[thelist] AOL/netscape was:Netscape 6 loads page twice

[Jacob Stetser]

There's a pretty decent  book out there called "The Software 
Conspiracy" or something like that.

Now James, I suggest you give _us_ a break and stop trying to tell us 
companies are blameless and they push out the best product they can 
when they can, etc. and they have no obligation to do any better.

Pardon my English, but bullshit. At least where I work,  I'm expected 
to do the best job I can for that company. I'm not expected to do 50% 
or 80%; I'm expected to do 100% or better. Ideally, developers would 
rather have bug-free code that does all the stuff they need it to. 
Ask em! Marketing people, the ones who really drive software 
development, care more about the deadline and the marketable features 
- for example, a "media bar" in IE.Sure it's cool, but do you think 
the developers made that call? And how does their 100% work become 
80% when the product ships?

Now let's take that out to the Real World. In the real world, there 
are two types of software - software that can be used where people's 
lives are at stake and software that can't. You'll notice in all  the 
licenses for Windows that they disavow its use in places such as 
nuclear power plants and medical facilities, and in general provide 
absolutely no guarantee that their software will work as advertised. 
If you read their licenses, you might as well have bought a rock from 
them, because that is just as compliant with their license as the 
software on the CD. And you _still_ wouldn't own it. But there does 
exist software that people's lives depend on, and bugs are much rarer 
in such software.

I think there are two types of people: those who would like 
businesses to take a long-term approach to their business (as 
long-term approaches tend to be more ethical and successful anyway) 
and those who think that as long as a business isn't actually going 
out and pointing a gun at someone's head (in the literal sense, as 
many Objectivists/Conservative Right/Libertarians have explained to 
me), they should be able to do whatever they damn well please in 
search of the almighty dollar.

There is absolutely _no_ reason that operating systems should crash 
as much as they do. But they still do.

You give us a break. Many of us who take a long-term approach to our 
coding have embraced standards as the base of our development 
practice and build on that. Those who view things on the short term 
are holding on to these concepts that businesses (and by extension 
themselves) don't need to do anything because it's the responsibility 
of the user to choose. But when the user has no choice (as in a 
standardized business environment) or when both choices are pretty 
bad, and only features keep them, how can choosing be their 
responsibility?

Think on this: instead of making their software/web sites/etc as 
close to perfect as possible, competitors merely attempt to outdo 
each other. Why else creeping featuritis and bugs begetting bugs?

Do Adobe, Quark, Microsoft, AOL, et al really _need_ your defense?

Jake

P.S. Thanks for the tip, by the way. It might come in handy.

<tip type="always test!!!">
In a related tip, I've been working with importing/exporting 
favorites from a server. Well, on 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/methods/ImportExportFavorites.asp, 
the page says that IE4+/Mac/Linux/Windows supports it.

Sorry, the feature only works on Windows. Always test. Don't assume 
any source of compatibility for a function is gospel.

*Jake goes back to the drawing board.
</tip>
>Jamie Madden wrote:
>
>>  The reason people except BSOD's and incompatibilities and the like is that
>
>>  developers (web, software, etc... yes, that includes us) have told them
>>  that this is to be expected instead of trying to fix problems.
>...
>>  The reason rational people expect this in a computer related
>>  genre is that they've been told all along that this is gospel and they
>>  didn't have the initiative (or they didn't have the intellectual capacity)
>
>>  to check it out for themselves.  And, theoretically, they shouldn't have
>to.
>
>	The big buggy software conspiracy. Nothing personal, but give me a
>break.
>
>James Aylard
>
><tip type="XML">
>	Since we're on the subject of big software companies, and their
>efforts to roll back civilization with inferior products, it seems an
>appropriate moment to cite the url to a chart of Microsoft's XML DOM
>implementation (available in GIF and PDF flavors):
>
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/voices/news/xml.asp
>
></tip>
>
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