All these cheerleaders for the icon, and the other means of feedback by the
public, some named and linked on this group and many missed are wasting your
time and theirs. Notice they have not one shred of evidence that the bugs
are read, and that anything is done. A softie braying how much feedback is
important to them from the public with specious, sententious convoluted
language as is done on for example Corey Snow's blog--the developer
associated with Connect is even more evidence that it's not.
MSFT doesn't give two shits about input from the CPP! Get used to it.
They never have and they never will. It's a company with some interesting
and often nice products but no one does arrogance and disingenuous better
than MSFT.
Other than the financial promotion aspect, MSFT couldn't give two shits
about the "CPP or the so-called CPP testers. That's why they have all
those pios blogs with nebulous specious bullshit about their concern but
have never showcased a stepwise mechanism for the submission of bugs, the
metabolism of them, and the public beta.
MSFT has a build or two a day. They've moved two builds the hell past Beta
2 (5384.5) as to their bug focus. One thing consistent though is that many
of the bugs are still there--they just change the build name (lol). The
bugs get a house with a new address. Instead of 5384 MSFT Way, Building 5384
on the MSFT campus, it becomes 5456.5
I like the .5 which has deep Zen meaning--and whose existence is necessary
for Vista to ship.
Many of the TBTs have been trying for months to get some major bugs fixed
and have been talking to a collection of tin/incompetent ears.
System File Checker--yet another "interim" build--yawn--still doesn't have
any switches that mean fix and replace working. I truly think no one on
the Vista team who is responsible for SFC remembers it's in the Windows
OS--Core File Services or whomever. Win Mail newsgroup toolbars-- have the
stability of a Katusha rocket in Hezbullah hands after 6 drinks at Crystal
or Minot.
Bright and helpful as Colin is, other than give a mantra that the bugs or
any form of input gets serious attention from the CPP to Redmond because I
suppose Colin thinks it's the loyal thing to do since he gets the MVP swag
at Redmond once a year, access to MVP groups and some closed blogs and
possibly because some people think if they toe the party line, they'll be
invited to any of the 200 plus betas they want-- or he's a nice guy and
doesn't want to speak ill of the mother Windoz/Redmond ship.
Colin Barnhorst and Mark Gillespie can't give you any tangible examples of
how bugs from the unwashed
public impact anything done on a team at Redmond because there aren't any.
An "attaboy" from Colin or Mark , as well meant and sincere as it is, is
useful to encourage you to try new software from MSFT. You should. You
should also, as time permits, try Linux, Apple, Firefox, and Opera and a
gamut of 3rd party tweakers to the Windows OS--it gives you perspetive and
it's fun.
But it's simply ludirous to think this company gives a damn about feedback
from the public. The only feedback they look at is the sales numbers. When
RTM time comes around, they'll slap RTM on that sucker, have a series of
parties, get the choppers and the media out with great fanfare whether
they've fixed major bugs are not.
I can offer a panoply of evidence as to their ignoring major features that
are right now Dead on Arrival. Windows File Protection is but one.
It has occured to me that Vista is "a Beta" but in a larger sense so is
Windows XP and all the other software that comes from Redmond. There is no
reason that SFC's switches can't work after 13 months of official Beta and
its existence since Windows 98 with the 3rd build since Beta 2 about to
drop.
Jane had this yadayada but when asked to document how her bugs were making
impact--silence.
There is all this specious, sententious holier than thou crap on blogs from
MSFT, but none of the bloggers ever demonstrates anything substantive to
indicate public bugs are handled in any meaningful way None of the blogs--
Corey Snow's from Connect who rambles with more meaningless yammering about
the firerce loyalty of MSFT to the public, the Windows Vista "team blog"
that Nick White does on Tech Net (as if there were one team when there are
thousands of people working on aspects of Vista in a very complicated and
somewhat disorganized way), or Paul Donnelly's recently birthed blog "A
Bug's Life" ever demonstrate that public input has any impact whatsoever.
One symptom that public bug reporting doesn't mean jack shit is that there
is a public MBC (bug reporting tool) and the thing is buried deep within the
forums of MSDN blogs. However, unlike the setup for TBT Beta Testers as
opposed to unwashed CPPs (that Redmond couldn't give two shits about other
than cheerlead you with advertising on their sites and bombard you with
emails to buy their product in droves--there is no organized mechanism
whatsoever to get feedback or have any interaction with MSFT unles you want
to consider a Technet Live Meeting interaction where there is often no time
for questions or time for one question.
There ain't no newsgroup where you're gonna see those people to follow up
and in the Beta there is often this bullshit "see you in the groups" when
they have no intention whatsoever of seeing or talking to you anywhere.
*They want to see your money so they can get more toys.* It's plain old
Redmond capitalism. "Show them your money" as Cuba Gooding said in the
movie.
They pay for shit tech support by turning the idiots at Convergys of Ohio on
their sucker public customers. The quality tech support takes place free of
charge on public newsgrups and forums because many of us feel compelled to
clean up a lot of their non-intuitive messes slapped together into an OS.
It ought to be painfully obvious that a very basic marketing principle is to
seed the public's interest in your product some way. "CPP" is it. MSFT is
capable in the marketing area, and Vista has some fine features. The use
of meta -ags for searching pics and music is one. Another is the attempt in
Event Viewer (which most of the MSFT customers never heard of and never
touch) to try to centralize a file format .elf and .evt files. The problem
is, they still have a tin ear as to the failure of error information in that
the logs are still ectopically and metastatically writtten all over the 4
corners of Vista although each program is supposed to register its errors
with event viewer. The logs are as impossible to decifer as ever, which is
why when Beta testers had trouble getting Vista on their boxes, they were
encouraged to send the logs to MSFT for interpretation. That ain't being
done with the unwashed CPP.
So called "Restart Manager" and the "Resouce Exhaustion Detection and
Recovery" feature (most people will never have heard of it when Blackcomb
RTMs in 5-6 years) are admirable feature attempts at stability, even though
they fail miserably much of the time. They can be a pain in the ass to hang
up on when they stall, even with Task Man trying to put them to bed. The
idea is to have continual monitoring of the system and to manage virtual
memory's commit level supposedly. Previous versions is an excellent idea.
The attempts at auto repair, and Win CE/STartup repair are. Unfortunately
they are indifferent to the fact they will be screwing their projected 400
million OEM customers out of access to Win RE's features because they won't
be able to access it with the DVDs from OEM or the crap partitions just as
nearly 100% of them couldn't for six years in XP with the worthless recovery
discs that wouldn't do a repair install or get their OS back because it was
short a ton of lines of code from the XP CD that does repair installs. If
you're easily snowed by superficial eye candy then they've done a great job
marketing a buzz/and superficial mystique about Aero Glass. Talk about
underwhelming.
Watch the look on the face of one of their excellent Technet evangelists
live as he dutifully goes through Aero Glass Flip 3D/and Windows Flip--boy
I know when I need help with Vista instead of ole "cool switch," I'll just
hit the keys for Windows Flip and Flip 3D and everything will be copacetic.
"While in the Flip 3D environment, you can scroll through the list of open
windows using your mouse's scroll wheel. You can also use the Left Arrow and
Right Arrow keys to move through the stack of windows. Simply let go of the
Windows Key to exit Flip 3D and select the window that is visually on top of
the others in the window stack."
"One interesting feature of Flip 3D (and Windows Flip) is that the Windows
Desktop now shows up as one of the running tasks. So now you can jump
directly to the desktop as well, which is handy."
Oh boy. That's killer.
CH
