What's your definition of vaporware? Something that just came out in a top-quality high performance feature complete beta2 that can be an is already being used in production? Something that's clearly on track to ship in the fall? What's your definition of vaporware?
"Heck, personally I can't see why anyone's pushing the Network Computing concept at all. Hard Drives are faster, cheaper, and much more secure, than bandwidth. "
{whoosh..sound of point flashing past poster's ears} The point of net based storage is not that it is cheaper than your drive. It is that it is more available than on your drive. Think.
Are you serious? That's proposterous. If you download an app for your system for free, then a couple years later they make an improved version available that won't work on your system, how on earth does that mean you paid for the original app? It still works just the same. What a waste of bytes. Besides, the latest IE still works on OSes that are several years old, and doubtless IE6 will run on W98 too.
last I heard, you had to actually work for the evil empire to 'take a look' at their source.
You are misinformed. MS shares their OS source code with hundreds, possibly thousands of organisations, particularly universities. Of course there is a non-disclosure to sign, reasonably enough. This is all public record.
I don't mind paying for my software, but by God I better be able to do with what I purchase as I please. Do you think Microsoft will do this any time soon? What would it be like if when you bought a lawnmower, you were only allowed to mow certain types of grass? Or perhaps it ran not on the fuel you could purchase at most any gas station, but only fuel that the manufacturer sold?
Let's take the highest quality, best performing, best in class software Microsoft ever shipped (judging by the grudging praise it gets even here): IE, which is free to anyone. I'd say that the quality ratio of that is infinite.
I don't mind paying for my software, but by God I better be able to do with what I purchase as I please. Do you think Microsoft will do this any time soon? What would it be like if when you bought a lawnmower, you were only allowed to mow certain types of grass? Or perhaps it ran not on the fuel you could purchase at most any gas station, but only fuel that the manufacturer sold?
A better analogy would be that when you buy a car, you don't presume to have a right to get the drawings and plans that were used to make it?
Amazing. If I want to see the comments of people who agree with Microsoft in any way, I have to browse at 0. Otherwise I read the same opinions over and over.
Moderators, please, grow up. Flamebait is a deliberately poorly-reasoned and tendentious comment designed to aggravate people. Reasoned comments that do not align with the beliefs of the majority here are NOT flamebait, and they should be ENCOURAGED, whatever your personal views.
That's the bind that Linux is in. Companies like Red Hat do a lot of the work to make Linux more usable. And Linux needs to be easier to use, easier to install, easier to configure. But the more progress that is made on this, the less support it needs (by definition). So the less money is made, because support is where the money is supposed to come from. How can Red Hat base its business model on undermining its own source of revenue?
You're comparing Windows 2k with Mozilla to prove your claim that open source means fewer bugs? That's laughable!
And let me squash another myth. There are not "millions of good programmers" who can (let alone would) fix bugs in Windows. 98% (perhaps a higher percentage) of programmers in the world would not be able to find a bug in the NT Kernel source if you put a gun to their head...they do not have the technical skill. I know there are millions of VB programmers, but really, programmers are not fungible, and finding/fixing bugs in the source of a serious, mature OS is not simply a matter of opening it.
"In every technical way measurable, the Free Unix systems are already superior. "
Then perhaps technical, measurable ways aren't the only important aspects of an OS. What about the fact that my mom can only just use W98 and wouldn't have a clue what to do with Linux? W98's usability is surely greatly superior. And technical superiority, if that is what Linux has, is pointless if the user can't use it.
Go buy the Learning Edition for $70...it even comes in the back of some books. Really, you can't complain that VC6 is overpriced. If you can't afford $70, well...
A subscription model would provide a good incentive for MS to keep their app slim and trim. Currently each new product version has higher minimum hardware requirements than the last. That's not a problem as corporations typically either get new versions loaded on new computers, or replace their machines at the same time (or every other time). If they were subscribing, however, one imagines the product being used on the same hardware longer, being progressively upgraded, and users would not be pleased if it got progressively slower.
I think it's so cool that GM is such an understanding company and don't mind you calling upper management corrupt, "clueless morons" - so long as you say that you don't speak for them. Sigh - would that all large corporations would be so tolerant these days.;-)
That's very cool, but with respect, if you really did get all the bugs, I am quite certain that it was not a "major" project. For a start, once code reaches the complexity and volume of a "major" project, it is mathematically impossible to fully test it...I need not state further reasons.
I trailed along to this movie as part of a work morale event, expecting it to be squirm-in-the-seat bad. Typically if something is a "movie" rather than a "film" it's beneath me. Well stick a carrot up/my/ butt, though, because despite being indeed crap, including the most ludicrously bad first five minutes in which "The Rock" plays the main role, I was entertained throughout and laughed pretty hard in places. There's both more and less than meets the eye here, including homage to a number of other films if you watch closely. The "plot" is possibly the most preposterous "plot" in any film I can recall seeing/ever/. It's clear that they threw in more nonsense just for fun. Truly it surpasses mere crap and becomes meta-crap, crap about crap. None of the "actors" - again, I use the word loosely, and note that if it wasn't for this aside, the Rock would not be in this sentence - take it seriously; they play for bathos throughout. In places the crapness truly transcended itself to a new magnitude of crap, and the audience in my showing broke into applause. Truly a pastiche of crap, special effect overladen movies. If you want a good belly laugh for a couple of hours, have a few beers with your mates and traipse along to this. Make sure to have plenty of Raisinets to throw at the screen.
Maybe they were run by the same ppl I lived near to in Atlanta, a detailing company called "Righteous Detail". The centerpiece of their roadside ad was a huge cross. Tacky! But I guess they cleansed your car of sins too.
There is a story (since it's nth hand I can't say whether it's a myth, but it scarcely matters because it illustrates a truth) that the Shuttle has 2 (or n, I forget the number but it was small) "P1, S1" bugs, ie the most serious, easily hittable bugs. However these will never be fixed because of the risk of destabilization: it is much safer and better engineering to document them thorougly in order to avoid them. This emphasises that destabilizing a product by fixing a bug is worse than just ending up creating a new bug(s) to fix. You knew about the problem that you fixed; you don't know about the problems that you may have created (and they could be objectively worse, as well as undocumented).
My diagnosis is that you are allowing the developers to priorize bugs themselves. This is neither the job of testers or of developers but of enlightened project leads or committees. Developers' jobs are to evaluate and apply fixes, not prioritize, although they may be able to supply valuable information to help priorize.
Reason: developers are usually shitty at customer empathy, and are biased towards very easy and very interesting fixes.
I've done Software QA professionally for a number of years and I would consider myself an expert. Initially I could characterize my view of the role of the software Tester as the Naive View:
Naive View: The software tester finds all the bugs (possibly unspoken assumption is so they can all be fixed). This is the sole role of the Tester.
Gradually I have developed what I characterize as the Sophisticated View:
Sophisticated View: The software tester evaluates the quality (adherence to the written and implied specifications) of the sofware, including reporting deviations encountered; and determines the confidence level of this evaluation, including estimates of the distribution and characteristics of the undiscovered deviations.
Thus the tester has a twofold role, to help develop the product and to help determine when it should ship (ie, when it has reached the specified level of quality).
From observation, most shops' testers labor under the Naive View; only the most effective groups understand there are sure to be undocumented defects and that the tester is the best person to characterize these and evaluate the overall quality and shippability.
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What's your definition of vaporware? Something that just came out in a top-quality high performance feature complete beta2 that can be an is already being used in production? Something that's clearly on track to ship in the fall? What's your definition of vaporware?
{whoosh..sound of point flashing past poster's ears} The point of net based storage is not that it is cheaper than your drive. It is that it is more available than on your drive. Think.
Besides the author must have misconfigured his server. Custom 404 pages work just fine in IE and always have.
Are you serious? That's proposterous. If you download an app for your system for free, then a couple years later they make an improved version available that won't work on your system, how on earth does that mean you paid for the original app? It still works just the same. What a waste of bytes. Besides, the latest IE still works on OSes that are several years old, and doubtless IE6 will run on W98 too.
It's MUCH more stable? Is that worth $100 to you?
You are misinformed. MS shares their OS source code with hundreds, possibly thousands of organisations, particularly universities. Of course there is a non-disclosure to sign, reasonably enough. This is all public record.
Let's take the highest quality, best performing, best in class software Microsoft ever shipped (judging by the grudging praise it gets even here): IE, which is free to anyone. I'd say that the quality ratio of that is infinite.
A better analogy would be that when you buy a car, you don't presume to have a right to get the drawings and plans that were used to make it?
Moderators, please, grow up. Flamebait is a deliberately poorly-reasoned and tendentious comment designed to aggravate people. Reasoned comments that do not align with the beliefs of the majority here are NOT flamebait, and they should be ENCOURAGED, whatever your personal views.
That's the bind that Linux is in. Companies like Red Hat do a lot of the work to make Linux more usable. And Linux needs to be easier to use, easier to install, easier to configure. But the more progress that is made on this, the less support it needs (by definition). So the less money is made, because support is where the money is supposed to come from. How can Red Hat base its business model on undermining its own source of revenue?
And let me squash another myth. There are not "millions of good programmers" who can (let alone would) fix bugs in Windows. 98% (perhaps a higher percentage) of programmers in the world would not be able to find a bug in the NT Kernel source if you put a gun to their head...they do not have the technical skill. I know there are millions of VB programmers, but really, programmers are not fungible, and finding/fixing bugs in the source of a serious, mature OS is not simply a matter of opening it.
After all, what more can a man give than his most intimate, pubic support?
(Do I pube my point?)
Then perhaps technical, measurable ways aren't the only important aspects of an OS. What about the fact that my mom can only just use W98 and wouldn't have a clue what to do with Linux? W98's usability is surely greatly superior. And technical superiority, if that is what Linux has, is pointless if the user can't use it.
I hope your service guarantees are good - I'm paying $35/m for 0.768mbps (plus ISP)...admittedly it's been down about 72 hrs in the last 18 months...
Go buy the Learning Edition for $70...it even comes in the back of some books. Really, you can't complain that VC6 is overpriced. If you can't afford $70, well...
A subscription model would provide a good incentive for MS to keep their app slim and trim. Currently each new product version has higher minimum hardware requirements than the last. That's not a problem as corporations typically either get new versions loaded on new computers, or replace their machines at the same time (or every other time). If they were subscribing, however, one imagines the product being used on the same hardware longer, being progressively upgraded, and users would not be pleased if it got progressively slower.
I think it's so cool that GM is such an understanding company and don't mind you calling upper management corrupt, "clueless morons" - so long as you say that you don't speak for them. Sigh - would that all large corporations would be so tolerant these days. ;-)
That's very cool, but with respect, if you really did get all the bugs, I am quite certain that it was not a "major" project. For a start, once code reaches the complexity and volume of a "major" project, it is mathematically impossible to fully test it...I need not state further reasons.
I trailed along to this movie as part of a work morale event, expecting it to be squirm-in-the-seat bad. Typically if something is a "movie" rather than a "film" it's beneath me. Well stick a carrot up /my/ butt, though, because despite being indeed crap, including the most ludicrously bad first five minutes in which "The Rock" plays the main role, I was entertained throughout and laughed pretty hard in places. There's both more and less than meets the eye here, including homage to a number of other films if you watch closely. The "plot" is possibly the most preposterous "plot" in any film I can recall seeing /ever/. It's clear that they threw in more nonsense just for fun. Truly it surpasses mere crap and becomes meta-crap, crap about crap. None of the "actors" - again, I use the word loosely, and note that if it wasn't for this aside, the Rock would not be in this sentence - take it seriously; they play for bathos throughout. In places the crapness truly transcended itself to a new magnitude of crap, and the audience in my showing broke into applause. Truly a pastiche of crap, special effect overladen movies. If you want a good belly laugh for a couple of hours, have a few beers with your mates and traipse along to this. Make sure to have plenty of Raisinets to throw at the screen.
Uh, you mispelled possessive.
Maybe they were run by the same ppl I lived near to in Atlanta, a detailing company called "Righteous Detail". The centerpiece of their roadside ad was a huge cross. Tacky! But I guess they cleansed your car of sins too.
There is a story (since it's nth hand I can't say whether it's a myth, but it scarcely matters because it illustrates a truth) that the Shuttle has 2 (or n, I forget the number but it was small) "P1, S1" bugs, ie the most serious, easily hittable bugs. However these will never be fixed because of the risk of destabilization: it is much safer and better engineering to document them thorougly in order to avoid them. This emphasises that destabilizing a product by fixing a bug is worse than just ending up creating a new bug(s) to fix. You knew about the problem that you fixed; you don't know about the problems that you may have created (and they could be objectively worse, as well as undocumented).
Reason: developers are usually shitty at customer empathy, and are biased towards very easy and very interesting fixes.
Naive View: The software tester finds all the bugs (possibly unspoken assumption is so they can all be fixed). This is the sole role of the Tester.
Gradually I have developed what I characterize as the Sophisticated View:
Sophisticated View: The software tester evaluates the quality (adherence to the written and implied specifications) of the sofware, including reporting deviations encountered; and determines the confidence level of this evaluation, including estimates of the distribution and characteristics of the undiscovered deviations.
Thus the tester has a twofold role, to help develop the product and to help determine when it should ship (ie, when it has reached the specified level of quality).
From observation, most shops' testers labor under the Naive View; only the most effective groups understand there are sure to be undocumented defects and that the tester is the best person to characterize these and evaluate the overall quality and shippability.
Seriously, I'm not flaming. What major project have you played a part in shipping which shipped without known bugs. Tell the world.