Re: Help downloading 6.0.1 installer

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <4tnn6k$3hd@eddore.myrias.com>,
Devin Reade <gdr@eddore.myrias.com> wrote:
>In article <4tmjjg$8dk@darla.visi.com>,
>Nathan Mates <nathan@mixer.visi.com> wrote:
>>   Not to disparage any of those who've reported things recently, but
>>it helps to be real specific (e.g. someone can point to a file and
>>say 'GSHK pukes on _this_ file, but Shrinkit 3.4 does fine', I can
>>try investigating it. 

>"If it's not reproducable, then it's not a bug."
>Not quite accurate, but it will suffice.  OTOH, one person in particular
>in our QA dept really hates it when I tell her that ...

   Let's expand this to a more real world analogy: crashes (airplane).
A fair amount of the time when they crash, there are no survivors, no
little signs over the debris saying "The cause of the crash." So what
do investigators do? A few hundred to thousand investigators spend
days to weeks figuring out what happened by piecing everything back
together. (It was apparently a month or two before Pan Am 103's cause
was pinpointed; TWA 800's still not conclusive)

   Give a few hundred to thousand programmers as much time as they
want, and they could probably find the cause of any crash. (Heck, if
you've got that many programmers, just rewrite the OS, and do it right
:) Problem is, when it's just me looking for a bug, I'm not going to
spend a year looking over the code trying to find a bug off some vague
description. I've got other things to do, like hunt down bugs that
are a heck of a lot more repeatable-- nobody cares when I crash my
computer the 5-50 times needed to find a bug.

Nathan Mates

-- 
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/      <*>
# And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the
# Kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in 
# parables" Mark 4:11, NRSV