VISTA is nice! 1627
That's not compensation in the spirit of doing that service, and you know it. Beta-testing takes WORK, and merely getting to use that product in the mean time is...
They DO pay the public for their services, by giving them the OS for free for at least a year.
Tell me, oh so knowledgeable one, how does Apple pay its users to serve as beta testers of their major OS releases? NO, no, no need to actually answer it, since I can answer that: by NOT paying them, and CHARGING them $129 to boot (or in the case of developers, by charging THEM $1000 for the "privilege" of trying out their betas even BEFORE they are feature-complete and close to RTM status.)
This is because Apple does NOT release Public Betas at all. if so, WHERE is the download link? I would certainly be willing to beta-test it for them, but I am DEFINITELY not willing to pay them $1000 for the "privilege".
Microsoft, on the otherhand, believes that it is THEIR privilege to enable the Public to try out their OSes at no cost.
Oh, yea, oh yea, Stevie boy is SOOOO generous...NOT.
By the way, stud, ALL publically-available Windows betas ARE "official releases", otherwise, all one gets is a pirated version, which could contain ANY crap the "pirate" decides to put in it. In addition, ALL OFFICIAL Publicly-available releases of Microsoft Betas are feature-complete, and almost always very close to being ready to release to manufacturing.
By the way, the Aero Glbutt interface is totally RAD, compared with OS X, which is so plain and blaise it looks like it belongs on my old monitor").
I will be kind, however, and say that it looks like it belongs on my old Tandy CoCo2, since it DOES have color, after all -- THREE colors, in fact: White, Blue, and Grey. Those three, and no more. And VERY sparse colors, too. Yuck!!!