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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Mon 7 Sep 2009, 01:03 PM
This is hardly surprising.  All software has bugs, and the bigger and more complex your software, often the more bugs.  I have focused on a few very significant bugs, but "significant" is a tricky word.  Bugs in a Notes client have no significance to those who use only the server.  Bugs in application development code have no significance to those who use only mail.

So, let me be completely clear.  I have a complete, total obsession with rich text, MIME, HTML and coexistence.  There is quite likely nobody at IBM who spends as much time pushing and shoving and fighting with rich text, MIME and HTML as I do.  That means that issues I find with these areas have great significance to me.  They may not have similar significance to you.  You may not care about whether your emails show up in clear, coherent MIME, or whether they show up at all.  You may not care whether some set of circumstances may lead to corrupted or incorrect data.  The famous Pentium FDIV bug probably didn't actually affect almost anybody, but the significance was huge to those who depended on absolute reliability in large number crunching applications.

The bugs I find and make a big stink about (I find many that are not worth noting, or only worth noting internally) are significant to me, and perhaps to IBM.  I don't expect IBM to assign the same significance to them that I do, but I do assume that it might be worth paying a bit of attention to the one person who really cares enough to push on these issues, cares enough to painstakingly analyze and document not only the bugs by the reasons for the bugs.  IBM doesn't have to pay attention, but if I am finding issues their QA department is not, perhaps they should.  Who else is going to waste the cycles?

Let me repeat again and again - Notes/Domino 8.5.1 is a wonderful advance in a terrific piece of software (or will be once it comes out of beta).  I think it should be widely considered by all Notes customers.  They should just be aware of all the facts, good and bad, so they can make an informed decision.

Disclaimer: Notes/Domino 8.5.1 (beta 8) is beta software, and nothing I say or do may be relevant to the final release.

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