From: "Geo." 

"Tony Ingenoso"  wrote in
message news:3fdf8f94$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> These days its kinda like buying a car that's pre-rusted at the factory
;->

I'd really like to know what the problem is with software on the PC. Is it
the hardware, is it the OS, is it the languages, is it just bad
programming?

I've got a progress database with 2800 programs that are all menu driven
from the main menu. We've been running this software since 1995 with 30+
people beating on it 8 hours a day 5 days a week. In all that time I've
found 2 bugs and neither one was worth mentioning.

Just today on windows I was trying to install a firewire card. Well let me
give you the full story. I bought a firewire card last week, tried to
install it and got an error installing the driver that basically said
"invalid data" so I called their support lines, went thru a bunch
of tests and tech says card is defective. So sent it back and got a
different brand (not taking any chances that it was a bad batch) and upon
installation I get "invalid data" again when it tries to install
the driver.

Call this new card's support line and go thru the same procedure again all
of which fails to solve the problem so the tech puts me on permahold. Well
while he's waiting for the light on his phone to stop blinking I'm browsing
and came up with a good search that let me to the fix (copy at
http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/data_is_invalid.htm) and got the card working.
His light then stopped blinking.

The fix was to change security settings on part of the registry. Makes
sense right, that's invalid data..

Anyway the point is you really can't expect to do much of anything on the
PC without running into bugs, really bad error messages, conflicts, dll
versioning, font issues (Oh font issues had one of those today too) etc.

So what is it? Is it the hardware, is it Microsoft, is it bad languages, is
it a combination of all these, is it too dynamic an environment, what? I
don't get it, why is it every time I go to do something I run into a bug of
some sort?

It is like a pre-rusted car, with 100,000 miles on it and tons of stuff
just waiting to strand you out in a night time rain storm.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5