Re: Does beta software crash?

[Linux Idiot <esoteric@atlnet.com>]

Hans Reiser wrote:
> 
> Have you ever made minor tweaks to a kernel? :-)
> 
> All you need to do is step on one little byte that you shouldn't have
> stepped on, which you can do with the most trivial of changes involving,
> say, writing past the end of an array, which you may well have done
> while adding code intended to be a bug fix of a less dramatic bug.
> 
> It is the bugs in the shipping product that deserve being infuriated
> over.  Windows 95 crashes a lot.  That is ridiculous.  A beta of 98
> crashing is just something to ignore.
> 

I totally disagree.  I've been developing code for a few years, and I've
done my fair share of Beta demos with the 'boss.'  The bottom line is,
when you get to the point of doing a demo, especially at something like
COMDEX, you have run through the whole demo a bunch of times, until you
can do it in your sleep.  Then for the demo, you do everything the exact
same way as you have been testing.  You don't do anything different and
you don't change anything.

Let me ask the crowd this.  How many times have you seen beta demo's
crash?  I've seen my share of demos at Comdex and other such brew hahs,
and in my time, I've seen one major software crash and now heard of a
second.  You all know what the latter one is.  The first one?  A huge
demo of NT 4.0 at a conference in Atlanta GA. 4000+ folks in attendance,
and the demo dude just spit out some words to the effect of (and I
paraphrase) "NT is more stable then Windows 95..."  then, blue
screen....  I rest my case.

--
Until later,
Geoffrey	esoteric@atlnet.com