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Big Challenges for Vista Bug Hunters
The New York Times is reporting on the final rush to bug fix Windows Vista. Even with massive numbers of testers and five years of work behind them, the folks in Redmond are pushing it to the wire in order to make sure it releases soon. From the article: "Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft. Such data supplements the company's own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name -- Windows Test Technologies.) This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors."
Or more accurately - the USERS.
How much, if any, of this "testing" is to establish whether anyone who will have to use Vista be able to do so without going mad?
We know that Vista and Office Vista (or whatever the next version of Office will be called) will be the most bloated software onslaught known to man. Sure, Clippy is dead, but what about all the other "productivity enhancements" that are there simply to ensure that the MS product managers who pushed through these changes will get their pay rises?
Rant rant rant I could go on all day.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
On the heels of the latest revelation (how high are we up to now on the halloween documents?) of Microsoft's involvement in supressing superior technology (mainly superior for not being opaque), now this.
Being sceptical has made me consistently right about Microsoft as the latest Baystar news surfaces. My bullshit detector is screaming out loud that the current story is a Microsoft PR Plant based on fiction, the only real fact visible requires one to read between the lines, which is that Vista sucks and will be buggy. This story is simply a moronic attempt to say how hard they looked for bugs, so that anybody who in the future has a bad experience on Vista (crashes, etc.) will be marginalized and a large percentage of the blame can be moved onto their application or hardware vendors. I have been trying to decide whether to get a top of the line PC or a top of the line Mac and this has got me 90% decided. Not that I haven't been screwed by Apple before, or that I am going to happy with the performance of Windows apps under Parallels (which is apparently "good enough" but 2-3 times slower than a quick pc), but I am just tired of it. The other day I was worried about a vulnerability I heard about, and not having read about a workaround I installed genuine advantage on a pc at work.. which Microsoft seemed to require in order to do any other updates (another lie). Recently I have heard from 3 users that their PCs just seem to get slower and slower, despite tests for viruses etc, and though I got a close to free PC, display and printer out of it this is just the end.
When I used to write windows software I had to reinstall 98 a number of times I remember too. I told one person they should wipe everything. There are just too many bad things about Microsoft that anything comes up, I end up being so cynical I expect it is an intentional performance drop before I even open up the lid.
Well, I've had an epiphany. Anything you do with Microsoft, you will get screwed, and the closer you get to them the worse it gets. They aren't even that good at fucking people over, since they keep getting caught, but they are great about neutralizing any attempts to do anything about it. What HP did is *nothing* compared to what Bill Gates has done repeatedly, it's just he does it on such a scale that it boggles the mind. That said, I do not for a minute believe half a million tested Vista. It is crap and I don't need to see it to know it now, it just smells so bad from here. I will do my utter best NEVER to buy Vista.