
But perhaps a comment on the naiveté of some of the Reg readers.
> Instead of new varieties, M$ should develop an OS that may require the occasional patch but not the thousands they put out over it's lifetime.
Sure. But here's the thing. My car has around 10,000 moving parts and I have to bring it in for routine maintainance and fluid changes twice a year. Windows XP has well over 40 million lines of code and I need to update it twelve times a year.
Now, I'm not a math teacher, but I think I am smarter than a fifth grader, so here goes: Simple ratios put it at 10,000:2 vs 40,000,000:12. Reduce to 5,000:1 for the car vs. 3,333,333:1 for the software.
Seems to me that Microsoft does pretty well. :)
All fun aside. Seriously. 40 million lines of code. Really think about that for a minute, then reread what you wrote.