glancing over the messages.
in many source repositories, you have to register something with a name like "defect" any time you want to drop in some new code, or modify existing code that doesn't have anything to do with the addition of a new feature, so it is not uncommon to have a swack of "defects" in your statistics that have nothing whatsoever to do with failures in the code. maybe some slashdotters aren't aware of this because of the way development is done in the community.
at this point, i diverge from the topic slightly, though this is related to this story, and others of its ilk in general.
really, this kind of imprecision and sensationalism is kind of bad for linux. i love it, much like everyone else, but hypersensitive "linux is flawless" rants and malformed "everything from microsoft is shyte" ideas only prevent people from seeing where things could be improved, or where there are good alternatives. As a student, i know a lot of good, talented people who have taken positions at microsoft because it seems like a decision made with a lot of security behind it. i can't say i make my decisions like that, but what i mean to say is that i think it would be ridiculous to assert that microsoft can't do anything right. it just doesn't happen often.
From: Bug Team
To: W2K Developers
Subject: [BUG #63001] Race condition CAPSLOCK.DLL and LOSER.DLL
It has been shown that long exposure to the W2K desktop sollicits total and absolute losers to start writing comments in web surveys. At that time, the capslock subsystem seems to be irreversably stuck. Suggested fix: Subscribe loser to AOL or MSN.
Come on people. Honestly, think a little. Read the article.
It's not 65000 bugs (though the author interprets it as bugs - FUD at it's best). It's 65000 logged work items. So, you've got all sorts of stuff in there: from minor, minor UI defects, like 'the splash screen is badly dithered,' to differing opinions on how something should work like 'should dragging an item onto the taskbar open it?' to functionality requests like 'double-clicking on the documents item in the start menu should open up the documents history folder,' to stuff like 'would it be possible to implement iteratively, rather than recursively'.
Also, I'm sure that in those 65000 bugs, there are duplicates and old bugs that just haven't been purged (you know, the kind of bug that gets fixed when another bug's fix gets checked in).
I mean, while I'm sure there are a few 'bugs' in the sense of the word that you are people are implying (the annoying ones that make you go 'fuck microsoft'), I can almost guarantee that 99.9% of those 65000 bugs aren't that kind of bug.
Seriously, sit back and think about it - you can't honestly tell me that linux is any better! I could probably come up with a list of 65000 problems with the UI alone. And note: with Microsoft, 'Windows' encompasses everything from bugs in notepad, to bugs in IIS, to bugs in it's GUI to bugs in it's kernel. There are -hundreds- of programs that would fit in that list. With Linux, you guys can just dismiss problems and say "well, that's not linux, that's X, or that's KDE.. not our problem if they have bugs."
So, anyways, moral of the story: Try to tone down the hypocrisy a little - every third story I see on slashdot is something about MS' FUD tactics. How is this -any- different than what MS does?
they are not 'bugs', they are FEATURES!!!!
"Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
The way I see it, Windows is like one of those adventure books. You never know where you'll go next. Certain death is almost always inevitable. Microsoft's slogan: "Where do you want to go today?", is perfectly appropriate, because they weren't sure either.
Wigs
"Every creature has within him the wild, uncontrollable urge to punt." -- Snoopy
... but Microsoft's Prefix tool crashed when it localized the 65026th bug and exceeded the counting variable ...
I completly agree. That totally cracked me up when I saw it. Like saying "Do you support a crazed internet tyrant who is bent on owning your soul? Yes No" Just cracked me up. I do agree that an OS that has 64000 bugs before it is even released has some problems. Anyone bet they go opensouce before the next release?
I think the point was to see whether people would be willing to buy it in spite of the bugs. Anyway when the polled group selects itself the poll is always biased.
I found win95a to be very stable. Of course this is just my personal experience, but vs NT4SP2 and 3, win98, win98 osr1 (or whatever the new OEM win98 was called), and win95b, I got the fewest crashes out of win95a. It also requires very little RAM and hd space, relative to the other MS OS. Maybe it was just a freak of luck, but if I were to install Windows on a new computer in the future it would definitely be trusty ol' win95a (and back before I ditched Windows altogether I had "down"graded all my Windows computers to it.). There aren't really that many new features in the other ones anyway.
Yeah they dropped Alpha too semi-recently. Of course you can't blame them... they just weren't getting business in that area.
With such a codebase, it's rather surprising they got it to work at all
But the best quote is: ;-)
Our goal for the next release... is to have zero bugs
. Maybe they also have some Bugzilla T-Shirts or so.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Unless you have unlimited funds and unlimited time, you can never "fix" all bugs.
.oO0Oo.
Go take a look at the TeX web site
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It's all so predictable, it's not even worth trolling.
:)
So why Did you
Remove the NOSPAM to spam me...
Well, I've run Win2K since Beta 3, and even then it was much more stable than NT4 with SP4. I never shut down my PC, I just used the Hibernate function. In three weeks, I restarted my computer 4 times - 2 because of program errors, 2 because of hardware installation.
:)
That said, my Linux box has been up for 3 months without restarting...
As a coder, programming VC++, I agree completely. 2000 works on all kinds of hardware, where as Linux doesn't didn't support my video card or ATA/66 controller until only recently, when I've had them for 5 1/2 months!!! !?!
Thats unacceptable in todays world.
While I think Linux is extremely cool, it has a long way to go. Its a game of catch-up.
Whenever I say to a Linux user:
"Linux doesn't do this." or "I need it to do this."
I get:
"Well that will be out in the next version of X." or "this distro has it."
Well, sorry. I need one thing that works, cause I don't have time to screw around.
Maybe its not fair, but with things like MFC, linux is going to have a hard time keeping up...
Here Here!
Well, there seems to be people on either side of the fence, but for those bashing MS, I question where they work, and what they do!! I'm on a relatively large project and between the client, our testing department and our developers, we have TONS of bug fixes, enhancements and corrections. Everyone is trigger happy to jot down what They think should be fixed. Everything from serious errors, to 'moving a button to the left'. It doesn't mean our product is bad, we continue to be the leader in our field and our client is extremely happy with our product. Its not surprising that MS, a huge company, has tons of people reporting this, that and the other thing, along with duplicates. That doesn't even include their massive beta testing pool who are also reporting things. W2k has been rock solid for me. I'm really happy with it!
I couldn't agree more.
'bugs' is a very ambiguous word and the fact that they have a list of things to 'enhance' or 'fix' is pretty damn good considering it hasn't been out very long...
I know at my job, people report duplicate bugs, and many of the things are quite little. The client and management can be quite picky. So many little things get reported, and of course, anyone can be picky enough to nail a whole pile of little things...
And everyone expects them to be fixed right away... But many of the little ones, simply
1. won't affect anyone, and
2. would cost crazy amounts to fix.
I don't think most of the people bashing MS are actual industry coders working on large projects.
I completely agree.
Its days like today that I lose a great amount of respect for the Linux Community.
Its quite unfortunate, but thats life.
I'd like to have a conversation with only those who actually work on BIG OOP type projects for a large number of users, especially those doing mission critical work.
THAT would be a better base to have a grounded conversation on the topic.
Me? W2k is rock solid. I've had zero problems, 95% less reboots, high speeds, no SMP problems.
I love linux too, its great!! However, I agree: Linux may be very cool, but it has a long way to go to catch up with W2k. Anyone who wants to bash W2k and pump linux, has to prove to me that they can use linux for a Well Rounded application. Server end, client end (easy to use, stable, etc), Communications end (nation wide networking, wireless satellite communications, etc.), and integration with other linux products.
Linux IS COOL! However, when people do cool stuff with linux, it requires all kinds of fucking around, tweeking, and experimentation. Who has TIME for that? Time is money. When we need something to work, we need it work now, and tomorrow, without days wasted of screwing around.
We also don't have time for getting things to work in the FUTURE. With W2k you know there will be apps for all sorts of things, that will work, out of the box, without screwing around....
dido to everything you said.
These people bashing W2k need to use it. And need to use it in a real environment developing enterprise level (or at least large) applications to really see all the benefits....
I'm all for well rounded conversation, but these little 'jump on the bandwagon MS bashers' make me sick.
Exactly.
Ignorance is not only bliss, It is the SINGLE LARGEST SECURITY WHOLE.
Knowing about everything that needs to be fixed, from the major bugs to the tiny little color changes is a major feat. It shows Responsibility, and EXTREMELY good knowledge of what needs to be fixed with their products BEFORE IT HITS THE MARKETPLACE!!!
Linux users are SO willing to turn the blind eye to little errors. Which is all fine and good until you're working on a project where people are actually relying on your product day in and day out.
That's Hole, not whole.
If you read the article you'll see a "spokeswoman said 750,000 testers received each beta version of Windows 2000." Microsoft sent these out to everyone! I recieved each and every one, myself, and promptly throw them in the garbage or made drink coasters out of them.
She then goes on to say the "hundreds of companies have signed of on the incredibly high quality and reliability of Windows 2000." So, let's give them an optimistic 500 companies that signed off on it. This results in .07% signoff. Now there's something to brag about!
Yes, I image the signoff process, what ever that is, is a bit more complex than my overly simplistic numbers indicate, but still!
BEGIN ProMsRant: Lets do a random rant about how software quality is degrading and how we dont expect anything more from Microsoft etc. If you want to complain about MS stuff so much ( I LIKE Windows2000 ) Then go apply to work at microsoft since its apparent you have a solution for them and you are not a part of the problem. Nuff said. END ProMsRant:
.. Given the amount of time you spend setting up and securing a *nix Box for production this is at least worth a shot..
Come on.. This is not even a solid *anything* just some 'internal memo' believe what you want I am *sure* there are about this many of small things in W2K. Ask yourself something, How many little nuisances do you pick up when you are using Gnome/KDE etc. *ponders* Hows this instead of killing the product before its ever released and flaming BEFORE you try it.. Just try it and them flame it when it crashes and costs you money.. Like we have been for the last 10 years..*shrugs* Oh well
JA
is how so many of these idiots talking schitt about M$ and the like all have hotmail addresses!
PINE - it's the only way to fly!
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
If this trend keeps up, Windows 2002 (or whenever) will be down to a mere 65+ bugs!
One must truly marvel at the efficacy of the debugging team at Microsoft.
"MS: It's not a software company, it's a neurological nightmare."
-a Multiple Schlerosis awareness billboard
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Win2K is just ONE HUGE BUG. What kind of bug is it, is it a lady-bug? No, that's too pretty, too Mac-OS Style. So maybe it's a cockroach? That's it. Windows 2000 is a cockroach. You can crash it, you can run away from it, you can be REALLY scared and paranoyed about it. You wish you never see one. You have to save your women from it. You sing funny songs about it (La Cookaracha, excuse me spelling) But you never EVER can really get rid of it, one or two always survive, and where there is one or two today, one or two thousand will be tomorrow. It's time to call for an exterminator - can DOJ be it? Or maybe it's a flu bug - a virus? Hopefully Symantec puts the specifications for Win2K into its next release of Norton Antivirus. Norton Antivirus is Installing. Checking memory. Win2K detected, running decontamination process: deltree c:\windows decontamination complete. Installing inoculation patch: Linux cheers
You can't handle the truth.
If it is anti-Microsoft, the memo must be true. If it is pro-Microsoft, it isn't true. Get it?
now i realize that it hasn't officially been released yet, officially, it is RTM though... Now... half my hardware either doesn't work, or has limited functionality. My DC240 has no support that i can see, the serial drivers were SUPPOSED to work, haven't investigated fully, but they sure seem like they don't. Creative labs says that they will begin to support win2k on Feb 17th... Gee, what about all those boxes that ship with SBLive? The win2k driver allows it to function, rear outputs do not work... or at least, i couldn't get them too (any ideas on this please email me: stoat@mindless.com Windows 2000 is very stable, i've only had it crash a few times, and all were my fault; used shitty software.
Here's a nice, unbiased poll question:
"Do you plan to buy Windows 2000 -- an OS with 63,000 known 'defects'?"
One hundred and fifty years ago, the Anglican Church demanded a a new translation of it's Bible because, it claimed, there were at least 30000 errors in it. They never got it. There are still people who are not Catholic. Shame. The Vulgate contains no errors. The same thing is happening in the Linux movement. People from windows environements expecting windows environments from Linux. So, Windows has 65K+ bugs. Good! Don't expect Linux to solve them. In fact, when you all come storming to Linux, check your windows bagage at the door. We don't want it.
According to the article, they spent $162M "specifically to improve reliability". If so, how much did they spend on the entire R&D effort behind Win2k? I realize that not all copies will cost $500, but how many do they expect to sell in what, the next 5 years (tops!)? I think its time to sell my stock. How are they ever going to recoup those costs?
It's nice to see someone out there acutally understands
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
MS has already released a patch for this problem.
.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=17727
http://www.microsoft
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
http://www.microsoft .com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=17726
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Great, a patch that has bugs, aren't patches supposed to fix them? Plus, Microsoft charges for it, WTF? I thought patches were supposed to be free!
Gateway, Dell and other computer manufacturers are already shipping Windows 2000 pre-loaded on their business systems. Feb 17 is the official release date for the stand-alone OS.
kwsNI
FYI, don't know if this was already posted, but I couldn't find it...
http://www.micros oft.com/windows2000/news/bulletins/response1.asp
Microsoft, when will you learn that everybody wants to wait until Service Pack 8,000 before we make a decision? Your track record sux...
octaene@yahoo.com
I'm not really sure that would solve the prob though...at least in Linux you can look in a fairly smallish area to find a bug to fix due to its modular nature. With Windows containing every type of software under the sun that MS could afford to buy and roll into their OS, opening the can of worms to the public could create more problems than it solves. Of course 10 years from now (after everyone quits scratching their heads at the way the OS is slapped together) it would be the best damn OS anybody ever saw :-)
Yes, but that OE shit tastes much worse coming back up than some Bud Light :-)
it happens all the time to me. just shrug it off and keep on submitting articles :(
Any software package of this magnitude is going to have loads of bugs. Linux certainly does. The problem is the magnitude itself. I was talking to a software engineer at a large technology corporation last week, and he said that the minimum specs for an installation of one version of it, and not the full server version, was 256 MB RAM, with 3 gigs free space. And that gets it to boot. The problem here is probably not an issue of bad coding, the probem is bad design. Of course, it may be both, since we have no way of knowing about the code.
Now if only they'd get rid of Internet Explorer, that would be a bugfix!
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
From the memo, detailing the bugs:
"More than 21,000 'postponed' bugs, an indeterminate number of which Microsoft is characterizing as 'real problems.' Others are requests for new functionality, and others reflect 'plain confusion as to how something is supposed to work.'"
and
"More than 27,000 'BugBug' comments.... According to Microsoft, they tend to represent 'unfinished work' or 'long-forgotten problems.'"
But then, for perspective, the article gives a third party opinion:
"'The fact that Microsoft found that many bugs indicates to me just how thorough their testing processes are,' said the Windows developer, who requested anonymity."
"Found?" Sounds to me like 48,000 bugs are issues that Microsoft knew about from the outset, but didn't have the resources to fix before their self imposed (and constantly slipping) release deadline. I thought the development process went something like: code--test--fix--repeat. According to the Anonymous Coward ZDNet quoted, I guess it's ok to stop at the testing part and pat ourselves on the back for all the bugs we found (that we created in the first place)?
Kinda makes sense thou. 65536, for all those base 2 newbies, is the largest possible 16bit number.
That 16bit legacy is hard to shake, eh?
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Except that Microsoft is charging $500 a pop for those 65,000 bugs. A typical Linux distribution costs from under $100 to free. And list all their known bugs for you without reservation (ever seen Bugzilla at Red Hat's site?).
Michael J.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
No 16bit code......but plenty of 16bit bugs:)hahaha
The thing is, as long as your average computer retailer selling computers to average Joe Schmoes bundles in the latest version of Windows as standard, Microsoft will continue to get away with these levels of "buggines". Nothing will change until the perception (or reality - you decide) of Linux as having limited user-friendliness is overcome.
It's so bad, no one will even pirate the stuff!
:P
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
And what the law allows them to get away with.
If you bought that car with 28k+ defects in it, you can bet your last bottom dollar that somebody's getting sued.
But assume the mantle of a "developer", and all is forgiven. This isn't to say that some protection isn't deserved and a GoodThang, but lets get real.
Defective software is the only thing you buy that you can't get your money back on. With this kind of protection, there is absoultely NO incentive for large companies with a lock on their niche to improve thier software. Thing to do is to
Remove protection from suit or
Remove their lock on the market niche or
both.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Fight Spammers!
No kidding Windows 2000 has 65000+ defects? And Win98 had 1000000000000000000000000+(BTW 0 is winning the poll and I can see why it's used a lot more than 1) I'm sure if you really want you could pick at an OS until you found a minimum of 10000 bugs. Ooh looks like this font included is a bit rough on the bottom corner of the "R" Theres a bug. Like any OS. Do it right the first time and you won't have a problem. GhOsT_ID
Actually, it's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow.
Opinion: Scientology is a cult you should avoid. Follow the
where did you got that? can yo list them, please? dont talk without foundations.
errera hunamum ets
I love Microsoft's way of implementing features. I used to support Access for Microsoft. When Access 2000 was released the ability to link to dBase databases natively using ISAM's (which had been in the past several versions) was no longer read-write and multiuser. It was read-only and single-user. Microsoft's "line" was that due to licensing reasons Borland/Inprise required the lack of functionality. The word that went around was that the guy that coded those bits previously no longer worked for Microsoft and no one else could figure out how to get them to work.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
I read the ZDNet article and didn't have any "oh my God!" reaction at all. How late is this product? So late that they had to change the name to make it sound new! A product that's released years late can't be expected to be anything but "patch-fest 2000", especially MS. This will probably be the last 5+ year OS development cycle for MS anyway, since Linux really will torpedo them if they do. But what if MS breaks up and and they clean house at the OS "Baby Microsoft?" They could take a cue from the Linux invation and get their act together as a fresh, new company. "I work for this super cool new start-up; it's called MicrosoftOS. Ever hear of it?" Who knows? -- Joe
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
Debian vs. W2k isn't really a fair comparison, because (as you note) Debian is a 2GB distro with tons of applications. If Debian was scaled back to the same level of features, I'd expect the bug count to decrease substantially.
"More than 27,000 'BugBug' comments" is a start, but what about all the 'BedBug' and dreaded 'BugBear' comments? Hmmm? What armor class are those suckers again? And how many hitpoints? Do they eat hot grits?
That hasn't stopped them from putting a prominent ad for their Windows 2000 store nearby. Oops! I forgot, this is the web, where mixing editorial content and advertising is "synergy."
I saw one of the billboards mentioned in the story on the subway tonight, touting M$ use by the federal government. The punchline? "Windows 2000: The government's business starts here"
There's nothing like truth in advertising :)
Read this response to the article. It's pretty funny. Considering the three systems I use to any extent are Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS9... What are the chances he's actually used any of them?
--Willtor
"The knee is the elbow of the leg." -- My wife
Call this flamebait, BUT as history showed before M$'s strength is in people's ignorance and lies. Average suit gives no damn about bugs in W2K or M$'s evil behavior. They like an idea of a braindamaged OS that doesn't require much brainstraining or administration. Reboot is always easier, even if it means hours of downtime, even if they don't know about the cause of the problem. Qoute "Real OS for real people". And M$'s propaganda machine makes it very easy to disgregard any second thoughts, and just buy into it, get the evil product and deploy their solutions no matter how much pain and suffering it will cause them in the end, afterall it's just an easy reboot, and it's "your" fault. This doesn't apply to every company of course, but MS wouldn't be so rich if their plan didn't work, would they? Let me tell you this, noone gives a rat's ass about bugs in MS products, they WILL use them anyway. Expect this begemoth be worth a trillion dollars after release of W2K. Expect huge demand for crappy OS for the next several years. Expect lines of people in front of CompUSA. 'nuff said. Expect Linux to be for traditional geek companies only and for geeks. Expect decrease of demand for proprietory *nix. Expect MS taking over web and 'net, expect more integration of crap into their crappy OS. Expect most people still not caring. Expect more MS-sponsored benchmarks. Expect Novell dying. IMHO Linux needs help in marketing and general awareness. What's done currently is really not enough. If you want to play with MS one on one, you need to have a product just as braindamaged as W2K. But that ain't happening, and probably doesn't need to happen. But the company will eventually eat itself because it will lose control, and we'll help it. It's just a matter of time. It happened to IBM, it happened to Intel, it will happen to Micros~1. If you go against change, change doesn't care, life goes on.
Disregard all spelling mistakes.
MS knows they will still make money, and the product will still sell like hot cakes with bugs or without.
A call a guy at Microsoft, he told me that Win2k will not have more than 65536 bugs.
And this is exactly what Microsoft considers a bug
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
You can't test quality into a product. It has to be designed in from the start. Windows' kludgy design has left it open to quality problems even if Microsoft were to test it from now till never.
In Microsoft's defense, the design of their software is drastically constrained by their requirements; specifically, their self-imposed requirement to keep future releases of their operating systems backwardly-compatible with old executables. Reasons like this are why they don't throw everything out and start again. It costs them, though. The "should we redesign from the ground up or should we patch what we have?" question is a tough call to make, and it's one where the conservative answer leads down a path of eternal backwards-compatibility, and thus eternal kludge.
While anyone would agree that an OS with 63k+ bugs in it has some serious issues, bug counts are not fool-proof metrics for determining overall quality of a product. We have not insight as to the degree of severity of these bugs. The very word bug has many different meanings across dev teams. bugs--> issues, enhancements, performance? but whatever, its going to suck anyway.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
How can something thats 5 times the code base size of Win95 have less bugs then Win95 when it 1st came out? Thats not normal for MS, guess they are slacking off a little :)
I don't think I could justify purchasing a product with so many loop holes in it. And at $500+ a pop I'd rather have a whole new computer with linux on it. At least I know it doesn't have such an extensive amount of possible security breaches in it.
We have been testing W2K for a little while now here at my office and 62,000 bugs sounds just about write. I am amazed it actually runs as good as it does with that many problems though. I still wouldn't give up my Linux box for anything, no matter how good "they" say Windows is.
I'm not afraid of the dark. Far from it. Just.... only when the lights are off!
Good. Place the responsibility squarely on the developers shoulders and change nothing in the way the project is managed. "Fix the bugs, make the rest of this crap go away. Take some initiative, you lazy, loafing bums."
God this is a Dilbert management speak if I've ever seen it. Unrealistic management directives, I've seen it a hundred times. "Work smarter, not harder", or other equally empty, uninspired drivel that gives you no actual useful information or direction.
You work for a big company and you see a comment like this and you realize just how totally clueless your leadership is... it doesn't do anything for you or give you anything realistic to shoot for so you pretty much just go about your work the same as before.
I've seen better success where attainable, realistic goals are set and then incremental, continuous improvement is sought. Not "we suck rocks right now, but guess what... 3 months from now we will go from 65,000 defects to zero." Kinda crap that makes you laugh, delete the memo, then go get a cup of coffee while you think about what life would be like at a real job. No wonder they are so fscked up.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
My stepdad said this a while back, I felt this was a very appropriate time to submit this statement.
"I feel that Microsoft's greatest achievement was getting the public to accept Second Rate software"
-- Donald M. Berryman
There is no caravan here, we don't know where your children are.
I don't know how many of you guys actually tried Windows 2000 out (prob none of you cuz you were too busy fuck'n Linus' bung hole), but I tried it and it worked great! I had it running for 4 weeks straight until I got a CD-RW for X-Mas and needed to shut down and install it. I put it to its limits. The only bug I found was in solitare you could Double Left Click then Right Click on a card and it would crash the program. It was just a sol.exe bug, not Win2K.
This is indeed an intimidating figure, and it makes me wonder if Microsoft is evening running BSD4.2 lint on its code, but I still may upgrade the Windows clients on this network to Win2k. Frankly, if it is somewhat more stable than 95 (these machines are still running disparate versions of 95), I would be pleased. I am told it has a telnet server, which would make life far more pleasant for me.
Besides, they're all sitting behind an OpenBSD firewall which is set up in 'high paranoia' mode and patched regularly. For any system that is important, there is not a chance I will 'graze my sheep on the lord's land instead of the commons' as it were.
And now back to reading...
If all of these are just minor things like "move window to 2 pixels to the left" then Marc Lucovsky, the guy writing the memo, must be an idiot for bothering the programmers with this unnecessary work.
I hate to ruin the wonderful M$ bashing party here but here is the way things are: Linux is great. Its stable, reliable, and it makes for a wonderful http/ftp server. Great. The problem is that it seems to have become some sort of religion. I mean honestly.... you guys are starting to sound like the same people who cheer on Steve Jobs' every year at MacWorld. The fact is Windows has got Linux beat on ONE THING: Its FREAKING EASY TO USE! Believe me, before I took my current job as a Net Admin, I was all about "linux will one day rule the world and MS is going to DIE" However, around that time I got my hands on win2k and my new job - needless to say the combination of the two have greatly changed my opinions. (I've got people who can't even move or resize a damn window in win98 - isnt that sad? Yeah I see them hacking away at a CLI interface on a linux box ) I cant help but wonder how many of you M$ bashers have actually USED win2k. I would say 10 percent at most. The fact is, it is VERY stable, VERY fast, and massive code base or not - it still doesnt take up as much memory as Xfree86 running KDE or Gnome. Now I realize this message will probably be classified as flamebait, but thats okay. Feel free to email me at: gamorck@home.com Im prepared to receive the punishment I have brought upon myself :-) The morale of the story here is: Don't Knock it before you try it. Try to give the competition a fair chance before you rein up your horse and scream to high heaven like a bunch of banshees. They say it takes 10 years for an OS to "mature". Windows is close to that point and I believe that Win2k is a massive step up from previous versions. Speed tests at my last job (writing data conversion programs) indicate around a 33% speed increase from previous versions of windows. By the way - AMD rules :-) My regards to you all, Jay (Gamorck)
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Writing Solid Code : Microsoft's Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556155514/ o/qid=950375111/sr=2-1/104-1089460-93644 46
HELO FOO.MS.COm MAIL FROM: RCPT TO: DATA From: To: Subject: 63k errors We would tell you (yeah right). If we did, we're stupid without knowing it. . QUIT Do you really trust this crap? Did ZDnet try mail them back? Did they got any response? Ms Exchange doesn't have any configuration to turn off the "none-existent recipient" autoreply. ::Optimization is the root of all evil
At last programmers won't have to worry about making viruses for Win2000, they come built in, all 65k of em!
Seriously though, viruses are based on bugs and loopholes, right? So, wouldn't an os with 65k+ of them (I'm sure a lot haven't been discovered) have an awful lot of possiblity for some chaotic programmers to go nuts with it? I'm sticking with osx.
Any way, people like my stupid mother are going to buy that shit?? windows 2000 with 63.000 bugs?? No way... but, how many will buy, knowing that windows 2000 have 63.000 bugs?? big question!!
Allways learning new thinks!!
Allright Linux people, all this article means is that Win2K has been hammered on by an army of adolescent 20-somethings for the last four years. Are we ready to compare all the bugs that these two OSs have? Well, let's just not compare the two ok, because you can't compare Linux and Win2k. Windows is an operating system that does everything and more. Better yet, chances are you won't need to browse a directory tree of documentation to figure out how to use each new component. 63,000 bugs and i havent't had it crash on me once using the beta 2. So far so good. Thank you Linux for making Microsoft competetive again and making Windows better...
For all of you weird holier than thou Linux purests you should at least try w2k. Lay this occult aside for just a few moments and enjoy a really superior OS. You guys would seem much smarter if you knew how to at least say something worth reading instead of this sucks and that sucks... Well, you all suck!
"Just say no Microsoft" Do they have a drug problem? "Suck the Donkey Nuts" Wow, you guys are worse off than I thought. I used to think you only spanked your pathetic little monkeys constantly in public rest rooms but sucking donkey nuts is even worse. I guess not being able to get a girlfriend gets to you after a while. Maybe you should try the romance section on MSN, search for MULE or DONKEY or ASS.
Did anyone else notice how crappy the article is? Read the part in the quotes ... Looks like this was an old email prior to release from the quotes and HEY it looks like they were trying to fix the probs for - who was it - oh yeah.. the customers... how is it that a company that is trying this hard to identify and FIX bugs is a bad thing?
There isn't a better solution for free.. thats your answer....
First off... look at the article.. read only the part in quotes which is all they had to go on (the article is off an email right)... it looks to me like no one is going to buy w2k with 63000 known defects - because no one is selling it - 63,000 entries in some database in Washington doesn't = 63000 bugs.. and from the looks of it the email shows how aggressively they were attempting to address the probs...
FYI: BUGBUG (all caps) is just a convention in MS (or at least nt) for easy searching the source. It can mean anything from, handle this error condition better, to this is where I left the hooks for this feature that isn't going in this release, but I will need to revisit someday down the line. A lot of times people choose to implement new stuff in a different way and the BUGBUG's get outdated. These build up over time. The BUGBUG's got filled as bugs in the bugtracking database recently (each instance got a unique bug) just to take care of buissness. These aren't "security holes" or "crashing" issues.
There is an extra name given to anything that is actually serious (such as any form of broken functionality, security related or crashes) called showstopper. The stuff that goes into the bug database can refer to anything from , "there is a mispelling in this spec" or "overactive assert in the debug build" to the showstopper class bugs. On shipping, there were no showstopper bugs, which was the criteria.
In the end, I suggest people use the product for a change, and see for themselves that it is quite stable.
And still the everything works quite well... I get my salary every month even though my bank is using MS products.
Don't be too sure about it -- banks don't run any of their actual operations on Windows. If they will switch to Windows in some "upgrade", handled by the next generation of managers, we will all start having a lot of questions, where are our money.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
New XFMail home page
On the "betatest" newsgroups, there are literally thousands of posts with testers posting what they consider "bugs" which, in my opinion, are nothing but "niggly" things that doesn't deserve any attention.
I think this is a really good example of where open source has some advantages. Little "niggly" things get fixed by the person they're "niggling". ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
I thought there was now a web front end for this....
--Chris
sigs are a waste of space
At least read the code.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
--
--
And look, you got knocked down to a zero yourself! It must be a conspiracy. I demand that the moderators mark me up to a 2 to make up for this outrage!
(Note: hit the link on the comment ID number and you can see it's moderation history.)
I mean come on people. Is there anything else you expect from Microsoft?
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
redhat's been around for a shorter period of time? really?
windows 2000 hasn't even been released, redhat's bugzilla tracks bugs through about 6 releases.
i know the pundits refer to linux as "new and untested," but a significant percentage of w2k code is completely new and unproven in a production level environment.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
"Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be 'real' problems."
Only three weeks ago, I attended a seminar hosted by a company selling "fireware solution" which runs on NT. The speaker was telling us that their "solutions" will run on W2K.
In the Q & A session, I asked the speaker if the company has any plan to port their wares into Linux, and you know what that guy said to me?
"We have no plan to port any of our product to Linux, and we will never do so, because Linux is too buggy."
Yeah, this is exactly what the guy (supposingly the CEO of the company) said, and his company was supposed to be one of the "biggest NT supporter" in Asia.
With W2K having over 28,000 "features" that may give them "real problems", I truly wonder what the guy will say next.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
On the Bright Side (TM), ~27,000 of these are just inefficiencies in the code that were long forgotten and need to be taken care of.
However, there are an estimated 28,000 Real Problems (TM) still in the software. This, is still quite disheartening. I for one am delaying deployment of Windows 2000 Professional on workstations until it's reported that the final version (give or take 4 service packs) is relatively stable.
And for all you IT managers out there, make sure you develop a stable method of deployment before updating all your NT 4.0 boxen, unless you want to deal with a huge heap of problems. Use common sense.
--
We have every reason to believe that once this hits production use, many more will be discovered. How many? No idea.
Also Microsoft has a history of saying that things anyone else would call a bug is not a bug.
Glad I am not planning to use this...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I'll try and answer this is with "plain talk".
When you say linux, what do you mean? Is linux just the kernel, the GNU binaries as well, or the entire distrobution?
See it's hard to say what linux IS. Some distrobutions have more bugs than others, and some kernels have more bugs than others. Also add to the fact that linux is being developed and debugged 24/7 worldwide. Look at the developer map on www.debian.org and see what I mean.
I can assure you from working on many projects, some open source some closed source - that linux's development cycle can't be held to the same pattern as MS windows, HP UNIX, etc. Linux is a distributed and large development effort with massive talent and harsh peer review. I wrote a small piece of code that was bug free. ( Very small i.e. near useless code is the only code that can bug free. ) And I still got email about a possible buffer overflow that could happen when the library was used with 'application X'.
Don't try and see releases as linux as a finished product, instead view it as a work of art - always adapting, always changing, always improving...
The current list of "release-critical" bugs (that is, bugs that must be fixed before release, is available from here.
Of course, there is a huge fluff factor here. Debian uses the bug-tracking system to track things that aren't really bugs, there are bugs that weren't really bugs, and so on.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
True, but a very high proportion of the bugs in Debian are with "non-core" parts of the distribution (things that wouldn't be distributed with a Microsoft OS). Many bugs are just users being "niggly" as well. A significant number of "bugs" are in fact proposals for policy changes. Not much difference in fact (except that Debian doesn't hide the problems).
Also, Windows 2000 has some HUGE features that debian doesn't have, like Active Directory.
Debian has some huge features that Win2000 doesn't have, including a complete development environment, full server functionality, lots of powerful applications, etc. etc. etc. The upcoming Debian release will span 4 CD's of binaries. Big as Win2000 is, if you take all the code that Debian distributes, Debian is far bigger.
But these comparisons wouldn't be possible except a memo happened to fall into ZDNet's hands. Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft made its bug tracking database public?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
> I think this is a really good example of where open source has some advantages. Little "niggly" things get fixed by the person they're "niggling". ;-)
I really really doubt this is actually true in the large sense. First, there are non-programmer users who simply can't fix the bugs (yes, they must be eliminated like the worthless deadweight they are, because knowledge of C is the only skill worth having). Secondly, there are technical users like me who simply don't care about having their own little private code fork that has to be maintained separately (if the original source was kept around at all) who have a very much accurately-formed impression that a diff from Joe Random Luser will be ignored, and generally don't feel like going through the bureacracy of whatever ad hoc QA system, if any, there might have been set up. KDE's bug reporting system is illustrative here: you must send an email that you must hand-format, with a module name that you must guess at, and you get a nastygram if it doesn't fit the formatting criteria. God forbid you get an actual response.
Yes it's possible to fix it yourself. It just hasn't become any less of an irksome chore.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Was NT ever ported to SPARC? I can't imagine anything would ever make Sun happier than a working port of NT to SPARC hardware. Sun considers Solaris as a loss-leader, it just continues to flog it because NT's scalability has always ben too laughable for the big servers Sun wants to sell. That and McNealy's ego.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
THey better not use an int or an unsigned int (32767 / 65535) to track bugs. Perhaps they need to use an unsigned long for their bug ids. :)
I hope you are not confusing it with the "Slashdot Community." I would dare say that a large number of real linux hackers have great disdain for slashdot, for a long list of reasons including those you mention.
Make sure you are disgusted with the right people for the right reasons.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
If MS's product history is any indicator, there WILL be too many bugs that aren't nigly in the least (not that you ever actually said anything to the contrary). The lack of quality in the industry never ceases to amaze me, particularly Microsoft, and especially their operating systems...
If you believe that I am a slashdot sycophant, then you really should search and read my past posts. I'm a student of finance--a soon to be entreprenuer--a capitalist. I'm highly skeptical of the Open Source movement, to say the least. This is not to say, however, that MS doesn't have serious flaws--most of which would not exist if the market were a little different. I believe the software industry is immature, and, that, time will mend these issues.
That being said, I might argue that some of the recent pressures behind Linux's (and other Open Sourceish products) recent popularity is symptomic of a reversal process (just a hint of it). Though Open Source is not the answer per se (and I doubt it ever will be), it indicates that at least some customers and businesses are growing tired of MS's (et. al) antics, considering alternative solutions, and "Open source" software is, unfortunately, one of the few alternatives that still stands. It has little to do with the fact that Linux is "free"; many have come to realize that software isn't an end unto itself--it is a means to an end, merely a tool to be used. It is a tool that doesn't wear out, and hence doesn't need to be upgraded every year. As a result, software can, and should, become more STABLE and CONSISTENT. This allows companies to cut down in costs in many ways. Not only do they not need to buy new software and licenses, but they don't need to upgrade computers so frequently either. In addition, this kind of stability allows the employee to become more familiar with his OS/Applications, further cutting support costs and improving efficiency. Likewise, a more stable feature set would allow the software the time to develop such that it actually performs as it is supposed to (every tried embedding documents often? mail merge? Connecting to a windows network (netbios) over dialup and TCP/IP...)
Most companies care little about how much MS (et. al) sells their software and licenses for (even though they're overpriced by most any measure). Nor do they care if the software is propietary (not "free"), for its own sake. It is the secondary and tertiary costs (e.g., support, HW upgrade, employee efficiency, etc.), some of which I mentioned earlier, that cost them dearly. Though most companies have not yet reached the point where they refuse to buy MS, there is definetly significant discontent emerging. Maybe not this year....maybe not next year, but Microsoft can't keep pumping out their same shit indefinetly...
Well, sure, TeX is approaching a "bug-free" state. There's no feature creep. That's not a valid comparison with an evolving commercial product.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
My company's in the Windows 2000 beta program, too, and we moved all the servers to Windows 2000 about one release candidates prior to gold.
Just because it's "beta" doesn't mean it doesn't work. Just because something has "bugs" doesn't mean they affect you and your configuration. Windows 2000 is very stable by any standard.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Nice idealized philosophy, but haven't you ever encountered this situation:
* Customer reports bug.
* Technician/Developer tries to duplicate bug, and fails.
Besides, not all bugs are "debugged" by fixing the software. Some bugs are marked for workarounds, others become warnings (don't use this with that), and so forth. Unless you have unlimited funds and unlimited time, you can never "fix" all bugs.
(By the way, the "infamous" Chevy Nova actually sold just fine in Latin America. The urban legend that it didn't arose later.)
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
lets apply a logical process. Windows is distributed as binaries in non-incremental fashion. Linux on the other hand is released in small upgrade increments, the kernel gets patched all the time and so do many of its programs. Windows NT is not a kernel and a command shell, its comparable to a distrobution in size and complexity. I would laugh my ass off if anyone suggested any distro of Linux had no bugs. Has anyone counted the lines of code in Redhat's distro lately? I would imagine it in up there in number. I'm not trying to defend Microsoft as much as I'm trying to make a bunch of prima donas think for themselves and stop the "Me too!" posts. Of course Win2k has alot of bugs but most of these bugs will probably not be seen by users if they are even an interfacable bug. As many other people have said bugs to Microsoft can be anyhting from obfuscated code to a missing funtion or bad library call. Any complex system is bound to have errors, thats just how things work out statistically. When I see a Linux distro with absolutely no bugs and really clean code with lots of comments and documentation and no hard coding single solution functions I'll be really impressed and I will commend the amazing power of open source but until then stop bashing the work of other programmers. Microsoft the corporation didn't program Windows 2000, a group of programmers employed by Microsoft the corporation did. A programmer is a programmer, you're all doing the same things towards the same goal. Have some professional respect.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
In all seriousness - how does that compare to windows NT, with all the service packs?
How does it compare to win98? how about to win98SE?
They're all buggy, and we all know that.
So is it getting much worse withW2k, or is it getting a little better, or is it about the same as the others?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
OK, I can see the M$ rep on Monday...
Micro$erf: So, when are you upgrading to Windows 2000?
Me: When you get the 65K or so of bugs out of the code.
Micro$erf: First service pack will take care of that - a month at the outside. Upgrading then?
Me: Um, no. I'd have to get rid of all the Alphas we rolled out for NT4 first.
Micro$erf: Ouch, tough luck. Want me to call Dell for you? $25K gets you the equivelent -
Me: -of a $10K Alpha.
Micro$erf: Heh, um yeah. But Windows 2000 has Active Directory!!! Dynamic DNS!!! We'll reduce your TCO to new lows, especially for your workstations!!!
Me: Even the Macs?
Micro$erf: Macs? Why would you want a dead architecture?
Me: 'cause we're in publishing.
Micro$erf: Oh well, Macs can get files, and they can print, that's all they need.
Me: K. If you say so. I read in the initial stages of Win2K that it would do MacIP - where is it?
Micro$erf: Upcoming feature. It'll probrably only be $49 or so per client, too. Isn't that wonderful!!!
Me: Beautiful. Really. Y'know, lately I've been playing with Linux, and-
Micro$erf: OH GOOOOOD! We've got another add on for unix-type machines, since we're supporting choice these days.
Me: So they get to participate in Active Directory?
Micro$erf: No, but it helps you migrate NIS into AD. You get to use all the familliar Unix utilities, and you can migrate to NT at your leisure from those nasty old legacy systems. For 149$ a server, you can't go wrong.
Me: Sure, what ever you say.
Micro$erf: See we figured it out and you'l only have to spend umm.... $75K to upgrade. Of course, we didn't include all the new Servers, network switches, WAN upgrades and wasted hardware in that price, but why worry about that?
So when can we expect you to order?
Me: (puts on red fadora, picks up stuffed penguin)When you get out of the psyciatric ward.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Hmm? "Next time, we'll do it right?".
Gee.. where have I heard that before?
You're forgetting all the extra money they make from rereleasing the same old office suite with a slightly shinier skin and an incompatible file format.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
You mean to tell me that Win2K only has 65,000 bugs? What a rip! I won't be buying it now! I've come to expect lots of bugs in Microsoft software, and if they're going to let things slip like this by cheating me out of the bugs I expect, then they just lost a customer!
It isn't surprising there are 65,000 defects in a major software system. Very few people want to actually ENGINEER software and would much rather just Program it.
Programming a system, without Engineering it, works well for certain types of evolving systems. Linux, web sites and prototypes change to quickly to Engineer, but trying to "just type in the code" for a major, static system like the autopilot for a aircraft is murder.
So what I'm saying is, as long as we Program a system and then expect to "freeze" it there will always be orders of magnitudes more bugs than we would like. If we keep insisting on not Engineering software there are only two solutions to making Programmed software more robust:
1) Fix it yourself, as in the Open Source model
2) Pay someone else to fix it, which usually means bying the next "upgrade" cleverly disguised as N-3 bug fixes and 3 new features.
Engineered software costs more to build but costs far less in the longer term. Just look as far as the nearest book on software engineering.
So the question is, why do we tolerate 65,000 bugs? Do we feel responsibly for not paying them enough to fix it? Do we feel bad we can't edit the source for them? Or are we just ashamed we keep buying their crap even if it isn't what we, as Consumers, want?
Sure, that's fair, and I'm glad to see this post is being moderated up. On the other hand:
As a coder, I'm not going to go liberally sprinkling my code with "BugBug" comments. That's reserved for something somewhat serious and important. Maybe Microsoft policy is different however. Still, 27,000 things Microsoft's coders think is important enough to mark as a bug, yet Microsoft feels the product is ready for release?? Wow!
That's why there are over 10,000 bugs in debian linux! Its beacuse its closed source of course
Bugs only get fixed if people care enough to fix them, non-critical bugs might not get fixed.
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Forget I posted that plz :(
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Where can I get an opperating system that dosn't take control of my computer and data?
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
From The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James:
Where can I access the W2K buglist so I can check it out myself? What is Microsoft's URL for a searchable bug database like Bugzilla? I just checked Knowledge base for product "Windows2000" keyword "issue" and only got 200 matches. Keyword "bug" only gives 16 matches. The article says "Microsoft is estamating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems." That leaves 27,784 real problems that Microsoft is aware of. What are they?
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
The way mass merchandised software is produced today, the public just swallows it, because it's NEW!
"Windows 2000, I have to have it"
I remember back several years ago, when this new revolutionary Windows 95 was being released, people were floccking to the stores getting in line so they could have it FIRST.
Do THESE people care how many bugs there are?
I've always had a beef for commercial software. It was ORIGINALLY designed to be a shortcut for those who didn't know how to code the application themselves.
Now it's the norm...
Now, I can sit in a Technical Support Cubicle in the Cubicle Jungles of a not-so-small software organization based in San Diego and listen to people whine and complain about what this Software can or can't do.
The only think I can think of, but cannot say, is "Well, this is software that you bought, of course it is not going to do what you want, because YOU didn't create it."
(That was probably off-topic, but I digress)
Back to WIN2K. Like some of the above write-ups are stating, the public will not care if there are PUBLISHED bugs, defects, etc.
There will STILL be people lining the malls, shopping centers, and Software Outlets just to get this defective, bug filled Operating System on their machine.
Just because, the computer public is the computer public. They eat this stuff up and complain about it later.
Bill Gates.... he's a genius, he has marketed to the Lowest Common Denominator.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
Just for comparison, a quick check of the Debian bug tracking system shows over 10,000 items. I might be reading the wrong table, but I'm not surprised by that count in a 2 GB distro. Assuming the bugs are evenly distributed, that's perhaps 1,000 potential defects in the packages that I actually install.
65,000 outstanding items for W2K seems high, but it's not outrageously high - it's two or three times higher than I would have expected, but that could simply indicate very enthusiastic testers.
I'm *far* more concerned by the hints that suggests the bugs are no longer seem to be orthogonal - service packs are introducing as many bugs as they fix. *That* suggests that the code is on the brink of becoming totally unmaintainable, a very real possibility with a large code base that pretends to be tightly integrated.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Yet it looks like you missed the point; it wasn't an attempt to bash MS, it was a description of the reality of many projects -- specifically retail products.
.DLL files. Unless the test plan includes programmers on the test team who can validate the binary API interfaces of all of those DLLs, and who can produce automation which can completely test each of those .DLL components and their interaction with the specified interface, you're stuck trying to build a test plan that takes all O(N**2) (or worse) interactions between those .DLLs in order to completely test the product.
Actually, I didn't read it as a bash, nor was I trying to bash Microsoft myself. Mine was comments based on some time I spent working at Microsoft (actually, DreamWorks Interactive, who is 50% owned by Microsoft--but the work was done at the Microsoft campus).
The two don't mix. While you can have a project that has elements of both, you can't call a system that relies heavily on ad-hoc testing a formal system.
That's not what I was trying to describe. What I was trying to describe was a process which has a formal test plan and formal testers who run through a formal script, combined with automation which can perform certain elements of a formal test plan in an automated environment, combined with testers who were also encouraged to "bang on it" within certain parameters. (Read: "Charles, you're in charge of banging on the ODBC Control Panel as well as performing pages 303-306 of the scripted test plan.")
That is, they use a formal test plan written at the start based on the formal specification of the product, but they also encourage their testers to "play with the project" as well as executing the formal test plan.
As to "beta testers", Microsoft calls them "customers." (Okay, I know--cheap shot...)
Integration has nothing to do with it. Complete specifications with the time to execute tests based on them is the whole issue -- it always has been.
Normally I'd agree. However, it seems to me that once a project reaches a certain level of complexity, due to the O(N**2) nature of certain types of interactions inside a "black box", the amount of time required to execute tests based on a complete test specification may grow to be in the dozens or even hundreds of years.
With Microsoft's Windows 2000 product, a number of the "modules" inside the black box are coded as
So integration *does* have something to do with it: it defines how complex the product's possible behaviors will be, and that ultimately defines how complex the test plan will have to be to completely test the product.
Now if they built this thing in a fault-tolerant fashion, in the way firmware is built for an airplane, they'd build it as a collection of independant modules which use well-defined protocols to communicate with each other. Then the testing reduces to an O(N) problem of testing each module and testing to make sure it communicates correctly with the established protocol.
My guess: Most of the formal group gets dragged into ad-hoc testing --or-- they have incomplete tests based on incomplete specifications that they 'sign off' on when marketing, production, upper-management-in-other-areas, decides that there has been enough testing.
Based on my experience, it'll likely be the latter: an incomplete specification (that is incomplete because of the nature of the product), combined with testers who will close bugs more on pressure from management than anything else.
I'm not disagreeing with you about the nature of the ad-hoc element of all of this. I just wanted to clarify my comments, to make sure that folks here understood that I'm not denouncing Microsoft for not having a formal test plan--I'm quite sure they have one.
I just believe that, due to the way Microsoft elected to build the Windows 2000 product, that the specification and test plan is necessarly incomplete due to how huge the entire product is.
In fairness, keep in mind that "defect", or even "bug" for that matter is a very broad term.
I have to concur about this. Realize that any company, such as Microsoft, who uses a formal Q/A program which uses a formal bug tracking system is going to eventually fill that bug log with a lot of niggly little things which frankly don't matter.
For example, one project I worked (a children's game) contained about 50 bugs from one tester who didn't like the color of the eyes of one of the characters. (He claimed they were too brown, and should be bluer.) Each bug report corrisponded to each scene in which the character appeared.
Eventually we scanned all of the art to make sure the eye color was the same, and closed out all of the bugs over the tester's protests.
I still have bug reports in my own bug tracking system covering similar non-issues, "helpful" suggestions, and things like "on-line help manual contains run-on sentence in 3rd paragraph." It's quite possible that the large bulk of the bugs relate to similar on-line content.
What's especially frustrating about such Q/A processes such as the one Microsoft uses is often they will report the easy to spot items, such as run-on sentences in on-line help. But at the same time, fatal, hard to detect crashing bugs will go by unnoticed because the Q/A test plan didn't include a situation which would stress the software in unexpected ways. And with the huge complexity of Microsoft's Windows 2000 product, that's the one that worries me the most: not that the product will ship with 65,000 content bugs, but that the crashing fatal bug which wipes out my hard disk wasn't even detected by their test plan.
FYI, Microsoft uses a specification-driven testing plan which is developed by a head of testing.
If there is one thing that Microsoft does right, by the way, it's this: Microsoft has separate career paths for programmers, testers, management, and content authors. Unlike other companies, which after 5 years of programming, you're expected to be bumped into management and never program again, Microsoft gives you the option to continue up the pay scale as a programmer instead.
What that means is that the head of the testing team for a large and important product such as Win2000 probably has a hell of a lot of Q/A experience.
Microsoft will also use a formal, specifications driven testing plan that included both a bunch of testers who do more "free-form exploration" of the product, and who do a formal testing which is driven by a script. They'll also be using testing automation.
The only problem with the Windows 2000 product is that it's an integrated operating system--that is, unlike Linux development which uses a Unix-like development philosophy of keeping each of the pieces small and managable, Windows 2000 attempts to put a hell of a lot into one large, monolithic black box. This plays hell on any formal testing plan in that you now have to test every possible interaction of every component of that black box. (Linux, on the other hand, can be tested more easily by testing each component separately, and making sure each component interacts with the standard Unix API correctly.)
The monolithic nature of Windows 2000 means that it will be near impossible to create a complete and full test plan, simply because of the huge number of component interactions within the black box. There's probably just too many conditions to test adequately.
For me, it's '###' in a comment, rather than 'XXX'; that's because '###' should never occur in regular C/C++ code. But I do concur; I've got '###' scattered pretty liberally throughout my code as well. They include things ranging from "I really need to complete this subroutine" to "I wonder if there is a better way to do this."
So just because there are about 20,000 BUGBUG lines doesn't really mean much.
I agree with you that the number "63000" is completely meaningless in this context. However, if W2K were free of significant bugs, why would they put out a service pack before it's even been released? I'd guess there were quite a few biggies left.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Has MS finally given up supporting Alpha and made W2K completely single-architecture?
NT was proclaimed to be architecture-independent when it first came out, but one by one all the ports to things like MIPS dropped away - leaving only the Alpha port (until now?)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Actually, what I had in mind was that it might have millions of bugs, but the bug index just rolls over at 65k...
MSK
I had always thought the depiction of Bill Gates as Borg was humorous parody, but seeing the 20% response of those who plan to buy Win2k bugs and all has convinced me it's not parody.
Obviously there is a significant number of people that are compelled to lap up whatever MS spews out. I had thought the failure of MS Bob was an indication that the public was starting to change its thinking, but it's clear this isn't yet complete.
Maybe someone could forward this on to the DoJ Anti-trust division for use in the trial.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
A cosmetic flaw when copying lots of files. The file copy dialog doesn't handle multiple gigs correctly and starts saying things like 373689 Minutes Remaining.
A couple bugs in the OS/2 console app emulation used to run older Microsoft console Apps and most importantly, to run the Brief editor. The OS/2 --version of Brief supports long filenames, runs great under WinNT.
One, The Ctrl-S and Ctrl-C keys are trapped and don't get through (this works in WinNT, the OS/2 support DLLs are unchanged in Win2000, it's a bug in Win2000).
Two, The file create function does not work on FAT32 volumes, just gives an error. Open works fine. (So for instance you cannot use Brief to edit a file on FAT32).
The most serious bug I know of it IDE driver doesn't work on Micronics 440FX based motherboards (and maybe others). Very popular in Dual Pentium Pro servers.
From the article:
One developer, informed of Microsoft's bug estimates, said all new software ships with lots of bugs but few software vendors are willing to acknowledge this reality. "The fact that Microsoft found that many bugs indicates to me just how thorough their testing processes are," said the Windows developer, who requested anonymity.
It could mean that they have done a really good job of finding the bugs, or it could mean that there are a lot of bugs to be found. It depends on a number of factors. What's the arrival rate of new bug reports? How are the known bugs distributed? How does that distribution compare to the distribution of new code in the system since the last release? How does the bug distribution compare to the distribution of testing effort? We don't know enough here other than to say that if this memo really is from within MS, we have no reason to dispute that they know about this many bugs.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Just a question, no flame intended. Anyone know?
In short, a hypothetical future statement that w2k has 65k "bugs" and w2k-sp1 has only 33k "bugs" would be a completely meaningless comparison, and says absolutely nothing about the quality of either code.
There is no accurate measure of the "bugginess" of the code, particularly one as complex as w2k. For a very simple code, I may measure bugginess by testing all possible inputs (for example, consider a code with two bits of input, bit A and bit B, whose assigned task is to return (A OR B). If the code returns 0 for A=0,B=0 and 1 otherwise, the code is 0% buggy. If the code always returns 0, it got 3 test cases wrong out of four and is 75% buggy).
We often rely on anecdotal evidence to evaluate software ("We have fixed the problem in the PPP script") and compare different pieces of software but should take numerical measurements (such as this bug count) with a grain of salt.
Whoops, wasn't thinking myself. The if block is only evaulated if your || condition is true and Linux_community is "true".
You might have meant something like
if (Liunx_community & (creationism | fundamentalism))
It is next to impossible for windows 2000 to crash without a BSOD. I am willing to bet that you have a hardware problem. Either some IRQ conflict or you're overclocking. That's what causes system freezeups.
That code of yours is broken.
if Linux_community is anything but NULL then your if block is evaluated.
Anyway, I was saying that the knee-jerk reactions everyone has is reminicent of creationists.
That COM one is interesting. I wonder what problems would be encountered if I were to hook the shell and notice when a DLL was being deleted, check to see if DLLUnregisterServer is exported and run it.
I mean, it would make sense, since heaps of applications leave their COM signatures in the registry after the dll is deleted.
ewww, are you sure? maybe the UI or video card just locked up and you couldn't tell....can you reproduce the behaviour? Cause if you can, it's a bug that should be reported.
Should be enough for everyone. ;)
_________________________
I think not.
_________________________
Patch it around
65,000... Hey! The keyboard isn't working! What's wrong with this darn....
Sure, not all of these are real problems. We're getting a number of bug reports indicating minor stuff (typos in man pages, user interface stuff we don't agree with, or reports of bugs that are actually user problems).
Still 65000 is a huge number...
As a comparison, Red Hat's bugzilla is currently at about 9700 bugs, about 95% of which are resolved, and some of the non-resolved bugs being non-reproducable; and Red Hat's bugzilla contains the whole system (and powertools). I don't think the 65000 bugs in Windows 2000 include bugs in, for example, Visual C++ (Red Hat's include gcc).
Even if only 20% of the bugs are real, that's way more than any bug ever reported in Red Hat Linux.
I think it's pretty much the same situation if you look at the number of bugs in the bug tracking systems for other Linux distributions, or the various BSDs.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Now you might say that Debian is worse at tracking bugs than MS (ie a smaller ratio of Debian's bugs are known than of Windows's bugs) due to the number of full-time MS employees etc, or you might say that the bug tracking system in Debian is at least as good because of its openness to anyone who would submit.. But those are the numbers for anyone interested.
Also important to note is that this does not include kernel bugs. I would have included them, but I don't know where to find those... Someone please reply if you have them.
Windows 2004, to be released in Q3 2005, will have a new and improved core. This core has been heavily tested. Our acquisitions department has been looking at the proper target and we feel the time is right to change our market focus.
In related news, Microsoft is looking for a new graphic artist who can properly draw a pentagram.
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No Zen is good zen
unsigned short bugs_r_us;
the bug counter will soon go from 65535 to 0.
So instead of correcting the problem and pushing back the release date, Microsoft is going to release Windows 2000 upon thousands of unsuspecting retailers, and millions of unsuspecting users JUST to meet the deadline. "That's okay, we'll fix it in service pack 1."
The only problem with that is, Service pack 1 is a good 6 months away. In the meantime, what do the users do?
"Our goal for the next release of Windows 2000 is to have zero bugs."
WHO do these people think they're KIDDING? The next release? Okay, we're at Service pack 6 for NT 4. Several of those service packs actually BROKE more stuff than they fixed, and the goal for Windows 2000 OSR2 is zero bugs? Sure, I'll hand it to them - They have the right idea, but:
A) it's more than likely just marketspeak: "This one may have 63,000 problems, but the NEXT one will have zero, enabling you to have fun, and be more productive than ever! Blah Blah..."
B) How about attainable goals? How many people believe in their hearts that Microsoft will put out a Bug-free operating system? There is no such thing. Also, Microsoft is so concerned about market share that they could care less about present problems. "Fix it later."
Market researchers have repeated warnings to their clients against upgrading immediately to Win2000.
Go back about 5 years, replace "Win2000" with "Windows 95", and we have the SAME EXACT situation all over again. (Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.)
Several outfits have advised customers to wait until Microsoft issues its first or second service pack before deploying Win2000.
*Ahem* - Replace "Win2000" with NT 4.0. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
>According to a story on ZDNET, Sm@rt Reseller got an internal MS memo that says Windows 2000
... then it becomes a relationship that both parties will be happy with. That is what is meant by a "zero-defect" delivery of product.
>has 63,000 "defects" (if you read the article the number goes up to 65,000+ bugs), and that's the
>same Windows that will be out on Feb. 17! Is this what MS suggests putting on people's workstations
>and installing on production servers? What do you think?
(By the way, when is the Extrans going to work again? Taco? Taco? Bueller?)
This "HeUnique" goombah needs a) a little computer science education, b) to read more carefully, c) to sit down and take a deep breath before posting.
First, the ZDNet article refers to 63,000 "defects", but not all defects are bugs. As reading it makes clear, some defects are simply usability issues, some are shortfalls in meeting intended functionality, others are simply things that cause end-user confusion. To equate all these with software bugs that make the product unusable indicates many things, starting with a lack of real-world experience delivering software to end-users, and obviously including no exposure to the product in question.
Of course Microsoft suggests putting this in a production environment. That's what a piece of software achieving release MEANS. Release does not mean the software works perfectly. It means it meets customer or client expectations, which in a properly managed relationship, are equal to the deliverable. If you've led the client to believe they'll get platinum and you deliver brass, that says more about you than the client. But if you say by X we can deliver brass, or we can wait until Y if you insist on silver, Z for gold
I hope that HeUnique doesn't continue to help Slashdot slide into the abyss of adolescent BBS flammage.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
O.k. the issue I'd like to highlight is the fact that Microsoft has very thorough configuration management software. I don't know what they use, but you can bet your sweet ass it beats the pants off Bugzilla (which I love, don't get me wrong) -- they can afford it and they need it. That being said, it is certain that they have now and have had for years bug tracking resources in their development teams.
The fact that there are 21,000 or 63,000 "bugs" -- for the sake of some degree of objectivity let's assume there are 20,000 actual "bugs" in Window 2000, as tracked by Microsoft's internal bug tracking systems -- that are being announced now implies that there were (let's say again) very close to 20,000 (or more -- this is assuming they've been busting ass to fix them since they went "gold") bugs that were in the bug tracking system when the product was shipped to manufacturers.
This is in spite off the resources they are claiming they have used to beta test the product! [ I should note that beta testing is rarely testing in a production-load environment, so it is not as useful for finding bugs likely to emerge in Real Use (this is not an indictment of Microsoft, it's just the unfortunate truth) ] I can only imagine how much of a piece of shit Win2k was when it went out for beta testing...
We know why they ship buggy product (two primary reasons -- to meet shipping deadlines, and because a "perfect" product has no need for upgrades :-) ). That they ship buggy product for exhorbitant prices is unforgiveable (ignoring even the marketing that claims otherwise as I'm trying hard to do). That they spend as much as they do on testing and still release shitware is an indictment of their development process -- though what they're doing wrong is open for holy war ("talk amongst yourselves...").
Bottom line: a large number (~20,000) bugs were most likely known, IN THE SOURCE CONTROL SYSTEM, at the time the product was shipped to manufacturers.
Draw your own conclusions.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
In the Linux kernel source (2.2.12), I found "XXX" 1,561 times out of approximately 2,000,000 lines of code.
Now, Win2k supposedly has 35,000,000 lines of code, or 17.5 times what is in the linux kernel. Therefore, to compare, 1,561 * 17.5 = 27,318.
Looks like the kernel source is right in line with Win2k as far as BugBug or XXX comments go.
In addition, as a coder, I do liberally sprinkle with XXX. Everytime I hit something that I realize I could do better or stub something out for now, I XXX. The code will work and be considered bug free (depending on the stub), but there remain XXX's to remind myself that I wanted to do something better there. In other words, a lot of my XXX's are for rainy days when I have time to improve code instead of just chugging to the next deadline.
Now I'm not supporting Windows here, but I hate biased poll questions, and that's exactly what they had. "Do you plan to buy Windows 2000 - an OS with 65,000 known bugs?" Come on, that sounds like the kind of question Microsoft would ask if it was about their competiton.
Though, Microsoft has spread enough FUD that maybe it's time for some Anti-FUD like this. In that case, could it maybe be a little less obvious?
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
But on the plus side: Notepad is unbundled from the OS, and now availble for only $99 from local retailers.
1) That's what the windows 2000 beta is. However Microsoft don't get people to try to fix the bugs themselves, that's up to their thousands of debugging and source reading people.
2) Microsoft already has a kick ass debugger - not free though. And the debug symbols for Windows 2000 are readily downloadable my MSDN subscribers or Beta testers. Core dumps (or any crash in windows) again can be debugged. You have many options. One is if you have VC++ installed, it'll bring up a window asking you if you want to debug, then you can do step-step debugging. ALso Dr Watson can collect information like your "core" dump files and store them. BSOD are also documented on MSDN and MS Support, including information for how to connect to a machine during a 'bugcheck/bsod' and debug the BSOD.
Windows 2000's DDK (Driver Development Kit) comes with several 'build' enviroments for creating and testing drivers. Including the 64bit build enviroments for Win64.
3. NT is theorectically hardware independent, very little has to be rewritten because of the HAL. However the market wasn't very good for MIPS, ALPHA, SPARC or PPC and those ports kind of died.
Without being explicitly pro or con Microsoft, a few things Microsoft could do to make its bug-squashing chores easier within the context of a closed-source operation:
1. Run a bugtraq-style mailing list. Even without the source, there are a lot of people with extensive enough knowledge of Windows OS internals to provide at least some outside insight as to why a particular bug might be occurring.
2. Make a really kick-a#! debugger readily and freely available in the tradition of gdb. Make things like core dumps and other Unix diagnostic niceties standard, to allow people the ability to pull something useful out of the rubble for a postmortem. Obviously, within a closed-source paradigm, some method would be needed to ensure that only Microsoft programmers could dissassemble the cores; encryption, maybe? (and yes, I know there's a joke in there somewhere about a user's disk filling up with core dumps within five seconds, but I'm leaving it alone!)
3. Two words: architechture independence. While I have no hard facts to back this up, I would imagine that, because Microsoft is concentrating on a single hardware architechture, quite a bit of assembley code is sneaking its way in. Assembley code is good for speed, but (although there will be doubtlessly much debate about this) the fact remains that the more architechture-independent code is in a product, the more stable it is. For further proof, look at early OSs (such as MSDOS 1.0) that are coded significantly in assembley, and something like BSD Unix, which is about 80% architechture independent - the only assmbley routines are device I/O, memory mapping, and other such things. If Microsoft went to an architechture-independent approach, it could make its debugging job a lot easier.
I know that many people here will probably flame me for giving honest suggestions to Microsoft, but politics aside I think that if Microsoft were to take up the practices I outlined above, along with similar practices common in the Unix world, it would make all our lives a lot easier. After all, Microsoft is going to be here for quite a while, and the less pain that existence inflicts on us, the better.
And they claim there's no 16-bit code left in Win2000...
:-))
(Please don't moderate this if you're not a programmer.
MSK
If you were to add up the bugs in Linux that Microsoft would consider a bug (eg. would be in their count) I bet it would be the same, if not more.
These bugs aren't show stoppers, gee 65K ooh that is heaps, the damn thing won't even boot! Not.
These bugs are more like, on this system with X hardware when running along side with this hardware and when running X's software package called Y, windows 2000 will have a pixel out of place.
A majority of bugs in the 65K are very much like this. Bugs that cause potential problems with people not having HCL hardware. In fact I wouldn't even call most of them 'bugs' as such, since in the traditional sense they aren't - unless like Microsoft you want to make sure Windows 2000 works on the billions of hardware and software configurations out there.
And this statement "Is this what MS suggests putting on people's workstations and installing on production servers? What do you think?" is just so typical of what everyone's reaction around here would be. So blind, arrogant and ignorant, and very predictable. It's the type of knee jerk reaction which has made me so bitter with the Linux community over the past 3 years.
In many ways the Linux community acts too much like creationists/fundamentalists, no matter what science comes up with there's a knee jerk "oh we're not all monkeys you devil worshipping bastards" reaction.
Windows 2000 is by far the most stable and featured operating system Microsoft has written to date. I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of our production machines at work.
I admit, on a 3 year old K6200 at home, I have seen around 6 BSOD during the beta testing phase, around the same amount of kernel panics I get on the machine as it seems, so i suspect my hardware is stuffed.
In the last few months of the beta, Microsoft was only paying attention BSOD (bug check) bug reports, even though other bug reports (like cosmetic or hardware compatabilty reports were still being sent in). This isn't incompetance, it's good management.
There's a point in a product's life cycle when it has to ship or never gets shipped. I mean, how many bugs has Redhat 6.1 had since it's releast, heck how many security problems has it had since it's released?
Microsoft at least plan these out, and while they're working on Windows 2000, they also have very good ideas of what the next service pack will do, and even what the next version of Windows 2000 will do. An example of one of these 'feature' bugs is load balancing COM+ services, this was a feature that never got finished in time, but has been moved into the service pack. It's by was by means essential, so it'll get updated later.
Microsoft has tried to do everything they can in Windows 2000, and it's no suprise that they'll be problems and things they don't get done, but that's software! Things that don't get done, get done later in a service pack (or option pack), and bug fixes are the same.
Despite these 65K bugs, Windows 2000 is still stable and will work for most people.
Anyway look at it the other way round, 75% of people _won't_ have compatability problems according to this article. That's not bad for an OS upgrade as HUGE as Windows 2000.
In fairness, keep in mind that "defect", or even "bug" for that matter is a very broad term.
I myself am a QA tester, although not in the Windows group. I've entered many, many bugs that were Postponed or Won't Fixed that, honestly, probably didn't deserve to be fixed. Things like "such and such a static is too long for this control" or "we should notify the user if x, y, or z happens". Little niggly things in other words.
Keep in mind that a "bug" is anything a tester doesn't like, including personal design preferences. It isn't necessarily a flaw that would interfere with use of the product. If a bug is of that kind, then it's smart for a time-starved group to Postpone or Won't Fix the issue.
-matthew Priestley
mpriest@microsoft.com
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!