Xp Service Pack 3

Preach it again akijikan.

It is hard to imagine someone would thing that something as complex as an OS should not have to be upgraded. The simple fact is this; we are still in the infancy of software development. Compared to other inventions of mankind, computers and therefore the software that runs on them has had one of the most explosive growths in history. Most people were not even exposed to a computer until Windows 95. Wow that was only 10 years ago. There is still much to be learned about this beast called software. From as little as we do know, updates and security patches are going to be a way of life. From this point on, if a piece of software over 100 lines long does not get an update at least once a year, most likely you are a sitting duck to be hacked.

Think of it this way. There is a software engineering term referred to as defect per line of code, usually per 1000 lines of code. A defect could be anything from a bad loop condition to a security hole. A very good software project will have maybe 1.5 defects/KSLOC. Lets say you even have really really good QA and it gets down to .5 defects/KSLOC. Now think of how many millions of lines of code Windows XP has in it (around 40M)

40,000,000/1,000=40,000 SLOC
40,000*.5=20,000 defects

There could be as many as 20,000 defect in Windows XP. If even 10% (2,000) are exploitable then you will need a patch immediately. This is for an extremely well written piece of code. If you have ever written code you will much better appreciate this paradox. Code is a very hard thing to create and putting code out without patches is a thing of the past.

P.S. akijikan, you sound quite educated in this area, any comments would be appreciated.

P.P.S. This does not include bugs introduced with patches or other upgrades such as new functionality.

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Oh I wish you wouldn't display such an ignorant view of the software development process.

I'm not exactly the pro-microsoft guy so forgive the apologetics, but the whole idea of "releasing software after it's finished" is a whole bunch of bull.

Software is constantly being improved. Look how often open-source software is updated or new versions are available for download.

Most serious Linux distros have an update system: apt-get, portage, yast...

But I'm willing to best that you wouldn't slam them, only the big evil Microsoft.

The software is not incomplete, features are just added. What's the difference between an update and a service pack? A name. That's about it.

The popular open-source alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox has new versions released often. What's the diference between that and what Microsoft does with service packs? One is a whole new program, one modifies an existing program. More often than not, the "whole new program" is just like the older one except for a few <i>updates</i>. The only difference is installing a whole program to get them. So it in essence the same thing as what Microsoft does. Does that make Firefox incomplete? No, just means there's an improvement.

The day your software is complete is the day you're a stale programmer.

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If they stopped making service packs and 'upgrades' then Windows would be hacked to hell...o wait it already has...
And .... I'm wondering how many problems this SP3 will create this time....

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Since today, i think SP3 isn't available, just a plant !

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As I believe that WinXP SP3 was a combination of all small service pack into 1 big files and they named it Service Pack 3. Mostly all the small updates that u can find in microsoft website is there inside the SP3. If u update ur windows xp regulary, i dun think u will need this SP3.

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