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Microsoft: Because Bugs are Cool
h_orion writes "According to Mr. Gates, Microsoft recieves 'Less than one percent' call volume in relation to bugs. He also blames the users lack of knowledge as a cause of some of these bugs. He goes on to say that the feeling of frustration that people hold towards bugs is a sociological issue, rather than technical saying that people complain about software bugs 'Because it's cool.' Read more in this interview." Boy, where do you even begin...
Although the MS Knowledge base is good a resolving lots of questions/bugs I wish it were more like Bugzilla....
A: You don't.
Don't bargain with an abuser, don't negotiate with a thief, don't spit in the wind.
Don't try reasoning with Bill Gates. He's not interested.
united states nuclear device terrorist bioweapon encryption cocaine korea syria iran iraq columbia cuba
With that mentality, McDonalds will be next at saying people complain about tainted food, "because it's cool"....
hmmm... I never quite got the "coolness" factor of praying to the porciline god...
Face it, whining about minor bugs is now become an art form. Sometimes the software deserves it, sometimes not.
Its actually hard to believe this interview is real. Actually is there any proof that it is? Gates sounded very unprofessional and not like himself in the interview, almost like he was attacking the FOCUS interviewer. Anyone else care to comment on this?
October 23,1995? This is a really old interview. It is nice and old. /. History for Nerds. Stuff that mattered. Hmm. At this point, it is difficult to even verify if this interview is even real...
-Sean
...face it, you have to be. But a blue screen, or any sort of error dialogue is not purely psychological. I respect my subconscious quite a bit, but I suspect it to be quite incapable of conjuring up indecipherable addresses related to memory...
...either that or I have some extremely low self esteem.
Nobody demanding to see the original transcript?
No, those links at the bottom don't lead to the original transcript, only some German "analysis" of the original transcript.
Because of this blatant lack of evidence, everything else is suspect.
I have been pwned because my
So I must write the coolest programs on the planet!
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
I want my copy of Windows 98 to go more than 3 days without a reset. Does that mean I'm in the minority? Or is OS stability just a 'feature'?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
1995.
That's the year of the quotes attributed to Bill.
No one needs more than 640k of RAM.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
that people complain about software bugs 'Because it's cool.'
That's why they create so many of them. It's all for the customers.
Bill thinks it's cool to waggle back and forth in his chair like an unloved monkey.
What are the other 99% of calls about? Oh yeah. Crap documentation that tells you the obvious half of what the tool or call does, but doesn't bother to tell you what its actual behavior or use is.
I wonder if he's counting the 3-10 times a week my XP machine says it's sending a bug report back to Microsoft.
I've had to stop using Outlook Express entirely because it won't work, and Microsoft was no help.
And I've already run into race conditions in the event handling for C#.
People report bugs not because it's cool, but because they think Microsoft might just have a desire to help.
How wrong they are, Mr Gates seems to be saying.
Funny, I used to get lots of letters from irate fanboys who asserted that it was an obvious fake. Not one of them could spell.
Why is this just getting to the light of day?
Does this interview sound fake to anyone else? I mean, come on:
Gates:
No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS:
Yeah, I did...
Gates:
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that.
---
Gates:
No, only if that is what'll sell!
Gates is a businessman - I don't think he'd be stupid enough to say this kind of stuff in an interview. I want to see the original source documents.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
You can begin by saying that billg knows his userbase, which is to say that they are mostly blooming idiots who don't know about any of the actual issues of the computing world. They know enough to see a Dell for sub$1000 and buy that. Can you imagine how they'd feel if they had to go out and install an operating system? These are the people that don't even know that Apple does a better job doing what Windows is famous for than Windows does.
I think that this is just a logical step in the MS ass-covering train, nothing really crazy. They already blame users for security lapses in their products with that silly "if you don't patch it's not our fault" idea, ignoring the fact that sometimes the patches hurt worse than most of the bugs you're patching against....
:/
Still, I think they have a semivalid point here that I'm sure not everything that they get as a bug report is their fault. I'm sure there are a lot of people using 3rd party apps that get errors that they think are OS-related and bug MS about them. I'm also sure that a lot of people that DO run into MS bugs don't bother to report them, given their track record.
Still, even if they do get a bunch of non-issues as bugs, to take such a condenscending tone with their userbase and suggest that they're complaining about what they believe is a valid problem is abhorrent. Then again, no amount of bad publicity like this will hurt them at all. So, I think, people should find lots of VALID bugs and submit them (even though they know the bugs won't be fixed). And someone do double for me, I don't think they'd react kindly to me sending them bug reports from my linux box.
How did an idiot like that become the richest man in the world?
If by "users" you mean "developers" and by "lack of knowledge" you mean "total oversights of fundamental security," then i do agree with you mr. gates.
Even though Big Bill seems to be getting angry with this interviewer, he does bring up a good point. Most new versions of software tote new features more than bug fixes. Bug fixes seem to be addressed more in service packs then in these releases.
This is why I use a Macs. OSX have no bugs so far. Apple actualy cares about it's custumers.
99% of Iraq's population voted Saddam Hussein to be their supreme overlord because they thought he was cool.
damn, what a bunch of crock!
And to think that I actually spent money on a shrink. Thanks for the free mental diagnosis Mr Gates!
Doesn't Microsoft only receive a small number of bug-related calls because they charge for telephone support?
I don't know which person is more insane, fearless leader William Gates, Jr. or beloved leader Kim Jung Il.
It's the user's lack of knowledge that explains our crappy engineering. Mind you, the defense industry does the same.
Where did this article come from?
Can anyone vouch for the veracity of the comments in it?
Did the interview really take place?
Did the interview take place at a time and in an environment that would have an effect on today?
If you just want to blindly start swinging because it's Bill Gates, then fine, do your swinging. But if you want to join the world of grownups, maybe it would be useful to think critically.
I have been pwned because my
How did this even get posted? It's obviously complete satire. Click here to see all of the websites that link to this...they're all TECH HUMOR. If humor was the intended goal, it'd be responsible to make note of that in the summary. Please correct this in the dupe.
This is not only from 1995, but has been known by the zealotry at /. a looong long time. ;)
This interview sounds highly dubious. Gates gives many interviews to the press every year, and I doubt he would express himself in such an off-the-cuff manner.
But even if it's true, how is this news? The interview, even it's accurate, is 8 years old!
Yeah, who really cares about what Bill Gates said or did 7.5 years ago. I mean, George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving in his 30s and now he's the President of the only superpower on earth! Let ancient history be forgotten...
I mean, 1995 old. Before BSOD even was invented.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
He is so full of it, his eyes are brown.
Lets see, drivespace toasting data is not a bug that people want fixed. Machine hanging, is not a bug people want fixed.
Yeah, right.
Fight Spammers!
Bill Gates seems extremely out of touch with Windows users. Bugs are acceptable?!! By whom? Bill needs to get of his fscking high horse and get with the real world. One would have to assume that security bugs are looked at the same way: not important. Well....that much is pretty obvious now, isn't it.
But it needed more racial epithets and jokes about bzip2, NIGGER!
Gee, thats really the pot calling the porcelain black... Moron.
Oddly enough I agree with him (hence the anonymous posting)
http://www.detroitluv.com
From the article
:::The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for.:::
Isn't this the same company that holds war sessions and decides which bugs get attention immediately and which get kicked to the next version to be fixed? (i.e. bugs get kicked to the next release/fix of XP because they're not worth fixing now?)
"Wait until the next version" isn't going to go away even if Gates decides that it's not. Hell, sometimes it's just easier to tell the customers that. And sometimes, we just need that little slice of hope that the next version won't turn out to be crap...
So, how does one reconcile Mr. Gates's words with the words quoted in this post from yesterday's discussion about the development of Windows NT? "It's in Longhorn. Next bug." goes against Gates's words like the semen stains on Monica's blue dress contradicts the phrase "I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman".
I've tried hard to refrain from MSFT bashing, but when Bill opens his mouth and spouts bullshit like this, I just want to kick his teeth down his smug fucking throat. Monopolize this, asshole.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Actually, I don't doubt the idea that it might be sociological, at least in part. It happens quite a bit. It runs parallel to the concept of first impressions.
Any psychologist will tell you that first impressions when meeting someone (or something) can be vastly important in determining ones attitudes towards them in the future. Microsoft is introduced to so many people as being an evil monopoly that makes bad software that many people accept this as fact.
It is true that Windows does contain many inexcusable bugs, especially when compared against Posix based operating systems. This fact too contributes to the first impression phenomenon. If a users first experience with the software is a bug and there are rants and complaints against the company for producing a poor product, it is inevitable that that user will perpetuate the idea that the software is poorly constructed.
This is certainly no excuse for a poor performance record but it does explain the almost excessive torrents of bad publicity the software gets.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Given the grammar transcript I would say that a lot of what was said in that interview was horribly mangaled. This is not current and not news.
At least it wasn't done in mandarin chinese where pronunciation is the difference between horse and mother.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I never find it cool to find a bug in my system... getting hacked either... but damned if it doesn't come up in conversation all the time! A bug in my system is a technical issue dealing with my system... not a subjective opinion about the operating system... if everybody's talking about the bugs in the operating system it's good because more attention to an issue fixes more problems.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
If MS (and the rest of the PC industry) would stop marketing computers as something anyone can easily use, they wouldn't get so many calls from those who believed them.
that windows is a bug itself. It started off as some other program but keeps growing and mutating. Can you think of any other reason how something like clippy could come into existence.
Lack of user knowledge (or even the ability to infer) is a common problem in regards to bugs and other tech support related issues.
I do tech support for a local ISP and some of the calls we get are ridiculous.
Me:Okay, Click next. (On 7th screen of 'Internet Connection Wizard')
User: Alright, now it wants my username and passowrd.
Me: Type them in the appropriate blanks. Make sure password is case-sensitive.
User: I thought it was qwExEjv?
Me: Pardon me?
Later...
Me: What do you see now? (1235th screen of 'ICW')
User: The same thing as I did before, nothing has changed. Is this thing broken? Are you sure you're doing this right?
Me: You see the exact same thing? (perplexed)
User: YES.
Me: Oh. Click Next please.
User: Oh, you didn't say to click next.
I mean COME ON
Posting as directed.
It sounds like Mr. Gates has taken some of the smug from Linux developers and put it to use in his closed code. Does that violate the GPL?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
And it seems to be about Win95 which is totally different to Win 3.11 so I can understand why Bill says most of the calls are about people not knowing how to use it properly. That wouldnt hold true today though.
Well you know, it DOES give us something to complain about. If it weren't for Microsoft's behavior, there may have never been Linux.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
read the subject line homeboy
How do /. editors know that this was a real interview ?
This link is not even on FOCUS magazine's website
This post fooled you all
The interview link in the post is on The Cantrip Corpus
website
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank.
corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
George Bush getting drunk has absolutely no coralation to Bill Gates doing an interview.
The only thing they share is having happened in the past. And two poeple you don't
Because people can't see me crapping and sneaking up on them at night.
Most of the users I've been training for years and years, on Macs or D'OS or Win3.x-2K, blame their own timidity and perceived inferiority for the problems they encounter.
Sometimes they're right! Who told them that they could check email while printing and performing an interminable Access query without crashing! Sheesh!
Was I an idiot in 1996 for trusting that win95 could run as a simple file server without needing to reboot every 44 days whether it crashed or not?
Users don't have the language, time, or context to report bugs. They just curse mr goats and get on with rebooting. Only geeks really care enough.
Damn those pesky terrorists
No one needs more than 640k of RAM.
Actually, I heard from Bill himself that he was misquoted on that and he basically said the opposite, that computers would not survive on a small amount of ram.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
C'mon, this thing is over 7 years old, and is clearly satire. It's not news, and it doesn't matter.
I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town.
In case some of you didn't see, this interview is from 1995.
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
How do
This link is not even on FOCUS magazine's website
This post fooled you all
The interview link in the post is on The Cantrip Corpus
website
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank.
corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
This article is not the way Bill Gates talks. Dollars to donuts this is a big hoax. It reads like something a slashdotter might say Bill Gates said, not something he would actually say.
Did anyone else notice?
from http://www.cantrip.org/
The Welcome:
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment;
2. an elaborate deception or prank.
Who owns your data?
There should be a way to mod down news as -1 Troll for /. now-a-days. It seems like it's getting worse and worse. I suppose that can be said about anything after it's golden age.
It isn't a coincidence at all the that "nobugs" article is posted on a site with other anti-microsoft articles...
------------------------------
Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
This sounds faked, especially because the Focus Magazine homepage is littered with Microsoft paraphenelia and is tied in with MSN. You people need to stop taking everything against Microsoft and running with it! Sometimes it is just a hoax!
Who the f***ing hell was that idiot that wanted to buy the blue screens?
Date + Style of the interview point to it being old and/or fake. Take your pick and either way it is a nice piece of history and little more.
Dumb quote of the week:
Bipolar disorder is not a character flaw!
Ok so where is there a number I can call and talk to an MS Tech that will let me know how to fix a problem with out having to pay something like $100/hr??
The reason no one calls about bugs is that there is no one place at MS to call.... I work in an IT dept... We log all our calls about Outlook and windows and other problems maybe we should send them a quarterly report....
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Maybe we're just so used to the bugs, we just reboot after the blue screen or hard lock.
Or how about:
We search for the fix and apply it ourselves. (http://aumha.org)
Just because Microsoft receives only 1% of calls that are bug related doesn't mean that Microsoft's products are only 1% buggy.
Perhaps Gates needs to visit (http://www.securityfocus.com/microsoft) to get a better perspective on things.
It sounds more like a joke than a real interview. Unless Bill is starting to wanna run for government. Say alot of words, don't answer the question, and don't accept that there is something with your policies
I'm not even going to begin to defend this article. More than likely it is fraudulent, but I think that there is a larger issue here. Microsoft does not go out of their way to make it easy to report bugs. Phone tech support and you have the privilege of paying to report that bug.
Think of the stability increase if Microsoft had something similar to the bug tracking software on SourceForge. What about hosting some forums that users could discuss problems? Users helping users, etc. I know that they have mindshare and all that so don't really *need* to make rock-solid apps, but they'd clean up their image as well as improving the lives of the millions of people who are frustrated with their software.
The site that its posted on is cantrip.org
cantrip
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank.
Please check before posting
As a side issue, I work with Microsoft (yes, and Linux, and Apple) software almost every day; and I work with technical people who debug on those three platforms. Generally speaking, the bugs are rarely with the Microsoft software (and, as flameproofing, Linux tends to be pretty un-buggy as well). The bugs tend to be with non-Microsoft software running on the Microsoft platform. I have a laptop that runs Windows 2000, MS Word, IE 5, and a pretty plain-vanilla printer driver. It runs nothing else, and I always run it in a fairly protected mode. It works fine. I've never encountered a bug, or a bluescreen, or a crash (which I can't say for my other boxen, Linux or Windows, which have been stressed).
Granted, there may be bugs in other software, or libraries, or DLLs, or any other system components, which cause those software to fail -- but I've found precious little in terms of bugs in the base software put out by MS. They do a fairly good job at that, for all the other things they can't do right...
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Works the other way, too. It's entirely pointless to tell slashdot users not to mindlessly bash Microsoft.
I totally agree with you, I just don't understand why you'd bother expressing such a reasonable statement here.
--
pants ahoy
Microsoft released the much anticipated Windows 95 operating system to replace the venerable Windows 3.11.
I support windows, from 95-xp. THey have changed the interfaces around with every damn release, for no sensible reason. They just bury them under more obfuscation , for no other apparent reason then to keep my ass in business.
In additon, with every release, their office products go through more bloat, and give less value. I just had an Excel XP spreadsheet, that would only open proplerly in EXCEL fucking 97. And open office. All the other versions would lose all of the graphs. Some fucking improvements. MS excel was the ONLy MS product i thought worked well. Well, i switched to Open office. Their own products cant handle their own spreadsheets as well as their competetors, ie open office. Yeah, OO is a little clunkier, but its free and it goddam works.
Can anyone explain to me why WORD 97 opes up 12 seconds faster on a pentium 300 then WORD XP on a fucking 1.8ghz box? I didnt think so.
After supporting WORD XP for a year, i can categoriaclly say that it offers the same features as word 98, for all practical purposes. Oh, as a fucking feature improvement, how bout if you open a word document from outlook, dont hide the fucking saved changes in a HIDDEN system directory thats erased when you log off. This has been a problem since word 98. Silly users, they think when they save a document, theyll be allowed to see it again.
Please dont mod this as flamebait, it is an honest rant. I have been supporting their crap for 5 years, and im tired of it.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Stuff like this is what makes /. fun to read while drinking.
Yes, there are (many) bugs in software. Windows has 'em, Linux has 'em -- any large piece of code is going to have bugs. No matter how much testing is peformed all the bugs cannot be caught due to what kind of stresses users put software through. (Today's testing methods are very inefficient...but that's a whole 'nother store.)
Anyway, whether this story is real or not, I have to agree with "Bill." I think idiot users are half the problem. I used to help with tech support as a summer job awhile back, and when customers called in complaining about some piece of software, it was, 90% of the time, something they had done that was very stupid. I mean, hell, wouldn't software design be extremely easy if designers didn't have to worry about "error catching" and "user input"? Most definitely.
Okay...my two cents. Spend it how you will.
Maybe thats why I recently started using Phoenix?
moo.
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly
So does that mean that most people are Luddites? In short, yes. When was the last time that a normal (non-technical) manager wanted to change their computers to Linux?
I simply had to see this artical before replying. The headline seems too anti microsoft to be real. Then I read the artical. Wow, it sure puts things in perspective.
... it's really amazing: We do it because we think that's what customers want. That's why we do what we do.
... 90 percent of the time I get the answer "Oh, well, yeah, that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll be fixed". That's how the system works.
...
FOCUS Magazine Interview with Bill Gates:
Microsoft Code Has No Bugs (that Microsoft cares about)
In this interview, Big Bill gets distracted and reveals his contempt for you, his loyal customer.
Note: this page is also available in Italiano, Español, and Japanese.
In an interview for German weekly magazine FOCUS (nr.43, October 23,1995, pages 206-212), Microsoft`s Mr. Bill Gates has made some statements about software quality of MS products. [See executive summary, below.] After lengthy inquiries about how PCs should and could be used (including some angry comments on some questions which Mr. Gates evidently did not like), the interviewer comes to storage requirements of MS products; it ends with the following dispute:
FOCUS:
Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the older one is also more complex and has more features...
Gates:
No, only if that is what'll sell!
FOCUS:
But...
Gates:
Only if that is what'll sell! We've never done a piece of software unless we thought it would sell. That's why everything we do in software
FOCUS:
But on the other hand - you would say: Okay, folks, if you don't like these new features, stay with the old version, and keep the bugs?
Gates:
No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version - it's not there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version.
FOCUS:
But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to have fixed.
Gates:
No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
FOCUS:
Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from version 5.11 to 6.0".
Gates:
No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS:
Yeah, I did...
Gates:
It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that. -- The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.
FOCUS:
How come I keep being told by computer vendors "Well, we know about this bug, wait till the next version is there, it'll be fixed"? I hear this all the time. How come? If you're telling me there are no significant bugs in software and there is no reason to do a new version?
Gates:
No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
FOCUS:
Probably you have other contacts to your software developers. But if Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store or a support line and says, "Hey listen, there's a bug"
Gates:
Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year.
FOCUS:
Hm, a couple of million dollars?
Gates:
500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone calls and classify them. That's the input we use to do the next version. So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop. People call in - we decide what to do on it. Do you want to know what percentage of those phonecalls relates to bugs in the software? Less than one percent.
FOCUS:
So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have this and that feature"?
Gates:
Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software. That's the primary thing. We could have you sit and listen to these phone calls. There are millions and millions of them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing".
FOCUS:
So where does this common feeling of frustration come from that unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every day that these things simply don't work like they should.
Gates:
Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that - oh, yeah, I know that bug." - I can understand that phenomenon sociologically, not technically.
Executive Summary:
So...
Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually, unimportant;
If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition) in the minority;
Microsoft doesn't care about bugs because bug fixes are not a significant source of revenue;
If you think you found a bug, it really only means you're incompetent;
Anyway, people only complain about bugs to show how cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.
Straight from the horse's mouth.
More information....
(Not all software is as unreliable as Microsoft's. For example, PCs running Linux often run for many months without need to reboot for any reason.)
Text for this page is extracted from the RISKS archive:
This is the raw interview transcript (from which the magazine article was transcribed in German) kindly provided by the interviewer, Dr. Jürgen Scriba. The introductory text at the top is from Klaus Brunnstein, as found in . (A big Thank You to Drs. Scriba, Brunnstein, Neumann, and Marshall for making this material available, to Michele Beltrame for the Italian translation, to Iñaky Peréz Gonzáles for the castellano translation, and SHINYAMA Yusuke for the Japanese translation.)
If you maintain a web page, you are encouraged to make a link to this one.
Send email: ncm-nospam@cantrip.org Copyright ©1996 by Nathan Myers. All Rights Reserved. URL:
BTW... Scientology and Scientology.
I'm sure it's a mix of the three, but which of the three explanations do you think is predominantly behind billg's goofy comment? (I'm really not sure, myself)
Shocked gasps greeted this chilly pronouncement. There were cracking backs and necks as men turned to see who had spoken. Slowly, then, as if to give them exactly what they wanted, a white-haired figure in a long black coat and a turned-around collar rose slowly from the bench at the very back of the room. The scar on his forehead--it was in the shape of a cross--was very bright in the light of the kerosene lamps. It was the fellow who had slipped in unnoticed while the Manni elder was going on about Aegypt and sacrificial lambs and the Angel of Death.
It was the Old Fella.
Telford recovered himself with relative speed, but when he spoke, Tian thought he still looked shocked. "Beg pardon, Pere Callahan, but I have the feather--"
"To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly counsel," Pere Callahan said. He stepped into the aisle and began to hobble down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis. He wasn't as old as the Manni elder, nor nearly so old as Tian's gran-pere (who claimed he was the oldest person not only here but in Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his foreheard (according to Zalia, it had been self-inflicted). More had to do with the sound of him. Although he had been here long and long--enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking--not even a stranger would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was from here. His alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure slang he used ('street-jive," he called it). He had undoubtedly come from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about, although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his home. He had been here since long before Tian Jaffords was born--since town elders like Wayne Overholser and Vaughn Eisenhart had worn short pants--and no one disputed his right to speak, with or without the feather.
Younger than Tian's gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was still the Old Fella.
Now he surveyed the men of Call Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford's hand. He sat down on the first bench, still holding it.
Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and no one needed to ask for an explanation.
"This is chickenshit."
He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept his head up, but under the Old Fella's dry and bitter gaze, the rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.
"Chickenshit," the man in the black coat and turned-around collar repeated. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards collar. On his forehead, that other cross--the one he'd supposedly carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some awful sin--glared under the lamps like a tattoo.
"This young man isn't one of my flock, but he's right, and I think you all know it. You know it in your hearts. Even you, Mr. Overholser. And you, George Telford."
"Know no such thing," Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped of its former persuasive charm.
"All your lies will cross your eyes, that's what my mother would have told you." Callahan offered Telford a thin smile Tian wouldn't have wanted it pointed in his direction. And then Callahan did turn to him. "I never heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy. Thankee-sai."
Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He felt like a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.
"I know a bit about cowardice," Callahan said, turning to the men on the benches. "I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one cowardly decision leads to another...and another...and another...until it's too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I assure you the tree of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your souls are in danger."
"Hail Mary, full of grace," said someone on the left side of the room, "the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, J--"
"Bag it," Callahan snapped. "Save it for Sunday." His eyes, blue sparks in their deep hollows, studied them. "For this night, never mind God and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the sneetches and light-sticks of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You're the men of the Calla, are you not? Then act like men. Stop behaving like dogs crawling on their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master."
Overholser went dark red at that, and began to stand. Diego Adams grabbed his arm and spoke in his ear. For a moment Overholser remained as he was, frozen in a kind of crouch, and then he sat back down. Adams stood up.
"Sounds good, padrone," Adams said in his heavy accent. "Sounds brave. Yet there are still a few questions, mayhap. Haycox asked one of em. How can ranchers and farmers stand against armed killers out of the west?"
"By hiring armed killers of our own," Callahan replied.
There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the Old Fella had lapsed into another language. At last Diego Adams said--cautiously, "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," the Old Fella said. "So listen and gain wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen and gain wisdom. Not six days' ride northeast of us, and bound southwest along the Path of the Beam, come three gunslingers and one 'prentice." He smiled at their amazement--their utter and complete amazement. Then he turned to Tian. "The 'prentice isn't much older than your Heddon and Hedda, but he's already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion. The others are quicker and deadlier by far. You want hard calibers? They're at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it."
This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned as if with a fever. His great pod of a belly trembled. "What children's goodnight story is this?" he asked. "If there ever were such men, they passed out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years."
There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any kind. The crowd was still frozen, caught in the reverberation of that one mythic word: gunslingers.
"You're wrong," Callahan said, "but we don't need to fight over it. We can go and see for ourselves. A small party will do, I think. Jaffords here...myself...and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?"
"There ain't no gunslingers!" Overholser roared.
Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. "Pere Callahan, God's grace on you--"
"--and you, Jorge."
"--but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty Wolves?"
"Hear him, he speaks sense!" Eben Took, the storekeeper's son, called out.
"And why would they fight for us?" Estrada continued. "We make it from year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few hot meals? And what man agrees to die for his dinner?"
"Hear him, hear him!" Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.
The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: "I have books in the Rectory. Half a dozen."
Although most of them knew this, the thought of books--all that paper--still provoked a general sigh of wonder.
"According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward. Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld."
"The Eld! The Eld!" the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers raised. Hook em horns, the Old Fella thought. Go, Texas. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the smile that rose on his lips.
"Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?" Telford asked in a gently mocking voice. "Surely you're too old for such tales, Pere."
"Not hardcases," Callahan said patiently, "gunslingers."
"How do you know, Pere?" Tian heard himself ask. "And how can three men stand against the Wolves?"
One of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to, just the same). "I know because I know," he said. "As for how three may stand against many--three and an apprentice, actually--that's a question for their dinh. We'll ask him. And they wouldn't be fighting just for their dinners, you know. Not at all."
"What else, then?" Bucky Javier asked.
Callahan knew they were there because he had seen them. He had seen them because the thing under the church floor had awakened. They would want the thing under the floor, and that was good because the Old Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem's Lot in another world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn't rid of it soon, it would kill him.
Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.
"In time, Mr. Javier," Callahan said. "All in good time, sai."
Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along the benches like from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.
Gunslingers.
Gunslingers to the east, come out of Mid-World.
And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld's last deadly children, moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a wind.
"Time to be men," Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without compassion. "Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true."
BULLSHIT Microsoft software doesn't have bugs. I know that's an old interview, but it doesn't excuse him for having such a complacent a shit-eating grin when it comes to the instability of his companies' software.
4 Microsoft Visual C++ bugs that I can think of immediately (because that's the MS app that I use the most):
MSVC: Label before a closing brace, eg:
...will fail to compile with an error because there are no instructions following the label before a closing brace. Inserting a dummy bracket pair "{}" after the label works around the problem.
MSVC: Occasionally will slow down the longer you have it open with complex projects. And get slower and slower. Sometimes opening a file and starting to type makes it pause for 30 seconds while it checks to see if the file's checked out or not. You must shut MSVC down and delete the .opt file to fix this problem.
MSVC: "(skipping) no changes detected". Meaning: clean and rebuild because it's lazy build caching is confused and will never recompile a changed source file even if you explicitly tell it to.
MSVC: Does not adhere to ANSI spec:
...will give a redefinition compile error - WHEN IT'S AGAINST THE ANSI SPEC.
Instantly crash Windows 95: Right-click on the desktop, select "create shortcut". An icon will appear on the desktop, a window will pop up to ask you for the name. Press escape to cancel then quickly highlight the icon and press delete. Oops. Crash. (If you don't touch the icon it disapears in about 2 seconds - it was never really there in the first place and the bug is because you're telling Explorer to erase something that doesn't exist but it hadn't got around to forgetting about).
I can think of more MS bugs but I'm tired and this is long enough already.
However, he does have a little bit of a point that most of his users are retarded to the point of breaking their software to keep the idiots happy:
Microsoft Word 6 had a lovely "fullscreen" mode. Selecting it would maximise the window, make it topmost, remove all menus and toolbars. You could get a big screen of document and nothing else - great for concentrating. To get out of fullscreen mode: press escape / move the mouse to the top of the screen to get the menu / hit ALT+V(iew), select 'fullscreen'. Simple, right?
Wrong.
Microsoft Word 97 & later all have broken fullscreen modes apparently because of the number of dorks who couldn't figure out how to turn it off and were stuck staring at their fullscreen document. From now on there was a great big permanent "exit fullscreen" button on screen that COULD NOT be removed. I was livid at it for about 6 months - Fullscreen Zen writing mode had been destroyed! I later found out I could write a Visual Basic macro to make it go away again - but talk about inconvenient.
As an epilogue: I'm still using MSVC on Windows at work, but at home I now use KWord under KDE on FreeBSD. Sure, it doesn't have a fullscreen mode - but I'm away from the insanity of Microsoft software and I know that I could tinker with the KWord source if I wanted. :)
Sorry, /. editors are morons for posting this. Can anybody read this and actually believe it's true?
It *is* true, but Bill Gates would've never said it.
WTF is Focus Magazine, anyway?
Oh, it's not april first you say? An editor posted this and thought it was REAL? Well damn, I guess it's better reading a joke presented as truth then the usual dupe though. Although if we get a dupe of this one, I'll be pissed, it's already 8 year old humour, don't know if i can take it more then once.
Check out my life
propz to the h_orion (if he knew it was a fake). lol!!!!!111
That is 8 years ago. 8 years ago Microsoft was positively pleasant compared with current behaviour.
So who cares what Bill said (or maybe didn't say) back then?
"Cats like plain crisps"
While Linux is by far more reliable and stable than Windows on average, I've always found the second statement to be misleading. Maybe someone can correct me
I've used multiple Linux distribution and all Windows versions besides XP. Yes, Windows, even older versions, is usually in need of reboot every week with moderate usage. Yes, Linux machine has a longer *average* uptime. But months and months... no. If the machine is actually *used*, it will not last for months. Memory leaks, zombie processes, kernel panic, other strange events... I wouldn't claim more than a month on average...
Why I am sitting on an updated Debian machine and I don't think I have seen an uptime of a month even once (in last year or so).
If he thinks that the typical Windows user considers calling Microsoft for support for even a nanosecond he is either stupid, or a lier.
OK, maybe both.
Indeed.
Never mind that this article is from 1995 -- the Slashdot summary is incorrect. Bill isn't saying that Microsoft never fixes bugs. He says, "We don't do a new version to fix bugs. ... We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis." [Emphasis added.] This doesn't mean that Microsoft never fixes bugs, or that Bill doesn't think bugfixes are important. He's saying that a product can't be sold on bugfixes alone.
And he's probably right. Consider Apple's release of Mac OS X 10.2. They charged people who already had 10.1. Those people complained pretty loudly about being charged for a "point-one" upgrade, and that was bugfixes and a feature release. Guess how much Apple's "point-oh-one" updates cost? Nothing.
If you try to charge people for upgrades that only contain bugfixes, you will either be ignored or yelled at.
irb(main):001:0>
Don't publishers have an obligation to do any fact checking at all? How the hell can Slashdot post this drivel? With something like this you should be immediately suspicious of its origins. In fact, extremely cursorary research into would show that the article is completely made up.
Oh, yeah, it was really cool how Code Red spread across the Internet and brought systems down around the world.
propz 2 h_orion w00t w00t lol!!!!!111
But if you have that magazine, could you transcribe the interview here? Perhaps in your Journal?
Also, include the magazine name and issue number.
kthx bye!
I have been pwned because my
* Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually, unimportant;
* If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition) in the minority;
* Microsoft doesn't care about bugs because bug fixes are not a significant source of revenue;
* If you think you found a bug, it really only means you're incompetent;
* Anyway, people only complain about bugs to show how cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.
Straight from the horse's mouth.
The $10,000 question is can Gates code or did he just make a some great investments: Enquirering minds want to know.
In an interview for German weekly magazine FOCUS (nr.43, October 23,1995, pages 206-212), Microsoft`s Mr. Bill Gates has made some statements
Jeez, is Commander Taco THAT backlogged?
1. Me: Turn on your computer and when it is finished loading wait about ten seconds
Her: How long is ten seconds?
2. Me: Enter your 10 digit customer id (supposed to enter into box on screen).. i then hear him entering the 10 digits into the telephone
3. Me: What version of Windows do you have?
Her: What's Windows?
Me: You know, Microsoft Windows. What version of the operating system do you have?
Her: I've never heard of Windows
4. Me: Put the floppy disc into the drive
Him: Ok, let me open it noises...noises..noises
Him: This disc is round but the slot is a rectangle. I don't think it will fit.
Me: Um, did you actually take apart the floppy disc and remove it from its shell?
Him: Oh, yeah, was I not supposed to do that?
Above stories are all true and have happend within the last three months. Ah the joy of college part-time jobs as tech support.
Why do you think they got all those MCSE out there ?
They pay hard $$$ mostly every year to M$, and their employer can then waist money on those problems.
And Microsoft won't even have to spend on all those problems...
Please correct this in the dupe.
Good night, everyone!
Dear Mr. Gates:
Your company must not be making you aware of the the numerous bug reports I have sent in. I estimate that I send in 3 a week.
Now, maybe as a dumb user, I do not know what a bug is, and all these crashes may indeed be due to a single bug. But when IE6 utterly crashes and ptompts me to send in a report and restart, I consider that a bug.
What do you consider those error reports? Bugs....or perhaps a new feature.
More questionable is why in your inane intelligence you consider the call volume, in any way, a decent measure of your company's software quality. If little else, you should realize that your company has gone to great lengths to nearly automate these error reports; people probably believe this is being taken care of, so why would they call in the first place?
That in itself may be revealing. Is this yet another sociological problem that you have solved?--if the app crashes, have the user submit a bug report. They don't tie up phone lines. You disregard the report. And the user feels better because they believe, falsely, that your company is doing something about the problem.
Regardless, after 6 months, despite downloading over 70MB of XP and IE6 updates, the crashes continue.
So I now use OpenBSD for my firewall test machine, soon to go into practice, and server machine, Linux on my "daily work" machine, and that copy of XP, well, it's just there as a reminder of the ineptitude of common folk and the US government in enforcing monopoly laws in our country.
Now, excuse me while I find a wet towel to clean up all this salt I see.
"If this patent holds up in federal court, Apple will have no choice but to convert to analog," said Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs, "and I have serious doubts whether this company would be able to remain competitive selling pedal-operated computers running software off vinyl LPs."
I know I'd buy one.
but this cannot be real. As much as many on /. hate Bill Gates he did not become a billionaire by being a PR moron. This is not something he would have ever said -- nor would his publicists have let him.
/. for it's eclectic culture, but this is fairly pathetic and it's disappointing to see on the main page (much less any other). Being funny is one thing, but passing off drivel such as this as being real makes this site look like something put together by ten-year-olds.
Do you really believe that something this inflammatory could have remained unacknowledged for eight years?
People never forget the "640K ought to be enough for anybody" line, do you really think they would have let this stuff slip.
I respect
If this is somehow true then I'll eat my hat.
They're not called bugs.
I believe they're commonly known as "features"?
Skal! AMS
pretty silly of /. to post something like this. anyone who even thought for a second that that was a real interview's got a screw loose. i think slashdot has reached the point where they'll put up anything anti-ms. lets move on already. there's much more interesting things to talk about.
You start by mentioning that this "interview"-- if it's genuine at all-- took place eight years ago.
Grow up.
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
I was thinking about maybe comparing Microsoft support to Open Source support.
Yes, and while for the first you pay a lot and receive nothing, for the second you pay nothing and receive a lot. A lot of condescending insults, snide remarks and concentrated hostility. Sometimes even some help. But then again, that happens also with Microsoft support, albeit not as often as most folks would like (the help part).
But that's probably not something we want to discuss here on Slashdot.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 0001337 How to be cool :
Since you're not smart enough to know better, make sure that whenever you encounter one of our 'bugs' (blue screens, poor driver support, poor security, etc) you whine bitch and compain, even though you have absolutly no reason too... because these aren't bugs.
This in the end will make you much more cool.
Now please turn around while we remove our giant boot from your ass.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
I'm having trouble believing that Mr Gates actually said this... wtf is a service pak? Bugs fixed is *exactly* the reason I buy an new operating system. I download every damn security update possible... A bug fixed in a new release *is* a new feature!!! Why? It's something the last version could not do! Duh! Let's not lose focus on what is the objective of new software in the first place... a *solution*!
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
- We've never done a piece of software unless we thought it would sell
Right. So what moron thought Bob would sell?And let's be more accurate, Microsoft doesn't do anything unless someone else is making money doing it. (double space, TCP/IP (networking in general), disk defrag tools, terminal server, the entire office product suite...)
Is /. going to post Bill Gates's mugshot from 197whatever and shock us all?
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
taking a seat on two sides of the issue - i, a designer, and a very good friend of mine writing for WASP - i get to hear a lot of complaints from other designers about bugs in mozilla, and my friends hears from his other programmer friends about the bugs in mozilla that they've submitted to bugzilla.
complaining is cool. submitting the actually bug doesn't happen often. automated bug reports tend not to tell jack (unless of course you want to send a tidy package containing every spec of information about your machine every time there's an application level crash).
Either way I don't see this as an interesting piece. The reporter plays it stupid and tries to get Gates angry so he will say a bunch of stupid and incoherent shit.
Liberty.
Can someone mod this as both offtopic and funny?
Well, this is mostly what i expected, another microsoft bashing match.
The article this links to has been written by a blantantly biased journalist.
The article ONLY containes an edited version - no links to the origional discussion, which leaves most of the interview open to exaggeration.
secondly, the commentsdo not seem to take this into account. It's a classic "woo! another chance to bitch about MS!" scenario. Honestly, how many people RTFA!!
I hate to insult people, and i do not mean this as flamebait, but this is getting just plain old stupid.
that there is someone else out there who also thinks that the interview was fake?
Not sure if it's been pointed out, but. From what I've studied of linguistic transcription (read: English Geek present), it is normally considered a big faux pas to include emphasis notation (italics, excessive exclaimation marks) in interviews, especially in consideration of journalistic integrity. Just the way the interview is transcribed and edited in itself makes me skeptical.
I think that's why "less than one percent" of their call volume is in relation to bugs. It's because MS insists that they're features. Just like the one in Word 97, 2000, and 2002 which "could permit a clever cracker to steal copies of files on your hard drive."
So this must mean that over 99% of their call volume is in regard to "features." Yeah, that's it!
I realize that VA has the editors slaving over a new backend system designed to improve connectedness with bullshit like journals and "friend lists" but I took the time to read that article and you know what? I recognized this and sure enough, its from 1995. I think I saw this one back on slashdot a long long time ago, but even then it was probably a dupe.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
One of the things that makes it funny is how penetratingly insightful it is, but only accidentally!
Slashdot seems to have certain weeks when there are non-stop Microsoft articles, and two-thirds are obviously slanted in some way against them, usually through some snide and ingnorant remark in the summary or a biased headline.
Finding some unconfirmed 1995 article is just another great opportunity to get as many readers as possible in the "make fun of Microsoft for technical bugs" category to click the links. They're popular among the biased crowd of Slashdot, and so get posted. Just moving hits along, as usual.
"Re:Give me ten programmers... (Score:2)
/root]# uptime /root]#
/root]# ssh slate /root]# uptime /root]#
by dubiousmike (558126) on Thursday February 20, @12:39AM (#5341500)
(http://www.borisfx.com/)
I have a home computer running XP and a work computer running 2000. Both run for days without a reset."
Well, hot damn! Let's see how long my desktop has been running since last reboot...
[root@granite
4:46am up 182 days, 5:10, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root@granite
Yeah, yeah... I remember those brown-outs late last summer. Oh, I know, what about my router/firewall?
[root@granite
root@slate's password:
[root@slate
12:22am up 164 days, 8:47, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root@slate
Oh, that's right my wife accidentaly kicked out the power plug once last year... Gotta get off of my duff and by a UPS for that guy. I mean, hell, when she kicked out the plug, it was a good 45 seconds of no net for us after she plugged it back in.
Does windows even have an "uptime" command? Or would it just be too damned embarassing for them?
In the words of the nameless Unix-guy from Dilbert: "Here's a nickel. Go buy yourself a real computer."
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
I mean, Code Red is just a user error. Same with the Nimba worm and blue screens of death.
They aren't exploits and flaws... they're FEATURES!
What a bunch of bullocks.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/bugs/default.asp
# of times I had to reboot my Windows-based computers *today*:
Laptop = twice, once when IE crashed, once when Outlook crashed
Desktop = once, GPF
Strangely, neither computer asked me about my degree in computer engineering before they decided to crash oh-so-ungracefully. Methinks that the bugs in Windows are probably more closely tied to the fact that Microsoft employees can't code.
How are we supposed to look smart if we can't criticize highly-skilled engineers? And, I ask you, how are we supposed to get a break at work if our computers always run smoothly? Shit, I'm running OS X now, I don't know what to do. I used to have 3 or 4 programs I could depend on to crash my machine.
...is now become an art form.
And sometimes, you get really close to your bugs. Certain apps, you'd have to do things in a specific order - I was like a nerd Fonzie. Hit a couple keys, go "Ayyy," and watch the girls in the next cubicle swoon. But alas, now I have no bugs to complain about. Luckily, there's always UI issues!
Is that bad grammar, or really advanced? Like that quote on the guy's helmet in Full Metal Jacket: "I am become death." What was that from anyway...?
c-hack.com |
Isn't it great that slashdot has dragged out a five year old article solely because it will provide good Microsoft-bashing fodder and I'm the troll here?
I knew there was a reason I stopped coming to this site.
Nuff said.
you are a big rich nerd who just plain blows.
please piss off and die.
Having said that, MS has a really good bug-tracking tool that they use internally that actually is similar to bugzilla (at least as far as I can tell). The volume of bugs that developers are required to fix before release is phenomenal, and believe it or not, MS standards for what has to be fixed is actually quite high, much higher than most open-source projects that come to mind (this doesn't mean I'm not an open-source fan --- I just wanted to point out a seldom discussed fact).
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
One percent of $500 million means that just the phone calls of his bugs cost him $5 million per year to answer the phone. If I got $5 million of bug reports per year, I'd figure I had a problem.
Take a guess at the percentage of users who encounter bugs and realize that they are bugs. This might also be pretty low. Take a guess at the percentage of users who realize that they have come across a bug and bother to report it. This should also be very low, because (1) you are expecting to spend half of eternity on hold, (2) you are expecting that they aren't going to fix it just for you anyway, (3) you are expecting that some of their other hundreds of millions of users have already reported it, and (4) you know that the people who answer the phone are no fun to talk with and will just blame you like Gates does in this interview and you've had enough aggravation already.
With low percentages at each stage of the bug reporting process, and with some reasonable estimate of the dollar and time cost of each bug that smacks a user, we can extrapolate that the annual cost of Microsoft's bugs is greater than the combined GNP of half the member nations of the UN.
Speaking of the UN, don't bomb Iraq, just airdrop Windows ME disks and cubicles.
- There are no significant bugs
...
That depends on one's classification of significant. I, and in fact, most of world, will differ with you on this.- If you really think there's a bug you should report [it]
99% of the time, that's useless. I'm convinced it takes a nuclear armed army to even get MS to admit something is borked. They will repeatedly claim the user doesn't know what they are doing or "it's not a bug." Even after being given the precise steps to reproduce the bug, they will say it's not broken. When pushed, they simply respond with "you don't have a support contract" and essentially "fuck off."[Case in point: I tried repeatedly to report a caching bug in all versions of IE... try it yourself. IE will not cache anything to the host "www.hp.com" With a simple trailing dot ("www.hp.com.") IE goes to the exact same place and fetches the exact same data and caches it.]
- We don't do a new version to fix bugs.
Ok. New versions are not released solely to fix bugs. However, in many cases, the only way to get certain bugs fixed is to buy the new version. Microsoft is alone in this arena.- Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year
An insignificant fraction of the revenue generated by those calls -- add up all the support contracts and 250$/incident costs... And, btw, people aren't going to call to report a bug; they send lengthly, detailed emails with attachments. Explaining a bug to the sheep answering the support lines is a lengthly waste of time.In an interview for German weekly magazine FOCUS (nr.43, October 23,1995, pages ... Gates: Because it's cool. ...
206-212), Microsoft`s Mr. Bill Gates has made some
first google hit for [gates interview "Because it's cool"]
This article is 7 years old.
It's debatable what relevance it has today.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Not that I'm one to necessarily defend Microsoft, but whats to say that Bill Gates (and subsequently Microsoft) hasn't changed their attitude towards bugs since this interview took place: over 7 years ago.
You post a link to a phony interview dated 1995 and pass it off as a representation of Microsoft's current position on making quality software. Did you guys even read this article?
Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, yet this "interview" reads like it was conducted with the hobo that collects soda cans from my trash.I'm on perscription medication
Yet I'm posting at +2
Isn't that wild?
I mean, totally, fucking wild?
1. Post obviously fake interview on Slashdot.
2. ???
3. "Microsoft sucks!"
Rob
Ive got a better idea, why don't you shut the fuck up?
How long do you wait?
I leave my Powerbook on all the time and restart perhaps once a month... if you force poweroff it takes a long times to start up sometime as it makes sure the filesystem is OK. Perhaps that's what you're seeing, it sits there for quite some time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought bugs were IN the code. Isn't complaining about them how we get them fixed? Ass, this is kinda like when Arsineo Hall lost touch with his aduience.
I ran into this attitude from Microsoft when I reported a serious bug in one of their compilers. They acknowledged the existence of the bug and said it would not be fixed. The developers were busy writing code for new products and they saw no profit in assigning developers to fix bugs in products that had already shipped. At least they were honest about it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Gates has been known to attack interviewers in the past. In recent years he has been trying to clean up his image a bit and not seem like the huge ass hole that he really is. I think Gates is so insulated from the real world that he suffers from Michael Jackson syndrome, where he is able to create his own reality. When he is confronted with the truth he becomes defensive.
It's like every single line, "There are {no bugs|users} causing problems." "It must sell."
I mean, he sounds so ridiculous, like a cartoon villain.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
I agree 100% with Mr. Gates. It is cool to complain about bugs. I am cool like Fonzie from Happy Days when I complain about bugs. Cool. Cool. Cool. That's me, complaining about bugs all the time because I am cool all the time. Way cool. Hey, did you hear about the bug in the Internet? Pretty cool, huh? There were some bugs in the AOL, too, so I switched to the MSN. Then I found a bunch of bugs in the MSN too. Oh man, am I cool.
Saddam will flipout.
It was 1982, I believe, and the University of Kentucky had hired me to figure out why their Apple ][ Z80 co-processer driven CPM OS boxes were crashing. The OS vendor was a wee company called Microsoft- I believe this was their FIRST PRODUCT EVER- it preceded DOS by a year or so. The CPM OS was so poorly written that it ignored the well-documented soft switches in the Apple ][, so well documetned that it took me, a neophyte, about an hour to debug & prove...In those days, bugs were a source of shame and generally treated like bromodosis or the mange...MS, on the other hand, had a brand new take on bugs: BUY THE UPGRADE (said in a not very nice tone of voice).
Mr Gates made a lot of money early on by driving shitty software to the market, then charging to fix it. He loves bugs and he really loves ignorant customers with bugs-they give him money, early and often.
It is naive to think that Microsoft has anything but the most carefully thought-out and crafted strategy on bugs...it has nothing to do with being cool, it's all about money.
Remember the MS motto- Buy The Upgrade!
People still use M$'s products.. Obviously most of people care about new features far more than bug-fixes.
Since we're riding the wayback machine here...
http://davenet.userland.com/1995/02/27/emailwithbChoice quote from billg:
And my favorite
(Both of those were in emails "from billg@microsoft.com" and I'm going out on a limb to say that davewiner posted honestly on his site)
I guess BillG was feeling pretty chatty back in 1995.
judging by his inane comments in the interview..
sheesh!
OK, everyone raise your hands who remembers this when it first surfaced back in '95.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
...we'd know that it was the Real Deal. That evil Bill Gates wouldn't have stood a chance aginst mighty warrior geeks such as them!
/. -- Australia and New Zealand!
Why don't we ditch all these nasty foreign submitters and posters once-and-for-all, and stick with what _really_ matters now at
Tie me Slashdot down, Sport!
So that leads to an interesting though: maybe some one should come up with a Tell Microsoft About Bugs Day, where millions of people phone up to report their favorite bugs... I don't know if it would really be possible to organise, but I like the thought anyway :-).
(And yes, I do know that the interview is from 1995 and may or may not be real, but the attitudes portayed are probably pretty acurate, so it's still interesting.)
From article:
No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
Then there would be no reason for:
this
or this
or this
or this
or this
So, Bill, let me ask you. Why does every one of your "released" products have an associated service pack?
-ted
...is still a pretty huge number.
Let's say for the sake of argument that by "less than one per cent" he means half a per cent. Of the "millions and millions" of calls that they receive (over what period of time is not stated in the interview), that's still 5000 calls per million, remarking on bugs.
myselfmusic
If complaining about bugs is cool, than I'm Miles Davis.
The problem with windows crashes and general bugs is that microsoft mostly just tests their products in a microsoft environment. MS programmers are far more familiar with how to avoid interfering with other programs that are running. They use their own versions of the .DLLs. If they want something added to the .DLL, it becomes the standard. But your average user has 15 apps in their startup file that haven't been programmed very skillfully. Unlike with Linux, windows doesn't have a strong mechanism to prevent all of those apps from interfering with each other, and the system stability starts going downhill from bootup time.
I have a system that I use as a gateway to the net for my other machines. It has winME (for ICS), two NICs, a 3d card (no 3d drivers installed), 400mhz processor, 48MB ram, cable modem connected, MS internet connection software, zone alarm and an FTP server. It runs for months at a time without crashing (and at very low CPU utilization). I also never touch it.
My other system has filesharing apps, two non-MS web browsers, IM, CDrecording software, TV tuner, games, winamp, firewall, macro software, system monitoring software, and some actual productivity stuff. I have to reboot it an average of twice a day. It's usually a combination of non-MS products that bring down windows.
Are there many specific bugs in windows? Not really. There's just a bad overall design that makes it easy for one buggy application to wreck the rest of the system. It doesn't help much that your average user can't recognize an impending crash without a BSoD to announce the loss of an hour's work.
The interview claims to be from FOCUS Number 43, but if you look at the FOCUS Magazine site, the current issue is Number 8. Unless they did some major restructuring, I don't know of any places that go back on their numbering.
...It's an undocumented feature!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
- Non-bug calls are all by different people. Nobody's going to call twice to report the same bug, but plenty of clue-challenged folks spend half the day calling MS support on the company dime to ask how to open a file or turn their text purple.
- Users believe that it's their responsibility to tell MS that their software is broken. Even if they believe this about the community as a whole, social loafing is bound to kick in as everyone believes that "someone else will call it in."
- Users bothered by bugs don't simply abandon MS software for a better product.
- Users believe that reporting bugs causes them to be fixed.
- And so on...
The bottom line is this: let's have a show of hands. How many people here have experienced a bug in a Microsoft product? Okay, keep your hands up if you think MS should fix those bugs. Now, how many of you have actually reported a bug to MS?Ah, I see.
My deviantArt site
I also can't connect the English translation to the German original in some places. Looks like either the translator "decorated" his version in some places, or, and this is what the sometimes awkward German wording (I'm 100% German) makes me believe, the page linked above has had access to an English original version of that interview. It's not a hoax, but hey, it's 8 years ago, and I remember that Microsoft was in a totally different situation back then.
When he is confronted with the truth he becomes defensive.
And he knows offence is the best defence..
Puhleese! Karma and Slashdot encourage users/posters to bitch about Microsoft. Slashdot has helped create the environment, so to deny its existence is either naivete, bullshit, or both.
(btw, there goes my karma)
This article is a repeat. I read it when it came out - I'm not sure where it was linked from. I specifically remmember the line, "oh my God!"
Torsten
Atomic bomb ends war with Japan!
Slashdot editors discover that they can avoid duplicates by posting stories that predate slashdot!
Look at the date; this is an eight year old article that, for some reason, was posted to the front page of Slashdot...
Anyway, a couple points:
- I think there was some mis-communication. Gates is right -- nobody buys a new version to fix bugs. You might download an updated point release (or service pack or whatever) to fix bugs. But you don't often go from Office 97 to 2000 over some minor irritations.
- I actually believe the bug report percentage in relation to their phone call volume. When's the last time you called a software company to report a bug? When is the last time you discovered a truly unique bug in a major piece of software that you were sure wasn't known about?
And as someone else mentioned, most of their calls are along the lines of "how do I turn my computer on?" or "I upgraded MSN and it broke my inner-net"
So, basically, it's a poor article from 8 years ago. Slow news day...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
"I never thought I'd defend Gates over anything, but I'm more interested in accuracy and truth than having a lynching party."
Damn!
*This ad seen the following day***
For Trade-Everything must go.
1000 Unlit torches.
1000 Freshly sharpened pitchforks.
1000 Cans of gasoline
2 Unburnt effegies-Gates and Ballmer.
1000 Former "unfed" employees of companies crushed by Microsoft.
Will trade for an original copy of Bram Stoker's:Dracula.
So that's why my Windows XP machine at work is always crashing! Because bugs are cool! A-ha!
Seriously though... I have every single update applied from the windows update and I still get Internet Explorer crashing regularly. (I have NO additional plugins or anything else installed - this machine is brand new as of last wednesday!). Also, I frequently get "Windows has encountered a serious error. Sumbit report? blah blah blah. If anyone knows how to fix this, please reply!!! The IT "experts" at work have no clue how to fix it. They keep telling me to go to windows update but I've already applied it all. I hope Billy is reading this! Throw me a bone here Bill! Help me out! Your crap dont work!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Hey, people like to complain. About the weather, their cars, their spouses, their neighbors and their computers.
Complaining about bugs *is* "cool." Especially Microsoft bugs. That's like making fun of lawyers. Everybody "hates" them, but we all need them (unless we all want to manage the complexities of a nation based on "laws" without specialists to assist us), and we'd love our kids to be one! (I wouldn't stop my kid, if I had one, from taking a job at MS.)
Most of the people on this board probably would prefer discussing technical matters with people who understand them, rather than confused, frightened end-users. Isn't it obvious that most of Microsoft's support calls (of its hundreds of millions of users) are non-bug-related issues having to do with the vast percentage of the functionality they ship which *does* work?
It's fun to pile on, but try re-reading the intro to this article from a more balanced perspective. Put yourself in the shoes of a Product Support Engineer at Microsoft, who doesn't care about "technical politics," but just wants to do his/her job. I think Bill Gates is representing them very well.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
From the front page of the site (www.cantrip.com)
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an
elaborate deception or prank.
corpus: (kôr pus), n., pl. -pora,
1. a complete set of writings; 2. a dead body.
Congratulations, Slashdot. YHBT
How many times has this been on slashdot? Been around since 95, slashdot seems to repost things about three days since the original post... I'd say atleast a dozen, maybe even 30-40 times.
scott
Bill Gates Rants about Users Stealing Software
Bill Gates Rants about Software Copyrights
Slashdot - History for Nerds, Reported after the stuff no longer matters! (c)In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Billy must be right about the few bugs reports. A simple query on google:
site:microsoft.com bugfix
suggests that only around 20 bugs were fixed.
But searching with:
microsoft bug
Gives more than a million results.
{sigh} That was an old one.. The message was dated Nov 4, 1995.. Good to see Slashdot is keeping up with the times...
:) It's not like their a big software company or anything. Just some average Joe trying to put out a piece of software. :)
I honestly do understand Bill's answer though. At the time, I'm sure 99% of their support calls were people not having a clue how to work Windows.. He had just taken something that most of his users could work, and turned it inside out.. At the same time, I had everyone asking *ME* how to work it..
"What's a Start Button, and why do I click there?"
"How do I play my DOS games?"
"Why's this so slow?"
"I have a 386/16 with 4Mb RAM. Can I install Windows 95?"
Luckly I was working in a computer store at the time, so I had the luxury of explaining to thousands how to work their computers.. {sigh}
Well, I'm still explaining the basics of Windows to people, so not much has changed.. But now it's more like only 50% of the users have no clue how to work Windows..
But, how many people call to report bugs, and how many just don't understand what they're doing? I'd *LOVE* to call and report bugs every time we experience them, but I don't have the money to pay their support fees every time.
My favorite is still when Outlook goes to collect mail from a POP3 account, and can't open a local socket. It comes up with something like "Can't open local socket for connect.....", with a whole bunch of random numbers.. The only solution is to reboot. No other fix. Trust me, we've tried. After I hear the first words, I just tell them, "reboot your computer and try again."
I love when users tell me, "I just did, and it still does it.". I call them liars to their face.. They'll finally admit they only closed Outlook, and reopened it.. I again tell them "Reboot your computer, and try again.".. Amazingly enough, when they do reboot, it starts working again.
Why do people lie to you when you're telling them exactly how to fix their problem?
I guess it would be better if Microsoft just fixed the bug, rather than leaving thousands of users wondering what a socket is, and why it can't be opened.. The users always blame the server, and it's not a server problem.
Lately, Outlook problems have been more popular than Windows locking up, so I guess they're doing something better.. Not quite right yet, but they should keep trying.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I remember when he said that. I think it was at some conference. He may not remember it, that doesn't effect reality unless you have lousy fact checkers. Not that it really matters, we've all said silly things in the past, and relative to 64K, 640K wasn't so bad. Plus there were little utilities that gave you an extra 100-150K, as long as you didn't have a Hercules card or a bulky (IBM) BIOS. This was useful if you used one of those pre-emptive multitasking programs, you could run your BBS in 200K, a DOS shell in 16K, and leave the rest for applications and TSRs.
Nobody has an original copy of win95 with an uptime of the date the original article was written to the current date. I'll even bet that nobody has win95 that has an uptime dating back to a YEAR AFTER the article was written. Comeon, all you would have to do is let it run...Right?
Love Music? Got a Band? Are you a Label? http://garageradio.com
subject
ok, back in 1995, the internet wasn't exactly burgeoning. Patches and bugfixes were not being released by vendors on their company websites because most companies didn't really have a website to speak of, and web pages really weren't that pretty, since netscape was a fresh product, IIRC, having recently been ported to Windows 3.x and MacOS.
My point here is that for your average desktop computer, support for software didn't exist the way it does now. I feel like an old fogey when I say this, but
Service Packs, not new versions, are how bug fixes are delivered. It is service packs that drive stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Gates is absolutely right - you NEVER buy a new version because of a fix you expect. If you do, you're psycho. You DO install Service Packs to get the fix. Have you noticed that Service Packs are free or very affordable? There's a reason - no one pays for bug fixes - it's the responsibility of the company to fix things that don't work.
This is like buying a car. If you want the thing to last, you buy the car that has been in production for at least 3 years. Why? Because the kinks have been worked out. Then when you buy it, you assume it works. If it doesn't, you liberally employ the warranty, because you paid for a working car. If someone were to insist you pay to fix your alternator a year after buying a new car, you'd laugh at them and promptly take them to court. Same story with software.
Install the service pack if you want stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
I get more Microsoft related articles thrown at me than Linux related
Slashdot has turned into Yet Another Hate Site
Ok..
1) This has been circulated around various humor sites and lists for years
2) It's humor, as in satire, as in not true. That interview never took place
3) None of those quotes are real, like the "640k should be enough for everybody" quote that seems to be so popular in this discussion isn't an actual quote.
I am not at all convinced that this interview took place. Is is just me, or am I seeing too much M$-related stories over the past 24 hours on Slashdot? As if to add to the profusion of Microsoft-related stories, yet another link of doubtful veracity is propagated... *sigh*
Not that it really matters, we've all said silly things in the past, and relative to 64K, 640K wasn't so bad. Plus there were little utilities that gave you an extra 100-150K, as long as you didn't have a Hercules card or a bulky (IBM) BIOS. This was useful if you used one of those pre-emptive multitasking programs, you could run your BBS in 200K, a DOS shell in 16K, and leave the rest for applications and TSRs.
Did you ever try that? I did, and I can tell you that there just simply was not enough memory to run a BBS, a DOS shell and some applications. You could run a BBS and have a separate DOS shell running, but hardly any applications (I don't think edlin is an application). And what exactly can you do with a dos shell if you can't run any applications with it?
The machine I used for my experiments at that time was a 286 with 1 MB of memory.
It has to work - rfc1925
I've tried to contact Microsoft a dozen times for a bug I've discovered in CMD.EXE (yes it's still persistent). One time I came as far as chatting with a Microsoft technician, but all he did was to direct me to a webpage where people could send a form or something. I never heared from Microsoft.
The bugs tend to be with non-Microsoft software running on the Microsoft platform.
.dll's. well, if you allow programs to modify system files, then there's something faulty with the system security.
whoa, fella. if an OS allows programs to bring down a system, then there's something fundamentally flawed with the system. for instance, X can get weird. but can X bring down a system? rarely. even when it really hangs, or spins out of control, i can telnet in and kill X. i hear all sorts of things like crappy device drivers cause windows to crash. well, then the device API is faulty. no, i don't program device drivers. also, i hear about corrupt
even though stability has never been the strong suit with windows, i think it is the security that has caused all the ill will. securing a windows box is a major PITA.
Granted, there may be bugs in other software, or libraries, or DLLs, or any other system components, which cause those software to fail -- but I've found precious little in terms of bugs in the base software put out by MS
really, have you seen their code? how do you "know"?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
If konqueror crashes then I get a nice backtrace and I know exactly where to send the bug report. I care about it and feel like my input counts. It's part of a larger effort to make something good. So I submit the bug report with all relevant information.
Now when I used MS products if something crashed or didn't work I'd think "someone else has reported it", or "it's not worth the effort", or "I have no idea how to reproduce the error". No-one want to make a phonecall just to report a bug, but for a new feature they will. A bug is something everyone experiences, so not much point reporting. But a new feature or a change in the way things are done, that's something possibly only "I" want, so then it's worth suggesting.
It should be considered that the number of bug reports is related to culture - that there's simply not enough motivation to report them.
First post!!! yeah, at last!
I know I've read this before and the copyright says (c)1996.
How could this be called news??
I found a bug in IE6, or failing that an undocumented "feature". Then I found out that there is no way to report bugs to microsoft. Clearly this is because there are no bugs in Microsoft products. As of a year or so ago the process was to send an email to ms-wish@microsoft.com. Says it all really. They are not interested in bug reports, they are merely interested in new features.
meh
...if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me "this is a bug" when it was actually some other component of their system or just them doing something wrong, I'd be a nickelaire.
Anyone who works with a Microsoft OS is quite familiar with it's primary problem. They lock up and crash at the drop of a hat. Long gone are the days when NT 3.51 was rock solid, I only had to reboot it once to clear a lock up. One of the single biggest problems is the miserable way it handles memory. The only real way to clear the garbage out of the memory is to reboot. One of the primary reasons Linux is slowly taking over for running servers. There are plenty of minor bugs but can't Microsoft at least give us a Pro level OS that doesn't have to be rebooted on a regular basis? Would you buy a new car that stalled several times each time you drove it and on a long trip had to be stopped and restarted every hundred miles.
cantrip: (kän tRip), n. (Chiefly Scot.)
1. a magical charm or enchantment; 2. an elaborate deception or prank.
-- My Weblog.
This is the first ever computer bug
(It's a moth that was found between relays in a Mark II computer).
The term "bug" should only be rightfully applied to hardware defects or anomalies.
Any mistake in software code should be called what it is - an error, made by the developers.
Where I used to work there was a poster on the wall with two insects. One was just a plain old insect, and it was labeled "BUG". The otherwise identical second insect had on a nice suit and tie and a pair of sunglasses, and was labeled "FEATURE". It seems Bill Gates is trying to convince us that Windows comes preinstalled with a large walk-in closet full of Armani suits.
500 million $ worth of support calls in 1995??
The calls the gey today should cover a small country budget. Or maybe invade Iraq or seomething.
I got in an argument over this very article last fall.
.NET and MS's security initiatives of late show gates' commitment (they are both basically his idea) to the innovation and improvement of a faulty product and platform. Once Gates got out of the corporate hotseat and turned to a more philanthropic role, changes began to emerege. Most notably, much larger thinking such as .NET, the security initiative, and most recently the tablet pc version of XP. It looks to be a very sophisticated distributed application that integrates almost every major product under the microsoft name. most say this is a bad thing - but that wasn't the point of the argument.
Basically, the article gives a glimpse of a bill gates of 8 years ago. It reflects very well the bill gates CEO, decision maker and sole "stakeholder" of Windows as a software package and Microsoft as way of life. It was his belief in the infalibility of his product, the "superiority" of it (from his perspective) that drove the sort of dialog found in the interview. Oddly enough Linus and Gates have a lot in common in that respect. Linus is highly opinionated when it comes to his "product" - though not to put words in the mans mouth i'm sure that he believes his branch of linux/*nix/bsd family is the best (as he should).
The single most telling aspect of windows/gates' perspective with regard to the end users from 95 - Millenium was the message that came up after the computer crashed: "The computer was not properly shut down..." of course it wasn't, it crashed. The tone of the message was that the user was at fault when it was really the product. Generally speaking such condescend dialogs with users are generally hard to be found in windows products these days.
bill gates has turned from the man presented in the interview - to something different. A man that now realizes his software ISN'T perfect.
the facts simply point to a gates that has changed, significantly both in his role at MS and his disposition personally. the MS of the mid 90's isn't totally gone, and neither is the old gates. he's just moved on to bigger and better things. Defending his product from attack and preserving the investors stock value are no longer his primary concern (maybe personally, but not as an officer of the company). Instead, he's been able to focus on how to build something that's as good as it can be - give it a few more years, these things take time.
Based off of Gates' statement am I to understand that Bill has never used a Microsoft product?
To me it's a credibility thing when a large company (especially) persists in calling errors for "bugs", like "it's not our fault", and "fixes" when it should be corrections.
I couldn't agree with him more on this. It's like the highlight of the day for a software user. "Wow! It's a bug isn't it?" Their eyes get this exclusive glow, and their voices raise in pitch.
Also, users often ask for features they don't need.
My words are final,
I'm a programmer.
"Punt to Longhorn!!"
This, I think, is the key:
"We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say 'Would you buy a new version because of bugs?' You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs."
No matter how much we SAY we hate software bugs, we still go out and buy software that we know probably contains them. And we are not really that willing to pay for bug fixes. Not because they "should be free" - we already paid for the software, so there is no reason for the vendor to put effort into releasing fixes (unless we're on a support contract or something). If we software consumers really want to make a point that bugs will not be tolerated, then we have to STOP paying for buggy software. And if we still hand over the cash, with full knowledge of potential bugs, then by the economic principle of revealed preference, the vendor is right - it's not worth it to fix bugs.
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty one
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.
Bhagavad Gita
I believe it is from Hindu beliefs from the birth if Shiva the Destroyer, or the God of Transformation.
But these days, it's not the Hindu connection that is well known, but rather the connection to J. Robert Oppenheimer. On seeing the first atomic explosion in the Nevada desert he said "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". A very chilling and appropriate quote if you ask me.
Well, actually for the most problems I have had with Windows operating system, MS's KB was not helpful. Actually, MS people even didn't know some problems of their OSes. :)
There are definitely many, really many bugs.
Have you ever seen that notepad.exe closes itself after a few seconds on Windows XP?
They have ignored bugs in their products. I think that it is one reason why people don't call them.
...1: this is more of Gate's "are you a luddite?" defensive attack mode. ...2: In open source, Bugs are Cool(tm), because you can squash them if you like and you don't have to call anyone to tell them about it.
I look forward to being moderated down once again.
Simply, Bill Gates' comments are probably close to the truth. He is not a stupid man. You may hate him for being rich. You may despise his tactics. But to dismiss his analysis of his own company and industry?
Even if you feel his domination of the industry is unjust, his views cannot be dismissed as inaccurate. Or swept aside just because they "sound arrogant". So he's direct and straightforward. It's not a crime. It worked for him.
I don't object to debating the man's ideas. I don't object to disagreeing with everything he says! But the editor who posted this article added "Boy, where do you even begin...", which implies to me an attitude not of one who hopes to learn that he may one day rule (or at least compete), but, more likely, one who despises authority of all kinds.
"Boy, where do you even begin..." is a rallying cry for the lazy and unimaginative, not the industrious and analytical.
Many postings in this thread have been thoughtful, but I wish in the future, the editorial staff could be more thoughtful themselves, and avoid such cliche commentary.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
Well I like em.. The brown ones have cream centres
I am too. A lot of us are. But, for now, what passes for "support" is there as schools churn out thousands of MSCE's per year. With trained people so plentiful, its not hard to get one to work for you, and you can generally pick one up cheap. If you get a bad one, no problem.. kind of like picking up a box of 6-32 nuts, only to find some have buggered threads. It doesn't stop the show.
But, tension is building. Like a spring under pressure. Right now, market forces are holding the spring together, but pressures are building. The more resentment is stored, the more rapid the explosion will be when the pressure is released.
If we want open software to succeed, we have got to let Billy churn the software as much as possible. So what if its all incompatible. So what if you can not communicate with Microsoft servers without some sort of de-obfuscator. I think he's stepping in it soon when he releases these media centers which contain lots of DRM. The kids will get miffed off and if the "cool" factor for running Linux gets popular with the new generation, this will solve the problem businesses have with having an adequate supply of trained Linux people. Face it, for every classroom teaching Linux, there must be 100 teaching Microsoft. Kids running Linux will be learning it in their bedrooms. Its very important that we keep the internet open for these kids - to make sure the information is available - as well as cool applications and how they were made. Kids aren't dumb, ya know. But they don't have corporate sized budgets either. That $500 price tag on Microsoft Visual Studio.NET should defray most of them having anything to do with the corporate stuff.
The neat thing too is that with Microsoft mostly being for the big corporations which can afford it, the small guys, running Linux, should be able to expend far less of their resources trying to keep their computational infrastructure operational, meaning they have more resources to allocate to serving their customers. Big companies have to compete eventually with the small guys, and if the big guys are paying out overhead through the nose not only to keep their software up-to-date, but also the big salaries being paid to people who specified such software, it just makes it all the easier for smaller more efficient small business to undercut their prices and get their customers. We need to take advantage of the fact that Big Business considers their customers as lowly minions that must be herded into performing as desired by using all sorts of multi-pronged incentives such as "educational" programs, technological barriers, and legal maneuvering, whereas the small business focuses on just having a happy customer which will come back on his own volition without being forced to.
I get the idea that as the States alienates the world with its political posturing, and all the discussion of cyber-warfare, other countries will embrace open-source so they can verify for themselves what their software is doing. Once the pendulum swings to open-source, and businesses that need world-wide connectivity will need software that talks to everybody - not just those with a particular vendor. The little tag that says "best viewed with ***" only means that the company coding it is completely ignorant of something the rest of call web standards. Little tricks like singling out Opera browsers don't sound like the antics of a company I would trust to represent me to my customers.. but then I am not a big business. When you are big, you can get away with a lot of stuff and treat your customers like shit. Who is going to take that million-dollar bonus from the MBA who dreamed up that paradigm that pissed off the customer base anyway.. when you get high enough up in the big corporation, you are immune. If worse comes to worse, you still have more money than the working man would earn in his entire career.
Another thing... unrelated .. but it seems with Hollywood egging on this DMCA thing, it appears one of the consequences of DMCA will be a marked reduction in ability of smaller entities to compete in trying to build anything here or design anything. Will history record our generation as the one who sold our "technical superiority" for a song? Literally?
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.44.html#subj11.
to see the original interview before it was translated to german (and then back to english). It is however only the same part of the interview as in the linked article (ie the beginning is not shown there either).
The interview is real... but it is also from 1995...
may be, unless u tried to plug in a scanner. and it blue screened. :)
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
BillG of the criminal company is most certainly right about the phone calls - Few of them are about bugs since MS support is so horrible that no sane person ever calls twice to report a bug.
A typical session:
MS support how may I help you ?
Ever since I upgraded word, my printer is unable to print on both sides of the paper.
Please give me your credit card details.
What for ?
So we can charge you for the support call.
Oh, its XXXX.
Please give me the proof of purchase for your installation of windows.
Its YYYY
Please give me the proof of purchase for your installation of MS Word.
Its ZZZZ
Now please upgrade your video card driver.
But my video card is working perfectly. Its the printer causing trouble.
Please upgrade your video card driver as this should resolve the problem.If it does not feel free to call back and try to get a refund of the money we just charged you for this support call. Have a nice day *click*
Of course this call will not be filed under bugs since the bug was obviously in the video card driver. Of course the subsequent 20 calls to get a refund are not filed under bugs either.
Ancient News For Nerds. Stuff That Doesn't Matter Anymore.
That's from fscking 1995! Slashdot is going severely downhill recently with it's quality of article selection. That article doesn't even look real.
Oh well, maybe when it gets reposted later today I'll be in a better mood to read it.
Nick...
If that were the case, we should see babelfish-like results: "Because insects are at low temperature."
"I remember when he said that. I think it was at some conference"
Which conference? Who else was speaking? Sources please. Or sit down and shut up.
You have FAILED me for the last time admiral.
Boohoo, those mean slashdotters are being mean to Microsoft again...so what do I do? Run to slashdot and accuse everyone of MS "bashing"!
Not sure where the hell all of you Microsoft "defenders" have come from...seems like every article that so much as questions Microsoft in any small way, you come out running, accusing everyone of Microsoft "bashing".
Guess what: Microsoft deserves it. They are big enough, make enough money, and are every bit the monopoly we say they are (proven in a court of law). I'll bash 'em all I want.
Hey you can always go hang out at "winmegasite.com" if you don't like it. I'm sure there are no meanie "bashers" over there.
Oh and concerning the article...who cares if this was done in 1995. Gates and his moronic "640k" comment happened back in the early 80's, but that doesn't make it any LESS moronic and shortsighted. If Gates is the big bad visionary the trade press foams at the mouth about, let's see him prove it--yet every time he opens his pampered yap, he only proves what a clueless fool he really is. It's "cool" to complain about bugs? Tell me Bill, do you even know what a computer is?
Ok this is just utter proof that microsofts reality is completely disconnected from the REAL world.. Ppl are just so used to microsoftware bugging up that only the newest of newbies can even be bothered wasting time calling microsoft on it.. ppl are just SO used to it that they accept that if they choose to use microsoft.. then it will occasionally crash without any logical reason.. secondly WHEN they get problem.. they rather call the hardware stores/manufactures for help on driverupdates and ways for them to get help to get around windows problems because they are simply SO USED to microsoft fucking up and not bothering fix that they just totally disregard the chance that microsoft would ever bother to give a fuck about them as a customer with problems .. and they're absolutely right! Unless ur a multimillion/billion corporate microsoft customer the chance of them lissnin to ya is below nonexistant.. and most corporations of that size already have inventive and smart sysadmins that have the knowledge that windows WILL be buggy and unhelpful that they have gotten used to either finding a workaround or looking at more helpful sources.. its only in the very end of the most extreme issues they cant find any help for anywhere else that anyone but the most complete moron would try and ask microsoft for help..
You have to remember that they're talking about reported bugs, not actual bugs. Most people call in and report issues that aren't issues.
For example I got into a heated argument before with someone who complained that DOS was still necessary to perform any meaningful task in Windows XP, and he backed it up with a laundry list of reasons. I rebutted every single one of those reasons with an existing tool (in some cases the exact same tool) which could complete the job in Windows XP. He complained then that such tools are undocumented and Microsoft was evil for hiding it. I responded with 7 knowledge base articles and information straight from the help file to show him that this information is quite readily available to any user. His response was that he wasn't willing to read any "M$ crap," and then he told me that he was going to eventually move to Linux (enjoy those man pages!)
So here we have a case of someone whom is completely uninformed, and worse unwilling to become informed, and blaming everything on Microsoft.
Hmmm... In 1991 Linus Torwalds announced :
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)
If you go back far enough, you'll always find someone saying something that was true then but isn't anymore.
Peder
Here goes the Karma...
Doesn't anybody here ever use any Borland software? You'd start thinking Microsoft had a top notch QA department. Try just about anything from Borland, but I'd say Paradox (that goes back a few years now) was the very worst. Then there's C++ builder. Pick your version. We're talking about a level and inconsistency here that would make you beg for a daily BSOD. In fact they have a bug that has been on the known bug list for 3 or 4 YEARS now, and they claim they CAN'T fix it. Ha! That's just the one I know about.
But do we ever hear a word about it around here? No.
How about the horror stories about Apple's previous OS constantly locking and crashing? Do we hear about those? No.
But we sure do hear about the BSOD, even though Win2K is plenty solid enough for your average desktop computer user, myself included. The version known for frequent BSOD'S (and boy was it bad) is three years in the past folks!
But at least it's entertaining to watch people sit around and mindlessy bash MS. Bill's right I guess. Bitching about bugs really is cool.
When in reality, these computer users know nearly nothing about computers. They know how to surf the net and tell people about "things they've heard" and so on. It's really annoying.
Sure, Word has bugs. Windows Me has bugs. What about the users? Have they ever considered the possibility that they don't know everything about Word? Have they ever considered the possibility that they are using IE on lowest security level, accepting all sorts of scripts and downloads and spyware? Have they considered the possibility that they saw some cool register hack in a beginner's computer magazine, tried it and it didn't work well?
Mind you, some computer users, when asked what operating system they have, say things like "uhmmm, Windows 97? No, wait... Word 98?" They really are in no position to talk about what is a bug and what is not.
bius sig file. This is a moebius sig file. This is a moe
'a - Outdated drivers'
1: This a bug, the system should inform the user that the driver is out of date.
2: The driver doesn't work properly it has a bug, go get the latest kernel.
'b - Just too much installed to where they had 20+ icons in the system tray'
this is a bug,
1: if all those programmes in start or run eact up huge amounts of system resources then the OS should tell you.
2: The OS should tell be before anything gets put in my init.d run or start, virus here we go.
'c - how-to issues, people not knowing how to do something, etc.'
1: This is a bug, the documentation is shit, WTFM (write the fscking manual.), how fewer problems where there when Applications/OS's came with full printed manuals.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The other ~99% is complaints about the licensing...
No, its just that Microsoft's bugs are all just abstract non-repeatable bugs that are too strange to be able to simply explain to tech support. Rillopy
So this is what I get for watching The Philadelphia Experiment and then checking /. before bed... I've been transported back to 1995! Well, maybe this time I'll actually catch the Seinfeld finale.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
The thing that most people don't seem to realize is that commercial software is about the costumer, the company behind the product will do what the customer wants to sell more products, but free (as in speach and beer) is about the code. It doesn't matter how many copies they give away, it's just about personal pride. So if you want stable software go with open source, but if you want all the features that Micro$oft thought would sell go with them.
Wherever you go, there you are!
So that can be the reason I never pay for MS software - I pirate it because it is cool!
Bill's version of user friendly: give me all you money PLEASE
I really like to rake B.G. over the coals and such, just look at my sig, but that just doesn't sound like Bill Gates to me. Bill Gates is much smoother, in this interview he sounded all most spitefull. If that was B.G. I wonder what kind of abuse he endured to get himself to the point where he came accrost so testy. B.G. has been interviewed enough so that he'd know how to say those things but make them sound nice.
B.G and Microsoft et. al. maybe the evil coporate Satan incarnate, but you'd never know it from talking to them. My hookey meter is off the scale on this one. ( Sheesh I'm defending Bill Gates, who da thunk)
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If talking about software (bugs) is so cool... why are nerds picked on so much?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I wish there was one fewer grammar Nazi...
=@@= -[Mu!]
um I started up IE, typed in mozilla and:
p ment.html
0 529
h tml
Results 1-15 of about 19 containing 'mozilla'
Mozilla.org
Check out latest developments on this open-source web browser, find developer documents, download a copy or join a Mozilla newsgroup.
www.mozilla.org
mozdev.org
Source for XUL implementations for the Mozilla browser sorts projects by media players, community technologies, games, and productivity tools.
www.mozdev.org
Mozilla.org
- BugzillaUse this tool to report bugs in the Mozilla Web browser. Visitors with a free account can also track the status of problems already recorded.
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Mozilla.org
- Chimera Development InformationDevelopers who want to contribute to the Mac browser can get the source code, read a FAQ or list of bugs, and track changes.
www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera/develo
Mozilla.org
- The Chimera ProjectOpen-source browser for Apple Macintosh is intended to be small and fast. Get the latest release, read news, review notes on known issues.
www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera
Creating Applications with Mozilla Paperback - Amazon.comShop for "Creating Applications with Mozilla" by Brian King and get the paperback edition. Offers free shipping with a minimum purchase.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059600
Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 7 Help and TipsCheck out a list of commonly asked questions and issues. Learn how to make Netscape the default browser and email program.
www.techaholic.net/ns7.html
Mozilla Organization, The - C++ Portability GuideFind set of rules, guidelines, and tips useful in making C++ code portable across many machines and compilers.
www.mozilla.org/hacking/portable-cpp.
O'Reilly Network - Mozilla DevCenterMozilla developers can find news and information. Topics include game development and web design.
www.oreillynet.com/mozilla
Mozilla.org - Platform for Privacy PreferencesDescribes the P3P that was developed by the W3C as a mechanism to control the use of personal information by Web sites visited. With info on Mozilla support.
www.mozilla.org/projects/p3p
What was your point?
When I did tech support for an ISP, 50% of our calls where due to bugs in the Microsoft OS. When a customer has to reinstall TCP/IP on a monthly basis, I call that a bug. Is that something Linux users have to do regularly?
I see a story like this almost every other day. Anything anti-microsoft in particular is posted without even checking to see if the source is valid or reputable. How does one miss that this article (if even real) was written in 1995?
Of course it's cool to complain about bugs. At least on /.
Show me any reader comment that includes a two-line pseudo-C snippet that is obviously meant to be a joke.
The followup is immediately some code monkey saying "ha! you didn't include stdio.h neener neener!"
Last week, I was working on a older minicomputer we still have at work, and the dumb terminal I had hooked up for a console died. Not having another dumb terminal handy, I figured I'd grab an old P2/350 PC from the back room and use *it* as a terminal. It had come back from a user who got a new PC, so I figured it at least had NT4 on it (new machines we use W2K), and would make a fine dumb terminal.
I grab a functional (a little dim, but functional) 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse, and this PC, and hook them up by the mini... and power it up...
booting, booting... slow.. *BLUESCREEN*.
IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL or something like that.
I try it again, same thing. I happen to look in the back, and someone stole the 10/100 NIC out of the back. Went back in the back room, found the same 3Com NIC that would have been in that machine (from its era, thats what we were getting in all of them), popped it in, and... it boots fine.
Now, is *BILL* telling *me* that a machine missing a NIC crashes the machine?? Thats' not a bug?? That's *normal* behaviour for an OS. Hahahaha...
The mini, by the way, who'se OS was written in the 80's, has a 10Mbit "NIC" thats a 15" square (as in 15" on a side) circuit board... if I yank *it* before I boot, the system simply comes up and gives me an error "device unavailable" if I try and run the network software. But the OS boots fine, I can mount disks, run software... just can't access (obviously) the network.
So, Bill... this is *progress*?
Maybe Windows users have just grown to accept bugs so much, that they don't even notice them.
If complaining about bugs is 'cool', then when I switch to Linux because of them must make me 'ultra cool'.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Did anyone notice that chrisd links to http://www.dibona.com/ and that http://focus.msn.de/ is an MSN site?
/.
It isn't a large amount of work just to make a cursory glance at the frontpage articles and veto them. I'm sure we could get plenty of volunteers to simply do this check. If not, maybe its time to move on to another site. I see one more of these and I don't think I'll be returning to
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Imagine a simple Q/A on the PGA Tour:
Q: "Who's the best golfer?" A: Tiger Woods.
On Slashdot, the geek translator writes:
Q: "Hose the best gopher?"
A: "Forest belonging to wild animal."
Michael Jackson had issues.
From a certain point of view, expecting MS software to be stable could be considered a user error.
I was once working help desk support for a large company. One of the users called in to say there was something wrong with her PC. We had all the machines available using a program called NetOP, which is similar to PCAnywhere or VNC. I asked her for her IP address then connected.
"OK, I can see you now. Show me the problem."
"You can see me?"
"Sure," I said. Then as a joke, "You've changed your hairstyle."
"How can you see me?"
"I'm just kidding. I can't see you, only the computer screen."
"But how did you know I changed my hairstyle?"
I don't think I ever completely convinced her that I couldn't see everything that she was doing.
...sorta. Of course, bugs are extremely annoying to everybody. Yet, so many people really cultivate their hate against MS, insult Bill Gates personally for everything that doesn't work, and ... still use Windows. When you ask them why they don't switch to some alternative OS, they come up with some fishy reason... The only way for me to explain that is that they actually think insulting Microsoft is cool: "becuz it suckz lol".
I hate Bill Gates and Microsoft as much as the next guy.
But dragging up an interview from 1995 is just cheap. I doubt much, if anything, he has to say then applies to today. After all, the internet wasn't even an issue at the time.
I didn't even know Microsoft took calls from the general public about bullshit (You should do this feature this way, I want this, fix this).
In fact, what's the number? Which users have gotten the number? Can you find it on microsoft.com?
Maybe if they packed their 800 number for reporting bugs into the THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN dialog box they'd get just a few more bug reports?
this article is from '95! i've read it countless times in countless places....how the HELL is this news for nerds or stuff that matters?
Come on man, "I wish there were one fewer grammar Nazi" The only subjunctive mood remaining in the English language.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
"What Jesus blatantly fails to realize is that it's the meek who're the problem!"
/. blatantly fails to realize is that it's the geeks who're the problem!"
-- Reg, People's Front of Judea
"What
-- Me
Discuss.
I quite honestly think slashdot should be sued for slander over this one - if the editors can't be bothered to verify the things they report, especially when the purpose of the material is to try to defame someone's character, they should be held accountable.
Reload the article. In big letters near the top it says "Slashdotters: yes, it's real."
heh.
If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug.
Once (years ago), I tried, with a showstopper problem with Excel. I rang them up, and after 30 minutes on hold decided "what's the point?" Maybe only 1% of their calls are about bugs because this is how they treat people who report them.
Certainly if I were making business policy I don't see why I'd encourage my technical staff to spend their time waiting on MS's hekp if that's the sort of respect that MS show to customers.
Consumers will not buy a new product *just* for bug fixes, and neither do they call up and report bugs very often (for whatever reasons, either they can't identify it as a bug, or they think it is their fault, or they think MS doesn't care, whatever). Really, how many of you have actually called up MS to report any one of these bugs that you are constantly bitching about here? Would *you* buy a new version of a product just for bug fixes and no new features?
As long as users keep buying the stuff he'll keep making it...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I heard from Bill himself
:/
we'll it's anecdotal so you're just going to have to trust me. I was unable to find a web source to back me up though
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Certianly this is not news...it may even be a repost. I've certianly read this article before.
However, the most interesting response on this list are the "it must be a fake" people who are justifying their answer on an alternate defintion of a portion of the domain name? Yet none of them actually looked to verify any of the details.
Such as: Does this article appear on a non-cantrip site? Yes.
Is there a german magazine called focus? Yes.
Now this certianly doesn't prove that the article is genuine but it does rebuff the "site contains a "
Now for the sub-moronic "Bg is a businessman and wouldn't talk like that." arguments...well you folk might be beyond help.
I'm not necessarily doubting your claim, but why would an article (even from the supposedly valid link you and others have posted) in Time or Wired be done in German? That just makes no sense.
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
I just did a complete check of all the sites with the words
"Bill Gates"
and
"Klaus Brunnstein"
On google, and the only people who reference this article are English people. Which leads me to believe that Focus Magazine, a german mag is not the source.
As well, the only references for this article are directed at the site above. Which I hardly consider a reliable source.
I am searching through some archives though to see if I can find it anywhere. More to come...
~ kjrose
From PC Magazine, February 14, 2003
You couldn't have answered that any better. I hope the other guy's seething in hatred as I type this :)
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
This is true, it's completely legit.
...
...
I found the article at
http://focus.msn.de/F/INHALT/inhalt.htm
in the archive.
You have to pay for it. but it's there.
23.10.1995 Focus 043 206 FORT:Forschung und Technik
"Das ist Kapitalismus"; Software-König Bill Gates über die
PC-Gesellschaft, über Langeweile in der Schule und unfähige Computerbenutzer; FOCUS: Herr Gates, Sie
As well there is another interview at
06.11.1995 Focus 045 360 REDA:Redaktion LESE:Leserbriefe
Zu den Akten gelegt; (43/95) Bill Gates im Interview; Fast alle
PC-Benutzer haben die Produkte von Microsoft auf ihren Maschinen, und diese laufen offensichtlich
Completely legit (if you want to pay to read the article in German.) I didn't pay, but the article is there. I would be interested if anyone did decide to pay to see the article.
~ kjrose
Everytime that I am typing an essay late at night and word 97 crashes all I can think to myself is:
"Damn cool!"
Well 1/2 of that anyway...
--Joey
Anyone besides me think that an interview that old is likely to have little or nothing to do with Gates's current mindframe or business? Microsoft couldn't exist today if it was the same as it was in 1995! Few, if any, tech companies could!
The only subjunctive mood remaining in the English language.
:)
If someone should post such a view on Slashdot, he should watch out lest he be contradicted.
Since i work in a technical support capacity, i do have some experience with this. Most rational people would prefer to hang up the phone and go back to work with a solution that allows them to keep going.
A subset of people literally do persist in going after you even after you explain what is going on, unwaveringly pursuing the dubiously valuable trophy that is a bug report number. They'd rather be able to say they found a bug, and struck some kind of blow against their software-purveying oppressor, than to actually have a solution. They want a bug report and a fix next tuesday, rather than a way to keep working today. And usually, you give it to them, and let them wait for a fix that sometimes even comes, and they put off their work for a month. Which is probably the intent anyway.
So, the writeup is not entirely off base with that statement. For some strange deluded people, bugs are indeed cool.
Curses, owned again. If English were my native language I'd be upset. I FAIL IT!
=@@= -[Mu!]
I'm not saying that modern computers are quite as complex as brain surgery, but it is a subject that requires training, and most people receive none.
This is definitely funny!
There's only one problem, when I searched the German mag FOCUS I could not find the article that was supposedly the source for this interview.
As much as we feel vindicated by the article I'm convinced it's false. Someone would have picked up on it and it would have received the same status as the "Halloween" paper did. It's simply too good to slip by unnoticed...
WIndows bug whore
The biggest thing to me is that he must be lumping all those numerous "security issues" in with this nonchalant bug category? For shame.
My program just crashed!
> A bug?
I think so
> Sweeeeeeeeeeet
s/someone/one/
s/he/one/
I fixed your post. HTH.
=@@= -[Mu!]
Above stories are all true and have happend within the last three months
Funny how the exact same story with the exact same lines happens to different people in different places every three months or so. I call bullshit.
rehashing this ANCIENT story as though it was "news" is journalistically and ethically irresponsible, to say the least.
i hate microsoft as much as anyone, but this kind of nonsense a) casts the alternative in a bad light and b) is the reason i stopped reading slashdot; i'm sorry i checked back in.
get bent, slashdot; you have officially jumped the shark.
After reading that interview, I think it is fake... But even though I think it is fake I tend to agree with gates answers alot of the time. I know my way around computers and barely ever have crashes or problems (knock on wood!). Now my father, who isn't so great with computers, has crashes and problems several times a week. This isn't on just one computer this is on about 4 different computers over the last few years.
the parent post is a GOATSE link!
Microsoft products definitely have a large number of bugs. But when people here are saying that there are a large number of obvious reproducible bugs making the software hard to use, I find that quite hard to believe.
Microsoft software is held under such a microscope that I feel they would be criticized if there really were no bugs. It would be MS fault for not reporting bugs in that case.
All together the point was that people feel they are always correct (people in the sense of the end user). When an individual "just wants to" do something, they feel the application's inability to do it, is a bug.
What Gates said (it's cool...) is more in terms of the popular way to assess a situation in which what you want to happen in software doesn't happen that way. People do not want to admit their own inability to do something, and would much rather lay blame.
If he wasn't prepped for these questions (and given the skill of the interviewer, I doubt he was either), then he might have flipped and gone off exactly as printed.
Or it could be a troll, whatever. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Consider Apple's release of Mac OS X 10.2. They charged people who already had 10.1. Those people complained pretty loudly about being charged for a "point-one" upgrade, and that was bugfixes and a feature release. Guess how much Apple's "point-oh-one" updates cost? Nothing.
This is Apple's story, and they're sticking to it. But it's not the way many of us users see it.
I bought 10.2 for the bug fixes. What features does it add? iChat? Rendezvous? Ink? Bluetooth? Ruby? Menus are a little more opaque? Quartz extreme (which my graphics card can't use)? Nothing of value to me. (Ok, some apps now only run on 10.2 or later, so indirectly I need it, but that's it.)
And 10.2 did fix some bugs, but most of the bugs in 10.1 are still there. So I'll report them once again, and, like a sucker, I'll plunk down cash for 10.3 in the hopes that a couple more of them are fixed. Of course, it'll have 17,000 new features...
As much as I dislike microsoft, this is not how I would like to think of our community (of non-ms slaves). At best this is a very unflattering translation from German, at worst it's just completely fabricated. I'd prefer to beat MS with a bit of integrity.
Okay, this article may be perfectly legit, if ancient, but the way it's presented is really bad. Specifically, I'm thinking of the tag at the top, "Slashdotters: yes it's real"
Rather than saying "no really, this happened" why not just cite your sources and leave it at that? It just comes off as being overly shady and/or defensive.
||:|::
Sweet! I've been looking for a source for this quote for my master's thesis! Now I can cite it as "Some Conference, I think"
I can't believe that Slashdot posted this.
Quick Background: I develop business software on the Microsoft platform, but I am a daily reader to Slashdot (I love it all).
Has anyone here actually heard Bill Gates speak? I kept trying to map his little high-pitched nerd tone to the statements attributed to him in this article and I just couldn't do it.
Bill Gates doesn't speak like this.
Besides, he wasn't touting the power and ease-of-use of the new Tablet PC (his latest pet), so it can't be genuine.
Go back to class.
I'd say that it is 'cool' to bash MS bugs. Those in know do it out of frustration (linux folks), and the un-knows see that this subset knows what they're talking about. Wanting to look like they know what they're talking about, they try and follow suit. 1337speak came about the same way, basically, but was based off an unknowledgeable populace, unknowingly ;)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Here's the most clueless call I ever had. It was a call I had doing tech support for a local ISP in Tucson (AZStarnet.com) in 1999 or 2000.
Me: What operating system are you using?
Customer: Windows 98.
Me: Click on the start menu.
Customer: There is no start menu.
Me: Are you sure it's not a Macintosh?
Customer: No, it's Windows 98!
Me: Hit the key on your keyboard with the Microsoft logo.
Customer: I don't have any keys like that.
Me: You're POSITIVE this isn't a Macintosh!?!
Customer: No! It's Windows 98!!!
Me: Move the cursor around the edges of the screen and see if the cursor changes to something different like an arrow or something.
Customer: Nope, it doesn't change.
Me: and you saw no Start button while doing so?
Customer: No!
Me: Do you have a cute little picture in the upper left corner of the screen?
Customer: Yeah!
Me: Is it a picture of an apple?
Customer: Yeah! *sounding real excited now*
Me: Mam, you are using a Macintosh.
Here's the funniest thing ever said to me. It was a DSL customer that was having issues with line noise and his db quality. This was right when USWest and Quest merged.
"Dealing with Qwest is like trying to shove a worm up a cats ass."
In all seriousness though, I would like to see a scan of the magazine before I believe this interview is real. Also, I would like to say that most calls are for help, not a bug fix. When I was doing the NT Server support, 99% of the calls were due to misconfiguration. Given, 15% of those were things that could have been avoided if the Windows programmers thought like Macintosh programmers and prevented users from making simple mistakes that wreak havoc on a network. When there was a bug, it got sent higher up and eventually a hotfix was released to fix the bug. I've dealt with a LOT of companies tech support and Microsoft is one of the best. No quotas and random customer surveys keep you working hard to make the customer happy. For $245 the customer gets their problem fixed. I would refund calls less than 15 minutes or so in length. I was free to do this on my own! Other calls would take 40+ hours of work and research, fixing a gigantic corporate network. $245 is dirt cheap for that amount of work. Support isn't there to make money. Support is a money pit used to support the client base and keep them coming back. Microsoft KNOWS that good support will keep the customers coming back.
-Lucas
no, it hangs on boot. maybe some library file is corrupt? I should probrably just reload OS X.2.x but it was a pain to install everything I need on it, plus backing up the stuff on there I have. It hangs on boot about 70% of the time. Really weird.
If you call M$ for bugs in windoze we will put in trenches and ......
While the interview does read a bit like an ambush, I got to admit it really pissed me off. For Mr. Gates to actually say " Luddites don't know how to use software properly" is just plain offensive to the point of absurdity.
Microsoft makes billions by designing software that doesn't require a degree in computer engineering to use. Their approach has always been one of "let's keep as much of this technical stuff out of the user's face as possible" (Hell, even the included "manuals" for Win9x and Win2K barely break 100 pages and most of that content is marketspeak along the lines of "What else do yuou want to do today"!), and the end result has been their near total dominance of the software market.
This approach has always been, and will probably continue to be their strongest marketing tactic. Unfortunately, it sounds as if Mr. Gates is beginning to learn that, as the complexity of the software increases, so does the need for some form of proper user education. Unfortunately, he does not seem to realize that he may himself be partly responsible for the absence of education that he decries.
Maybe a better question for Mr. Gates whould be: If you honestly think that "Luddites" don't know how to use software porperly, then why oh why are you working so hard to keep them in the dark?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Focus was too. Did you follow the clueless response link?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have to pipe up here. i have the unfortunate dute of working for MSN. The bastard child of Microsoft. I have noticed quite a few comments on this thread stating that Microsoft Tech Support Reps. have absolutely no clue what they are doing. I can't vouch for the folks doing actual windows support, but if the information flow to them from higher up is anything like the information flow I get here, I can honestly say that it isn't thier fault that they are clueless. Often times servers will go down around here (Especially those lovely passport servers) and we wont hear about it or see a posting for hours even days. I don't want to turn this into a rant about how poorly treated tech folks are. We already know. But just show a little kindness to the folks trying to help you with your problem. Usually the only reason they are clueless is the same reason you don't know what is going on. They haven't been given the information. Oh yeah, and before some one flies off the handle that they have called MSN or Microsoft or whatever and been ran through a series of steps that they knew were useless, realize also that we have to follow procedures. If we don't then we lose our jobs. Simple as that. I would be rich if I had a penny for every time I knew, immidietly what the issue was, but was forced to follow basic troubleshooting steps before I could actually help someone. But hey, that's what keeps my kids fed. So again, take into consideration who it is you are actually talking to when you get on the horn with MSN or Microsoft. It's just an average joe like yourself, who probably doesn't have any more power to make your software/hardware/internet work than you do. Save what tips and tricks they stroe in thier cranium. Anyway I'm done now...
Loads of M$ stories keep the fanboys and trolls busy while the rest of us can talk about news that matters.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, I kinda sorta remember seeing a quote from this interview back around the time it supposedly hapepned, in (maybe) Dr Dobb's. The one about bug fixes being the stupidest reason for new versions. Of course, that's what service packs are for.
Anyway, from a fresh reading, this little gem jumps out:
Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing"
The reason for this is that, even back in 1995, only chumps actually try to call Microsoft. Their "it's not a bug, it's feature" reputation was strong established even back then.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
s/someone/one/ s/he/one/ hey dickless, "he" appears twice perhaps there should be a "g" after s/he/one/. or maybe not, im not an anal retentuve english major
Bill Gates is an authority on what's cool? Just look at the man. Lordy, lordy...
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Published in 1995. Surely they got the bugs out by now.
Bugs aren't really bugs when you call them features. Nor are there ever any problems, only issues. And having customers pay for tech support is the ultimate kick to the groin.
Thanks Bill!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
You suck.
I contacted Focus to ask, if this is a fake.
They only answerd:
Lieber Herr Burmester,
zumindest hatte im Jahr 1995 Focus ein Interview mit Bill Gates im Blatt
(Heft 43).
Schöne Grüße,
--
Jochen Wegner
In English:
There was a Interview with Bill Gates in Focus in 1995 (Issue 43).
So no real answer
On a related note, as a followup to their article on Palladium which was posted to slashdot, the Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting an online discussion today at 2 ET with Brian LaMacchia, one of Palladium's designers. It should be an interesting chance to answers straight from one of the horses' mouths.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Last Post!
Imma gonna win.
Microsoft doesn't charge for support calls on new bugs or bugs whose fixes aren't publicly available.
You call in, give them your credit card number, it gets charged, and if it turns out that your issue was caused by a bug, and that's the only issue you're calling about, you get your money refunded.
How do I know? Because I spent 5 years working in Product Support Services at Microsoft and personally refunded people's money on the occaisions that their problem was caused by a bug that wasn't documented and fixed in a publicly available manner.
What I mean is if you call and the latest service pack fixes the problem, you aren't getting a refund because you should have been running the latest service pack.
By the same token, if there's a bug, and knowlege base article, and a hotfix that you can download publicly, you don't get a refund.
If the KB article says "call PSS" and that's all you called for, then you DO in fact get a refund. (I've issued 'em.)
At the same time, the support people are empowered to make the call if they feel a particular issue warrants a refund that doesn't fit the above guidelines.
The reason your credit card gets charged first is because there's a strong tendancy to add extra problems to the call: "You mean you'll refund my money for this Outlook Web Access hotfix? Great! Hey my server stopped receiving SMTP mail, help me fix that!" (OWA has no relation to SMTP)
Thanks
Most of them call to get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software.
Caller: How do I get my 30 page Word document back after Windows Blue Screens?
Tech Support: *Marks this as an advice call*
Save it before the Blue screen happens.
"What's the point of going abroad, if you're just another tourist..."
Forgive me for suggesting this, but... users shouldn't have to pay for bug fixes. And producers of software shouldn't question whether or not they should fix bugs.
If I buy a car, and it has a bad fuel injection system which causes it to stall at high speeds, would (*ahem*) Ford require I pay to fix their problem? Hell, no! That's what recalls are all about, the manufacturer paying to fix their fuckups.
Microsoft does occassionally provide service packs, granted. But often these service packs are designed to push an agenda, be it DRM, or the breaking of compatiblity in competing products, or similar. They are rarely simply bug fixes.
User's should have to pay. The consumers should be in the driver's seat, not the corporation. That's what's fucked up about our current computer market: Microsoft is the one calling the shots, not the consumers.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Accept it, until open source somehow unifies and is capable of providing apps that install *seemlessly* regardless of hardware AND provides prettier UI's. MS will always be on top.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
Yeah, some guy I know heard of a thing where at a conference Linus Torvolds was heard to say that Unix sucks.
Hey fucko, if you ain't gotta source then your comment ain't worth shit.
Most of the problem calls that were serious that I took over the last 10 years in tech support. (this discounts the stupid calls where user shoots self in foot or doesn't know what they are doing).
/etc /usr sort of directories are hidden by default (not from the console though). Most applications go into /Applications where each one is a bundle containing every file the app needs. Unix apps such as XFree86 are of course more complex. But then again, those that will use such a system will be familar with it. Most Mac users don't need X11.
1. DLL Hell caused by third party software installations that are just plain broken. DLL-A is older but still overwrites DLL-B which is newer. Ony a small subset of required DLL's are installed. i.e. ODBC being the biggest culprit. Install application A and it replaces DLL-1 install application B and it replaces DLL-1 with an older version. Application A ceases to function. Reinstall application A and application B ceases to function. This is a direct result of programmers doing a crap job of building the installation package. It's also the fault of Microsoft for not providing a decent installation system. There are maybe 3 mainstream vendors who produce the packaging systems and the most popular happens to be the most complex. The Microsoft installation packager included with VB is absolute crap. Ultimately the programmers are rushed to market and don't QA test their installation packages. 90% of software out there has a broken installer! Microsoft is just as bad but it's worse because their applications integrate so damn tightly into the OS. MS-Office makes over 12,000 registry edits and installs hundreds of files. Same goes for MSIE. It's difficult to even get a file listing of what just changed after an install. You need to use a third party tool track the changes. Windows desperately needs to have a new installation removal system on par with RedHat's RPM or Debian's Apt-Get. At least the tech's could get some information about what went wrong and how to fix it. One needs to be able to verify an installation and be able to confirm that it installed properly. This will put the blame on the third party software vendor where it belongs. Note that XP will fix major system DLL's on the next boot, so this is a step in the right direction but it's not nearly enough.
2. Corrupted user or system Registry. The registry is a binary database that stores virtually ALL operating system settings, configurations, and most application settings. It get's damaged far too easily and there is no decent backup. i.e. OS/2 backed up it's configs at boot time and rotated the automatic backups. You should be able to restore a registry from a system backup when it hangs and states it can't continue because the registry is damaged.
3. The file system layout needs major re-work. Unix is far superior to even XP in this regard. Files end up all over the place and it's still too damn hard to back up user data without losing something. Unix has inherit security permissions on system files. XP doesn't by default. The average user will never ever secure a wide open system. It should be secure out of the box. Sure this will generate more calls but it's worth it in the end. To lock down a clean XP install takes a long time and hell of a lot of testing. That's why companies use Ghost because they can do all that in the lab and then not have to worry so much about it when they roll out a thousand ghosted images.
4. When hardware fails the OS just dies. Motherboard, CPU, or RAM goes bad and then nothing works. Microsoft ought to press the hardware industry to provide better diagnostics. POST code checking is lame and doesn't work well enough. SMART for hard disks actually works well. We need to have something like SMART for motherboard, CPU, and RAM as well.
All of the above is why I run Mac's, Linux, and Sun systems. I get paid for fixing MS problems every day. I am damn good at it. I don't need to come home and do it some more! Unix based systems make so much more sense than Windows it's not funny. It only took be about a week to fully master Mac OS X.
On a Mac the following is true:
1. No DLL hell all the system files come from Apple and are tightly controlled. Applications install into their own bundle (the launch icon is really a container for all the files the application needs). Sure some apps link to things at the system level but it's less of a problem. You can move most applications just by dragging and dropping them and nothing breaks. Even across a network to another Mac. Disk space is less of an issue nowadays. There is no reason to share many libraries. Unless of course you are Microsoft and all your apps are designed to integrate into each other in order leverage your market dominance. MS-Office won't work without MSIE!
2. The Mac uses individual XML based text files to store information that MS stores in a single binary file. Got a problem with one of them? Delete it and it will be recreated. Sure you'll have to reset all the configs afterwards but I can deal with that. Worst case scenario you could get to a console prompt and edit the text file with vi. Journaled file systems make this even more reliable as the file corruption should be less likely to occur under a journaled file system. No matter what anyone says, NTFS is not a real journaled file system. NTFS also fragments very very badly. Even worse than FAT16/32! Buy Diskeeper if you use NT/Win2k/XP!
3. The Mac file system layout is mostly Unix with some differences that are not that difficult to adjust to. The Unix
4. Apple provides a hardware diagnostic CD which may not be perfect but it's better than what you get with a PC. You could boot and run hardware diagnostics on the system. Most PC users don't have this ability at all. There is less Apple hardware and Apple tightly controls the hardware so there is less to know to test said hardware. On PC's there are thousands of vendors, etc.
You mean, there's an option to manually cause a BSOD? And I've been mistakenly pressing that when I meant to do File/Save? Silly monkey!
We all know idiot users. How many times has your mom told you her computer messed up, you go there only to find that everything works perfectly fine but she had made a stupid mistake?
Is this wildly popular article supposed to fall under "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that matters", perhaps both, or is it here by accident?
Maybe someone can clear that up for me and my pals here on the short yellow bus. I look forward to being put in my place.
To you English native speakers, the uproar this interview creates is not really founded so well. For one thing he really seems to say what he thinks. They create new versions to make money, big money. Why being surprised that focussing on fixing bugs doesn't helps here. Also, we all know this for a very long time that Microsoft doesn't care so much for a long uptime (they make up with fast reboots :).
The other thing is, the interview was printed in German and then probably translated into English. That can change the tone quite dramatically. It has happened quite often to me, that when I said something in English, many times people found it a little bit to harsh and direct, while this rarely happens when I talk in my native German language.
I agree reading the link from slashdot it all sounds very aggressive, but the original interview was much more relaxing, really, nothing to write home about.
The interview is real, was conducted in English, translated into German and authorised by a German
u bject: Re: Gates interview [RISKS-17.42]
:-)
:-)
... it's really amazing: We do it because we think that's
... 90 percent of the time I get the answer
employee of Microsoft. Prof. Brunnstein from Germany managed to obtain the interviewer's original notes (before they were translated). Here is his contribution to the RISKS digest (ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks/17/risks-17.44):
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 1995 15:28:33 +0100
From: Klaus Brunnstein <brunnstein@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.d400.de>
S
Following my report on Mr. Gates` interview in FOCUS (RISKS-17.42), some
colleagues assumed that my translation might have adversely change Mr.
Gates` original words, or the German interviewer may have misunderstood some
phrases. The interviewer, Dr. Juergen Scriba <scriba@focus.burda.com> was
born in USA and grew up there, so his English qualification should be good.
The interview was in English, translated and "redactionally adapted" in
German (e.g. to remove redundancies and polish sentences, as is usually done
in such interviews). Finally, the German version was authorised by a German
employee of Microsoft.
Dr. Scriba was so kind to read my "translation back to English". Though some
of my phrases differed from Mr. Gates original speak (due to "polishing"), he
regarded my text as semantically essentially correct, with one exception: I
mistranslated "Maschinenstuermer" as "machine addict" but the correct
translation is "Luddite". Apologies for this serious fault
Dr. Scriba sent me "original Mr. Gates", so I append this "raw text". In
comparing the published interview with the spoken one, I regard the journalist
having been really friendly with Bill
Enjoy Mr. Gates` original speak. Klaus Brunnstein (November 4,1995)
----- Original interview text of Mr. Bill Gates before translation
and adaptation; German (not this English) version was authorized -------
FOCUS: Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the older
one is also more complex and has more features...
Gates: No, only if that is what'll sell!
FOCUS: But...
Gates: Only if that is what'll sell! We've never done a piece of software
unless we thought it would sell. That's why everything we do in
software
what customers want. That's why we do what we do.
FOCUS: But on the other hand - you would say: Okay, folks, if you don't
like these new features, stay with the old version, and keep the bugs?
Gates: No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version - it's not
there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version.
FOCUS: But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to
have fixed.
Gates: No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any
significant number of users want fixed.
FOCUS: Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the
page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page
numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from
version 5.11 to 6.0".
Gates: No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe
that you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS: Yeah, I did...
Gates: It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so
you should look into that. - The reason we come up with new versions
is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to
buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots
of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense, is
stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.
FOCUS: How come I keep being told by computer vendors "Well, we know about
this bug, wait till the next version is there, it'll be fixed"? I hear
this all the time. How come? If you're telling me there are no
significant bugs in software and there is no reason to do a new version?
Gates: No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not
enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft
Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?"
You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of
bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
FOCUS: Probably you have other contacts to your software developers. But if
Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store or a support line and says,
"Hey listen, there's a bug"
"Oh, well, yeah, that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll
be fixed". That's how the system works.
Gates: Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year.
FOCUS: Hm, a couple of million dollars?
Gates: 500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone calls
and classify them. That's the input we use to do the next version.
So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop. People call in - we
decide what to do on it. Do you want to know what percentage of those
phonecalls relates to bugs in the software? Less than one percent.
FOCUS: So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have this and
that feature"?
Gates: Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get advice
on how to do a certain thing with the software. That's the primary thing.
We could have you sit and listen to these phone calls. There are millions
and millions of them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in
and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait,
just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I
found a bug in this thing".
...
FOCUS: So where does this comon feeling of frustration come from that
unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every day that these
things simply don't work like they should.
Gates: Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that - oh,
yeah, I know that bug." - I can understand that phenomenon
sociologically, not technically.
Original text with kind permission of Interviewer: Dr. Juergen Scriba (FOCUS)
The parent post is a Google link!!
A lot of BICHOS (bugs) will die, but fews could to kill the big application, ohhhhh :(
JCPM (copyright)
If you've ever worked on shrinkwrapped software, you know that he's (mostly) right. Users don't buy bug fixes, they buy features.
Shrinkwrapped software makers have lower and lower returns on each bug. Once the number of bugs goes below the threshold of what's acceptable, it's not profitable or even sensible to fix them.
Sad but true. Bugs don't get fixed because customers don't buy bug fixes. Microsoft may be evil, but it's not dumb.
However, recall one of the big anti trust issues, that Microsoft did not release the full API...
Perhaps the greater quality of MS software is because they have access to full API documentation, whereas other companies must use flaky workarounds to do the same thing MS can do with a single API call?
Of course that's absolutely inconsequential.
The angry, disrespectful Bill Gates is the real Bill Gates. He once threw a tantrum in front of several Time Magazine editors, who reported it in the next issue of the magazine. There were stories in many publications giving examples of VERY immature behavior.
However, Mr. Gates was persuaded to hire Waggener Edstrom, a public relations company. Pam Edstrom helped him create a new image. Pam somehow got Mr. Gates to take showers, wear good clothes, and stop having public tantrums. She arranged carefully scripted interviews, so that Mr. Gates' real self is never seen now.
Waggener Edstrom is in Portland, Oregon, USA, and a local newspaper, Willamette Week, reported the Gates-Edstrom connection. However, the article is available as a paper copy only.
Public relations firms are extremely successful at influencing media companies. There is a reference to this in a Willamette Week story in which someone suggested that Pam Edstrom heavily influenced the Oregonian newspaper not to print stories that Microsoft pays no taxes. (Search for "Edstrom".)
this interview is from 1995. Just imagine all of the dumb shit I said in 1995 (like "internet, schminternet"). Thank god nobody cares enough to drag it out and post it on slashdot.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
I used to work for a company that provided testing services to MS. I and a team of 2 others tested a product that had serious bug problems. We found some 300 bugs, many severe, and the program manager didn't want to hear about them. I had to practically threaten him just to get the worst of the bunch fixed, and the fixes introduced new bugs that they also wouldn't fix. They had a ship date, and that's all they cared about, aside from egregious show-stopper bugs. It was a depressing experience for a tester. Normally, we get our job satisfaction from seeing our work result in a better product. With this project, we saw most of our work dismissed or ignored.
I found the whole environment weird. MS is the only place I've tested where I would get cussed out by developers for finding bugs. Their bug DB had a lot of really dysfunctional QA/Dev "discussions."
I really think the reason most users don't report MS bugs is because they've been conditioned to be resigned to them. It's this big, hurkin' denial bandwagon and BG is driving.
Inside the kernel, Linux is something of a mess.
I thought Linux was just the kernel?
Gnaff! Semantics!
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Hate to admit it but Robo-Gates is often right when he talks about the consumer (or should we just say, "the bewildered herd?"). And his idea's are always backed up by hard $$$ numbers. Look at Micro$oft's Market Cap. He knows how to market software (or at least he knows how to use the market position of Micro$oft to make more $$).
No...it's okay...I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway
We should all realize that Gates may be right that less than 1% of calls are the fault of [*confirmed*] bugs. If a company (or support division) won't admit something's a bug, then it's not; and all the calls in the world won't be counted towards that tally of percentage of calls due to bugs.
This is the poorest interview I've ever read. Why did /. even agree to post it? It looks like it was held by a grade 8 student. It seems the interviewer went into the interview with qualms, and no matter what Bill said he was going to spew them.
I'm not a big supporter of MS, but if the interviewer had of visited http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.a sp and/or http://office.microsoft.com/ he would have likely found the free bug fixes he desired.
MS releases bug fixes at the above URLs (it's automated, similar concept to apt-get), and also has patches/updates/bug fixes on their site for free.
Bill Gates was saying they only release new versions of software as to add new features. The interviewer couldn't seem to get out of his head silly preconceived ideas (which in my opinion are wrong).
Adrian
slashdot@mormon.mine.nu
Yes, I do admire this man. Although I am a hater of MS products, this man is not Satan. :) He's not out there to make friends, he's out there to make MONEY. COLD, HARD CURRENCY! Come on people, can a saint make it out there?
The guy takes a rational approach to the problem. If it's not statiscally important, scratch it out. If more companies took a rational approach to things, more of them would be profitable. He doesn't even try to hide it! He's honest, I'll give him that (even if he did kill OS/2 disonestly). People that made him rich should be shocked. I haven't and I'm not.
For most people, rebooting the PC every 2 hours is not an issue. I like source-code and I like the open-source energy. But I'm also realistic and I know that most people don't give a damn.
Keep going! :)
The Genius bar!! At least if you have an Apple store nearby. You might want to look up how you can have the thing boot such that you can see the console messages, that might help pinpoint what is hanging...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"He also blames the users lack of knowledge as a cause of some of these bugs."
Yes Bill, I'm sure that it was the way I clicked the button that caused the BSOD...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Did you ever try that? I did, and I can tell you that there just simply was not enough memory to run a BBS, a DOS shell and some applications. You could run a BBS and have a separate DOS shell running, but hardly any applications (I don't think edlin is an application). And what exactly can you do with a dos shell if you can't run any applications with it?
;). I think one of my little utilities lengthened the time between RAM refresh to give me an extra 7-8% performance boost...
Yep, I did. I ran the Citadel BBS, K2NE variety in 200K. Then I had about 32 K for an 8K DOS shell (prolly DR-DOS 3/4 or MS-DOS 2) which was enough to look around for files and "type" them and other such simple tasks. Then there was over 300K left for applications, Wordstar and Borland Pascal + tasm ran fine, they were all overlayed programs and I had a big 10MB hard drive to swap out to. (I think the seek time was like 8ms, faster than my current 40GB laptop drive.) This was on a 8088 10 Mhz (turbo!) with 1MB (I had to solder some of them on
Aside:
As for the AC's asking for proof, go look for it yourselves! If the word of an honest guy like me isn't taken over that of a known liar and shameful perjurer, then what can I say? If you really care I'm sure you can find out. I don't give a damn. I really admired Microsoft back then, but I remember this because it was one of those things a quarter of the room knew he'd regret saying and the rest were to excited to even think about the words coming out of the guy's mouth. I don't think it was a thought out thing, which might explain why he doesn't remember it, and we all know that when he's not rocking in a chair he's not really thinking.
So it's my fault that the 'table of figures' in my word2000 document skips all annotated figures that have their text wrapped around instead of only before and after?
When I use OpenOffice I don't have this problem.
And it's my fault that windows on my laptop this week suddenly refused to recognize the memorystick on the clie anymore?
Etcetera Etcetera. MS is blowing brown steaming objects.
From '95?? Can't you guys find more current MS material to haggle over? Not to mention the title of the post was even a misrepresentation of the quote in the article. BG didn't say "Bugs are cool." He said "Because it's cool [to complain about software bugs]."
MS Bug #1
MX Bug #2
A preposition is what you meant to end your sentence with.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
No, it's the 'I'm cool because I know about bugs' stage. Which is the stage directly after the 'computers are magic' stage.
Then its quickly into the 'bugs suck' stage, the 'loss of data sucks' stage.
Leading to the M$ sucks stage, which might lead to the apple is art stage, or the unix is hard but doesn't suck stage.... and so on.
Thing is Microsoft is aiming lower then apple right now, as for as new customer's tech level, so I imagine they always have large amounts of people moving up from the 'computers are magic' stage.
Yes, and there is a difference between what is INSIDE the kernel and how you communicate with it from the OUTSIDE. Now STFU.
Of course no one calls in and reports bugs to microsoft, it costs >=$25 per phone call, and must give a CC# before even getting though. Oh, and forget about it if you have a server, >=$235. Who would report bugs, if it costs you money to do so?
While the knowledge base is useful, I have, on many occasions, recieved the fix as being "Microsoft has a fix for this problem, but you must call to get the information on how to resolve this issue"...then I have to pay $$ to get it. And since it *only* ran 2000 server, I will garentee that it was not a 3rd part software causing the problem!
So, I guess his statement is correct, but blatently biased...to the point of a lie.
Why are you guys running an 8 year old article on your front page? Man, did you guys know that AOL bought CompuServe? Did you know that a new modem technology is coming out that's faster than 33.6kbps? The Giants and the A's are going to be in the World Series!!! Isn't that crazy?
that this interview is bullshit? I started reading through, and I'm sorry, I've read quite a few different articles where Bill Gatesy makes a fool out of himself, and he doesn't talk like that. And if the problem is in translation, then why the heck are there so many false mannerisms and turns of speech? I'm afraid I've got to consider this one as garbage, for now. Feel free to prove me wrong, but heck, telling me a german magazine REALLY DID print it, that doesn't make it so, folks.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
but I have stupid-user stories just from working at MCDONALDS. I mean, I know McD's workers are the butts of many jokes, and a great deal of them deserve it too, but if you think the staff are dumb, you should see some of the people that eat there.
[Peon] Welcome to McDonald's, may I take your order?
[Customer] Yes, I'd like a combo please.
[Peon] *pause for more... none forthcoming* Uh, what sort of combo would you like, sir?
[Customer] Oh, coke is fine.
(A combo is a meal-deal... I don't know if they call it the same thing in other countries, but you select a burger, and get fries and a drink with it)
Or the people who walk into McDonald's and ask for Whoppers, or KFC chicken meals... jesus christ. There are seriously people out there with their brains permanently in neutral. I suspect many of them use computers also, based on some of my support jobs.
In the phrase "because it's cool", "it" doesn't refer to bugs, but to the action of complaining about bugs.
Bill Gates never said bugs are cool.
Submitters or editors should correct the title.
so the interface is a mess...
you mean the system calls?
I thought THAT was standardized to be POSIX-like?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
B.G. suffers from exactly the same problem most of corporate america suffers from -- lack of vision.
He has good business sense and has gotten luckly, however he is no visionary. This entire xbox thing just show his lack of knowing what his company does.
My personal favorite quote from him is, who needs more than 640 kilobytes.
> And frankly, people don't expect their
> computers to work as reliably as they should.
> It's hard not to think of MS as having
> something to do with this as the clear market
> leader for some time now.
Cannot agree more.
My co-worker next to my cubicle is having those 'memory problem' (alert message boxes pop-up when closing applications) on his 2000 Pro machine in a daily basis for weeks if not for months, yet he only mentioned it in a chit chat yesterday, and had no intention to call for help. Well, for us, we're supposed to call our local IT Help Desk instead of directly to MS, but it's just the same scenario -- my point is, especially in a workplace environment, as long as the bug/fault/discomfort originating from your machine is not severely stopping your work, most people (at least in my office) may just choose to ignore it, knowing that most of the time your well-documented problem submitted to the Help Desk system will remain un-resolved.
Lesson learnt? The best way to solve a NT4 conversion to 2000 Pro "PC-speaker problem", after several months of waiting, is to bring in your own speaker to your workplace.
That was my experience after spending several sessions and several hours with microsoft support.
We (network architect, NT specialist, and myself) worked with them, and kept giving them net dumps demonstrating the problem we were complaining of. They kept asking for more dumps with different specs. After we built a couple of test environments to their spec that demonstrated the problem, they finally declared that the behavior was intentional and as designed. Interesting that it didn't occur to them to say that in the first place.
Maybe this is just bad tech support, but anytime someone consistently benefits from their own mistakes, I'm skeptical. As far as they're concerned, that call wasn't about a bug, and I'll never buy support from them again, and never bother them with another bug again. It isn't worth it. This is what I'd always heard from my developers, but this was an interesting enough problem to make us want to pursue it.
Ultimately, our call wasn't about a bug , because Microsoft didn't call it a bug. Whatever. Now it's filed with NTBugtraq. They're interested in documenting bugs. Too bad they can't fix them.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Quite apart from his habitual crimes, Gates this time is merely following a script honed and perfected in Washington: if you tell the people that their troubles are riches, you will always bear good news.
They're not bugs, they are undocumented features. ;)
I did! I did end my sentence with "a prepositon"!
=@@= -[Mu!]
...would rather not wait on hold (ie. are smart enough not to bother).
Can someone tell me where the COOL is in having to reboot your computer thrice a day because it comes to a standstill after you open a couple of programs - and before you blame the hardware - this is with a 1.3G P4 with 512MB RAM. And where is the COOL in the weekly Windows Updates that come and only make things worse. After updating yesterday, I get another one today to fix an IE Security issue that was caused by an earlier patch. After installation I could not even boot the damn computer and had to remove it from Safe Mode. OH - I forgot - I guess I don't know how to push the button correctly. Or maybe this is just a way to get me to upgrade from 2000 to XP. But I tried that Bill. After buying a brand new copy off the shelf, spent almost 3-hours installing patches and upgrades. The XP experience was way too COOL for me though, particularly the crayola icons and the exponential Updates, so I put 2000 back. But your words Bill, have provided me with great comfort. In fact so much so, I AM going to go out and buy that new software. Too bad it won't be yours though. Moving to the Linux environment that may not be so COOL, but at least the people developing it give a damn! And just think, they make no profit out of it!!!
If Bill wishes to get philosophical, that's OK with me (he seems obsessed with 'phil' words, like 'philanthropy' and such. Maybe he's reading the dictionary again) But - he is right in a way - there is a sociologic problem with not reporting bugs. And Microsoft and other lareg proprietary software companies helped create it, though I doubt that they consciously meant to do it. I offer, humorously, that they are not *that* smart. The sociologic issue is not characteristic of a Luddite. It's characteristic of a user who feels no power over what they supposedly own - about having no power to impress people that something needs to be fixed. Why is this? I think it's all that beaurecracy and red tape involved to simply report a bug. They feel unimportant, though the bug may be very pressing for them. Let's be frank. When a Microsoft product crashes, it's not the product that is on people's minds as much as the data they lose. It's easier for people to say "Dumb Microsoft did it again" than to call the hotline, and BG is right about that. But Microsoft isn't addressing the problem. Honestly, I don't think they can. That the people at Microsoft, with all their shrewd business acumen and 'technological wizardy' (heh) cannot support their own products is... well, it's damn funny. Enter Free Software... Thank GNU!