Slashdot Mirror
Are Betas Taking On Lives of Their Own?
Ant writes "CNET News.com's Paul Festa thinks the final stage of software development, beta versions, are taking on a life of their own, as companies tinker endlessly with their products in public according to a recent article. Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products."
It's a bad idea to put two male betas in the same bowl as they WILL fight to the death..
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
ICQ was like that (I dont know if it still is, I haven't used it for years.). They'd just be in permanent beta. What a cop out. Grow a set and put a "release" stamp on it, bugs and all. Works for Microsoft.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I'll post the final version of my comment. This one is still in beta.
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
Now, we have the new perpetual beta. Any company can, with a wave of the magic wand, make itself blameless when its software doesn't work. "But it's in beta!" they gleefully shout when you tell them about something that doesn't work correctly. "Refer it to our testing team, who will ignore your report."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's a simple case of fear of commitment (or litigation). If a product is beta, you don't have to really support it, and if it breaks it's really no big deal. It is, after all, a beta version.
Once you make the jump to release versions then suddenly everything has to run (nearly) perfectly and any issues need to be properly dealt with. Perpetual beta has it's advantages in that you simple don't deal with these problems. Or you don't deal with them formally, but you do fix them.
Google News is stuck in beta because Google can and will be sued the instant they start trying to make money (via text ads or something) off other sites headlines and stories.
I agree that selling software actually labeled as beta is a bad idea, but don't we already pay for software that require constant patching, such as the latest release versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, and nearly all of the latest games? Does release software even live up to the quality expected?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
It clarifies between "working" and "rock solid".
There is a reason NASA doesn't send the latest "working" laptops up to the space station, it's because you can only say something is "rock solid" after very extensive testing.
My gmail account isn't any better or worse that it would have been, it's just I know not to run anything mission critical off it.
More things should be in beta, there are too many things that claim to be rock solid that aren't.
At the same time, I don't condone the abuse of "beta" to avoid offering proper support... but we haven't seen widespread abuse (yet) whereas we have seen widespread abuse of people claiming things are solid and secure when they are not.
If you want to use debian unstable or fedora vs debian woody or red hat enterprise it's better to be making an informed decision than one based on marketing.
and
What little training I had seemed to involve code existing in four stages of development, and beta was the second:
Alpha: the phase in the development cycle where code first comes into being. Subsystems are being built, and testing takes place on the that (subsystem) level.
Beta: the phase in the cycle where all subsystems are nominally in place, and testing occurs on the system level; not everything works, and features may be added, but we're looking at the whole code.
Final: features are locked down, the system is tested in the form it intends to be released. I believe, under the influence of someone like Microsoft, this is now referred to as "Release Candidate" stage.
Released: The software has been distributed.
On the other hand, this article implies another notion of software development stages, one that I see applied rather frequently:
Alpha: Testing done in house.
Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.
So does someone have the answer? What the hell do these terms mean, and are they useful any more?
I have only been using it for about 6 months and in that time the only change I have seen is that the contact manager became much more detailed. Allowing more than one address per contact as well as several custom fields.
They also added pop3 support.
Define forever and how long it should take to roll new features out to the public using the proper development cycle of design, coding, testing and release?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
If slashdot would conform to standards it would render correctly. When slashdot conforms to IE, non-IE browsers may have difficulty. It's that simple.
Having said that, I haven't ever had slashdot render incorrectly in firefox.
I've heard (I admit I don't know how reliable the info is, so this is typical Slashdot gossip) that a lot of google features remain "beta" so they don't have to deliver them to certain technology alliance subscribers. Ever.
IIRC, betas are mainly used for bug fixing, not for new features, that's mainly a pre-beta thing.
Mike Pacific
Whatever happened to the good old days when users *expected* version 1 to be the unstable version and that version 2 or 3 is when the good stuff comes out? In the time it took for Phoenix/Fire(bird|fox) finally exited beta, Netscape had gone from version 1 to version 2 to version 3... anyway, my thoughts on this...
1/ Overuse of betas will lead to a diminishing of the meaning of beta. Favorite examples would be ICQ and Firefox. I used Firefox since 0.6, and it's worked beautifully for me ever since. But *despite the fact that it worked fine enough to serve as my primary browser*, it was considered beta. As more and more people discover this little fact that "beta doesn't really mean beta" then its meaning will diminish. Next thing we know, we'll be talking about long alpha periods.
2/ The versioning system is supposed to give people a good idea of what kinds of changes there have been. The use of beta names diminishes and distorts that. Once again, I return to Firefox. The amount of changes made between 0.6 and 1.0 of FF is tremendous. Based on what is seen on paper, it was more substantial than what 1.0->1.5 would be. With perpetual betas, people have that magical 1.0 barrier that they can't break. So there is a compression and thus distortion of version numbering.
3/ It's a cute new way to push aside blame. Well, it's a beta product, so if it's broke, it's not our fault. Of course, there are time when this *should* have been used (and not used), like Netscape 6. But it's being overused.
4/ This is just pure nostalgia, but I miss the good old days when version numbers would leap ahead and people would be in anticipation of exciting new features. Now, version numbers creep from beta1 to beta2 to beta3 and while there are still cool and exciting changes, they seem marginalized.
I strongly believe that betas should be used for things that are legitimately under development. As soon as it's stable enough that the developer would feel comfortable with using it on a regular basis without it completely blowing up, it's 1.0. Save the perfection and endless tweaking and bugfixing for 1.1 or 2.0; I have yet to see a perfect 1.0, even if eons of time have been funneled into perfection.
Because with a limited number of invites, they have an idea of what kind of disk space can potentially could be filled up. I doubt that there is a specific Gigabyte of storage set aside for each account that has been created, (there's no way EVERYONE is going to use up an ENTIRE gig) But with invites they can control new account creation and prevent people from registering a million accounts.
to a computer scientist, a hacker is someone who tinkers with access to a supposedly secure system, for not necessarily malicious intent... in fact, such testing of the defenses can even be construed as beneficial
to the general public, a hacker is tantamount to an online terrorist, period
to a computer scientist, p2p is an evolving paradigm, where everything from spare processor cycles to segments of larger files that can be reassembled on the fly can be traded to amplify the power of the internet
to the general public, p2p is where you get free music, period
to a computer scientist, beta connotes a program that isn't ready for final release yet
to the general public, beta connotes an offering from a large computer company/ gateway portal that is just unsupported
now some may see these changing word definitions as some sort of repugnant dumbing down of vital concepts, concepts important to areas of endeavour that some care passionately about, and they resent it
but i assert, from the standpoint of a realist, that since the internet is a phenomenon whose impact reaches beyond the realm of ivory tower computer scientists, such a dumbing down effect of certain terms previously secluded to the realm of computer science is just inevitable, unavoidable, and shouldn't be a reason for any reaction except a rolling of the eyes and maybe some laughter
all words evolve in terms of meaning and usage over time, and computer scientists, even if they invented the terminology, don't own word definitions
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that "beta" no longer means what it used to. I remember when you had to be someone special to get a beta version of a program, back when my friends would come over and say, "Guess what I managed to get my hands on?" and they'd be waving around a beta version of some popular product and we'd all go, "Wow, how did you manage that?"
However, I also remember the days when a "syndicated" television program meant network reruns. A show that was original in syndication would have confused everyone.
So although I completely agree with you that "beta doesn't really mean beta" anymore, and that we also need a reliable way to know exactly how stable a product is (and whether or not the developers are taking any responsibility for its failings), I don't know that it's a disaster that this is happening. I'm not willing to cry, "No, that's not what beta means, you're violating the ancient traditions of software development!"
Maybe that's going to be what beta comes to mean next. Maybe the new beta is going to be a product perpetually in development with users responsible for quality control. Maybe it's going to become "open testing, no liability" software. Maybe instead of being a phase of software development, beta will become a style of software development.
I can't predict the future, so I can't say, but I do know there are some marginally decent original syndicated television programs these days. So yes, while I note the word isn't the same beta I grew up with, I'm willing to sit back and see what evolves out of this. I do want a word which clearly expresses to me what I can expect from a given level of a product, but if "beta" is no longer that word, well, no disaster.
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
That would have been funnier with the comma over one word to the left...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Beta prevents the need for support but allows you to sell/release your product. This is a dream as it prevents those damn leeches called "consumers" from harassing them.
I really don't think it's a joke. I've been telling people that for years. Stuff that the Open Source world would consider "public Beta", Microsoft has been shipping on a regular basis. XP Service Pack 2 is an example of what happens when you do that -- lots of broken software due to changes in a so-called "production" product.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It would seem even Slashdot is caught up in the Beta craze.
c m2000
http://developers.slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#
^_^
Why does everyone keep saying they haven't seen any new features whilst its been in beta? I've seen quite a few myself, maybe I just pay more attention to the little things, or (ha! v. unlikely) I've had GMail for longer than most slashdotters. :)
Not many are coming to mind tbh, and I cant' seem to find a list of updates.. They added thumbnails to emails with picture attachments, they added external POP3 access, they've improved the contacts manager, they fixed up that nasty bug (which shouldn't have really been there anyway for someone like Google) where memory could be read by missing a closing tag in the To (or wad it From?) field. There's the GMail notifier and other things I cant remember at present. I can say I'm happy with the progress they're making, considering it was a good service beforehand, and there will be god knows how many bug fixes and things we won't notice. Being in Beta is a sensible idea, they aren't as pressured to be perfect and it's not finished. If they released it fully now and people found bugs or errors it wouldnt look very good, if they wait, the majority of people wont notice, and they have an excuse. Beta is the programmers heaven
- Corporation you work for?
- Other webmail providers you've maybe used?
- Carnivore? (yes, it's not a corporation, but does it really matter?)
- ...
The list is long. Google is no different, it is just honest about it. What other _free_ webmail system you've seen that offers:- 1GiB of space
- sending of attachments up to 10MiB
- unlimited filters and categorizing options for your mail
- no image ads
- automatic phishing detection and disabling links in phishing emails
- speed almost of local application (on my computer, usually even faster)
- Domain Key Signing support
- unlimited POP access
- really useful search that actually works, and works fast (it's Google after all)
- autocompletion of recipient fields from addressbook
- email address plussing
- at least 32 variations on your username by default, _besides_ plussing
- feedback system that reacts within minutes, and fixes your problems within hours
- spam filter with >95% accuracy (atleast for me)
- clean and well designed UI
- giving you three months of inactivity before it puts your account to sleep
- ability to put any information you want in addressbook, and search through it all
- labels instead of folders, so you can have orthogonal categories without extra effort
- reliability better than most commercial solutions
- full Unicode (UTF8) support
and so on... I surely think it's much more advanced than any other webmail around.-- So, quoting myself isn't that bad. --me