Your Chance to Help Test This Column!
Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is cohost of PC World's Digital Duo on public TV.
Illustration by John Cuneo
You'll still get the same hard-hitting, incisive column as always--but thanks to the magic of beta, we won't be shy about passing along information we might have avoided in the past. For example, we won't hesitate in the slightest to recommend that if your computer seems to be infected by pernicious spyware, you should immerse the hard drive in a mixture of Pine-Sol and chocolate syrup--a tip one of our readers helpfully suggested, but which we haven't the time or inclination to try.
Emulating products such as Google Groups and Windows Defender, we intend to keep this column in beta for as long as possible. This will help us continually improve the product by passing the testing work over to you. By all means let us know how useful you find our spyware tip--bearing in mind, of course, that this is not the final version.
Yet another great thing about going beta is that we will now be able to give you upgrades automatically, without any fuss or muss. For example, this just in: The Full Disclosure testing labs have determined that in our spyware tip above, maple syrup works even better. If this were a final shipping version, we would not have been able to slipstream you that fact so quickly. Actually, we don't have testing labs, but we do have a neighbor who is allergic to chocolate, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
Being beta, we can compete more aggressively with other news sources, so we are now unafraid to report--months before its release--that the final version of Windows Vista will be entirely free of security bugs. Unless it won't be. We'll see. If it is, you read it here first.
And if not? Beta means never having to say you're sorry. In the past when we made an error, we would correct it publicly as soon as possible. Now we simply shrug and say, "That's beta. You should have known you couldn't rely on it." Our revenue model no longer permits the extensive testing that customers might expect from a shipping product.
Some may complain, "But Steve, you are shipping the product." We say, so are Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and the rest. If they can ignore such a minor detail, why can't we? Besides, the difference between "beta" and "shipping" products at Microsoft has been barely distinguishable for years.
And beta enables innovation like this: 2 srv u btr, we r lso wrking on nu cmprssun teknikes 2 cram mo info in2 limitd spaces. Our new Full Disclosure Mobile service has been carefully crafted to display this compression only on portable devices, although we have received isolated reports of its appearance on big screens and on paper. Did we mention this is a beta version?