Michael Ortega said:
This shouldn't scare you, lets say that there are 100 or so people here who
are having problems. There are millions of others out there that dont post
here because there isn't anything wrong with SP2
There are things wrong with SP2, unless Microsoft arranged a miracle
and somehow hired God to produce the first piece of software in the
history of mankind with no bugs or massive f&&kups! Claiming that
they did accomplish this is simply silly.
The industry average is a bug per 50 or 100 lines of code, pretty
much no matter how hard ordinary consumer quality dreck called
software tries to change that. Divide the oft quoted 5 million
lines of code fiddled with in SP2 by 50 or 100 and that estimates
there are likely 50000 or 10000 bugs still remaining in SP2.
I believe the published estimates for the number of bugs in XP when
it was first released was higher than this, but I'd have to find
the paper buried here somewhere, I think it was in IEEE Computing.
You might try reduce that number by a bit because this is the n-th
iteration of XP, but thus far every iteration of windows since 3.0
seems to have obeyed the same laws of software bugs, code size and
"features" keep growing fast enough to maintain the same bug rate.
There have been repeated admissions here by MVPs that there is no
way Microsoft could have tested this against all the multitude of
different bits of hardware and software that are out there. There
have even been some admission by MVPs that the beta testing done
by Microsoft leaves a number of things to be desired, because the
kind of people who get involved with that and the kinds of machines
it is tested on don't represent the range of customers or machines
it is going to end up getting used on. That might, if we were
generous, explain maybe even 80-90% of the problems real customers
have seen with this, but there is zero data to support that claim
thus far. But if you can't demonstrate a bug, and often even if
you can, it isn't going to get fixed.
And for your figure of 100 people with problems, by my count there
have been perhaps 100 people with the "Windows Explorer" problem,
about 90% of which appear to have not found a fix for that yet.
That doesn't even consider that likely a tiny tiny percentage of your
millions of customers have any idea how to find microsoft.public.*
or read it or make postings in it, whether they need it or not.
And any time you multiply a huge uncertain number times a tiny tiny
uncertain percentage the result is completely unknown.
I offered an even bet to the last person silly enough to claim that
there were no bugs in SP2, $100000 and a loaded pistol, winner take
all. I did caution them that their claim did refute the experience
of everyone with every piece of software ever written in the last
half century.
