Re:Proof we are not capitalist
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not an economics major, but all the capitalists I've ever talked to seem to love the whole idea of "the market will solve".
That is only true in a free economy.
Once the government gets involved and limits that freedom, things like black markets and "the underground" come up.
The media companies are not interested in being part of a free economy, they are interested in control and big bucks, and they pay government officials regularly to ensure this lack of freedom.
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
If the networks can no longer count on people watching at least some ads, how are they to pay for content?
That is their issue. I don't know the history here, but I assume that ads have been the source of revenue from day one. The thing is that they were fewer and less obnoxious. It used to be "this program was brought to you by..." and there was what, one ad break per show?
There is "product placement" and whatnot. I mean goods and services are a part of life. Just incorportate them into the story, but don't focus on that bag of Doritoes for 30 seconds at a time. We know what they are.
Last time I checked, Bush's approval ratings were down in the low 30s, nowhere near a majority.
And? So, has 70% of those polled done anything to get him out of office? The procedure for impeachment is that it is brought up by the house of representatives. Again, behavior speaks much louder than a passive opinion when asked. I've written my representative asking for change, have you?
Yes, I'm sure that statistics (as in lies, damn lies, and...) can be skewed (or just plain made up) to make it seem that most Americans want an absolutist, totalitarian government.
Currently, a majority of Americans are OK with Bush still being in office.
If you buy this product, the net result (over the alternative listed above) will be to simply annoy anyone else who uses your keyboard.
That is why I stick with the QUERTY keyboard vs Dvorak or another arrangement. Its standard, for good or bad.
I'm a good typer, but even today I have to "hunt and peck" for keys that I simply do not use that often. Especially when they are located in different places on my different keyboards. I'm talking things like volume, eject, or even some keyboards put common stuff in weird places like control, cap-locks (which should NOT be on a keyboard in 2006), the arrow keys, or some manufacturers (yes thats you Sun) dare to put the ~ and ` key on the right hand side. I mean they are all fairly arbitrary, but standardization is better then being "right".
Call me stupid, but I just don't see what the big deal is.
I don't either. I've designed and studied keyboards over the years and the best way to type faster is to type more accurately. 30 words per minute accurately is much faster then 100 words per minute inaccurately. These are estimates here, but they are based on my own measured speed.
The best thing to do to a keyboard to increase keying speed is to make the backspace much more difficult to use. Back "in the day" when people had to type on typewriters and they had things like carbon copies and whatnot where a single mistake meant that the whole thing had to be redone if there was an error, or it took considerable time and white out to correct the problem, people learned 1) to type correctly the first time and then 2) to type more quickly _with_ accuracy.
Sure you can use a split keyboard, a kenesis keyboard, a dvorak layout, or even a custom one, but until you get accuracy together nothing else will increase your speed or productivity.
I guess I'm lucky that I have an ISP who takes spam blocking seriously, using a combination of Brightmail and a user configuarable Spam-Assassin install that seems to block 98% of spam and which has virtually no false positives.
Any false positives means that SA is configured improperly, and not very effective in my book.
The only false positives that I get are solicited mass commercial mails, and those come from misconfigured mailers that are also the same mailers used by spammers and I don't care if they get filtered or not. Nobody needs to buy something today simply because a mail from an online store tells you to do so.
Adobe Opened the PDF spec, unless they specifically reserved some portion as "trade secret" or the license restricted implementation of certain features.
Even though this suit is against MS, its still fud and BS.
OS X has had native PDF generation in its printing facility since I assume day 1 (and I LOVE IT!)
What part of "Portable" does Adobe have an issue with?
I used to hate PDFs. Mostly due to the bloat in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, but now that I can use Preview and generate PDFs on the fly with a simple Command-P I think that PDFs are a great way to distribute formatted documents that anybody can read.
Only in the software industry, folks, can you buy a product and then buy another product to make the first product work. I suppose if you are making a bomb that could apply too.
I don't know how things are like overseas, but Americans take a lot of pride in their jobs. "What do you do?" is one of the first questions asked after an introduction to another person. We put our own personal value into the jobs we do.
That is such an important comment.
Work is important. I mean, what would many people do if they didn't work? Sit around, get high, have sex, and watch TV? I could not imagine not working. I have a "retired" guy across the hall from me. He "retired" about 1 year ago, yet, he got here before me this morning. I worked with one guy that just up and died 2 weeks after he retired. I see this as no coincidence. Charles Shultz of Charlie Brown fame died right after he retired. Its not that uncommon.
I see work as simply doing things for other people and getting compensated for it. A "starving artist" that simply does his work and nobody sees it until he is dead is not really "working" and thus he is "starving". However, if people appreciate his work, he will get justly compensated for it, and will no longer starve. My point with the artist is that the effort may be completely the same, or heck, even less if he "works", but the flow back and forth requires interaction and perceived value from others for the work to, err, work.
Your work changes you, even when you're not at work. A judge simply cannot do things that others can outside of their work hours. They can't even have a listed phone number or openly tell people where they live. Laborers get side jobs, and have social interactions with people because of that. Same goes with use/.ers that fix people's computers (I don't:) My lawyer friend comes into the bar every night in a coat and tie. My contractor friend comes in torn up clothes. Another friend wears a jumpsuit in jail:) An airline pilot cannot get into much drama in their life. They don't even work that much, about 1/2 time, but they cannot go out and party all the time and be a womanizer. They can't have that crud on their mind when they are flying an aircraft.
Oh well, enough for now, no real conclusion, I guess I have to get back to "work"...
Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
First, I don't think Americans are lazy. Yes, I know we are seen that way, especially when compared to someone like the Japanese, but our work is a little different.
Its difficult in our work culture to even take a 2 week vacation. Its hard to explain, but 2 weeks for a "desk" type of job is about it, and even those that come back from a vacation of that length feel as though they are "behind".
I fuck off at work all the time, but I'm kinda irreplaceable, and I've only taken 1 - 1 week vacation since I've been working fulltime (~10 years). Its hard to explain. I'm basically on call 24x7, and I'm kinda like chronically "at work", but I don't do that much "work".
I set up and run pretty big computer systems, and they run just fine, many 9's here. But when "the shit hits the fan" and some strange thing happens, I'm basically the only person that can put the stuff back together or do some kind of temporary change to keep availability happening. It kills me, because the stuff I run is not "mission critical". Its just research. I'm guessing that anywhere between 99.9 down to 70% of what is researched on my systems is complete junk. So, why I stress about having stuff up all the time is beyond me:) They seem to think its important to progress 24x7, so I play along at the expense of lost vacation time and a higher chronic stress level. As I said, we Americans are weird workers. Me included.
- pages load faster due to smaller pages - seperated most of the styling from the content (CSS) - easier to maintain/modify
Don't downplay the original CSS redesign. While the front look may have not been altered much, a lot of changes went on behind the scenes.
Personally, I didn't notice faster load times, actually they probably increased for me. Before the CSS redesign, I had the "light" setting which eliminated the icons and whatnot. After the CSS overhaul, the site didn't look right without the icons, so I had to undo the light thing, which increases/.'s bandwidth, and slows my load times.
I did say bullets 2 and 3, and didn't downplay the CSS thing. I knew it would only be "A good thing(TM)", it just did not much for my personal experience before looking at the new cleaner appearance of the "winner".
Yuck. The main body text is in a sans-serif font. Hard to read.
Wow. I didn't realize that, but this is not even "in production" yet, and I'll say that when I first looked at it, I thought -- WOW! This is how Slashdot should look!
I think its very clean and nice, and just looks slick. Personally, I still believe in the sans-serif fonts for headlines and section headings and whatnot, and serif fonts for body as well, but many if not most of the online news sites are pretty much using san-serif fonts all over the place. Its trivial to make this an option for those of us who are registered users (hint, hint).
The only other issue I have with the design is that in my browser, Safari, there are alpha-channel issues with the bottom two grey rounded corner areas. I'm assuming these are PNGs here with an alpha channel.
But otherwise, I think this is very clean and beautiful. I can't wait until that Thursday when this gets thrown out on us!
Kudos for Slashdot for opening this up, and kudos to the guy that did this. If I needed a web designer, I would definitely ask you if you were interested in helping me out.
The original CSS overhaul was not that significant, except that it added div tags and whatnot for the addition for a new CSS overhaul. This is definitely a work in progress.
Mirroring provides redundancy, but not a backup. If anything happens to the box itself or the building it's stored in (e.g. a fire), you're still screwed.
You're right. Its so important to have offsite backups for reliability.
Think about it. If you're diligent about it, and take offsite backups from your house to your work or neighbors or whatnot, when you're house burns down you can still have all of your MP3s, TV shows, and everything!
The bitch is that you forgot to do redundancy and offsite backups of your couch, TV, computer, stereo, wife, kids, and pets.
Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...actually even with many many dics how am I gonna backup 750GB.
Real men buy two:)
Actually, I currently have 2 400 gig hds that are pretty full with no backup at all right now except for "important" data that I have replicated on different machines. These drives are about 1 year old, and I realize that I will need to get a backup for them sometime, or feel the pain.
So, now for about $400 I can backup both of my drives onto one disk. Not bad. Last year or maybe 18 months ago, I paid about $350 for one of those drives. Now, I can pay about the same money and have all my data backed up. Not bad.
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.
Duh. Especially if you have it on random play, the odds of it being hit, are, well lower with the more content you have.
There is the 90/10 or 80/20 or 99/1 or whatever rules, depending on the situation, but what those guys say is that 90% of the time you will be listening to 10% of the material you have.
Its generally true. However, its still good to have those other 90% laying around for those times when you "really need them".
Other rough examples. You read 10% of your books 90% of the time. 99% of the world's money is owned by 1% of the population. 90-95% of the alcohol consumed in the US is drank by 5-10% of the population. 95% of my complaints/problems/issues from my users comes from 5% of them. Etc, etc, etc.
The point is that when you get into listing bugs, you have a number of caveats.
Why is it that people think that computers are something different than any other thing in this universe?
There are bugs in everything. Cars require a variable amount of gas to get them a fixed distance. Cars require maintenance like oil changes. Cars cannot even go the speed of sound, let alone anywhere near the speed of light. Cars cannot hold an infinite number of passengers, some only hold one or two. Cars don't last forever, and new bugs are found in them over time. Cars are very susceptible to human error which can leave them inoperable.
It is NOT inevitable that software will have bugs in it. By your reasoning, it is inevitable that bridges have design defects in them, and that at some point (in their usable specified lifetime), will collapse.
By your reasoning, there would be no redundancy or over engineering of bridges and they would last forever.
There is variability in everything. Every nut and bolt on the bridge is unique. Most are within tolerance, some are not. I don't know the details, but many bridges are overspeced, and I would guess that the degree of overspecing varies according to the part. For example, its fairly typical to have 5x overspec on a static tensile load.
Now, software at this point and time cannot be overspeced. You can't check 5 times to make sure a buffer is not overflowed (poor example, but bear with me). At a minimum, it will make the software 5x slower. The degree of "sanity" checks and error conditions depends on the need for reliability in a piece of software. For example, scientific apps use far less error checking and just "blow up" because they cannot take the performance hit by checking each and every step of the operation. Now, with system level programming, there is a much greater number of checks.
There is room for honesty in business. Just think about how customer support would improve if the users were accustomed to having a list of known bugs or issues and not bother with customer support for known issues with possible workarounds.
That is the list of bugs "fixed" by Windows XP SP2, with no list of new bugs or issues that come with SP2. Now, look at the page carefully. I did not use IE to read the page, so that may have an affect, but even the knowledgebase release is buggy.
Just to get a grip of the number of bugs that were "fixed" by SP2, there are 827 listed on that page.
1) There are 4 "Summaries" at the top of the page. 2) Of the 827 bugs that were fixed, most come in the form of a URL like http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=812203 , but some are in the form of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812203/ . Notice that both of those links go to the same information. But how in the world can this list that I would assume is computer generated have 2 different URLs? That is a sign to me that the company has little attention to detail. 3) At the bottom of the list, the List of fixes applies to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (I thought this was SP2, not fixes to SP2). Also it must really, apply to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, because they listed it in a bulleted list 3 times. Along with 2005 Tablet edition.
These kinds of issues are why I simply do not use Microsoft products. They simply cannot seem to get even the basics right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an economics major, but all the capitalists I've ever talked to seem to love the whole idea of "the market will solve".
That is only true in a free economy.
Once the government gets involved and limits that freedom, things like black markets and "the underground" come up.
The media companies are not interested in being part of a free economy, they are interested in control and big bucks, and they pay government officials regularly to ensure this lack of freedom.
If the networks can no longer count on people watching at least some ads, how are they to pay for content?
That is their issue. I don't know the history here, but I assume that ads have been the source of revenue from day one. The thing is that they were fewer and less obnoxious. It used to be "this program was brought to you by..." and there was what, one ad break per show?
There is "product placement" and whatnot. I mean goods and services are a part of life. Just incorportate them into the story, but don't focus on that bag of Doritoes for 30 seconds at a time. We know what they are.
Last time I checked, Bush's approval ratings were down in the low 30s, nowhere near a majority.
And? So, has 70% of those polled done anything to get him out of office? The procedure for impeachment is that it is brought up by the house of representatives. Again, behavior speaks much louder than a passive opinion when asked. I've written my representative asking for change, have you?
Yes, I'm sure that statistics (as in lies, damn lies, and...) can be skewed (or just plain made up) to make it seem that most Americans want an absolutist, totalitarian government.
Currently, a majority of Americans are OK with Bush still being in office.
Behavior speaks louder than words.
If you buy this product, the net result (over the alternative listed above) will be to simply annoy anyone else who uses your keyboard.
That is why I stick with the QUERTY keyboard vs Dvorak or another arrangement. Its standard, for good or bad.
I'm a good typer, but even today I have to "hunt and peck" for keys that I simply do not use that often. Especially when they are located in different places on my different keyboards. I'm talking things like volume, eject, or even some keyboards put common stuff in weird places like control, cap-locks (which should NOT be on a keyboard in 2006), the arrow keys, or some manufacturers (yes thats you Sun) dare to put the ~ and ` key on the right hand side. I mean they are all fairly arbitrary, but standardization is better then being "right".
Call me stupid, but I just don't see what the big deal is.
I don't either. I've designed and studied keyboards over the years and the best way to type faster is to type more accurately. 30 words per minute accurately is much faster then 100 words per minute inaccurately. These are estimates here, but they are based on my own measured speed.
The best thing to do to a keyboard to increase keying speed is to make the backspace much more difficult to use. Back "in the day" when people had to type on typewriters and they had things like carbon copies and whatnot where a single mistake meant that the whole thing had to be redone if there was an error, or it took considerable time and white out to correct the problem, people learned 1) to type correctly the first time and then 2) to type more quickly _with_ accuracy.
Sure you can use a split keyboard, a kenesis keyboard, a dvorak layout, or even a custom one, but until you get accuracy together nothing else will increase your speed or productivity.
Now that's how to gain customers!
Well, being that people are greedy and lazy, that is why they use MySQL. This is not a troll, but MySQL is a fast, cheap, and a lazy man's DB.
And, yes, I'm lazy and an MySQL user/admin. I'm not that greedy though. Sorry.
I guess I'm lucky that I have an ISP who takes spam blocking seriously, using a combination of Brightmail and a user configuarable Spam-Assassin install that seems to block 98% of spam and which has virtually no false positives.
Any false positives means that SA is configured improperly, and not very effective in my book.
The only false positives that I get are solicited mass commercial mails, and those come from misconfigured mailers that are also the same mailers used by spammers and I don't care if they get filtered or not. Nobody needs to buy something today simply because a mail from an online store tells you to do so.
Adobe Opened the PDF spec, unless they specifically reserved some portion as "trade secret" or the license restricted implementation of certain features.
Even though this suit is against MS, its still fud and BS.
OS X has had native PDF generation in its printing facility since I assume day 1 (and I LOVE IT!)
What part of "Portable" does Adobe have an issue with?
I used to hate PDFs. Mostly due to the bloat in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, but now that I can use Preview and generate PDFs on the fly with a simple Command-P I think that PDFs are a great way to distribute formatted documents that anybody can read.
Only in the software industry, folks, can you buy a product and then buy another product to make the first product work. I suppose if you are making a bomb that could apply too.
Batteries not included.
Sheesh. And how long is his commute?
Why would you do that?
I would gladly take the time in the form of a check.
I don't know how things are like overseas, but Americans take a lot of pride in their jobs. "What do you do?" is one of the first questions asked after an introduction to another person. We put our own personal value into the jobs we do.
/.ers that fix people's computers (I don't :) My lawyer friend comes into the bar every night in a coat and tie. My contractor friend comes in torn up clothes. Another friend wears a jumpsuit in jail :) An airline pilot cannot get into much drama in their life. They don't even work that much, about 1/2 time, but they cannot go out and party all the time and be a womanizer. They can't have that crud on their mind when they are flying an aircraft.
That is such an important comment.
Work is important. I mean, what would many people do if they didn't work? Sit around, get high, have sex, and watch TV? I could not imagine not working. I have a "retired" guy across the hall from me. He "retired" about 1 year ago, yet, he got here before me this morning. I worked with one guy that just up and died 2 weeks after he retired. I see this as no coincidence. Charles Shultz of Charlie Brown fame died right after he retired. Its not that uncommon.
I see work as simply doing things for other people and getting compensated for it. A "starving artist" that simply does his work and nobody sees it until he is dead is not really "working" and thus he is "starving". However, if people appreciate his work, he will get justly compensated for it, and will no longer starve. My point with the artist is that the effort may be completely the same, or heck, even less if he "works", but the flow back and forth requires interaction and perceived value from others for the work to, err, work.
Your work changes you, even when you're not at work. A judge simply cannot do things that others can outside of their work hours. They can't even have a listed phone number or openly tell people where they live. Laborers get side jobs, and have social interactions with people because of that. Same goes with use
Oh well, enough for now, no real conclusion, I guess I have to get back to "work"...
Eight weeks, not including holidays! Funny, they never get labeled as lazy.
:) They seem to think its important to progress 24x7, so I play along at the expense of lost vacation time and a higher chronic stress level. As I said, we Americans are weird workers. Me included.
First, I don't think Americans are lazy. Yes, I know we are seen that way, especially when compared to someone like the Japanese, but our work is a little different.
Its difficult in our work culture to even take a 2 week vacation. Its hard to explain, but 2 weeks for a "desk" type of job is about it, and even those that come back from a vacation of that length feel as though they are "behind".
I fuck off at work all the time, but I'm kinda irreplaceable, and I've only taken 1 - 1 week vacation since I've been working fulltime (~10 years). Its hard to explain. I'm basically on call 24x7, and I'm kinda like chronically "at work", but I don't do that much "work".
I set up and run pretty big computer systems, and they run just fine, many 9's here. But when "the shit hits the fan" and some strange thing happens, I'm basically the only person that can put the stuff back together or do some kind of temporary change to keep availability happening. It kills me, because the stuff I run is not "mission critical". Its just research. I'm guessing that anywhere between 99.9 down to 70% of what is researched on my systems is complete junk. So, why I stress about having stuff up all the time is beyond me
they confirm raids in the Swedish file sharing community and at least two brought in for questioning
Any particular charges? I'm not familiar with Swedish law, but do the police need warrants?
More details please.
as a consumer, writer, musician, actor, or software developer.
Remind me how it benefits someone else?
- pages load faster due to smaller pages
/.'s bandwidth, and slows my load times.
- seperated most of the styling from the content (CSS)
- easier to maintain/modify
Don't downplay the original CSS redesign. While the front look may have not been altered much, a lot of changes went on behind the scenes.
Personally, I didn't notice faster load times, actually they probably increased for me. Before the CSS redesign, I had the "light" setting which eliminated the icons and whatnot. After the CSS overhaul, the site didn't look right without the icons, so I had to undo the light thing, which increases
I did say bullets 2 and 3, and didn't downplay the CSS thing. I knew it would only be "A good thing(TM)", it just did not much for my personal experience before looking at the new cleaner appearance of the "winner".
In other words, I really like it.
In re collapsible sections, just realised you need not to be blocking Java, if you're using a browser with that capability.
I don't enable java by default, and it works fine for me.
Maybe meant JavaScript?
Big difference. JavaScript is OK (its part of the web), Java and other plugins are not.
Yuck. The main body text is in a sans-serif font. Hard to read.
Wow. I didn't realize that, but this is not even "in production" yet, and I'll say that when I first looked at it, I thought -- WOW! This is how Slashdot should look!
I think its very clean and nice, and just looks slick. Personally, I still believe in the sans-serif fonts for headlines and section headings and whatnot, and serif fonts for body as well, but many if not most of the online news sites are pretty much using san-serif fonts all over the place. Its trivial to make this an option for those of us who are registered users (hint, hint).
The only other issue I have with the design is that in my browser, Safari, there are alpha-channel issues with the bottom two grey rounded corner areas. I'm assuming these are PNGs here with an alpha channel.
But otherwise, I think this is very clean and beautiful. I can't wait until that Thursday when this gets thrown out on us!
Kudos for Slashdot for opening this up, and kudos to the guy that did this. If I needed a web designer, I would definitely ask you if you were interested in helping me out.
The original CSS overhaul was not that significant, except that it added div tags and whatnot for the addition for a new CSS overhaul. This is definitely a work in progress.
Mirroring provides redundancy, but not a backup. If anything happens to the box itself or the building it's stored in (e.g. a fire), you're still screwed.
You're right. Its so important to have offsite backups for reliability.
Think about it. If you're diligent about it, and take offsite backups from your house to your work or neighbors or whatnot, when you're house burns down you can still have all of your MP3s, TV shows, and everything!
The bitch is that you forgot to do redundancy and offsite backups of your couch, TV, computer, stereo, wife, kids, and pets.
Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...actually even with many many dics how am I gonna backup 750GB.
:)
Real men buy two
Actually, I currently have 2 400 gig hds that are pretty full with no backup at all right now except for "important" data that I have replicated on different machines. These drives are about 1 year old, and I realize that I will need to get a backup for them sometime, or feel the pain.
So, now for about $400 I can backup both of my drives onto one disk. Not bad. Last year or maybe 18 months ago, I paid about $350 for one of those drives. Now, I can pay about the same money and have all my data backed up. Not bad.
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.
Duh. Especially if you have it on random play, the odds of it being hit, are, well lower with the more content you have.
There is the 90/10 or 80/20 or 99/1 or whatever rules, depending on the situation, but what those guys say is that 90% of the time you will be listening to 10% of the material you have.
Its generally true. However, its still good to have those other 90% laying around for those times when you "really need them".
Other rough examples. You read 10% of your books 90% of the time. 99% of the world's money is owned by 1% of the population. 90-95% of the alcohol consumed in the US is drank by 5-10% of the population. 95% of my complaints/problems/issues from my users comes from 5% of them. Etc, etc, etc.
The point is that when you get into listing bugs, you have a number of caveats.
Why is it that people think that computers are something different than any other thing in this universe?
There are bugs in everything. Cars require a variable amount of gas to get them a fixed distance. Cars require maintenance like oil changes. Cars cannot even go the speed of sound, let alone anywhere near the speed of light. Cars cannot hold an infinite number of passengers, some only hold one or two. Cars don't last forever, and new bugs are found in them over time. Cars are very susceptible to human error which can leave them inoperable.
Get my point?
It is NOT inevitable that software will have bugs in it.
By your reasoning, it is inevitable that bridges have design defects in them, and that at some point (in their usable specified lifetime), will collapse.
By your reasoning, there would be no redundancy or over engineering of bridges and they would last forever.
There is variability in everything. Every nut and bolt on the bridge is unique. Most are within tolerance, some are not. I don't know the details, but many bridges are overspeced, and I would guess that the degree of overspecing varies according to the part. For example, its fairly typical to have 5x overspec on a static tensile load.
Now, software at this point and time cannot be overspeced. You can't check 5 times to make sure a buffer is not overflowed (poor example, but bear with me). At a minimum, it will make the software 5x slower. The degree of "sanity" checks and error conditions depends on the need for reliability in a piece of software. For example, scientific apps use far less error checking and just "blow up" because they cannot take the performance hit by checking each and every step of the operation. Now, with system level programming, there is a much greater number of checks.
Yes, software does have bugs, and it always will.
Every major open source project has a complete list of bugs for all versions of their product for all to see
i ndows-4.0.html
Also, Netscape would do this as well. See http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/4.0/relnotes/w
There is room for honesty in business. Just think about how customer support would improve if the users were accustomed to having a list of known bugs or issues and not bother with customer support for known issues with possible workarounds.
Now, check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811113/
That is the list of bugs "fixed" by Windows XP SP2, with no list of new bugs or issues that come with SP2. Now, look at the page carefully. I did not use IE to read the page, so that may have an affect, but even the knowledgebase release is buggy.
Just to get a grip of the number of bugs that were "fixed" by SP2, there are 827 listed on that page.
1) There are 4 "Summaries" at the top of the page.
2) Of the 827 bugs that were fixed, most come in the form of a URL like http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=812203 , but some are in the form of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812203/ . Notice that both of those links go to the same information. But how in the world can this list that I would assume is computer generated have 2 different URLs? That is a sign to me that the company has little attention to detail.
3) At the bottom of the list, the List of fixes applies to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (I thought this was SP2, not fixes to SP2). Also it must really, apply to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, because they listed it in a bulleted list 3 times. Along with 2005 Tablet edition.
These kinds of issues are why I simply do not use Microsoft products. They simply cannot seem to get even the basics right.