[LINK] WinXP problem survey

[Stilgherrian]

On 01/11/2009, at 8:31 AM, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> And it squares nicely with our most heartfelt
> opinions of the operating system provider.

Didn't someone say the other say, "the plural of 'anecdote' is not  
'data'"? ;)

One person's "unusual problem" is another's "known bug".

Even if Stephen's computer has had no changes to hardware and software  
initiated by him, well, actually there have been changes.

Every bit of software has had its regular updates, layer upon layer of  
them. The computer has actually been used, and over time there's the  
continual incremental chance that a bug in the operating system or  
application software or a power spike will cause some data corruption  
somewhere, or a disc will develop bad sectors, or a hardware component  
will start to fail intermittently -- capacitors on the motherboard are  
one such early-failing component.

Even if all of the above are ruled out, I reckon software vendors  
would naturally start allocating more programmers and testers to the  
new version of their products to ensure compatibility with the new  
version of Windows, since that's where the greater return on  
investment lies, Bugs in older versions might perhaps be more likely  
to sneak through. Windows XP is, after all, now *two* versions behind  
the "current" release of Windows.

Humans are very good at perceiving patterns where none exist -- what's  
that fancy word for seeing shapes in clouds? Especially if they match  
pre-existing fears.

Here's another anecdote: maybe someone who's more OCD than me can dig  
out the data?

The number of bugs in a software update will be roughly proportional  
tot he seize of that update. This month's update from  Microsoft was a  
big one. I reckon the updates in September and October tend to be the  
biggest. And that's because they come in the annual cycle after the  
July-August Defcon hacker conference, and the bad guys have had a  
chance to turn the newly-demonstrated tricks into workable tools, and  
then Microsoft has had the chance to respond.

Stil


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