True, but I doubt that a multi-core chip will be on par with a similar dual-cpu setup, you still need to get the heat away from that single cpu. It's very possible you will only get about the same 15-30% boost in speed you get from HT.
Your doubts are baseless. IBM's Power4 CPUs, which have been out a couple of years, don't have any such problem.
If heat becomes enough of an issue, exotic (for a PC/workstation) solutions exist already. For example, water cooling has been an established solution in mainframes for decades before PC enthusiasts adopted it.
From what I understand multi-core designs have all cores on a single piece of silicon at the center of the CPU just like uni-core CPUs.
Yes, it's a single piece of silicon with two separate CPUs on it.
A recent example would be the Hyperthreaded CPUs. SQL Server can be licensed per CPU and with Hyperthreading, the software does for all intents and purposes treat it as a second CPU. However, Microsoft's stance is surprisingly that you only license per the physical processor.
Pretty reasonable because the second virtual processor isn't as nearly as good as having two physical processors for most server applications since the virtual processor runs only when the real processor isn't busy. For regular systems, this is most of the time, but for most multi-threaded server apps running full blast, it's very seldom.
Multi-core, on the other hand, gives multiple independent physical processors that just happen to fit into one socket. Its more than likely multi-core systems will be priced according to the number of cores.
If Oracle and MS continue to use "per processor" licencing, I humbly speculate that it's just a matter of time until VMWare or some other Virtual Machine vendor/software supplier creates a "virtualized processor layer." VPLWare would present "n" processors as one large fast processor. Run your Oracle or MS application there. Problem solved. Wait, can't we do this already?
Uh, that's about as feasible as it is to get 9 women pregnant in order to get a baby in one month.
What if I buy a machine with ~twice the megahertz?
Two comments:
Double the MHz does not equal double the speed. There are many reasons for this, for example: All other things being equal, if the program and its data fit completely in a CPU cache, a processor with twice the MHz would indeed be close to twice as fast on a single task. Since that's rare, the CPU spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to be read or written from memory or disk, which is glacial in comparison. Moreover, disk and memory speeds/latencies aren't improving nearly as fast as CPU MHz.
On top of that, for appropriate splittable tasks and all other things being equal, two processors are always faster than one processor that is twice as fast. The closest analogy I can think of is two people manning two teller windows versus one person that is twice as fast manning the same two teller windows. Some overhead is involved for said person to move between the two windows and get set back up. The reduction in performance can be significant.
I have a copy of Windows XP Professional OEM version running on my PC. It set me back a whole 28,000 yen (Roughly US$280) Please somebody, tell me that what the Japanese pay for Windows is not ridiculously overpriced. The full boxed version of XP over here actually verges on US$400... so the OEM version looks cheap in comparison. MS must think that XP is worth the price of a CPU or top-of-the-line motherboard.
Newsflash, nearly everything in Japan is overpriced compared to US prices. For example, MSRP there for Sims 2 will be 8379 yen (~$83) versus $50 in the US.
(It's pathetic that someone actually modded the parent as informative.)
Analogies be damned. If an artist writes a song and aasks people (either directly or through an agent) not to obtain a copy without paying them and some person does it anyway then said person is being an asshole.
>Then that is a fundamental flaw in the way these products are designed. Now, if the machine was delivered with only the slots ordered but room for more (which could be added as a bolt-on) and some kind of hardware dongle to stop the robot arm from accessing these unless they are licensed, problem solved.
How is that any different than the software lockout, other than making the machine cost more making the purchase of more capacity a pain in the ass?
>Any business model that relies on monies brought in from a service contract is fatally flawed from the outset.
Ahem, IBM, HP, Sun, and so forth might have a differnce of opinion about that.;)
A) only applies to agents of the government B) only applies if the person wasn't inclined to commit the act anyway.
Aside from that, in an ironic twist, they can actually use the defense used by most torrent sites use: they're not hosting the content so they're not directly condoning the copying.
In all seriousness, I ask you: Suppose I wrote some software and requested anyone who came by to make a copy not to do so without paying me. How would it not be an issue of morals if someone made a copy in violation of my request?
Got news for you - scumware authors have *already* tried to target Firefox and Mozilla. The developers' reaction? Implement a "whitelist" system that only allows extensions to come from a small, fixed set of official servers.
Yeah, but that doesn't scale up:
1. More and more plug-ins means that the list maintainers spend more and more time policing the list.
2. This opens up the list maintainers as targets of lawsuits by people wishing to propagate scumware.
>Does Knuth's TeX program have bugs? He will send you a cheque if you find one
>TeX was designed, then implemented. It works
Knuth's TeX program is a small well defined bit of software, written under no time, budgetary, or feature pressure, by a person who is an internationally recognized master of his field.
Give me 1000 Donald Knuths and the same circumstances and I could make even something like Windows a masterpiece.
>Do you work for the RIAA? Before you answer that I am attacking you ad hominem, working for the RIAA is not an insult, a priori.
I do not work for the RIAA nor am I affiliated in any way with the music industry. I speak only as a devloper who is interested in technology trends.
>You write that as though it is an established fact. Your premise is that the music industry is making less money than it is owed, as though there is a social contract between us and them to give them money.
Quite the opposite; I agree that no individual or corporation is owed a living. However, this discussion is in the context of convincing businesses with interests in DRM to change their course. My contention is not that DRM is good or the RIAA is right, but solely that Mr. Doctorow did not provide any convincing reasons for people to stop pursuing DRM.
>>People have the chance to pay already. What you're saying that people should be able do is dictate what artists are willing to sell, against their will.
>The artists? Get real. You mean the industry. Can you really say that the artists wouldn't rather give people the option to download their music for a fee?
Fine, substitute "artists" with "artists and the music industry" or just plain "seller". The point is that the seller is saying "I'm willing to sell a copy of this song on a CD for X dollars, but I am not willing to sell it in any other format". The listener is then saying "I want the song as an MP3 so I will take a copy of the song from you against your will anyway." Tell me how this is different than "Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want". If it isn't, tell me how this isn't *wrong*.
>>Au contraire, sir, I tackled it head on and ground it to a fine powder. Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it.
>Business is about people. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I know, it's old, and it's corny, but it's true. If you try to force people into your business model because you control something that you think they are forced to pay for, and you feel that they owe you money just by existing, you just might find out that you were wrong, in the end. Cory's argument was about human psychology. You say you attacked it head on, but all you did was spout a bunch of assumptions as fact. Give me a break, you didn't even bother to cite any RIAA studies.
And you accuse me of not reading? Read again what I wrote: "Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it." I didn't say that DRM is good or that the RIAA is owed money. All I said that your opinion stated in the second paragraph of your original post (competition being good for artists) is not proven by Mr. Doctorow's speech because his analogies were bad (for reasons previously outlined) and that he thus provided no business case for dropping DRM, so people are (quite correctly) not going to listen.
To simplify it even further: Honey costs money, sonny. Doctorow didn't show them how they can make more money, so they're not going to put out any honey.
>You have this notion that people just won't pay for what they can get for free (you would probably say steal). How do you explain then, the incredible success of ITunes? Do you think ITunes would be less successful if it didn't have light DRM?
What success? The issue is the success of ITunes relative to existing music sales, not that of ITunes itself.
In any case, ITunes illustrates the truth of the first statement perfectly; someone went to the trouble of cracking ITunes, even though it had as minimal and friendly DRM as possible, and people are using that crack. Even if all DRM schemes were as minimal as ITunes, some fellow would still crack them and we would be in exactly the same situation as we are now.
>I say give people half a chance and they'll be happy to pay for content. Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want.
People have the chance to pay already. What you're saying that people should be able do is dictate what artists are willing to sell, against their will.
>That was the thrust of Doctorow's argument, and one which you can't refute merely by ignoring it. The more restrictions you lay on, the more annoyed your actual customers (you know, the ones who keep you in the biz) are going to get, and in the end you only hurt your best customers, you don't stop infringement.
Au contraire, sir, I tackled it head on and ground it to a fine powder. Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it. Every model Mr. Doctorow cited had a media manufacturing cost to which some sort of compensation could be attached and some difficulty which prevented copying (e.g. videotapes had signal degradation where copies had less quality than the original). Now the cost of copying is zero and each copy is perfect.
"Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want"...and what they want (and what they can now do) is to get it for nothing. I have but to point to BitTorrent and the first incarnation of Napster to demonstrate that. There is no business model that works on nothing.
>Did you even read the speech? It sure doesn't seem that way.
Stooping to ad-hominems, eh? Well, apparently, I've actually given some thought about the content of the speech and its implications instead of just swallowing it's optimistic notions whole because it jibes with my ideology like you have.
>He does propose a solution: Microsoft should a) grow a pair of balls, and b) tell the RIAA to fuck off. Building a "record player that can play anything" (his phrase) is the first step.
That's not a solution because it's missing a couple of vital ingredients; "Growing a pair of balls and telling the RIAA to fuck off" doesn't present a opportunity to make more money than they would by pursuing DRM and "Build a record player that can play anything" is not a business plan.
Businesses aren't driven by ideology, you know. Until he comes up with a real incentive, Mr. Doctrow's words will fall on deaf ears at Microsoft and every other corporation.
>One point you fail to address is that competition and innovation are good, in the end, for the artists.
A) Sez who? All Mr. Doctorow demonstrated is that competition in distribution mediums is good.
B) Good in the end or not, shouldn't the people who actually create the stuff be the one to decide what their own best course of action is?
>Well, lo and behold, an entire industry was created for renting and selling videos which not only added to the MPAA's bottom line, but in some cases actually surpassed box office sales.
Yeah, but now the cost of copying is *zero*. Unlike Bibles, piano rolls, and videotapes, it's really, really tough to build a business model on zero.
Dead on. MS is taking on Sony in the console wars despite incredible odds because they smelled money; there's no reason to doubt they'd do the same against DRM if there was a buck in it.
However, Cory completely failed to make his case. The options are:
1) Get paid by people who want DRM to build a DRM solution, futile or not.
2) Develop a (carefully unspecified) something that will help the flow of information that's sufficiently more exciting than "cp X Y" that people will pay for.
If I were a money-grubbing bastard (99.9% of successful businesspeople.), I know which I'd take.
>But this is getting to be just so stupid an argument.
Agreed.
> I'll say it again, part of the beauty of open source is how quickly things happen. If you're somebody who needs to be cautious, then you have the freedom to wait.
I'll say my point again; weak or nonexistent QA is a weakness of many open (and, for that matter, closed) source projects that can potentially reduce the quality, depending on the size of the project, quality of the programmers, and other factors. For sufficiently complex patches or version upgrades, I'd have to wait much longer for assurance that there is little risk of problems for the "thousands of guinea pigs" method than a (properly managed) QA process.
>Aaaacchh, please! The people who wrote the patch are obviously qualified and more than likely testing it out themselves, as are most of the people who work on the core of Linux (in the case of a kernel problem). Do you not think that in those fist 24 hours that patch has been peer reviewed by dozens of some of the best programmers?
If that's the case, then how did the bug get in in the first place, pray tell?
(As a side comment, you appear to be framing this in terms of Open Source vs. not, whereas my intent was framing this in terms of delayed by going through QA vs. not. Granted, more closed source shops have QA teams than open source shops, so I may have given the wrong impression.)
>Open Source bonus 1: the patch is available faster.
No argument there.
>Open Source bonus 2: thousands of people in "real life" situations are willing to test it out. You decide wether or not you need to and when you want to patch, if at all.
1) You get both volunteers and the right to decide regardless of whether the patch is QAed or not.
2) Quality vs. quantity. Thousands of random people (a few of which may or may not be mechanics) examining my car, doesn't substitute for an examination by a known mechanic. If there is a problem, that's thousands of people who may or may not correctly recognize the problem with a patch, may or may not correctly identify the problem, and may or may not report the problem or report the problem correctly.
>So, is MS applying that *real* QA process? >If they do then it is obviously no solution to the problem.
Dunno. I imagine they do, along with Sun and Oracle and IBM and most other large software and hardware. However, just because MS screws up its QA doesn't mean that we should abandaon QA processes altogether. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Slashdot Mirror
>After all this time that something is going to happen? Would some of the explosives now be inert?
= explosives+unstable+age
Apparently, many types of explosives become unstable as they age, meaning that an explosion becomes more likely over time.
http://safety.utoledo.edu/explosives.asp
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q
Yeah, that's why I put the tilde in there. ;)
Oh, sorry. Don't mind me; I'm a little pedantic sometimes.
That is a darned nifty trick! Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but what tool did you use that allowed you to craft it?
True, but I doubt that a multi-core chip will be on par with a similar dual-cpu setup, you still need to get the heat away from that single cpu. It's very possible you will only get about the same 15-30% boost in speed you get from HT.
Your doubts are baseless. IBM's Power4 CPUs, which have been out a couple of years, don't have any such problem.
If heat becomes enough of an issue, exotic (for a PC/workstation) solutions exist already. For example, water cooling has been an established solution in mainframes for decades before PC enthusiasts adopted it.
From what I understand multi-core designs have all cores on a single piece of silicon at the center of the CPU just like uni-core CPUs.
Yes, it's a single piece of silicon with two separate CPUs on it.
A recent example would be the Hyperthreaded CPUs. SQL Server can be licensed per CPU and with Hyperthreading, the software does for all intents and purposes treat it as a second CPU. However, Microsoft's stance is surprisingly that you only license per the physical processor.
Pretty reasonable because the second virtual processor isn't as nearly as good as having two physical processors for most server applications since the virtual processor runs only when the real processor isn't busy. For regular systems, this is most of the time, but for most multi-threaded server apps running full blast, it's very seldom.
Multi-core, on the other hand, gives multiple independent physical processors that just happen to fit into one socket. Its more than likely multi-core systems will be priced according to the number of cores.
If Oracle and MS continue to use "per processor" licencing, I humbly speculate that it's just a matter of time until VMWare or some other Virtual Machine vendor/software supplier creates a "virtualized processor layer." VPLWare would present "n" processors as one large fast processor. Run your Oracle or MS application there. Problem solved. Wait, can't we do this already?
Uh, that's about as feasible as it is to get 9 women pregnant in order to get a baby in one month.
What if I buy a machine with ~twice the megahertz?
Two comments:
Double the MHz does not equal double the speed. There are many reasons for this, for example: All other things being equal, if the program and its data fit completely in a CPU cache, a processor with twice the MHz would indeed be close to twice as fast on a single task. Since that's rare, the CPU spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to be read or written from memory or disk, which is glacial in comparison. Moreover, disk and memory speeds/latencies aren't improving nearly as fast as CPU MHz.
On top of that, for appropriate splittable tasks and all other things being equal, two processors are always faster than one processor that is twice as fast. The closest analogy I can think of is two people manning two teller windows versus one person that is twice as fast manning the same two teller windows. Some overhead is involved for said person to move between the two windows and get set back up. The reduction in performance can be significant.
...by doing what Apple did: Build your wimpy OS on top of something strong, like BSD, Linux, or some other flavor of *NIX.
<snicker> Uh, what, something strong like VMS, perhaps?
They've munged it so much that it's taken until now to make an OS that almost doesn't suck, but that doesn't mean the foundation isn't there.
I have a copy of Windows XP Professional OEM version running on my PC. It set me back a whole 28,000 yen (Roughly US$280) Please somebody, tell me that what the Japanese pay for Windows is not ridiculously overpriced. The full boxed version of XP over here actually verges on US$400... so the OEM version looks cheap in comparison. MS must think that XP is worth the price of a CPU or top-of-the-line motherboard.
Newsflash, nearly everything in Japan is overpriced compared to US prices. For example, MSRP there for Sims 2 will be 8379 yen (~$83) versus $50 in the US.
(It's pathetic that someone actually modded the parent as informative.)
Analogies be damned. If an artist writes a song and aasks people (either directly or through an agent) not to obtain a copy without paying them and some person does it anyway then said person is being an asshole.
That's as simple as it gets.
>Then that is a fundamental flaw in the way these products are designed. Now, if the machine was delivered with only the slots ordered but room for more (which could be added as a bolt-on) and some kind of hardware dongle to stop the robot arm from accessing these unless they are licensed, problem solved.
;)
How is that any different than the software lockout, other than making the machine cost more making the purchase of more capacity a pain in the ass?
>Any business model that relies on monies brought in from a service contract is fatally flawed from the outset.
Ahem, IBM, HP, Sun, and so forth might have a differnce of opinion about that.
Um, no. Entrapment
A) only applies to agents of the government
B) only applies if the person wasn't inclined to commit the act anyway.
Aside from that, in an ironic twist, they can actually use the defense used by most torrent sites use: they're not hosting the content so they're not directly condoning the copying.
In all seriousness, I ask you: Suppose I wrote some software and requested anyone who came by to make a copy not to do so without paying me. How would it not be an issue of morals if someone made a copy in violation of my request?
Got news for you - scumware authors have *already* tried to target Firefox and Mozilla. The developers' reaction? Implement a "whitelist" system that only allows extensions to come from a small, fixed set of official servers.
:
Yeah, but that doesn't scale up
1. More and more plug-ins means that the list maintainers spend more and more time policing the list.
2. This opens up the list maintainers as targets of lawsuits by people wishing to propagate scumware.
>Does every piece of software have bugs?
>Does Knuth's TeX program have bugs? He will
send you a cheque if you find one
>TeX was designed, then implemented. It works
Knuth's TeX program is a small well defined bit of software, written under no time, budgetary, or feature pressure, by a person who is an internationally recognized master of his field.
Give me 1000 Donald Knuths and the same circumstances and I could make even something like Windows a masterpiece.
Insightful, my ass.
>Do you work for the RIAA? Before you answer that I am attacking you ad hominem, working for the RIAA is not an insult, a priori.
I do not work for the RIAA nor am I affiliated in any way with the music industry. I speak only as a devloper who is interested in technology trends.
>You write that as though it is an established fact. Your premise is that the music industry is making less money than it is owed, as though there is a social contract between us and them to give them money.
Quite the opposite; I agree that no individual or corporation is owed a living. However, this discussion is in the context of convincing businesses with interests in DRM to change their course. My contention is not that DRM is good or the RIAA is right, but solely that Mr. Doctorow did not provide any convincing reasons for people to stop pursuing DRM.
>>People have the chance to pay already. What you're saying that people should be able do is dictate what artists are willing to sell, against their will.
>The artists? Get real. You mean the industry. Can you really say that the artists wouldn't rather give people the option to download their music for a fee?
Fine, substitute "artists" with "artists and the music industry" or just plain "seller". The point is that the seller is saying "I'm willing to sell a copy of this song on a CD for X dollars, but I am not willing to sell it in any other format". The listener is then saying "I want the song as an MP3 so I will take a copy of the song from you against your will anyway." Tell me how this is different than "Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want". If it isn't, tell me how this isn't *wrong*.
>>Au contraire, sir, I tackled it head on and ground it to a fine powder. Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it.
>Business is about people. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I know, it's old, and it's corny, but it's true. If you try to force people into your business model because you control something that you think they are forced to pay for, and you feel that they owe you money just by existing, you just might find out that you were wrong, in the end. Cory's argument was about human psychology. You say you attacked it head on, but all you did was spout a bunch of assumptions as fact. Give me a break, you didn't even bother to cite any RIAA studies.
And you accuse me of not reading? Read again what I wrote: "Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it." I didn't say that DRM is good or that the RIAA is owed money. All I said that your opinion stated in the second paragraph of your original post (competition being good for artists) is not proven by Mr. Doctorow's speech because his analogies were bad (for reasons previously outlined) and that he thus provided no business case for dropping DRM, so people are (quite correctly) not going to listen.
To simplify it even further: Honey costs money, sonny. Doctorow didn't show them how they can make more money, so they're not going to put out any honey.
>You have this notion that people just won't pay for what they can get for free (you would probably say steal). How do you explain then, the incredible success of ITunes? Do you think ITunes would be less successful if it didn't have light DRM?
What success? The issue is the success of ITunes relative to existing music sales, not that of ITunes itself.
In any case, ITunes illustrates the truth of the first statement perfectly; someone went to the trouble of cracking ITunes, even though it had as minimal and friendly DRM as possible, and people are using that crack. Even if all DRM schemes were as minimal as ITunes, some fellow would still crack them and we would be in exactly the same situation as we are now.
>I say give people half a chance and they'll be happy to pay for content. Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want.
People have the chance to pay already. What you're saying that people should be able do is dictate what artists are willing to sell, against their will.
>That was the thrust of Doctorow's argument, and one which you can't refute merely by ignoring it. The more restrictions you lay on, the more annoyed your actual customers (you know, the ones who keep you in the biz) are going to get, and in the end you only hurt your best customers, you don't stop infringement.
Au contraire, sir, I tackled it head on and ground it to a fine powder. Mr. Doctorow makes a fine case about the futility of DRM, but does not make any convincing business argument for those who want DRM or make DRM that they will be better off without it. Every model Mr. Doctorow cited had a media manufacturing cost to which some sort of compensation could be attached and some difficulty which prevented copying (e.g. videotapes had signal degradation where copies had less quality than the original). Now the cost of copying is zero and each copy is perfect.
"Limit their options, and they'll go around you to get what they want"...and what they want (and what they can now do) is to get it for nothing. I have but to point to BitTorrent and the first incarnation of Napster to demonstrate that. There is no business model that works on nothing.
>Did you even read the speech? It sure doesn't seem that way.
Stooping to ad-hominems, eh? Well, apparently, I've actually given some thought about the content of the speech and its implications instead of just swallowing it's optimistic notions whole because it jibes with my ideology like you have.
>He does propose a solution: Microsoft should a) grow a pair of balls, and b) tell the RIAA to fuck off. Building a "record player that can play anything" (his phrase) is the first step.
That's not a solution because it's missing a couple of vital ingredients; "Growing a pair of balls and telling the RIAA to fuck off" doesn't present a opportunity to make more money than they would by pursuing DRM and "Build a record player that can play anything" is not a business plan.
Businesses aren't driven by ideology, you know. Until he comes up with a real incentive, Mr. Doctrow's words will fall on deaf ears at Microsoft and every other corporation.
>We (society) may need to poke and prod them along a bit to get them to go down the right path.
Before you go down this route, remember why Alan Turing took his own life.
>One point you fail to address is that competition and innovation are good, in the end, for the artists.
A) Sez who? All Mr. Doctorow demonstrated is that competition in distribution mediums is good.
B) Good in the end or not, shouldn't the people who actually create the stuff be the one to decide what their own best course of action is?
>Well, lo and behold, an entire industry was created for renting and selling videos which not only added to the MPAA's bottom line, but in some cases actually surpassed box office sales.
Yeah, but now the cost of copying is *zero*. Unlike Bibles, piano rolls, and videotapes, it's really, really tough to build a business model on zero.
Dead on. MS is taking on Sony in the console wars despite incredible odds because they smelled money; there's no reason to doubt they'd do the same against DRM if there was a buck in it.
However, Cory completely failed to make his case. The options are:
1) Get paid by people who want DRM to build a DRM solution, futile or not.
2) Develop a (carefully unspecified) something that will help the flow of information that's sufficiently more exciting than "cp X Y" that people will pay for.
If I were a money-grubbing bastard (99.9% of successful businesspeople.), I know which I'd take.
>But this is getting to be just so stupid an argument.
Agreed.
> I'll say it again, part of the beauty of open source is how quickly things happen. If you're somebody who needs to be cautious, then you have the freedom to wait.
I'll say my point again; weak or nonexistent QA is a weakness of many open (and, for that matter, closed) source projects that can potentially reduce the quality, depending on the size of the project, quality of the programmers, and other factors. For sufficiently complex patches or version upgrades, I'd have to wait much longer for assurance that there is little risk of problems for the "thousands of guinea pigs" method than a (properly managed) QA process.
Fast is good; fast and loose is not.
>Aaaacchh, please! The people who wrote the patch are obviously qualified and more than likely testing it out themselves, as are most of the people who work on the core of Linux (in the case of a kernel problem). Do you not think that in those fist 24 hours that patch has been peer reviewed by dozens of some of the best programmers?
If that's the case, then how did the bug get in in the first place, pray tell?
(As a side comment, you appear to be framing this in terms of Open Source vs. not, whereas my intent was framing this in terms of delayed by going through QA vs. not. Granted, more closed source shops have QA teams than open source shops, so I may have given the wrong impression.)
>Open Source bonus 1: the patch is available faster.
No argument there.
>Open Source bonus 2: thousands of people in "real life" situations are willing to test it out. You decide wether or not you need to and when you want to patch, if at all.
1) You get both volunteers and the right to decide regardless of whether the patch is QAed or not.
2) Quality vs. quantity. Thousands of random people (a few of which may or may not be mechanics) examining my car, doesn't substitute for an examination by a known mechanic. If there is a problem, that's thousands of people who may or may not correctly recognize the problem with a patch, may or may not correctly identify the problem, and may or may not report the problem or report the problem correctly.
>So, is MS applying that *real* QA process?
>If they do then it is obviously no solution to the problem.
Dunno. I imagine they do, along with Sun and Oracle and IBM and most other large software and hardware. However, just because MS screws up its QA doesn't mean that we should abandaon QA processes altogether. Quite the contrary, in fact.