I don't know why him saying that they should have waited until this build to release it to the public is getting your panties in a bunch.
Because in order to release beta2, Vista had to meet a certain level of quality. Things like bug bars and quality gates. Sure you could go
beyond those levels that are set for beta2 and release something better, but that isn't the point. Paul knows all about these levels, and for him to not recognize that beta2 was released once those levels were met is silly.[/quote]
Thats not the point he is making - the point is, and most of this thread and the public seems to agree with, is that regardless of whatever internal quality goal MS set for itself, vista beta 2 was not ready for public consumption. It is a beta in every sense of the word, but too premature to release to the world, which is now getting a bad impression of vista, especially those who aren't into this kind of stuff enough to REALLY understand what a beta entails. MS may very well be happy with the Beta as it is, but most people are not.
I don't know why it is so hard for you to understand this very basic idea. Him saying "Beta 2 was not ready to be unleased upon the world" is a lot more useful and informative than him saying "No one should complain that Beta 2 is overwhelmingly unstable and buggy because it is exactly what MS planned upon." Considering they appear to have significantly tidied it up in a short period of time, they would have been better off holding back a week or two.
Paul has demonstrated his complete lack of understanding in quite a lot of things over the years. He has also demonstrated how completely full of himself he is. He does provide useful information to people outside of the development process, but he comes off as bragging about his 'inside' access and constantly makes inappropriate comments about stuff he knows little about. And from the access that Paul does have, he should know better than to write stuff like '5456 is what beta2 should have been'.
He does come off as somewhat full of himself, but build 5456 is still what the public release of Beta 2 should have been, regardless of MS's internal goals. Whatever you think of him personally, he's done enough panning of MS recently that I have no doubt he's not just a biased shill for MS, if it sucks, he's going to tell us it sucks.
This is clear from his constant flip-flopping on IE7 and Vista. One article says it is complete crap, the next says it's great. He's a hack who writes in order to generate advertising clicks.
It has seemed pretty consistent to me, taking into account the changes vista has gone through over the past couple of months/years. It went from feature laded but vapor, to stripped but coming soon, to stripped further, delayed, and now back on track. Obviously opinions are going to change during all that chaos.
And you might want to tone down the ad-homs toward members of the forum, chief.
Welcome to ATOT. I call them as I see them. Someone arguing that a reporter is an asshat who doesnt know what he's talking about, based on a technicality that 99.99% of people could care less about, deserves to be called an asshat themselves.