Re: When is a bug a bug?

[Steve Richter <stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 18:22:39 -0600, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There was some discussion of bugs in the last couple of days.  The
> direction the discussion took made today's events particularly ironic.
> I needed a bio of an IBM exec, and so someone at IBM sent it to me, but
> as is often the case in IBM, he sent it as a .lwp file, which is a Lotus
> Word Pro file, I believe.
> 
> Well, hoping that Word had a built-in conversion agent, I tried to take
> advantage of the integration of Outlook and Word, and simply dragged the
> attachment from the email to a blank Word document.  It showed up in the
> document as an icon.  I double-clicked on the icon, and Word popped up a
> warning that it might have a virus, did I want to continue?

so it was opening the document as an attachment?  Running a non
Microsoft viewer, dare I suggest an IBM/Lotus executable was opening
the attachment?

> The completely documented and consistently enforced lack of
> multi-threading in the interactive environment is simply a design
> decision that resulted in a missing feature. 

a design decision to allow multiple threads in all subsystems but the
interactive one.  What design would that be?

Two important advantages that threads have over separate jobs:
  - when the main process ends, the threads end also.
  - debugging.  a debugger can step from one thread to another as the
programmer traces down a problem.   Cant do that when separate jobs
and data queues are used.

-Steve