
VMware: Don't shut down that virtual machine - senthil_rajasek
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10016173-83.html
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ScottWhigham
what a frigging cock-up. VMWare is essential for my work but their customer
service is a joke. Clearly their QA testing team has issues as well.

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gaius
I guess they shouldn't have fired the CEO who built the company and replaced
her with a suit from a company that's widely acknowledged to have screwed the
pooch on virtualization.

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LogicHoleFlaw
DRM: screwing over genuine customers since 1996.

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dfranke
1996? Don't you remember DOS copy protection?

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tlrobinson
If I were to try to imagine the worst bug possible for a virtualization
product, this would probably be it. Though I suppose data corruption would be
worse.

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dmackdaddy
Well, you can't really blame QA all that much. This would have only been
caught if the QA team decided to turn the clock forward a few days just to see
what would happen. This was the Developer's fault for not checking the code
for expiration on a BETA. Glad we waited to Update to U2 tho!

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gojomo
Sure, you can blame their QA.

QA for such a big company, with calendar-sensitive products, should be running
full acceptance tests at a number of dates in the future. Malware researchers
do this with honeypot machines to see if certain actions are triggered at
upcoming dates.

VMWare should be doing this even if for no other reason than to verify that
their intended license-expiration works as expected.

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Kaizyn
Big corporations that have software everyone wants to use can treat their
paying customers as beta testers. You know this drill as Microsoft pioneered
the practice a long long time ago.

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stcredzero
Big corporations also treat their production staff using in-house software as
beta testers, even if this costs them many millions of dollars in the few days
after each release. (Because hiring a test staff for less than a million would
be "too expensive.")

It says a lot when a company can treat customers in the general public like
in-house employees it can abuse.

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jodrellblank
Software licensing - the worst invention since tangled cables.

I don't want key infrastructure to have license keys in it and need new
license keys to unlock more features. ESX Server? Firewalls? Routers? No! As
little code as possible, as high quality as possible, please.

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plusbryan
How much you wanna bet some disgruntled eng snuck that bug in?

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th0ma5
yup... software licensing... it's buggy!

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fairramone
Quite an unfortunate bug.

