We use JIRA and follow a general template (description of problem, steps to reproduce, users impacted/business impact, severity). Tickets submitted under a few different main project areas go to the respective SME for triage (follow-up, prioritization, reassignment to engineering). Speaking as one of the non-devs but with some prior QA experience, it seems to work just fine.

Thank you! I wish I had mod points. It's a nice article but you'll get all of this and more in a decent research methods class.

Not to mention the rest of the device -- I'm sure you've seen what happens to plastic left in the sun! That clear plastic screen will look great once it turns yellow. Of course, I imagine it's a) mainly a gimmick and b) designed to die (so we can buy the newer model) long before sun damage...

Why wait? You can follow my Twitter feed to learn what I had for breakfast!

We've been manipulating and modeling human behavior for decades. We chuckle when economists suddenly realize that humans act in so-called "irrational" (but theoretically and statistically predictable) ways. It's only irrational insofar as economists don't understand it.

Exactly. I'm currently finishing the write-up for a study that shows a correlation between low conscientiousness + low agreeableness and high texting use at work. One of the key variables we controlled for is age. If you are less responsible, independent of age, you're more likely to act irresponsibly (should be obvious, right?). Irresponsible kids are more likely to do it through texting while irresponsible adults do it in other ways. Texting just happens to make the news because it's "novel".

Disclaimer: correlation does not equal causation. BUT logically, personality dimensions are relatively static -- it is NOT reasonable to say texting somehow makes a person less conscientious or agreeable.

Same here, I've already been running it for months so what do I have to lose? Odds are, we'll have people over some day during that week anyway, so if MS wants to give me a free copy of Win 7 I won't complain.

You're absolutely right, but here's the problem: segregating by intelligence will lead to self-fulfilling results (see Pygmalion research) on the part of the students and the teachers (low or high expectations given the group). That means kids in the low intelligence group will do even worse than if they had been mixed with everyone else. But at the same time, high intelligence kids will do better as a group than if they are mixed with everyone else. The question is whether we want a select group of extremely intelligent individuals at the expense of the overall population, or an overall population that is generally more intelligent but does not have as many super geniuses.

Okay, not a museum... but as far as zoos go, it's pretty interactive. Make sure you walk through the indoor rainforest. AFAIK you might otherwise hit an open stretch of no museums while you cross the midwest, so it's a valid excuse to drop in!

Yes, Vibrams are fantastic! My only caveat so far is walking in heavily landscaped areas at night, because I have an odd fear of snail-between-toes and/or tree-dropping-between-toes. But it's a sacrifice I make for comfy feet!

While I'm on the subject of W7 bugs, I've said this before and I'll say it again: be wary of Homegroup. It's great when it works and it usually works, but it can destroy all it touches if it gets upset.

/twocents

Obviously they are not perfectly analogous. But current (more technical) users are also more likely to correctly report bugs. In addition, not all of the current users are techies. Speaking only for myself, I have migrated a number of friends/family to Windows 7 RC because there were running Vista. *shudder*

There's no doubt in my mind more bugs will surface with the much wider install, but if this site is correct Windows 7 is already close to 1% of the OS market, a respectable install base for an unreleased OS.

For the anecdotal record, I installed the RC on my ye olde underpowered XP laptop (512 MB RAM) and with the bare bones, stripped down setup it runs about the same as it did using XP. If nothing else, the fact that I've left it on for 3 months underscores my lack of desire to return to XP.