Quote from: CoalMinerRetired on April 17, 2013, 07:23:49 PM
It's a somewhat satisfying feeling seeing this work and knowing one is out ahead of the curve on it. I suppose that is a little bit of chest thumping.
Having been involved with hardware and software business since computers had toggle switches, I can tell you that to be on the leading edge of technology is not necessarily the best place to be.
Sure it's fun to play and test, but oftentimes as a technology is rolled out, certain assumptions are proved wrong and large changes are needed to fix the problems. because not many people are though to be effected, the changes may be rolled out without warning.
A typical example of not-fully tested software was the recent Microsoft patch that was immediately pulled because of major problems with users not able to boot their computers. Although tested, in actual usage it failed on a large enough scale.
In a large computer company where I worked, a Tech sent out a small patch to an addon piece of equipment that connected to our mainframe computers. Within seconds, hundreds of mainframes across the country went down. Because we used as segmented WAN, we were lucky that customer equipment was also not effected.
We were lucky that we could reproduce the problem, assemble a fix and roll it out the same day. Not every case is that easy to fix.
In Georgia the "phone company" installed fiber to the street (then LAN to the house). We were not the first neighborhood to get it, but still were on the leading/bleeding edge of technology when it failed and the phone company took almost a week to get repair parts and figure out what was wrong. It still took them most of 6 months to make it work smoothly.
When we were testing software, the general rule of thumb was to always skip versions that ended in .0, ie 1.0, 5.0, etc), reasoning that there were big bugs and those would soon be uncovered and fixed very soon with a .1 or .2 version.
We perfered to wait for people like you to test, report problems and force a .1 version before we even spent time on it :-)
THANKS!
