Faulty hardware found on shuttle

In article , derekl1963
@nospamyahoo.com says...
Marvin wrote:
Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

No longer true. QC has had a real priority for about two years. That's
why Passport has pretty much been phased out and Hailstorm has vanished
-- they couldn't be made to work. Also note the record of Windows 2003
Server, which is orders of magnitude better than early Windows.


*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis.

And smoking can't be bad for you, since so many people are smokers.


It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Fair enough -- we don't expect Shuttle to fly to the Moon.

Let's try a realistic standard: compare it to other contemporary
systems. While the Windows XP that is running on my laptop is waaaay
better than Windows 3.1, it still falls short of contemporary Linux
systems.

With a exception of a single machine that had its network interface
removed and its floppy drive expoxyed shut, no Windows machine has ever
received a non-lousy Orange Book security rating, yet various Unix
systems have received high evaluations.

There are legitimate arguments that Windows machines are not just a
hazard to their owners, but also endanger non-Windows systems since
Windows-born malware can seriously disrupt the shared resource of the
Internet. No other operating system has been singled out for this kind
of disruption.
(see http://www.newsforge.com/relocate.pl?id=
31a5092ddba1fec14d06b2e38a44232a for this argument)
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

In article , says...
But what users actually need (despite contrary propaganda from microsoft),
is a *stable* and *predictable* and *secure* system.

That's not sufficient. There are any number of stable, predictable and
secure systems that are unusable by all but a handful of specially
trained experts (VMS, Linux, VxWare, Multics, OS/390...).


There have been other operating systems that delivered this, but they didnt
have nearly the public-relations and legal-wrangling skills of microsoft,
thus they got gobbled up or trampled out of business.

While acquisitors are a curse to the software industry, you
misunderstand why Microsoft became dominate. Part of it was marketing --
they do this quite well. Part of this the code-bloat that annoys so many
people. There were any number of word-processors that let someone create
a newsletter, or a book, or a Wanted-Dead or Alive poster, but MS Word
was the first (and still only) word processor that let you do all of
these. In the corporate world, there is a real benefit to having all
your documents readable by everyone in the company. Microsoft
understands and exploits this.


Microsoft is an incredible business success.

These days, one also has to admit that their monopoly position gives
them incredible leverage.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

In article , "Greg D. Moore
\(Strider\)" says...
"Kevin Willoughby" wrote in message
...
Several recent court actions have demonstrated that Microsoft has used
its monopoly position to do coerce the purchase of MS products.
This is true. But on the some token, some of the best examples I've seen
used of this in fact turn out to be weak.

The best example of this aren't weak, but might not be easy to explain
to a "jury of your peers". My favorite example: having written programs
that create web sites, I used to have a least a half dozen web browsers
on my office machine. Somehow, IE managed to find some way to reset the
file-associations/MIME types so that IE was always the preferred
browser, regardless of my efforts to the contrary.


Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows never made the transition partly because they bet
the farm on OS/2 and because when they did release their Windows product it
sucked.

I worked for startup where the CTO and VP/Engineering came from Lotus.
Apparently Microsoft sold them on OS/2, claiming that OS/2 was the
future and Windows-2.0 was the past. (Well, they were half-right.) 1-2-
3/OS2 was designed by Lotus' best architects, based on the 1-2-3/MS-DOS
code base. 1-2-3/Windows was a complete rewrite of everything by folks
who lacked experience -- second system effect?

Of course, to this day, they blame Microsoft, claiming the Excel team
had special access to the Windows team. Somehow, they never managed to
provide hard evidence to support this claim...


After that, IE became a faster, more stable product.

The flip side of this: once IE has significant market-share, the "Great
Browser Wars" insured that a web site that looked good in Netscape was
unreadable in IE. At that point, webmasters had to either design two web
sites (one for IE, one for Netscape), or add a "best viewed with IE" tag
at the bottom of page...


Price had nothing to do with it as many claimed

No, but for the "everyone can use the Internet" audience, being pre-
installed into the operating system and constantly resetting MIME-
type/file-type associations was a real advantage.


There's no doubt MS has taken advantage of their position. The
single-sourcing OS deal I think is one of the stronger examples.

These days, Windows Media Player is also a strong example. Witness the
recent E.U. ruling.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

rk wrote in
:

I haven't seen any plans or even discussion to "hire microsoft weenies
to code the next shuttle" and to eliminate sitting down and thinking
so is this a real problem?

And Thank GOD for that.
The mere thought of Microsoft-generated code running something as expensive
as the Shuttle gives me cold shivers.

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

Marvin wrote:

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:


Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.


*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Oh, horsehit! Expecting it to run with negligible maintainence and no
progressive degeneration is not an unrealistic standard. This only true
if your standards have degraded due to constant exposure. Run multiple
different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor quality and
reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly obvious.

Brett

Brett Buck wrote in
. com:
Run multiple different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor
quality and reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly
obvious.

Brett

Amen!

Windows is a very fancy system, its got more bells & whistles than anyone
can discover in a lifetime.

But what users actually need (despite contrary propaganda from microsoft),
is a *stable* and *predictable* and *secure* system.

There have been other operating systems that delivered this, but they didnt
have nearly the public-relations and legal-wrangling skills of microsoft,
thus they got gobbled up or trampled out of business.

Microsoft is an incredible business success. It is not a software or
systems success.

Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:

Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.


Uhh, ask anyone why they are running MS OS on their system
and they'll tell you that it's because that's what came on
it, not because they actively sought it out. MS has been
one of the best at coercing PC makers into using MS OS
exclusively, that's already been documented worldwide. The
fact that millions are using it is spurious to the argument
that it's any good as an OS.

As to unrealistic standards, maybe it is unreasonable to
expect an OS to not crash in any given 24 hour time period.
I like blue screens of death.

JazzMan
--
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Please reply to jsavage"at"airmail.net.
Curse those darned bulk e-mailers!
************************************************** ********
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supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to
live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry
************************************************** ********

"Brett Buck" wrote in message
. com...
Derek Lyons wrote:

Marvin wrote:


Microsoft has a great sales department, second only to their legal
staff.
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on
the
priority list.


*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Oh, horsehit! Expecting it to run with negligible maintainence and no
progressive degeneration is not an unrealistic standard.

Really? I'll tell that to my servers that have experienced 0 crashes in
several years.

My laptop is over 3 years old, only maintenance I do is apply patches as
required and defrag the disk. I can't remember if it's crashed at all or
not. I don't believe so.


This only true
if your standards have degraded due to constant exposure. Run multiple
different systems on a regular basis and the ****-poor quality and
reliability of all versions of Windows is perfectly obvious.


Funny how many multi-million dollar businesses run just fine.


Brett

In article ,
Derek Lyons wrote:
But quality control is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the
[Microsoft] priority list.

*Right*. That's why millions of people around the world use it on a
daily basis. It's far from perfect, but it does work, people hold it
to an unrealistic standard and them complain when it fails to meet
that standard.

Nothing unrealistic about the standard at all. All it takes is a certain
amount of *attention* to things like stability and security. There are
several other systems which are at least an order of magnitude better in
those respects.

The reason why millions of people around the world use Windows on a daily
basis has nothing to do with technical quality. Microsoft was simply the
only major software supplier which didn't drop the ball badly at the
crucial time -- the late 1980s -- when there was a huge pent-up market
demand for a Mac-ish GUI-based system running on commodity PC hardware.
Microsoft had to struggle desperately for years to produce something half
usable -- Windows 1.x was junk and 2.x wasn't much better -- but the other
major players, mostly notably IBM with OS/2, fumbled the job so totally
and so disastrously that Microsoft had the time it needed.
--
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since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |