On Tue, September 9, 2014 9:33 am, Mark Tinberg wrote: > > On Sep 8, 2014, at 10:25 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at 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. > Naturally... I never said mine is not a layman's opinion ;-) Hence layman's comparison... Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++