On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 04:47 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Writing the code is less than 20% of a project's time. The rest is debugging the stuff, and getting it to conform to the original requirements. WindowsME is a bad example to compare against, because like a lot of MS software, it's written and released with as little testing as the customers will tolerate.
I am more of the opinion that they (MS) test extensively and do it on purpose; why on earth would they need such an enormous 'campus' and the tens of thousands of people who work there unless they were deliberately planning just such inconveniences.
Most of the world, if they just want to turn their computers on, do their work, and turn them off again, with as little dicking around as possible, should be on a Mac. PC's, since their invention back in the DOS 2.0 days, have always been for techno-weenies who like searching around for solutions to problems like VDX.386 stack dump 000000110010100001...(on and on for at least 300 more places), whatever the hell that means. And if you phone the MS technical support phone line, and wait in a four hour cue, they will tell you to 'reinstall Windows from scratch' and lose all your work or "we can't tell you; that's source code".
What I do know is that when I got my miraculous Windows 95 computer, it came with 1 year of technical support, and I used it, constantly, for hundreds and hundreds of hours, sometimes far into the night making me late for work the next day. Sometime I stayed home from work just to try to get my damn computer back up, reinstalling Windows four or five dozen times in the first year alone.
When my tech support ran out, I bought two more years and needed all of it. When that ran out, I was paying either $3.99 a minute, or $49.95 per incident to get my damn machine working again, and used it literally dozens of times, even though it was just fine when I least shut it off or tried to put it to sleep.
Then, we all 'had' to upgrade to Windows 98, which was ten times the nightmare 95 was. I screwed around with that for about a year and a half, and finally wound up going back to 95. Then I tried to install a genuine Windows 95 plug-and-play soundcard for the next six months until finally giving up and returning it to the store. I had to blow a gasket to explain to them why I had it for six months, but never actually got to use it, because it never actually worked. This, BTW, was a $700.00 Turtle Beach Pinnacle sound card for allegedly high end hard disk recording on the PC, which also never worked. Not once.
Christmas 2001 I bought a Mac, and when I got it home, there was a little card that said "90 days of free technical support". I thought, 'those cheap bastards, this is going to cost me a fortune!" I think I used the Mac technical support line twice, in the first week I owned it, and have never used it since. I have installed more ram, new video cards, USB printers and scanners, firewire CD burner, and everything has worked just perfectly right out of the box. Just like it should. I had one major crash, which was my fault, and that was it.
The Windows 95/98 scam was the biggest hoax ever pulled in the history of commercial enterprize; if cars, or cameras, or toasters were that unreliable, there would be rioting in the streets, and the company would be out of business so fast it would make your head spin, with class action lawsuits up the ying-yang. Bill Gates and his cronies have managed to convinced us all that we were idiots, or didn't know what we were doing, and that it was all our fault that the machine didn't work, even though it was fine the last time you switched it on. Gates should be in jail for what he did, and continues to do; instead, he is the richest man in the world, and is lauded as some kind of giant American hero. Time will prove that he has perpetrated the largest scam in corporate history. And we have all been his victims.
Get a Mac, you'll never look back; just ask Cotty.
Never again, Cameron Hood
