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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax · Guest

Paul Hovnanian P.E. wrote:
[quote]Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
[snip]
Vista is an ME re-run.
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

How many chances do they get? Remember how long they worked on Longhorn
(Longwait)? And when marketing started to kick ass and demand a release,
they started stripping out promised features (Shorthorn)?
[/quote]
Then thats the lesson for them.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax · Guest

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
[quote]On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:40:54 +0100, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
dirk.bruere@gmail.com> wrote:
From the users POV the best thing they could do is not release the next
OS until they get it right. REALLY get it right.

That won>t happen. Users only buy upgrades in the vain hope that the
next release will fix the bugs of the current version. Of course that
never happens because features and functions are added faster than
bugs get fixed. There>s always hope, but it never seems to happen.

If Microsoft actually did release something that was bug free, nobody
would upgrade to subsequent versions, resulting in a predictable
revenue loss. Therefore, it is beneficial to Microsoft (and other
software vendors) to intentionally leave a few major bugs in their
current products.

How it works:

1. It takes 18 months from initial release for a major software
product to be worth buying. Microsoft seems to take a bit longer at
about 24 months.

2. Subsequent upgrades add bloat, fix a few old bugs, add more bugs,
slow down the machine, and require additional RAM and diskspace.

3. After about 3-5 years, the products usually stabilize into a
consistent level of mediocrity. The product doesn>t really get
better, but the customers learn to tolerate its idiocyncracies and
bugs. If left alone, the customers get very comfortable with the
product and refuse to tolerate any furthur changes. This is bad for
selling updates, so new bugs, instabilities, and preformance issues
need to be introduced in the latest updates, to inspire such
conservative customers to update.

[/quote]
Well, in my case MS have just bought themselves another 3 years of
development time since I will be staying with XP on my next computer,
due this August. I only upgrade an OS on hardware changeover.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax · Guest

John Larkin wrote:
[quote]On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:49:10 +0000, invalid@example.com wrote:

"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Word is an astounding POS.

IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.
[/quote]
Why anyone would use either when Open Office and Firefox are available
free is beyond me.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

Jeff Liebermann · Guest

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:26:23 +0000, Guy Macon
<http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote:

[quote]Brilliant analysis!
[/quote]
Thanks. Fame and fortune will surely follow. I>ll have it framed.

[quote]Executive Summary:

* Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually,
unimportant;
[/quote]
Yep. With statistics and sufficient creativity, I can make numbers
say almost anything. If I also write the interpretation of those
numbers, I can do even more.

[quote]* If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition)
in the minority;
[/quote]
Most companies maintain a bug list or database not so that they can
schedule fixes. They do so that they don>t waste internal resources
on fixing known bugs.

[quote]* Microsoft doesn>t care about bugs because bug
fixes are not a significant source of revenue;
[/quote]
It>s not just Microsoft. It>s like that with most software companies.

[quote]* If you think you found a bug, it really only
means you>re incompetent;
[/quote]
I>ve had quite a few arguments with support and development people
trying to report what I consider to be a bug. In many cases, the
employees and zealots consider themselves the first line of defense
for "their" product. It has to be really bad and easily reproduce
able to get them to consider it a bug. In addition, there>s
considerable truth to what Bill says about user incompetence. I>ve
had to slog my way through a huge mass of incoherent and
irreproducible bug lists. In my opinion, the overwhelming number of
reports are not bugs, but user problems. A substantial number are
also just opinions on how things should operate (unexpected behavior)
and are very subjective.

However, that may apply to the GUM (great unwashed masses), but should
not apply to Microsoft>s own beta testers. I was involved in the
rather huge Windoze 95 beta test. Thousands of users submitted bug
reports and found problems during the tests. I spent considerable
effort documenting bugs. When the product arrived, most of the bugs
we found were still there. It took years for some of them to be
fixed.

[quote]* Anyway, people only complain about bugs to show how
cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.
[/quote]
Software companies expect a predictable number of bug reports from
their customers, beta testers, and developers. If the bug reports
don>t appear in the designated quantities, they are deemed to be
useless loafers.

[quote]Straight from the horse>s mouth.
[/quote]
Yeah, but that was 13 years ago, when things were somewhat different.
I don>t have any direct contact with Microsoft and am not familiar
with how they operate. However, I was involved with SCO for many
years. If you want bugs fixed, SCO had to allocate the resources.
There was a small group that did maintenance on existing code, but the
really big fixes and added features required that big OEMs (IBM,
Compaq, HP, etc) to pay SCO to fix them.

For a while, I lobbied to have only the minor and easy bugs fixed. The
product was looking rather shabby, with a large number of easily fixed
bugs becoming apparently permanent. As Bill Gates clumsily hinted,
nobody wants to pay to have those fixed. I suggested that instead of
concentrating on the really gross bugs, that require considerable
resources, testing, regression testing, documentation, errata notices,
install packaging, and time. Anything that could be fixed without
affecting other parts of the OS, should be fixed without the attendant
bureaucratic overhead for perhaps 3 or 4 months. In other words, a
general cleanup effort. It didn>t sell to management because it was
decided that the allegedly necessary change documentation cost would
exceed the value of the bug fixes. It would also impact the schedule
for fixing the revenue generating big bugs. Grumble.

I have some rather specific issues with Vista. However, they>re not
really bugs. They>re design decisions that I consider to be a mix of
stupid, sloppy, inept, and not necessary. For example, look in the
root directory of a Vista computah. There>s the usual "Program Files"
directory. There>s also a new "ProgramData" directory. That>s fine,
but what happened to the space between the words "Program" and "Data"?
Apparently, someone discovered that environment variables can>t have
spaces in them, so they correctly solved the problem by removing the
space from the environment variable, but also incorrectly removed it
from the directory name. Not a big deal, and probably doesn>t affect
anything other than my sense of aesthetics, but is indicative of some
rather shabby design. There>s plenty more of the same in Vista, but I
don>t wanna unload here.

It will be interesting to see if a few million dollars wasted on
public relations will improve the customers perception of Vista. I
predict it will backfire and be perceived as damage control and making
excuses.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

Vladimir Vassilevsky · Guest

John Larkin wrote:

[quote]
High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?
[/quote]
I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

[quote]XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.
[/quote]
Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

[quote]
Word is an astounding POS.

IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.
[/quote]
I am perfectly all right with the functionality of MS Office 97. The
further releases only introduced the incompatibilities.

[quote]Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.
[/quote]
What I dislike is that MS is selling not the utility software but the BS
concepts of "cyberspace" and "the digital style of life".

Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
http://www.abvolt.com

Baron · Guest

Tim Williams wrote:

[quote]"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in
message news:mtrn84p5jr2vbcnmjqkrngfo7au2qbahgc@4ax.com...
IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Now, I find them quite sufficient. I challenge you to scan my
computer and find a virus.

Tim
[/quote]
Everything on a windows machine is viral.
Do you like to be spied on all the time ? Most people don>t !
Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !

--
Best Regards:
Baron.

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax · Guest

Vladimir Vassilevsky wrote:
[quote]

John Larkin wrote:

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.
[/quote]
Was an attempt.
The attempt was aborted because it was taking too long and a defective
product was released with most of the major innovations omitted.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

John Larkin · Guest

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:18:40 -0700 (PDT), mpm <mpmillard@aol.com>
wrote:

[quote]On Jul 26, 11:52 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:49:10 +0000, inva...@example.com wrote:
"But we know a few of you were disappointed by your
early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt
sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest
Windows wasn’t always living up to your high
expectations for a Microsoft product."

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Word is an astounding POS.

IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

John

By itself, Word also gets a bad rap.
It>s actually very, very powerful software - and that is its downfall.
Most people (even programmers) don>t need that kind of power in a word
processor.
[/quote]

So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?

If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can>t pick it at all.

And Word seems to pick fonts randomly.

Why can>t I draw a box around text and move it? This is, I think, the
21st century.

Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

And heaven help you if you inherit a document that uses the "powerful"
features, with styles set up by a Word expert. That>s like walking
into an entirely new and bizarre program you>ve never seen before.

[quote]
I eventually took the plunge and got familiar with the Word object
model.
After that, the whole package started to look a lot more "friendly",
even inviting.
Word actually has the largest object model of any of the business
apps, even Excel.
Which is counterintuitive, at first glance.

But I agree. For the guy who justs wants to shoot off a quick
business letter, the first time Word gets a few settings out of whack,
it can be quite tempting to throw the whole thing out the window. No
pun intended.
[/quote]
Yup. We have the same challenge in designing electronic gadgets that
have a lot of features, namely that we have to make it easy to
understand and use the basic stuff ("How to make a sine wave") while
still providing the advanced stuff ("Global Event group addressing")

Microsoft did it very badly.

John

John Larkin · Guest

On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:20:05 -0500, Vladimir Vassilevsky
<antispam_bogus@hotmail.com> wrote:

[quote]

John Larkin wrote:

High expectations of Microsoft products? Somebody has those?

I remember people standing in the lines in the front of the stores at
the release day of Windows 95. MS XBOX and optical mouse caused some
hullabaloo, too.

XP is good enough that they should leave it alone. Vista is trying to
mimic the Apple OS, but without the programming skills.

Vista is an attempt to do the things finally in the right way, when
everything had gone too far for making changes.

Word is an astounding POS.

IE, Outlook, and any other Microsoft products should not be allowed
anywhere near a tcp/ip port.

I am perfectly all right with the functionality of MS Office 97. The
further releases only introduced the incompatibilities.

Their self-flattering prose is, as usual, disgusting.

What I dislike is that MS is selling not the utility software but the BS
concepts of "cyberspace" and "the digital style of life".

Vladimir Vassilevsky
DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
http://www.abvolt.com

[/quote]
Steve Jobs defines Microsoft products, and they struggle to implement
his vision.

John

Eeyore · Guest

invalid@example.com wrote:

[quote]Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit

Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista By Saul Hansell

Microsoft is really taking the gloves off this time.
ZDNet is reporting that it will spend $500 million to
make a powerful statement to its hundreds of millions
of customers. I imagine the statement would have to go
something like this:

"Windows Vista isn’t really as bad as they say.
Honest. Please don’t be mad at us. We promise our next
operating system will be better. Pinky swear."
[/quote]
My B-I-L says over here Vista is often referred to as ME II.

Graham

Tim Williams · Guest

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:dicp841jsjbk0pb54h957c1i2tgbgtuaq8@4ax.com...
[quote]So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?

If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can>t pick it at all.
[/quote]
LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.

The one thing about LaTeX is, it>s structured. Word isn>t, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).

So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.

Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven>t done anything as in-depth
as in LaTeX, but it seems to work well) and, as you might>ve guessed, LaTeX.

[quote]Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.
[/quote]
Now, there are packages to do this in LaTeX. I even wrote a paper including
line-numbered code, and it was even automatically highlighted (keywords,
strings, etc.) just as in the IDE. Can>t beat that!

[quote]And heaven help you if you inherit a document that uses the "powerful"
features, with styles set up by a Word expert. That>s like walking
into an entirely new and bizarre program you>ve never seen before.
[/quote]
I couldn>t imagine...

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

Tim Williams · Guest

"Baron" <baron.nospam@linuxmaniac.nospam.net> wrote in message
news:g6i7hp$s7m$1@registered.motzarella.org...
[quote]Everything on a windows machine is viral.
Do you like to be spied on all the time ? Most people don>t !
[/quote]
Wrong. Spying is hardly a virus. Windows in installed voluntarily
(assuming you>re doing the installation), it does not spread via internet or
what have you. You>re obviously ignorant of what a virus does.

[quote]Are you happy to have your computing behaviour monitored ?
The number of pages you sent to your printer !
How many Emails you replied to... etc etc !
[/quote]
Where are these counters stored, how are they transmitted, and to where?

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

Robert Latest · Guest

Tim Williams wrote:
[quote]If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can>t pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.
[/quote]
No, LaTeX puts images right where you insert them. What it /does/ push
around are so-called floats. This can lead to annoying effects if you
produce very picture-heavy documents, but upon closer inspection I
sometimes find that indeed I>ve asked Latex to do the impossible. Like
put floats "where I want them" AND keep them in sync with the text flow
AND fill all pages.

[quote]Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven>t done anything as in-depth
[/quote]
OpenOffice>s biggest problem is its determination to faithfully
reproduce each and every shortcoming of M$ Office.

robert

qrk · Guest

Intel went through the same thing with the Pentium 4. Intel>s solution
to a crappy processor was spending lots of money on advertising to
push their blunder. John Q. Public ate up the ads. As predicted way
back when, it took Intel 5 years to fix their blunder. AMD was quite
pleased to step in during those dark years.

Phil Hobbs · Guest

Tim Williams wrote:
[quote]"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message
news:dicp841jsjbk0pb54h957c1i2tgbgtuaq8@4ax.com...
So why does it do the simple stuff wrong?

If I insert a jpeg into a document, it may appear pages away from
where I drop it, or it may disappear entirely. And if I try to grab it
and move it, about a third of the time I can>t pick it at all.

LaTeX does the same thing, more often than not. Apparently it has a very
conservative heuristic for placing images, so it often places images on the
next page, or worse, *all* of them end up at the end of the chapter just
because one pushed them all out of sync with the text.e
You can control this in LaTeX:[/quote]

\begin{figure}[!h] will put the figure right there, come hell or high
water. I usually use

\begin{figure}[!hbt]
which means "try really hard to put the figure here (h) but if it cannot
possibly work, put it at the bottom of the page or the top of the next
page."

[quote]The one thing about LaTeX is, it>s structured. Word isn>t, at least in any
way you can see (I forget, maybe you can view markup on a Word file?).

So whereas merely mystifying to the ordinary user, Word is literally
impossible to understand, on a fundamental level, by the power user.

Incidentally, my word processing experience basically includes Notepad (no
word processing per se), Wordpad (limited, but good for simple stuff, and
fast), HTML (hand typed), some OpenOffice (haven>t done anything as in-depth
as in LaTeX, but it seems to work well) and, as you might>ve guessed, LaTeX.

Engineers sometimes start lines with numbers. Word takes over.

Now, there are packages to do this in LaTeX. I even wrote a paper including
line-numbered code, and it was even automatically highlighted (keywords,
strings, etc.) just as in the IDE. Can>t beat that!
For simple stuff like this, you can turn off the page formatting in LaTex:[/quote]

\begin{verbatim}

Anything in

here

will be formatted just as it>s typed.
\end{verbatim}

Personally, I>d have been happy with WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS forever,
but publishers and journals generally don>t accept WP any more.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs


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