I just checked it out, nothing happened on both Portfolio's I have... I would need to check the rev on the s/w & bios, perhaps you have an earlier release. Curt Jim Leonard wrote: -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.9.2 - Release Date: 4/5/2005

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 11:20:16AM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote: More likely, "space-return" as listed in the original bug was used internally as an end-of-file marker or something. Stupid design decision. The problem with much of today's software is that we are collapsing under our own weight. It's a fairly obvious cycle: The longer a product is around, the more a company has to add to it every few years to keep getting new licenses and generate cash flow. The upshot is that there is an expectation for all software, existing and new, to have an incredibly massive feature set to compete in the marketplace. Having such a massive feature set means more opportunity for error when creating it, especially when you've got multiple people creating different chunks of it. (To be fair, I think the industry has always had the featuritis bug -- it's only in recent times that personal computers have grown so much that they are finally at the level where they can physically house such massive applications -- kind-of like how our collection grows to fill the space provided for it :-) Another thing facilitating this is the mindset: Thanks to widespread adoption of the WWW, cheap broadband internet access, and Microsoft Windows 3.x and 95, it is now "accepted" in the minds of most consumers and developers that: - *Everyone* writes buggy software since it's so complex nowadays - I can always download a patch to fix something later - I reboot Windows once a day, why should applications be any different - It's so easy to contact tech support that it's not a big deal to do so ...etc. Back in the 1970s/1980s, there simply couldn't be bugs in the software because there was no way to get fixes to consumers. Luckily, most software back then was of the one-man-wonder variety and a competent progammer usually didn't make mind-blowing terrible mistakes. (I agree with Jules in that many bugs of the "collosal" variety I've encountered with large-team projects are the result of two people making a minor bug in their own components that, combined, cause a real problem.) It's important to remember that there were bugs and upgrades in the 1980s too (although mostly limited to the PC and Mac platforms). I can remember connecting to Wordperfect and Sierra BBSes to download patches that were uploaded by tech support to fix bugs in their products... Were there less of them? Yes. But I just wanted to point out they *did* exist because too many times I have talked to people who INSIST that early software was BUG FREE. -- Jim Leonard http://www.oldskool.org/ Email: trixter at oldskool.org Like PC games? Help support the MobyGames database: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or taste a slice of the demoscene at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Well, the first relase of the HP49G firmware had many more bugs -- and serious bugs -- than that. Not bugs that would necessarily lose data, but certainly bugs that caused the calculator to give totally bogus answers... Things like multiplying a real vector by a real matrix would lock the machine up (!), claiming that 1 is a prime number, and so on. That was in 1999 from what should have been a 'real company'. -tony