What am I missing here? I see a company that is dedicated
to delivering exceptional radios at a fair price and then, for no
additional charge, improving the product and delivering the
result over the Internet for immediate use. And what
happens? They miss something in the testing of an update and
get trashed for it!!!! I don't get it?
If we were paying an annual fee of substantial amount for the
updates, then maybe we could expect the quality performance
of, say Microsoft, or something. But the last time I looked, I
have not yet received a bill from Ten Tec for any of my
updates.
If, after I put an update on my radio and it did not work to
expectation and I was stuck, I would likely be a little upset.
But the last time I looked, I could go back to my previous
version in less time than it takes to reboot my wonderful and
costly and bug free Microsoft product.
If Ten Tec released an update with bugs and then ignored the
customer feedback that resulted, I would be in a position to
say they are developing a bad reputation for buggy software.
But the last time I looked, Ten Tec responds to bug reports in
a very timely fashion.
I think of this as a sort of Linux model. Ten Tec releases
software over the Internet at no charge to the customer. As
far as they know, it works OK. BUT.....................when the
software is released, there are now hundreds of testers
pushing and poking and finding things that their few testers
did not come across. The findings are posted to TT and they
make appropriate changes and release a fix or two on the
Internet. The process repeats and pretty soon we have some
pretty nice software [I probably should have been saying
firmware]. I have read that Linus sometimes released several
updates to Linux a day during the formative years. Users
would download the latest and promptly find something Linus
missed. Last time I looked, he did not have a reputation for
producing bad software. In fact, I have some of his work
running here that has been running 24/7 for several years
without a single hiccup. Not bad for someone who often made
several releases in one day!!!
Anyway, I think of us as part of the process and I'm very
happy to add my two cents worth when I find something. I
sure hope we do not become part of the problem.
For those who are really incensed by a buggy release, why not
just wait a day or two to see how it goes? If it has some bugs,
don't install it. If it is clean, have at it.
Someone said here that TT is on the leading edge of software
defined radios. I agree. They have a learning curve to climb
and I for one hope we will help them up that curve not drag
them down.
So, what am I missing?
-73-
-Lee-
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