Beta again vs RC1?

[Pete]

x-no-archive: yes

I've read more than one article that Vista is nowhere near readly as a RC1,
and that testers are urging Microsoft to introduce another Beta and to
postpone release date well into 2007. Will MS be humble enough to do this,
and do you all agree? (I am not a tester of any sort)
-Pete

 

[Guest]

I don't think so. MS will be lucky if they don't have another Windows ME
*shudders*

 

[John Barnett MVP]

Whether MS will postpone the release of RC1 is debatable but, regardless of
the 'little clique' of beta testers referred to in a few website blogs i am
seriously of the opinion that Vista needs another beta. It is no way ready
for RC1 as yet.
I can understand the 'rush' to get Vista out on time and bring in more
revenue for Microsoft - regardless of the why's and wherefore's Microsoft
are a business and need to generate revenue - however i cannot see the point
of the 'rush' when, in the end, the consumer, who, incidentally keep
Microsoft in the position they are, are very likely to be disappointed.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

The information in this mail is supplied "as is". No warranty of any kind,
either expressed or implied, is made in relation to the accuracy,
reliability or content of this mail. The Author shall not be liable for any
direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use
of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this mail..

 

[Pete]

x-no-archive: yes

Yes. And it's two years late anyway!
-Pete

 

[Chad Harris]

MSFT is a company brimming with thousands of outstanding, terrific,
maximally talented people who have a remarkable environment for
acomplishment given the size of that company. But as a corporate cultural
trait, I would not even begin to ever put the words

humble

and

Microsoft

into the same solar system or gallaxy. Humble is not something this company
has ever done, that Bill Gates has ever done except in rare areas (his
learning some medicine in connection with his interest in the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, for example and realizing that he can't get his
arms around it in a week, a month, or even years and it could even be as
complicated and unpredictable and challenging as coding).

CH

 

[Chad Harris]

It's corparate culture is also quintissential condescension.

CH

The Selective Service of the Armed Forces of the US, having exhausted its
recruitment and now stretched thin has opened up its age limit to 42 and
also promises that if you enlist, you will be made a citizen the very next
day.

This is being called "Gimme your huddled masses, so we can train them to
kick some asses."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0540,gillison,68594,2.html

"There are currently about 37,500 foreign nationals from over 200 countries
serving in the active duty forces and reserves . Seventy-one have died in
Iraq and three in Afghanistan. The law currently provides for expediting the
citizenship applications of U.S. service personnel, who become eligible to
apply the first day they enlist. The presence of non-citizens in the U.S.
armed forces dates back to the 18th century—“more than 660,000 military
veterans became citizens through naturalization between 1862 and 2000,”
according to a report by the nonprofit CNA Corporation."

US military stretched too thin?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/dailyUpdate.html?s=mets

"One result of this situation, The Washington Post reported earlier this
week, is that the Army alone has blocked the departure of more than 40,000
soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and Reserve members who were
eligible to leave the service this year. Reuters quotes the Pentagon as
saying that 187,746 National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized as of
Dec. 31, 2003. About 20 percent of the troops in Iraq are Reservists or
Guard members but this proportion is expected to double next year. The
Associated Press notes the number of military reservists called to active
duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week, reflecting their new role
in Iraq.

In order to accomodate the massive changeover between departing and arriving
troops the next two months in Iraq, the Army this week issued a "stop loss"
order to keep 7,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq from leaving
the service at the end of their regular enlistments. But some defense
analysts say stop-loss orders will discourage new recruits, bound to see
many in uniform as no longer volunteers. "The reality is the stop-loss
orders that are now in effect amount to a de facto draft," Charles Pena,
defense analyst with the Cato Institute, said."

 

[Pete]

x-no-archive: yes

It's corparate culture is also quintissential condescension.

CH

The Selective Service of the Armed Forces of the US, having exhausted its
recruitment and now stretched thin has opened up its age limit to 42 and
also promises that if you enlist, you will be made a citizen the very next
day.

This is being called "Gimme your huddled masses, so we can train them to
kick some asses."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0540,gillison,68594,2.html

"There are currently about 37,500 foreign nationals from over 200
countries serving in the active duty forces and reserves . Seventy-one
have died in Iraq and three in Afghanistan. The law currently provides for
expediting the citizenship applications of U.S. service personnel, who
become eligible to apply the first day they enlist. The presence of
non-citizens in the U.S. armed forces dates back to the 18th century-"more
than 660,000 military veterans became citizens through naturalization
between 1862 and 2000," according to a report by the nonprofit CNA
Corporation."

US military stretched too thin?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0109/dailyUpdate.html?s=mets

"One result of this situation, The Washington Post reported earlier this
week, is that the Army alone has blocked the departure of more than 40,000
soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and Reserve members who were
eligible to leave the service this year. Reuters quotes the Pentagon as
saying that 187,746 National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized as of
Dec. 31, 2003. About 20 percent of the troops in Iraq are Reservists or
Guard members but this proportion is expected to double next year. The
Associated Press notes the number of military reservists called to active
duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week, reflecting their new
role in Iraq.

In order to accomodate the massive changeover between departing and
arriving troops the next two months in Iraq, the Army this week issued a
"stop loss" order to keep 7,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq
from leaving the service at the end of their regular enlistments. But some
defense analysts say stop-loss orders will discourage new recruits, bound
to see many in uniform as no longer volunteers. "The reality is the
stop-loss orders that are now in effect amount to a de facto draft,"
Charles Pena, defense analyst with the Cato Institute, said."

Definately Off Topic.
-Pete

 

[Alan Simpson]

Actually Vista is four years late (the initial plan was to release in 2003).
But it's a tough call because you can't really judge the status of the whole
project from one build. Everyone assumes the build they have represents the
state of the project as a whole when they got that build. But like all
assumptions, that one isn't necessarily accurate. You can get one build
that's an absolute dog. Even things that worked in the previous build don't
work anymore. The next build comes along and it's like a miracle happened in
between.



But if 5472 (or whatever) is the state of the state then yeah, there's lotsa
work left to be done.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

I have seen EDW builds in webcasts well beyond 5472 and in the TechBeta
chats we are constantly getting references to fixes in builds later than
what we have access to. Whether RC1 releases this quarter as is reaffirmed
by MS or not, the Vista Team is saying they can do it and all of us will see
excellent progress.

This is quite a game of wait and see for all of us. Very interesting. I
wouldn't have missed it for most anything. (For money, maybe.)

 

[Chad Harris]

Alan's point is very well taken, but you have seen constant references in
chats since July 05 that xyz would be corrected in Build xyz and half the
time it hasn't been corrected up through Build 5487.0.060726-1810 that the
TAP participant developers in my hood are running. That a build is a
snapshot in a sense is a very important point, and that a numbrer of things
may be tried in a build to see how they pan out with the software and
hardware equation of 25,000 TBTs, and x number of TAP, and the rest of the
categories testing that may not work in a new build is understandable and a
lot of us, myself included tend to forget this.

That it may be hard to appreciate the overall progress unless you have the
overall view and a view into the future of things being polished up and
worked on for future builds, that some of the teams have at Redmond who can
see the big picture is also well taken.

CH

 

[Bernie]

Alan's point is very well taken, but you have seen constant references in
chats since July 05 that xyz would be corrected in Build xyz and half the
time it hasn't been corrected up through Build 5487.0.060726-1810 that the
TAP participant developers in my hood are running. That a build is a
snapshot in a sense is a very important point, and that a numbrer of things
may be tried in a build to see how they pan out with the software and
hardware equation of 25,000 TBTs, and x number of TAP, and the rest of the
categories testing that may not work in a new build is understandable and a
lot of us, myself included tend to forget this.

That it may be hard to appreciate the overall progress unless you have the
overall view and a view into the future of things being polished up and
worked on for future builds, that some of the teams have at Redmond who can
see the big picture is also well taken.

CH

On the build as a snapshot point, in my humble way as a long developer,
I have some experience of this. My last big project went out to beta and
I got a ton of feedback with lots of things to fix and a few features
that needed simplifying. I prioritized these and got to work. But there
was some demand to see how certain things were progressing. So I let out
a build that in some ways was less complete than the last because to fix
some bugs I had removed a few chunks of code to be worked on further.
The users saw the progress of what they said they wanted to see and then
cried that overall the program was worse because some bugged features
were no longer working at all.

Putting that kind of thing in the perspective of the number of things
being worked on at MS for Vista means there are bound to be "broken"
things that worked okay in previous builds. Those things are being reworked.

 

[Chad Harris]

I agree with you.

I always lament in some ways that my career path, and my hobby (partly
because of time) didn't go the route of the many demands on a developer. I
don't know that much MSDNese, although I do pay attention to their magazine
and I can understand a lot of the articles on that site and use their
reference library all the time. I think you and other developers would know
the points where I get stuck--language and vocabulary and concepts that
depend on them.

I go to some of the MSDN presentations to stretch my learning curve and see
what I can learn, but it's not the same thing in light years.

So the problem is, I can say I want X, Y Z to change in Vista for example.
But what I don't know is how changing x, y, z is going to impact on other
parts of Vista or a software that are codependent on it-- possibly the same
way .dlls share, only what I mean is if you change the code for one
component, do you also then have to go and change the code for a gamut of
components for that to work, and have the problem that you can never get
everything consistently working at once.

I feel if I were a seasoned developer, I'd have a lot better perspective and
standing to say "this should change to that."

Having said that, I do think a lot of improvements and changes are within
the developers on the Vista teams' grasp and the PM's are short sighted for
not pushing them Bernie.

And again, there is no excuse for them to hide the bug fix contexts and for
them not to put it on Connect. Anyone who says they can't or it takes 2
years for them to consider doing it is dreaming. MSFT does not want the
public to know what it is giving up on fixing, or never tried to fix. They
feel a significant percent of the 26,000 TBTs and the TAP testers won't pay
attention so it won't matter.

Pretending they value public feedback and walling off the public from seeing
what actually becomes of all the bugs and contexts is pure discrimination
and pure lack of transparency. This is the Stevie Sinofsky error of making
things appear good, when behind the scenes they aren't. The first thing
Sinofsky did was to hide financials.

The BS MSFT Version
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-17ReportingPR.mspx

Microsoft financials getting less transparent (The clinical on the ground
truth)
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/105090.asp

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=microsoft+changes+financial+reporting

CH