[NTLUG:Discuss] Microsoft stock slips after report, Dell comments

[Steve Baker]

sunflower1043 at juno.com wrote:

> which said in part, quoting ZDNet:
> 
> " 'Our customers do not want us to sell them products with over 63,000
> potential known defects'....stated one of Microsoft's Windows development
> leaders, Marc Lucovsky, in the memo. 'How many of you would spend $500 on
> a piece of software with over 63,000 potential known defects?'
> .....
> "According to the Microsoft memo, the Windows 2000 source-code base
> contains:
> .....
> "Overall, there are more than 65,000 'potential issues' that could emerge
> as problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is
> estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be 'real' problems..."

Much though I hate M$ products for their lack of reliability, I think
you have to put that figure of 65,000 (or 63,000 or 21,000) known bugs
in context.

I was reading the comments about this revelation on Slashdot - and there
are some important things to realise.

1) The Debian bug tracking database for Linux has over 10,000 bugs listed.

2) Of the 65,000 or 63,000 or whatever in the W2K bug tracking database,
   only 21,000 are considered "bugs".  The rest are things like ergonomic
   issues that are labelled "defects" - not "bugs".

3) Even then, some of these so-called bugs are things like spelling
   mistakes in dialog boxes, variables declared global when they could
   be local.  We are not talking 21,000 BSOD bugs here.

4) Lots of those errors will be in the gazillions of device drivers
   out there.  Since there are dozens and dozens of (for example)
   video adaptor drivers - and you'll only be using one of them,
   the number of bugs you'll actually experience will be a lot
   smaller than the full 21,000.  Most people (aparrently) actually
   install less than 10% of the code that comes with W2K, so perhaps
   2,100 bugs is a more realistic figure for the actual number you'll
   experience in practice.

Still, that's an awful lot of problems.  Knowing how many bugs there
are in the million or so lines of code I maintain at work, I can
appreciate the difficulty in keeping track of the tens of millions
of lines in the full W2K package.

Their most serious error (IMHO) is in treating it as one gigantic
chunk of monolithic code - with all the applications tightly
integrated into the kernel.

Linux's strength is that the kernel is completely separate from the
windowing system which is completely independent from the applications
and so on.  It's a lot easier to debug ten independent million line
programs than one massive ten million line program.

Still, that figure of 65,000 'known bugs' makes you wonder how many
'unknown bugs' there are....and it's a great number to tell your
boss the next time he suggests using Windoze where Linux would be
more appropriate.

   :-)

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)