Ran across this article and thought it was of interest:

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The Committee to Fight Microsoft
("CTFM"), the first civil rights and consumer action organization in
cyberspace, will hold a San Francisco news conference Tuesday, August 9th to
announce that it has begun a campaign to block Microsoft Corporation from
releasing Windows Vista to the general public unless and until Microsoft
offers a general and unconditional warranty to purchasers that the program
does not include "bad code."
The Washington, DC-based CTFM celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.
"Bill Gates sells the public defective products," says CTFM Executive
Director Andy Martin, "And then expects us to spend years being his guinea
pigs, while he corrects the myriad of defects and vulnerabilities in his
defective code. This is mass consumer fraud. It is unacceptable corporate
behavior. Over four (4) years after Windows XP was released I still receive
regular 'updates' and 'bug fixes,' which reflect a product that was originally
scandalously defective.
"Windows 95 was a disaster; it took three years to correct the major
deficiencies. But the 95 fix, Windows 98, only created new vulnerabilities,
and required yet another round of fixes for Windows 98. On and on it goes. No
other company in America gets away with selling defective products and then
expecting its customers to wait years for proper product operability.
"When computers were a tool for techies, bad code may have been
understandable. Today computers are a mass consumer product. The idea that
hundreds of millions of people should have to have a similar 'XP' as users of
Windows XP is unacceptable.
"Two other unacceptable scams that Microsoft has used over and over again
are to encourage people to 'upgrade' unsuitable old computers, and to
encourage manufacturers to sell underpowered computers. XP was authorized for
128 RAM, which was clearly inadequate. Who would buy an inadequate TV set? Or
an inadequate stove, that didn't get warm enough? Or an inadequate
refrigerator that didn't get cold enough? No one. Why should someone buy or
'upgrade' an inadequate computer on Bill Gates' say-so? The Committee to Fight
Microsoft is launching a legal action effort to bar such practice, in advance,
for Windows Vista. Bill Gates, you are on notice."

Adjunct professor of law Andy Martin created the legal theories that led
to litigation by state attorneys general against Microsoft. He founded the
CTFM during the second round of federal litigation against Microsoft, and was
an opponent of the original 1994 settlement.

Here's the link to the actual article:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...4084752&EDATE=

idiots... Just another "I hate Microsoft because Microsoft is a Big Corporation and all Big Corporations are Evil" group.

Interesting maybe. Silly certainly!

If a company such as Microsoft WASN'T developing software which had future developments in computer hardware in mind, they'd be criticised for that.

Microsoft Windows actually contains considerably LESS 'bad code' than other major software products. This is a nonsense claim, and hopefully the courts will see it as such!

Of course the definition of 'bad code' is also important.
Microsoft can in a blaze of publicity give such a guarantee by defining it narrowly as spyware or virusses which Windows indeed does not contain out of the box, users infect themselves (or in ever rarer cases are infected by launching infected applications or hardware which can be classed as infecting themselves).

'Good code' is clean, concise, and secure. 'Bad code' is not.

Microsoft products most certainly contain 'bad code'. Pretty much all of the cpmaritive analyses I've seen, however, suggest that Microsoft products actually contain a lower percentage of lines of 'bad code' than most other software products.

Is it realistic to expect that ANY software product is going to be completely free of this? Is it fair and reasonable to expect Microsoft to do so when the demand is not being made of other software developers also?


As you suggested, it's simply 'Microsoft bashing'.

I've read a statistic a few years ago that stated quite bluntly that there's a bug in every 100 lines of code (in other words no program of over 100 lines is free of bugs).
These don't all have to be bugs in your own code, they can be bugs in a compiler or runtime environment that gets exposed by that code.

As an example:
I once wrote a small Assembly program (maybe 50 lines) that did precious little (this was during a university physics study where we got an assembly course, who can say that anymore...).
The program contained the following 2 lines of code:
This caused the program to crash when reaching the second of those statements.
When reversing the order of the statements (which should have no effect as the statements are not related in any way, acting on completely different memory locations) the program worked perfectly.
And no, that was NOT MASM we used

I believe that statement as a plausible average.

I just saw the screenshots of Vista. It made up for all the times I swore at my computer for being so **** ugly! I hate everything that is visible on the XP desktop, I had to change it so the "Classic" theme and Start Menu to keep me from having seisures.

Just got the Vista XP logon skin.


Edit: The blatant and gratuitous obscenity was not necessary - Catweazle

Going a little bit further in favor of Microsoft, if it wasn´t for that company, even though it certainly has its faults, there would not be a computer industry as we know it.

I was there in the early days and know the underlying thinking process of the principals. Gates has always believed that he was producing a product for the people. I realize that this is not going to go down well with Microsoft critics, but it´s reality. This is from a personal observation and a personal relationship with the man.

From a systems background and perspective, there has not been and never will be a computer program of any consequence or size that does not contain errors. If one believes otherwise, they are deluding themselves.

It is obvious to anyone with any history in this industry that the code produced by Microsoft, although not perfect, is as good as can be produced by anyone in the business. They would be foolish to put out something that has not been tested to exhaustion before it´s released. They have to rely, just as any company that produces products, on the good graces of customers to let them know about the little quirks that crop up after that testing has been done to the best of their ability.

The process is the nature of the software industry and will never change. To try and profit from a lawsuit to take advantage of an inherent quality of a product is not only nonsense but underhanded.

zeroth

Well said Zeroth. Microsoft and IBM (IBM did so unintentionally, but they did it) together comoditised the computer (Microsoft the software, IBM the hardware) to what it is today.
I too remember the early days, when you had the choice between a ZX81 with less power than a scientific programmable calculator or a mini costing a hundred grand and needing a large airconditioning unit (and of course eating loads of electricity).

Then IBM came with their PC and everything changed. Suddenly the hardware became somewhat affordable.
Then Microsoft changed the price point of office applications from thousands per application to a few hundred for the entire suite and the vision of "a computer on every desk" started to become economically feasible (though it would take people like Dell to really lower the hardware prices from thousands of dollars to hundreds).

Without the vision of IBM of comoditised hardware and Microsoft's idea of comoditised software, lowering profit margins to get income out of bulk instead of sheer profit on a few units, we'd still be connecting to mainframes using dumb terminals over 2400 baud telecouplers.

Hi everyone,

If by bad code you mean bugs then i mean not only does Microsoft have them but almost all products do. Its something that's understandable. What i don't like is the spyware Microsoft bundles with its softwares to send to its headquaters. If the user know about i then its okay but don't try to hide them. I think alot of you guys remember the windows media fiasco.

I think the worst thing people are most angry about Vista is that they are planning to drop support for opengl. That made alot of game developers and gamers furious but lets see what happens in the future

Richard West