I note that there have been a number of debates on this topic. I accept that I am relatively new to Alpha, and I also know that I have created a powerful CRM application with Alpha - which I could not have done otherwise.
However, I believe there are two main categories of Alpha user: (a) the professionals who market their Alpha/programming expertise, and (b) those of us who use Alpha solely to run our own business's. We continue to learn whilst enhancing our applications on a daily basis - often with great help from this message board.
If you think about it, we, the latter category, are usually the first to experience the trauma of the faulty patch problems, i.e. the problems manifest themselves immediately in our live applications within our business's. Whereas the professionals don't generally experience the problems for a week or so. This is regularly evident from this message board, i.e. when a newbie suffers from a patch bug, its generally several days before the Alphaholics accept the bug.
Meanwhile, us poor newbie's are not looking for bugs, we are generally blaming our own inexperience for the issues. I sometimes spend days looking for problems in my application - only to eventually find out that it was an Alpha problem. Unfortunately, these bugs and Alpha 5's general instability obviously cause major headaches to a business. I accept that some instability may be partly down to Vista, or in my case, partly because I wasn't running the latest MS updates on all my PC's. I believe there are STILL conflicts between Alpha and read/write permissions to virtual memory etc - which often cause the 'frozen' screens, that are slowly becoming more prevalent in the Alpha world.
In summary, my conclusion is NOT to download future patches until they have been 'beta-tested' by the Alphaholics. I shall in future leave them alone for two to three weeks, whilst keeping a close eye on this message board in the meantime. If you are new to Alpha, I suggest you save yourself a lot of time and trouble and do the same thing.
Larry Gordon
However, I believe there are two main categories of Alpha user: (a) the professionals who market their Alpha/programming expertise, and (b) those of us who use Alpha solely to run our own business's. We continue to learn whilst enhancing our applications on a daily basis - often with great help from this message board.
If you think about it, we, the latter category, are usually the first to experience the trauma of the faulty patch problems, i.e. the problems manifest themselves immediately in our live applications within our business's. Whereas the professionals don't generally experience the problems for a week or so. This is regularly evident from this message board, i.e. when a newbie suffers from a patch bug, its generally several days before the Alphaholics accept the bug.
Meanwhile, us poor newbie's are not looking for bugs, we are generally blaming our own inexperience for the issues. I sometimes spend days looking for problems in my application - only to eventually find out that it was an Alpha problem. Unfortunately, these bugs and Alpha 5's general instability obviously cause major headaches to a business. I accept that some instability may be partly down to Vista, or in my case, partly because I wasn't running the latest MS updates on all my PC's. I believe there are STILL conflicts between Alpha and read/write permissions to virtual memory etc - which often cause the 'frozen' screens, that are slowly becoming more prevalent in the Alpha world.
In summary, my conclusion is NOT to download future patches until they have been 'beta-tested' by the Alphaholics. I shall in future leave them alone for two to three weeks, whilst keeping a close eye on this message board in the meantime. If you are new to Alpha, I suggest you save yourself a lot of time and trouble and do the same thing.
Larry Gordon
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