RaySun2Be - there is a reason why the 2.4 Linux kernel is not "gold" yet, despite Linus Torvalds' promise to get it out either by the end of Nov. or beginning of Dec. of this year - which is NOW! (they were originally targetting last Feb. for release). If there's a problem, then they tend more to hold back from releasing then trying to meet some business model deadline. Perhaps people laugh at that thinking (NetBSD does the same type of "no code released before its time", but at least it allows you to move on to adding new features rather than spending an inordinate amount of time trying to fix the existing code... which is why the company itself has bloated so...
The scary thing for me is the that we're not talking about an OS release from M$ being in beta - we're talking about a PATCH to the OS release!!! Why was SP1 almost 80MB in size????? Hell... My old 486 had an 80MB drive with Win 3.1 on DOS 5.0, WP51, Paradox 3.51, Quattro 1.0, the old MS encyclopedia, games galore, blah blah, with room to spare!
I know that there's been some talk from them about expanding the betas even more to try to match the open source "more eyes" paradigm but still... And what's scarier is Win ME - look at all the poor souls out there - the average joe's who come to me at work to moan about their brand new Gateway's at home with the broken ME on it...
And VizTech - I know that M$ support costs $250 - per incident I believe... It's a shame that you have to pay to fix a problem in their OS... I can see paying for support of that OS - eg., your own misconfiguration issues or getting it to work with your hardware/apps, but paying to fix bugs, and at that price, is a bit much...
Sorry guys for digressing, for this is truly Offtopic, but... sigh...
[EDIT: Did I put enough ""s in here or what? heh heh ]