Re: When is a bug a bug?

["Booth Martin" <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A bug you say?  Working as designed, I'd say.   Microsoft Marketing at its
best.

"We ain't  done until Lotus won't run"  - remember that phrase? 
 
---------------------------------
Booth Martin
http://www.martinvt.com
---------------------------------
-------Original Message-------
 
From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Date: 03/04/05 18:04:20
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: When is a bug a bug?
 
There was some discussion of bugs in the last couple of days.  The
direction the discussion took made today's events particularly ironic.
I needed a bio of an IBM exec, and so someone at IBM sent it to me, but
as is often the case in IBM, he sent it as a .lwp file, which is a Lotus
Word Pro file, I believe.
 
Well, hoping that Word had a built-in conversion agent, I tried to take
advantage of the integration of Outlook and Word, and simply dragged the
attachment from the email to a blank Word document.  It showed up in the
document as an icon.  I double-clicked on the icon, and Word popped up a
warning that it might have a virus, did I want to continue?  Being
pretty sure that the document wasn't infected (although one never knows
-- those IBM guys are pranksters!), I told it to go ahead.
 
Reboot.
 
Not a warning, not "this application is generating an error report", not
even a blue screen.  A hard, cold reboot.
 
Luckily, I didn't have any unsaved work open at the time, or I'd be
handling this with considerably less equanimity.  But even so, I think
this goes to show the difference between a "bug" and a missing feature.
 
The completely documented and consistently enforced lack of
multi-threading in the interactive environment is simply a design
decision that resulted in a missing feature.  A hard boot from a
Microsoft application running on a Microsoft operating system regardless
of the situation, but certainly in this case from simply opening a
document, is a "bug".  In my opinion, it is a perfect example of the
astoundingly shoddy code that Microsoft wants people to run their
business on.
 
(You wonder how many millions of hours of productivity a year are lost
to this sort of thing.)
 
Anyway, I just found it appropriate.
 
Joe
 
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.
 
 
.