IBM was exactly the same way. And big corporations and the trade press hung on IBM's vaporware announcements the same way.
Once a sole company dominates the marketplace as thoroughly as Microsoft today or IBM a few decades ago, the sensible corporate types and the trade press hardly bother with the competitors.
Who cares whether Control Data or Burroughs or Amdahl makes better computers than IBM? They can't win. Who cares whether the Mac OS or Linux is better the Windows? They can't win.
If you believe the future is inevitably Microsoft, it doesn't matter if it bungles its plans or reneges on its promises or manipulatively changes its direction. Because a murky view of Microsoft's future is more important than a clear view of the competitors' present. Because the competitors have no future, or at any rate not one that matters.
So everyone goes along happily listening to Microsoft's rosy fantasies, and when they don't materialize everyone will shrug and say "But look, it's still a lot better than XP."
...while publicly saying they weren't. So, what else is new?
Does anyone believe for an instant that nobody at Microsoft noticed this until after the product was released? I'd bet money it was on explicit checklists of release criteria and someone overruled the technical, SQA, and project management staff because they were afraid of getting a chair thrown at them...
Oh, wait, I forgot, this is the new millennium. There is no such thing as property. We own almost nothing. We rent almost everything as a service.
The very few things we own are only there for the purpose of supporting things we rent (playing music we've rented, watching videos we've rented, running an OS we're rented) and are only expected to last a couple of years.
...analysts have deduced that Apple's revenues from sales OS X are negligible compared to sales of Macs, and have concluded from this that Apple's death is imminent.
Years ago, there were Lotus 1-2-3 clones, which copied not only the general visual appearance but the actual menu layout, sequences, names, and functionality.
One of the more famous was literally named "Carbon Copy." That was the product name. Really.
Lotus took the company to court and lost. IIRC The court ruled that it was OK to copy the look, feel, and details of the Lotus product's menus, because there was no other way to produce a competitive product.
How the heck can a perfect functional duplicate of a complete menu tree be OK, but a vague organization of elements on a web screen be copyrightable?
This is not a case of Google being evil (although they are), this is a case of a sea change in what the United States is willing to grant IP protection to.
But at least it was the Google News screen. I was afraid maybe they'd gotten a patent on the spare, lean, mean Google Search screen and that it would now be compulsory for everyone else to have a cluttered web page.
Sooner said than done, of course... but if applications are so interdependent that the combined system is fragile unless everything is just exactly the right version and installed just so and configured just so and located in just exactly the right place in the directory and has all the other configurable settings of everything else in the system just so... then it wasn't well designed.
In the Good Old Days an application was a single file, you copied it to your system, and ran it. Over the years--I tend to blame the loosey-goosey early PC culture for this--applications wouldn't run unless a slew of other things were installed and configured properly, and all of a sudden everything needed to be Just So. And we fell into the black darkness of "installer programs." Which generally had the property that they would work fine on virgin systems, but often failed if any other application had been "installed."
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company where things were seriously out of control. One of the ways you knew it is that people were always sending out memos saying to remember that version 10.8.5 of application X would only work if application Y was 6.2.3b and the firmware was rev 8.1.9c and the OS was rev 7.1b-2.... I worked in a department where the department head thought everything was OK because everything on _her_ PC was hand-installed file by file by her developers... and everything worked. But an ordinary layperson trying to install the company's products in the documented way frequently failed.
What I'm saying is that you may not have an organizational problem, but a technical problem. If things are so complicated that neither IT nor development knows how to make them work, maybe things need to be made less complicated.
All well and good, and thanks for the information, but why don't all drives do this?
And why don't the standard OS drivers push this information visibly up the user?
You know, like the little wires that are built into brake pads so that you will hear a nasty scraping noise well before the brake pad wears out?
The current situation is like tires that not only don't have wear bars, they have little flexible plastic shells that hide the tread and make it impossible for you to see whether the tire is wearing out.
I'm not a hunter. I think hunting is icky. I distrust anything that tends to celebrate the enjoyment of bloodshed, even animal bloodshed. I don't own a gun. I think the Second Amendment is talking about the state militia. OK?
But I think that hunters have the right to hunt as long as they aren't harming other human beings. I don't care for it but there are lots of things people do that I don't like that fall under the heading of "none of my business."
Now, letting the blind hunt sounds like a joke. But, given the same degree of responsibility and care, I don't see a blind-plus-sighted hunting team would be any more dangerous to human bystanders than a sighted hunter.
I think the main danger is from hunters whose judgement is impaired e.g. because of alcohol, and frankly I think this is less likely to happen in the situation as described, which requires a good deal of cooperation and trust between the parties concerned. I don't think a blind person would want to entrust an intoxicated person to lead him around for long distances on uneven ground. I don't think a sighted person would want to share a loaded firearm with an intoxicated person.
So, I don't see the harm in it. It seems weird to me, but it's none of my business. More power to 'em.
"The figures don't include gifts redeemed via the iTunes Store" [because] "it gives a more accurate picture of what customers are actually prepared to pay for."
Huh? You mean the $50 iTunes gift card I bought for my granddaughter doesn't count as an iTunes purchase? I assure you that card is going to get fully used. And it represents something _I_ was willing to pay for. Why shouldn't it count? I'm sure those dollars are worth exactly as much to Apple and to the music publishers as those sales where someone types in a credit card number instead of a gift card number.
This reminds me of the days when every PC magazine was reporting that the top-selling software package was Lotus 1-2-3 when, in fact, it was Appleworks. The explanation? Well, you see, the magazines only reported sales _to corporations._
Oh, I'm so tired of these articles. Everyone concentrates on dye fading, because I guess it's easy to measure and quantify. If dye fading were the failure mechanism for these disks, they'd last twenty to two hundred years... according to vendors and researchers.
Everyone says "I've never had any trouble with brand ABC," but the thing is, ABC varies depending on what you read or who you talk to. Some people insist they've never had any trouble with the cheapest generic products they buy at Staples. Some say any name brand is OK. Some say Verbatim is good. Some say to stay away from Verbatim. The more sophisticated will tell you not to use anything but phtalocy- pthalocy- pffthal- the Mitsui stuff. Others (like this guy) are partial to other dyes. Some say you're a fool to use anything but Mitsui Gold... some say they're an overpriced waste of money.
It's all authoritative sounding talk, talk, talk and no two experts say the same thing.
In reality, I don't think anyone understands very well what actually causes these disks to fail in the real world. I've had disks fail in less than two years--maybe only a couple-three in many hundreds, but certainly not zero--and I've never seen any obvious pattern as to which of them fail.
The thing that really bothers me is that drives and/or their accompanying software drivers never give you any indication of what the signal quality of a particular disk is. If they did, you could detect that a disk was deteriorating before it failed, and make a copy. As it is, they just keep silently keep correcting errors behind your back and you have no warning until there is utter, catastrophic failure.
...just to hit the power button... or hold the power button down to force power off... or unplug the cord......which is what many of these replies are saying......then why isn't the OS programmed to just shut off the damned power right away when I select "shut down" from the menu?
For a couple of seconds there, I thought "Wow! The same amount as the original 1984 Macintosh." My, how times change...
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
What gripes me more than slow startup is the idea that a computer can't be shut off quickly.
The last time we had a power failure at work, I tried to shut down my Windows machine, which was on a UPS. For some reason, the machine decided at that very exact instant... apparently _after_ I selected shutdown... that it would be a good idea to download and install a system update first! There did not appear to be any way to interrupt the process. Knowing that the batteries on the UPS weren't what they usta be, I quickly turned off the CRT to reduce the load, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.
It took the machine the better part of ten minutes to shut down. Fortunately the batteries held out. Heaven only knows what would have happened if power had been interrupted while it was in the middle of installing a system update.
Years ago the science writers used to tell us that we needn't be afraid of computers taking over the world because, after all, we could always shut off the power. Yeah, right.
In the beginning, say from Edison's development of the electric lighting system, through the invention of the fractional-horsepower motor which enabled the development of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, most things started up in a fraction of a second.
Then came vacuum-tube-based electronics, which took a minute or two to warm up.
Then came the "solid state" revolution, and, once again, things started up instantly. WIth the exception of television sets, which had a vacuum-tube-based "picture tubes" in them. However, manufacturers soon developed circuits that kept a small amount of current flowing to keep the filament partially warm while the set was "off," producing "instant-on" televisions.
Early hobbyist computers were instant-on, too. Before diskette drives were common, the machine had everything it needed to boot stored in ROM and was up displaying some kind of welcome prompt within a fraction of a second. Even when the serpent entered Eden in the form of "operating systems," startup was quick. When you turned on an 48K Apple ][+ with a diskette drive and spiffy Apple DOS 3.3, there was a brief "whish" as the disk spun and loaded a few K of code into the processor, and there you were.
It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM?
What really gripes me is that lately Windows and Mac OS X have taken to presenting an empty _illusion_ of a faster startup. What seems to be happening is that all the minute-long processes still churn away, but the processes that present the UI run in parallel. The result is that the visible desktop gets into a displayable and interactive state quickly. But while the UI seems to be ready, nothign else is... particularly anything to do with the local network. If you actually try to do anything on that desktop, you still encounter minute-long delays.
The only time I use VBA automation is when a PC user sends me a Word attachment with a macro virus and I open it.
We must have cross-platform virus compatibility! If we don't have Word macro viruses, what will be left for antivirus programs to protect Mac users from? The Mac antivirus market will collapse!
In other words... "Did anyone ever try this even once on a fresh machine?"
Given that _large_ numbers of PCs are being sold "with Vista," meaning with XP presinstalled and a coupon for a Vista upgrade when it's available, there are likely to be large numbers of "upgraders." So...
"Did anyone ever try this even once on an upgraded machine?"
The bugs that always amaze me are the ones that seemingly would have been caught if anyone had ever actually tried the feature even once.
The only way I can account for something like this is that perhaps when a bug exhibits "protean symptoms" (fails in a different way every time), one could imagine in a completely bureaucratic, micromanaged corporate environment, instead of being registered as "this always fails," it could be registered as two hundred completely different bug descriptions, each specific description having been recorded only once and therefore judged by management to be unimportant.
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 0687FF13 618AC003..."
being regarded as a "different" bug from
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 31469B21 96CB2022..."
And before people start saying "blame the hardware," it's Microsoft's job to make sure that Vista does work on every PC certified for it. The days when DOS said "Toshiba DOS" or "PC-DOS" or "NEC DOS" are long gone. The name on the product is Microsoft WIndows and it's Microsoft's responsibility to see that it works.
It's Microsoft's choice whether to do this by making their code robust, or jawboning vendors at WinHEC, or pressuring vendors.
I liked his description of how his Megapath service "guarantee" didn't mean what anyone would have thought it meant. For reasons I don't understand, this sort of nonsense has been rife in IT circles for a long time.
Back, back through the wayback machine to the 1970s, when I was trying to conduct a class exercise at a major state university that shall remain nameless.
The university's computing center published a newsletter every month and every month near the top was the uptime for the month, typically 99.4% or thereabouts.
This was a course that did not involve computers, but for a special lab exercise the professor wanted every student to run a computer simulation. At considerable expense, extra telephone lines had been brought into the lab and Execuport high-speed (20 characters per second) terminals rented and everything.
The week of the exercise, nobody could log on. This continued for the whole week. I called the computing center. They said, "Yeah, we locked out all the terminals." I said "Why? Why?" They said "because everytime we let them in, the system crashes." I said, "So I should tell the professor the system is down until further notice?" They said "No, the system is not down." I said, "Well, if we need to access it via terminals and we can't, then it's down as far as we're concerned." "Oh, no," they said, "you can just come into the computing center and run it as a batch job."
So, total loss, waste of money, waste of a week's lab time.
Sure enough, next month the newsletter came out and reported "99.6% uptime," with no mention of any problems.
I loved his story of how service tags automatically time out.
Reminds me of the time Verizon DSL switched my DSL service from fixed IP address to PPoE _without notifying me._ Since they hadn't notified me, effectively I completely lost internet connectivity. Unfortunately, this happened at about the same time there was a major worm or virus attack.
When I called them, the first checked the electronic connection from my house to the telco office (approximately 1000 feet away), and said it was perfect and therefore there couldn't be a problem. When I persisted, they said they wouldn't talk to me until I had run a virus scan on my computer. I objected that the official description of the virus said it did not affect Macs, but they insisted, so I did it. They issued a trouble ticket and said they'd look into it.
Three days my connection still appeared to be dead. I called them with the trouble ticket number and they said they had no record of that trouble ticket.
Eventually someone acknowledged that they had simply discarded every trouble tickets that had come in during the virus attack.
At the 1996 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, the newly-appointed head of developer relations--details of the painful 1996 WWDC are mercifully fading and her name escapes me--said that she had been talking to developers and one thing had emerged as the most important single issue in developer relations.
Developers, she said, had been begging Apple for one thing: "Tell us what you're going to do. Then do it."
Avoiding all talk of the future is a seemingly risk-averse strategy, but it carries risks of its own. If a company wants developers to be ready consistently on day one of new-product introductions, they need to have a reliable roadmap.
Accusations of vaporware are a real problem, but I at least suspect that one of the reaons why companies hate discussions of futures by technical people is that it provides a public record of changes in internal direction, inconsistent decisions by executives, etc. which can be embarrassing to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM was exactly the same way. And big corporations and the trade press hung on IBM's vaporware announcements the same way.
Once a sole company dominates the marketplace as thoroughly as Microsoft today or IBM a few decades ago, the sensible corporate types and the trade press hardly bother with the competitors.
Who cares whether Control Data or Burroughs or Amdahl makes better computers than IBM? They can't win. Who cares whether the Mac OS or Linux is better the Windows? They can't win.
If you believe the future is inevitably Microsoft, it doesn't matter if it bungles its plans or reneges on its promises or manipulatively changes its direction. Because a murky view of Microsoft's future is more important than a clear view of the competitors' present. Because the competitors have no future, or at any rate not one that matters.
So everyone goes along happily listening to Microsoft's rosy fantasies, and when they don't materialize everyone will shrug and say "But look, it's still a lot better than XP."
...while publicly saying they weren't. So, what else is new?
Does anyone believe for an instant that nobody at Microsoft noticed this until after the product was released? I'd bet money it was on explicit checklists of release criteria and someone overruled the technical, SQA, and project management staff because they were afraid of getting a chair thrown at them...
...what then?
Oh, wait, I forgot, this is the new millennium. There is no such thing as property. We own almost nothing. We rent almost everything as a service.
The very few things we own are only there for the purpose of supporting things we rent (playing music we've rented, watching videos we've rented, running an OS we're rented) and are only expected to last a couple of years.
...analysts have deduced that Apple's revenues from sales OS X are negligible compared to sales of Macs, and have concluded from this that Apple's death is imminent.
(I meant "patentable," not "copyrightable." Of course)
I don't believe this.
Years ago, there were Lotus 1-2-3 clones, which copied not only the general visual appearance but the actual menu layout, sequences, names, and functionality.
One of the more famous was literally named "Carbon Copy." That was the product name. Really.
Lotus took the company to court and lost. IIRC The court ruled that it was OK to copy the look, feel, and details of the Lotus product's menus, because there was no other way to produce a competitive product.
How the heck can a perfect functional duplicate of a complete menu tree be OK, but a vague organization of elements on a web screen be copyrightable?
This is not a case of Google being evil (although they are), this is a case of a sea change in what the United States is willing to grant IP protection to.
But at least it was the Google News screen. I was afraid maybe they'd gotten a patent on the spare, lean, mean Google Search screen and that it would now be compulsory for everyone else to have a cluttered web page.
Sooner said than done, of course... but if applications are so interdependent that the combined system is fragile unless everything is just exactly the right version and installed just so and configured just so and located in just exactly the right place in the directory and has all the other configurable settings of everything else in the system just so... then it wasn't well designed.
In the Good Old Days an application was a single file, you copied it to your system, and ran it. Over the years--I tend to blame the loosey-goosey early PC culture for this--applications wouldn't run unless a slew of other things were installed and configured properly, and all of a sudden everything needed to be Just So. And we fell into the black darkness of "installer programs." Which generally had the property that they would work fine on virgin systems, but often failed if any other application had been "installed."
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company where things were seriously out of control. One of the ways you knew it is that people were always sending out memos saying to remember that version 10.8.5 of application X would only work if application Y was 6.2.3b and the firmware was rev 8.1.9c and the OS was rev 7.1b-2.... I worked in a department where the department head thought everything was OK because everything on _her_ PC was hand-installed file by file by her developers... and everything worked. But an ordinary layperson trying to install the company's products in the documented way frequently failed.
What I'm saying is that you may not have an organizational problem, but a technical problem. If things are so complicated that neither IT nor development knows how to make them work, maybe things need to be made less complicated.
Like I said, easy to say, hard to do...
I meant "push this visibly up TO the user..." of course...
(Must remember to hit preview... must remember to hit preview...)
All well and good, and thanks for the information, but why don't all drives do this?
And why don't the standard OS drivers push this information visibly up the user?
You know, like the little wires that are built into brake pads so that you will hear a nasty scraping noise well before the brake pad wears out?
The current situation is like tires that not only don't have wear bars, they have little flexible plastic shells that hide the tread and make it impossible for you to see whether the tire is wearing out.
I'm not a hunter. I think hunting is icky. I distrust anything that tends to celebrate the enjoyment of bloodshed, even animal bloodshed. I don't own a gun. I think the Second Amendment is talking about the state militia. OK?
But I think that hunters have the right to hunt as long as they aren't harming other human beings. I don't care for it but there are lots of things people do that I don't like that fall under the heading of "none of my business."
Now, letting the blind hunt sounds like a joke. But, given the same degree of responsibility and care, I don't see a blind-plus-sighted hunting team would be any more dangerous to human bystanders than a sighted hunter.
I think the main danger is from hunters whose judgement is impaired e.g. because of alcohol, and frankly I think this is less likely to happen in the situation as described, which requires a good deal of cooperation and trust between the parties concerned. I don't think a blind person would want to entrust an intoxicated person to lead him around for long distances on uneven ground. I don't think a sighted person would want to share a loaded firearm with an intoxicated person.
So, I don't see the harm in it. It seems weird to me, but it's none of my business. More power to 'em.
"The figures don't include gifts redeemed via the iTunes Store" [because] "it gives a more accurate picture of what customers are actually prepared to pay for."
Huh? You mean the $50 iTunes gift card I bought for my granddaughter doesn't count as an iTunes purchase? I assure you that card is going to get fully used. And it represents something _I_ was willing to pay for. Why shouldn't it count? I'm sure those dollars are worth exactly as much to Apple and to the music publishers as those sales where someone types in a credit card number instead of a gift card number.
This reminds me of the days when every PC magazine was reporting that the top-selling software package was Lotus 1-2-3 when, in fact, it was Appleworks. The explanation? Well, you see, the magazines only reported sales _to corporations._
Oh, I'm so tired of these articles. Everyone concentrates on dye fading, because I guess it's easy to measure and quantify. If dye fading were the failure mechanism for these disks, they'd last twenty to two hundred years... according to vendors and researchers.
Everyone says "I've never had any trouble with brand ABC," but the thing is, ABC varies depending on what you read or who you talk to. Some people insist they've never had any trouble with the cheapest generic products they buy at Staples. Some say any name brand is OK. Some say Verbatim is good. Some say to stay away from Verbatim. The more sophisticated will tell you not to use anything but phtalocy- pthalocy- pffthal- the Mitsui stuff. Others (like this guy) are partial to other dyes. Some say you're a fool to use anything but Mitsui Gold... some say they're an overpriced waste of money.
It's all authoritative sounding talk, talk, talk and no two experts say the same thing.
In reality, I don't think anyone understands very well what actually causes these disks to fail in the real world. I've had disks fail in less than two years--maybe only a couple-three in many hundreds, but certainly not zero--and I've never seen any obvious pattern as to which of them fail.
The thing that really bothers me is that drives and/or their accompanying software drivers never give you any indication of what the signal quality of a particular disk is. If they did, you could detect that a disk was deteriorating before it failed, and make a copy. As it is, they just keep silently keep correcting errors behind your back and you have no warning until there is utter, catastrophic failure.
...just to hit the power button... or hold the power button down to force power off... or unplug the cord... ...which is what many of these replies are saying... ...then why isn't the OS programmed to just shut off the damned power right away when I select "shut down" from the menu?
For a couple of seconds there, I thought "Wow! The same amount as the original 1984 Macintosh." My, how times change...
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
Love the closing sentence...
What gripes me more than slow startup is the idea that a computer can't be shut off quickly.
The last time we had a power failure at work, I tried to shut down my Windows machine, which was on a UPS. For some reason, the machine decided at that very exact instant... apparently _after_ I selected shutdown... that it would be a good idea to download and install a system update first! There did not appear to be any way to interrupt the process. Knowing that the batteries on the UPS weren't what they usta be, I quickly turned off the CRT to reduce the load, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.
It took the machine the better part of ten minutes to shut down. Fortunately the batteries held out. Heaven only knows what would have happened if power had been interrupted while it was in the middle of installing a system update.
Years ago the science writers used to tell us that we needn't be afraid of computers taking over the world because, after all, we could always shut off the power. Yeah, right.
Indeed.
In the beginning, say from Edison's development of the electric lighting system, through the invention of the fractional-horsepower motor which enabled the development of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines, most things started up in a fraction of a second.
Then came vacuum-tube-based electronics, which took a minute or two to warm up.
Then came the "solid state" revolution, and, once again, things started up instantly. WIth the exception of television sets, which had a vacuum-tube-based "picture tubes" in them. However, manufacturers soon developed circuits that kept a small amount of current flowing to keep the filament partially warm while the set was "off," producing "instant-on" televisions.
Early hobbyist computers were instant-on, too. Before diskette drives were common, the machine had everything it needed to boot stored in ROM and was up displaying some kind of welcome prompt within a fraction of a second. Even when the serpent entered Eden in the form of "operating systems," startup was quick. When you turned on an 48K Apple ][+ with a diskette drive and spiffy Apple DOS 3.3, there was a brief "whish" as the disk spun and loaded a few K of code into the processor, and there you were.
It seems to me to be lazy design that says that booting consists of more than loading code into RAM and establishing state for the internal hardware. I have no idea why OSes must churn away for big fractions of a minute _running_ code. Why can't it just load a snapshot of the desired final state of RAM?
What really gripes me is that lately Windows and Mac OS X have taken to presenting an empty _illusion_ of a faster startup. What seems to be happening is that all the minute-long processes still churn away, but the processes that present the UI run in parallel. The result is that the visible desktop gets into a displayable and interactive state quickly. But while the UI seems to be ready, nothign else is... particularly anything to do with the local network. If you actually try to do anything on that desktop, you still encounter minute-long delays.
...our revised data show we're only going to graze that iceberg.
This is terrible!
The only time I use VBA automation is when a PC user sends me a Word attachment with a macro virus and I open it.
We must have cross-platform virus compatibility! If we don't have Word macro viruses, what will be left for antivirus programs to protect Mac users from? The Mac antivirus market will collapse!
In other words... "Did anyone ever try this even once on a fresh machine?"
Given that _large_ numbers of PCs are being sold "with Vista," meaning with XP presinstalled and a coupon for a Vista upgrade when it's available, there are likely to be large numbers of "upgraders." So...
"Did anyone ever try this even once on an upgraded machine?"
The bugs that always amaze me are the ones that seemingly would have been caught if anyone had ever actually tried the feature even once.
..."
..."
The only way I can account for something like this is that perhaps when a bug exhibits "protean symptoms" (fails in a different way every time), one could imagine in a completely bureaucratic, micromanaged corporate environment, instead of being registered as "this always fails," it could be registered as two hundred completely different bug descriptions, each specific description having been recorded only once and therefore judged by management to be unimportant.
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 0687FF13 618AC003
being regarded as a "different" bug from
"Fails with blue screen of death reading 31469B21 96CB2022
And before people start saying "blame the hardware," it's Microsoft's job to make sure that Vista does work on every PC certified for it. The days when DOS said "Toshiba DOS" or "PC-DOS" or "NEC DOS" are long gone. The name on the product is Microsoft WIndows and it's Microsoft's responsibility to see that it works.
It's Microsoft's choice whether to do this by making their code robust, or jawboning vendors at WinHEC, or pressuring vendors.
I liked his description of how his Megapath service "guarantee" didn't mean what anyone would have thought it meant. For reasons I don't understand, this sort of nonsense has been rife in IT circles for a long time.
Back, back through the wayback machine to the 1970s, when I was trying to conduct a class exercise at a major state university that shall remain nameless.
The university's computing center published a newsletter every month and every month near the top was the uptime for the month, typically 99.4% or thereabouts.
This was a course that did not involve computers, but for a special lab exercise the professor wanted every student to run a computer simulation. At considerable expense, extra telephone lines had been brought into the lab and Execuport high-speed (20 characters per second) terminals rented and everything.
The week of the exercise, nobody could log on. This continued for the whole week. I called the computing center. They said, "Yeah, we locked out all the terminals." I said "Why? Why?" They said "because everytime we let them in, the system crashes." I said, "So I should tell the professor the system is down until further notice?" They said "No, the system is not down." I said, "Well, if we need to access it via terminals and we can't, then it's down as far as we're concerned." "Oh, no," they said, "you can just come into the computing center and run it as a batch job."
So, total loss, waste of money, waste of a week's lab time.
Sure enough, next month the newsletter came out and reported "99.6% uptime," with no mention of any problems.
I loved his story of how service tags automatically time out.
Reminds me of the time Verizon DSL switched my DSL service from fixed IP address to PPoE _without notifying me._ Since they hadn't notified me, effectively I completely lost internet connectivity. Unfortunately, this happened at about the same time there was a major worm or virus attack.
When I called them, the first checked the electronic connection from my house to the telco office (approximately 1000 feet away), and said it was perfect and therefore there couldn't be a problem. When I persisted, they said they wouldn't talk to me until I had run a virus scan on my computer. I objected that the official description of the virus said it did not affect Macs, but they insisted, so I did it. They issued a trouble ticket and said they'd look into it.
Three days my connection still appeared to be dead. I called them with the trouble ticket number and they said they had no record of that trouble ticket.
Eventually someone acknowledged that they had simply discarded every trouble tickets that had come in during the virus attack.
At the 1996 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, the newly-appointed head of developer relations--details of the painful 1996 WWDC are mercifully fading and her name escapes me--said that she had been talking to developers and one thing had emerged as the most important single issue in developer relations.
Developers, she said, had been begging Apple for one thing: "Tell us what you're going to do. Then do it."
Avoiding all talk of the future is a seemingly risk-averse strategy, but it carries risks of its own. If a company wants developers to be ready consistently on day one of new-product introductions, they need to have a reliable roadmap.
Accusations of vaporware are a real problem, but I at least suspect that one of the reaons why companies hate discussions of futures by technical people is that it provides a public record of changes in internal direction, inconsistent decisions by executives, etc. which can be embarrassing to the company.
...but your terror score will cost $9.95.