On Sep 8, 2014, at 10:25 AM, Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
Mark Tinberg wrote:
A lack of updates can also mean that there is a lack of effort or
competence
is tracking down and fixing bugs, or not a large enough customer base with the same bugs to generate sufficient, actionable, bug reports, it is not necessarily or even primarily a signal of quality.
You may be right. But in many cases you may be wrong. I'm stealing someone's else example (Hm.., maybe about 5-7 years old): ATI releases driver for their boards as rarely as every 6 Months. Which confirms careful work on debugging each released one. NVIDIA to the contrary releases drives as often as every other Month, so they don't seem to put enough effort into debugging each of them. Indeed, they are buggy in my experience. You, the customer, do at least part of their job: by discovering and reporting bugs ("artefacts" etc).
While that is an interesting point I think that graphics drivers and firmware are sufficiently different in development practices that you may not be able to generalize from one to the other, graphics drivers are about cutting edge software features and performance, firmware is about long term stability and low level hardware details.
— Mark Tinberg mtinberg@wisc.edu