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Bug Pushes Vista Out to November 8th
IntelliAdmin writes "Microsoft originally targeted October 25th for Vista's release to manufacturing, but a last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise' has caused an unexpected delay, said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead at a Seattle high-tech company that tests its products for Vista. Allen said the Vista team discovered the bug, which 'would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall'. Vista now has a new RTM date of November 8th" A reader wrote in to point out this story originated with Paul Thurrott.
That's what you get for hiring a furniture store for your quality assurance department.
Crap, now I have to wait another 2 weeks to not buy it.
I'm sure all kinds of jokes about MS bug history will come up, but at least they caught it before it was officially released. Better a 2 week delay to fix the problem than them saying they will worry about it later in an update.
That said, this sounds like a fairly major bug to catch this late in the game.
If you didn't actually need to re install vista after the crash, they probably would have went ahead with the date and patched it up later. But honestly, who really expected vista to not get delayed again.
A crash is one thing, but a re-install to fix it? I have my doubts, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Microsoft!
Not that hard to imagine, really. A filesystem driver bug that blows away critical tables in the filesystem could put you out of commission pretty quick. (I have no idea what the bug is but filesystem corruption is the most likely thing I can think of.)
its too bad they found it in time.. that would have made for a very good laugh.
They discovered that the default start page in IE was http://www.linux.com/
-tgpo
I would guess its got something to do with the security and DRM authorisation side of things.
It might not be as technically damaging as a filesystem bug, but with the DRM tied into everything if it fails the system will be left goosed.
I remember the cryptographic service failing on Windows XP causing problems, but this was fixable because it wasn't at the core of the system.
liqbase
Vista: The OS so bad it tried to kill itself before release.
Another member of Ethan Allen's team added "Give me Vista, or give me death". When Microsoft asked on what authority they could make such demands, Allen replied "In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress". Off the record, he also retorted "Come out, you son of an XP hack, or I'll smoke you out!"
(in case you don't get it)
Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
So the ship date was pushed back to allow them to Enhance the Feature.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1) Vista has suffered from massive flaws, bugs, etc. ever since it was still called Longhorn.
2) Most of the IT community believes there's no chance Vista will be released on time.
3) Microsoft swears on its collective mothers' graves that Vista will be released on time.
4) Weeks before the scheduled release, a "massive and totally unexpected" bug forces the release to be postponed.
Smart money says that MS cooked up the bug to buy themselves an extra week or two of code/debug time. That money also says that in two weeks, they'll find another massive flaw, and so on...
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Why are you surprised at this?? Do you know how many other things seem to require a complete re-install?
Every time I hear someone who supposedly knows a lot about Windows tell me to reboot the machine all of the time, or say "dunno, maybe you should re-install", I just want to choke someone. But the first Microsoft patch (reboot) is frequently followed up with the second (reinstall).
I've seen numerous machines that have become so unuseable as to require the scorched-earth approach.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Its good they caught this. I'd hate to see Microsoft's reputation for delivering quality software on time be shot to ribbons by a bug riddled delivery.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Once again, some Slashdot users prove that their hatred towards Microsoft surpasses objectivity. The article does not say how this bug occurs, how often or even why, so for all we know, this could be a very uncommon bug. It's just a good thing if the quality assurance team spots a bug and eliminates it, right? Why on earth should we flame them for that? As if the development of Linux was flawless?
I for one say, let's judge the final product before we smack Microsoft for something that's not yet released to the public.
Full Tilt
Oh yeah, that's the OS I want to base my Internet and personal business on. A total meltdown bug that takes most of the huge OS team by surprise on the day it's supposed to be manufactured ("in stone"), after all the testing is supposed to be complete. But it doesn't surprise everyone, so it's been known to some on the team - but slipped past testing anyway. Which causes a delay of only two weeks, despite the testing necessary to be sure this bug 1: is gone; 2: doesn't break anything else when fixed; and 3: doesn't have others like it waiting to "surprise most people".
What kind of $MULTIBILLION corporation, whose steady stream of "upgraded" products are essential to global business and billions of personal lives, runs this way?
Microsoft. When monopoly is all you need.
--
make install -not war
I say just leave it in and call it a feature.
Depends, is she 18 on the 8th?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
This will give Duke Nukem Forever more time to be finished.
Sigh.
Now, Steve Bink at bink.nu is a great guy and a friend, and I know he had no idea that these guys were just ripping me off. But that's the point of this: If you separate a story enough from its true source, it's becomes kind of unclear what the truth is.
Welcome to my life.
Poor Paul Thurrott! Such a hard life you lead. "I wrote about this first, I wrote about this first! digitimes didn't credit me! IDG credited digitimes, not me! I wrote about this first! bink linked to the IDG story, what about me!"
Paul Thurrott may be an important figure in the coverage of Microsoft Product or something, but I hardly think he's the only person with "sources" who get tipped off when these things happen. Maybe, just maybe, digitimes has sources too, and they found out about the setback from some place other than Paul Thurrott's site(s). Paul needs to get over himself, he's not the sole source of Microsoft news.
That, my friends, is what you get if you rely too much on automation and don't do enough manual poking around. For those who lack context, there's a strong push in Windows to do as much testing through automation as possible. As often happens when a $1M exec bonus depends on something, the underlings got a little overzealous and either fired software test engineers or "up-converted" them to "software development engineers in test" who were then told to write automation. The effect of this is that you have bits and pieces of Vista that are tested really well and other bits and pieces that aren't tested _at all_. One needs to remember that when your automated test case finds a bug and that bug gets fixed, it's not likely to find more bugs in the same code path. This doesn't mean there are no bugs in the code. This means there aren't more bugs _in this exact code path_ that test case exercises.
I do not believe that MS has spent enough time testing every facet of the new OS.
You're right. They should take a page from the crack developing team at 3dRealms and only release it "when it's done."
That way they will only ship only quality products.
Is it just me or does this sound like testing for a disease or something? "Bad news. We got your blood tests back. You have Vista."
I concur, I'm so glad Apple did the same thing with Mac OSX.
Hmmm... when I used to repair windows machines it was probably my #1 task. Many problems probably could have been fixed but customers didn't want to pay $65/hour to have me remove and reinstall drivers and apps, hack at the regisrty, or whatever else. Actually I rememebr a lot of technet articles that atcually said that reinstallation was the recommended solution. (this was pre XP days, I haven't been in that business since XP was released)
Just because the bug is severe doesn't mean it's easy to reproduce. It may happen in one very specific set of circumstances. You could test for 100 years, and if you never hit that one, specific case, you'd never see the bug.
The number of possible scenarios in something as complex as an OS is *staggering*, you just can't cover every last case with any reasonable amount of time and manpower. So, you design tests to cover sensitive areas and likely trouble spots, you take as large a sampling of other cases as possible, and you accept a certain amount of risk. Sometimes, someone gets lucky and stumbles across a showstopper two days before you release. Better to have found it in-house than to have a customer report it.
I don't remember the source, but I read once that the probability of introducing a new bug in the process of fixing an old bug was somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. My experience as a software engineer would push me to the lower end of that estimate.
So, what did they do on October 13? Add a huge new feature? Or just fix a bug that was bad enough that they felt they had to fix it before they shipped, and make a mistake in the fixing process? My bet would be on the latter.
I mean, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter, but I doubt they were dumb enough to be adding anything but bug fixes that late in the game...
Side note: The two scariest releases I have ever been part of took place on Friday the 13th and Halloween, respectively. And they were not scary because of the date, they were scary because we were nervous about whether the code was solid. Both went off without a hitch. So don't blame the date on this one, either.
Authentium already broke Patch Guard and hooked the Vista kernel. That pretty much destroys 50% of the unbreakable new security model, as far as I can tell. Microsoft're quoted in that Reg story as saying they'll patch it, but are they holding RTM for that? If not, the launch will be as big a farce as the development process to date...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I just got done trying to get Vista RC2 running on a spare hard drive, to get a "real machine" feel for the thing.
My experience -- It sucks.
1. The thing doesn't have support for my SATA controller. Gigabyte board, Ali SATA controller. I had to use the XP drivers. Tell me that Gigabyte/Ali are no name brands that no one's heard of. Not a deal breaker, as there's a work around.
2. Install is extremely slow. My personal idea is that every step along the way, the install is trying to find an IDE hard drive for some reason, but since I don't have one, I'm having to wait for timeouts. I'm not sure if this is the case, though.
3. Once you get in... My Geforce 3 can't handle Aero, so MS helpfully turned it off. The default theme is ugly as snot, with huge window borders (4-5 pixels), baby blue in color. Trying to change this baby blue color yielded no results; it stayed baby blue.
4. Getting used to the explorer shell again (I use Geoshell on my windows boxes) is a pain. What they've done to Explorer makes it less user friendly, instead of more user friendly. Granted, I don't use Explorer very often either (I use Directory Opus on my windows boxes), but even XP's Explorer is better/more usable.
5. The thing that made me finally throw my hands up in frustration. Somewhere in the 6 hours I had it running, I managed to completely lock myself out of Control Panel. Every time I'd try to go in there to get to something, it would crash. Whether I did it off the Start button, whether I did it from Explorer, it didn't matter... Explorer would crash. Another co-worker had this happen on a VM install of Vista, but he got around it by using MMC and manually adding in the plugins of whatever he wanted.
For RC2, this is a sad state. I remember, back in the day, happily running NT4 Beta 2 for months and months. Oh well.
Just starting out in software? Here's a tip - If your release date is affected by a single bug, your date is too close to the end of qa test. Your codebase should be untouched for a few days after QA before it can be declared suitable for consumption.
Glad I just switched to mac, even though it took a CompUSA store closing in Roswell, GA to get me to fork the cash out. Even a 30% discount was painful. Since then I've had two crashes caused by alpha software, but nothing from release quality stuff.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
WTF are you on about? Do you have any experience in computer science at all? Because you're speaking utter rot.
Automated tests are better.
Automated tests can be run at night, when no one's around. They can be run constantly, without driving someone insane.
Automated tests are reproducible. Try following someone's 'Uh, I clicked here, then opened this, then I think I cancelled that program, then...' instructions a few times. Then tell me automated tests aren't preferable.
Can't keep up with all the tests to run? Buy a new computer. Your scheme would have a new person hired every time someone's maxed out. (Or, alternately, dumping old tests.)
Automated tests cover regressions. Found a bug? Write a test for it. Then if it pops up again (which they always do), you catch it early.
Automated tests can be run by anyone, if done properly.
Automated tests are predictable. They do, in fact, cover the same code each time. This is an asset, not a liability. You know exactly what you've tested, and what you haven't. You can write _more tests_ to cover the other stuff. You'd rather someone happen to click a little different on the last build, and miss a regression?
Manual testing is required for GUIs to some extent, and to winkle out usability issues.
To suggest MS is dumb because they tried to make their testing rigorous, predictable and regular is utterly absurd.
Remember, remember the 8th of November...
The OS upgrade season and plot
I know of no reason
Why this Windows version should ever be bought
Read The mythical man-month, throwing more bodies at the problem will not get is solved faster, and in fact will often slow it down.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Finally, a reasonable post.
The vast majority of the posts on this subject leads me to believe that the vast majority of slashodtters don't have the first clue about the development and testing of a large project.
Oh, and let's not forget that a few months ago an Ubunto update deleted the entire home directory of users. That's as major as this Vista bug, and was readily producible (unlike this Vista bug), yet it slipped through.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Microsoft: Buy Vista Now!
World: Why should I?
Microsoft: Uh...because it's prettier and has DRM support?
World: No thanks, I'm happy with what I have now.
Microsoft: Please?
World: No.
Microsoft: Ballmer throws a chair in the new screensaver, and we dressed Gates up in a dress for the default background.
World: Really? Sign me up!
Microsoft: Really?
World: No.
(Months pass...)
Microsoft: WTS slightly used global software monopoly.
Google: 5 dollars and Gates in a diaper apologizing to the world.
Microsoft: Sold!
Your link doesn't seem to list any bugs requiring re installation.
Every OS has bugs. But there are bugs, and there are BUGS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was chatting with some folks on the Vista team, and it turns out the bug is actually fairly interesting. Apparently the latest version of Windows Media Player infects the NT kernel with some DRM, and the only way to unlock them is to download your authorized user code from Microsoft.com... which unfortunately you can't do if you have a locked kernel.
Who woulda guessed?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.