Got Your Vista RC1 Yet?
One major item that happened while I was offline was Microsoft's public release of Vista RC1--- "release candidate 1." You may already know this, and may have grabbed a copy; but it's a significant enough thing to warrant a "just in case" mention here.
A "release candidate" is a very late beta. It's usually feature-complete--- only in rare cases are new features added or existing features dropped from software that's made it to RC1. Rather, it's mainly there for bug-hunting purposes; to get the software installed on a wide variety of hardware to see what breaks. "Showstopper" bugs--- bugs that render the product unusable for potentially large numbers of users---are the main focus of further programming efforts. If showstopper bugs are found in an RC1 version, there's usually an RC2 to verify that the fixes worked.
And here's something that might surprise you: Normally, many less serious bugs that turn up in an RC1 version are not fixed right away. Rather, software managers do a kind of triage: They identify the bugs that must be fixed before the product ships; the bugs that would be nice to fix by ship date, if there's time and if no major re-testing will be needed; and the bugs they won't even try to fix by ship date.
That's right--- virtually every major software company knowingly ships unfixed bugs in the Version 1.0 of their software. It's not a Microsoft foible; it's common practice. And it's because there's no practical way to fix every bug prior to release: The software development time on a complex product such as an operating system would stretch to infinity.
If the software managers have done their job right, the bugs that remain at the ship date will be relatively minor; and none should be showstoppers. After V 1.0 is out, the managers then work down the bug triage list and release fixes in the form of patches, updates, and service packs.
Vista has had an unusually long development cycle, so I'm betting that the public RC1 is actually pretty far along and unlikely to be a wild and wooly bugfest. If you have a spare PC and/or are religious about your backups or disk imaging (because Vista is still beta, and it's possible it could crash and eat your hard drive...), then you may want to download a free copy of RC1 at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx ; or order it on a data DVD.
Given the long development cycle of today's operating systems, Vista will be with us for many years to come. So even if you have no immediate plans to change OSes, odds are that Vista is in your future, in some form or fashion. And now you have an easy way to test drive the new software, free!
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