leoofborg - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Soft machines for testing (Score 1) 420

by leoofborg on Friday April 10, 2009 @12:51PM (#27533311) Attached to: Microsoft Begs Win 7 Testers To Clean Install

Of *course* they're not 'testers'. Guys like *you* are the real testers, right? And of course the company always hires enough development, right? Beta testers should give your QA team data points to shore up your test cases and scripts in the plan, they ARE NOT substitute or 'free' QA.

'Beta-Testers' are for edge cases, data points and ... wait for it.. 'real life'.. They are the frosting on the cake, not the cake.

Because 'real life' is where your baby is going to be USED and not TESTED. Testing = Practice. Testing != Real Life, unless you have a VERY good SQA Manager who understands the customer experience.

Yes I know that you're specifying 'best testing practices' but it's those 'practices' as well as excessive reliance on automation that have companies like MSFT consistently producing buggy POS software.

I'm in a beta program right now, on the 'other side' as a beta tester after a LONG TIME as a tester. Yeah, I remember the litany, 'please use in your everyday workflow on a 'non production' machine. Nobody has time for that, 'outside'. Just like they don't have time to RTFM, do real net sec, or 'conform to a test case. And they certainly don't have the resources to set aside a production machine for 'dedicated testing'.

If you don't have enough edge, negative, or fuzz cases or make your software resilient enough to perform in those worst case, but all to common scenarios, then your baby needs to stay in the lab.

Comment Oh, the irony. (Score 1) 57

by leoofborg on Saturday February 28, 2009 @01:10PM (#27023513) Attached to: Facebook Vs. Spammers, Round Two

Opt-in spammers collecting from no-opt spammers. Kind of like that whole programs hacking programs thing from the Matrix.

AOL Users Will Need to Pay $2 a Month For Phone Support 202

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, 2008 @04:22PM from the dear-mom-and-pop-send-money dept.

destinyland writes "8.7 million AOL subscribers face a new 20% fee increase next month — unless they agree to never call AOL's technical support lines. They'll have to use AOL chat for support or the online help "portal" unless their issue is a failed connection — and they're being enrolled in the program by default unless they opt out. Ominously, AOL used the exact same wording as when they quietly changed their terms of service to allow them to sell subscribers' home phone numbers to telemarketers. 'Your continued subscription to the AOL service constitutes your acceptance of this change.'"

Lt. Col. John Bircher Answers Your Questions 232

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, 2008 @03:35PM from the questions-that-dan-savage-won't-touch dept.

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Lt. Col. John Bircher, head of an organization with a difficult-to-navigate name: the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations (CNO)-Electronic Warfare (EW) Proponent's Futures Branch. Lt. Col. Bircher has answered from his perspective, at length, not just the usual 10 questions, but several more besides. Read on for his take on cyberwar, jurisdiction, ethics, and more.

Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband" 593

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 03, 2008 @01:58PM from the get-spied-on-at-lower-speeds dept.

Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)

AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet 928

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, 2008 @11:18AM from the way-to-go-guys dept.

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

The Microsoft Office Rental Program 432

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 03, 2008 @07:57AM from the four-easy-payments dept.

LWATCDR writes "Yes, it looks like Microsoft is going to a rental program for Office. From the article, 'The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.' Well I for one will be happy to stick with OpenOffice for now. From Microsoft's point of view it means a constant flow of money. For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years. I don't think this will save the average user any money and I wonder about problems with 'activation.' So will this fly, or will it give a big push to OpenOffice?

Slashdot Top Deals