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in reply to PM Confessional

This is not a true Perl story, but I do remember learning how IBM's many service-tapes were best used as scratch tapes.   They called us up in a panic, having just delivered a service tape (apparently, to all their customers) that would render a mainframe un-bootable.

Fortunately, I had not installed it, and never planned to.   “Computer software like fine wine ... let it age.   Knowing that their service-tapes were cumulative, I actually applied them about once a quarter, and used tapes that were at least a month old (after reviewing all of the issues-lists for the tapes that had arrived subsequently).   The rest went into a (big...) box.

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Re^2: PM Confessional
by apl (Monsignor) on Jan 23, 2011 at 13:56 UTC
    “Computer software like fine wine ... let it age.”
    My firm's equivalent of this was to never use a version *.0 of any vendors software...

      Likewise, turn off “automatic updates” (anywhere and everywhere you find them ...), and when advised that a new version of software is available ... wait.

      For instance, when iOS 4.0 came out for my phone, I waited several months as the version-numbers quickly bounced along.   When they finally settled down and stayed that way for more than 30 days running, I proceeded with one uneventful upgrade.

      Software’s difficult ... we all know that.   So, there is no reason to be “on the bleeding edge” about the bugs that will inevitably crop-up with a new release of anything.