🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <48b92s$ns0@nntp.Stanford.EDU> edwards@sunrise (Larry Edwards) writes:
>Michael Eilers (eilersm@aruba.ccit.arizona.edu) wrote:
>: [...]
>: once again, people are missing the point: If I was a programmer, wouldn't
>: it be a dream to have half a million beta testers blithely take over my
>: job and find all the bugs for me? How many other corporations, large and
>: small, have such a resource to plunder--and are doing such a great job of
>: pludering it? I used the netscape beta 2.01b for about 2 days and it was a
>: complete dog--crashed constantly and predictably. This software wasn;t fit
>: to be released to the alpha testers, much less let out of the company
>: pool, yet they left it to me to find the bugs! I certainly remember
>: reading all of the "release agreement" before i dowloaded the stuff, and
>: it said lots about Netscape not being responsible for anything at all ever
>: including the ozone hole, but it did't say anywhere "Sorry, this version
>: is a real dog, expect to have to rebuild your system after using it for an
>: hour!"  If any other company (let's use Adobe as an example) released a
>: piece of software so buggy, even with a "b" on the end of the name, they
>: would be chased into the fire--but not beloved Netscape.
>
>beta testing is usually not done in-house (by definition I'd think)
>.... and typically no charge is involved (although recently this is
>changing with Microsoft actually charging people for beta
>testing.... now that's arrogance if you ask me) and one usually has to
>have some kind of previosuly established relationship with the company
>(although with some companies such as Borland you can apply to become
>a beta tester). Netscape has taken the approach of letting anyone
>beta-test there stuff, I'm not sure why bothers you so much.

All that would be perfectly ok, except that 2.0b2 is NOWHERE NEAR
READY for public beta testing.  It has a large number of really obvious
bugs.  That's not just a nuisance, it is dangerous.  The third time
in the first 15-20 minutes that my Mac froze and I needed to reboot,
half the files on my desktop went missing.  I had to spend the best
part of a day fetching a disk utility from a friend and patching up 
the bad links that had appeared in the catalogue structure on the disk.
(I recovered almost everything, no thanks to Netscape Inc.)  If it
was something real obscure that I was trying to do, then I could
think "such is life and beta releases", but it wasn't.  It was just
normal stuff that Netscape should have tested themselves.  They think 
(correctly it seems after reading you guys) that their virtual
monopoly will see them through despite some poor saps who were suckered
into doing their basic testing for them.  This company needs a swift
kick in the nuts.

Brendan.