On Jul 28, 2006, at 12:33 PM, Paul Sorenson wrote: > Yup - I know how beta releases work. The question was is anyone else > having problems with it. My reply was to note the facts of how it > worked for me on *my* machine. Should anyone else experience these > symptoms hopefully they won't be snookered into thinking a bug has > crept > through their firewall, as I was.
I understand fully. My comment was not directed at you specifically ... my apologies if it seemed that way. > <tongueincheek> > As a Mac user, I suspect you have little or no experience regarding > the > dilemna of determining if it's a buggy machine or the software that's > causing the problem. In the Mac world, with only about 5% market > share, > who wants to take the time to write attack software which will > affect so > few machines. :-) While Mac OS users deal with few intentionally malicious software issues, identifying and solving bugs with poorly written or early release software and compatibility issues are still a fairly large portion of what I do in my contract work. Even if it's only 5% of the market, though, there are at least 30 million Mac OS X users out there. Someone with malice in their hacker heart could get a good chortle out of a nasty. But Apple has been very alert to these kinds of threat and issues security updates whenever anything is discovered that could be a problem, even if no actual attack was reported. > We PC users, on the other hand, need to be on our toes > constantly, watching and waiting for the next round of malicious > infection. This makes it difficult, sometimes, to determine, is it a > bug, is it the software I just installed, or (gasp) is it the OS? We > lead such interesting lives, leaping from challenge to challenge, > crisis > to crisis. > </tongueincheek> LOL!!! I believe as you do, that exercising a beta release and reporting bugs is the best way to inform a developer that they are moving in the right or wrong developer. I put in some time every week on a couple of neat projects that I'm looking to see on the market soon. Some of the releases are next to totally unusable, others seem to be 'golden' from the first alpha onwards. Lightroom beta 1 was fairly hopeless for me, it got stuck way too easily to make a useful evaluation. Beta 2 went much better, now Beta 3 is approaching a real product. It's encouraging. :-) Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
