On Monday, January 7, 2002, at 05:42 , Jon Glass wrote:
> How about your car? How often does it break down, or cause problems?
> Why?
I have a shopping bike and use public transport or taxis.
But to not give you the impression I evade your question ...
I used to be a car owner a long time ago. And especially when I was a
student, I drove the junk that other people would throw away because it
was past its expiry date. However, even then I enjoyed better
reliability than desktop computers give you today. But for a fair
comparison you have to compare new with new. If you buy a new desktop,
perhaps one of the top models, that would probably compare to driving a
brand new Audi, Toyota, Chrysler middle/upper class car. Now, how long
will it take before that car will start giving you trouble. At least a
year, probably two or three. And even then, if you have your car
regularly serviced - say every 20000 miles or so - most of the time you
will enjoy trouble free driving.
Now, how about desktop computers ? Nothing like it ! Even a brand new
box with a brand new OS will crash on you like a 20 year old run down
rusty heap of junk on four wheels. Even if you have an IT department
that is paid to look after your computers permanently, there is not a
single day in which there is not someone at work who has his "Oh my god,
I just lost 30 minutes of work due to a computer glitch" experience. A
car would be considered troublesome if that happened once a month.
And the best of it all is that these so called computer professionals
don't even know how to explain the various incidents. All they have to
offer is either "Restart" or in more persistent cases "Reinstall". Well,
if you happen to have a problem with a car and bring it to the
professionals, they will be able to tell you exactly what went wrong,
because they are ***true*** engineers, unlike most of those IT folks who
call themselves engineers but they are just certified ignorants or
wannabees.
> As for the toaster, how often do you burn toast?
I use my toaster every morning and I cannot recall to have burnt
anything in there.
> Why? Have you ever had the
> fridge cease to cool your food because the knob got accidently bumped?
No. I am using a Mitsubishi MR-V32A-CR fridge with three compartments. I
bought it in Akihabara in 1994. It has so far survived three times
moving house and I only had one incident about two years ago when it
started to become noisy. We called an electrician and explained the
problem - an hour later he was in for ten minutes - knew exactly what
was wrong - cost us about 3000 yen and it has been quiet ever since. I
am looking forward to another 6 troublefree years using that fridge,
thank you!
> The truth is, computers are very, very complicated pieces of
> equipment, and a
> mixture of hardware and software. Every piece that goes into it has the
> potential to have an impact on everything else.
Nice try, but it doesn't convince me. TV sets are very complicated
pieces of equipment and they used to break all the time until they were
designed properly. The GSM mobile phone system is the most complex
system that humankind has ever developed and implemented. The effort
that went into it is by a magnitude greater than the effort that went
into the Manhattan project. Not unlike particle physics, at those high
frequencies, things become almost unpredictable and seemingly random.
Yet it was designed by engineering people who deserve to be called
engineers and in a professional manner such that GSM telephony has
become a high quality and very reliable service even though there are
factors like weather and sunspot activities that cannot be predicted but
can have a negative impact on quality and the overwhelming success has
resulted in far more users than the system was originally designed for.
And even in ancient or antique history there are examples of proper
design of very complex systems. Ask any architect about the complexity
of antique buildings such as bridges and viaducts built by the romans,
the pyramids, or countless monumental buildings like churches etc. One
masterpiece of design and craftsmenship Haia Sophia in Istanbul for
example has been designed and built over 1400 years ago to withstand
earthquakes of magnitudes that todays builders still struggle with, yet
it has plenty of other properties that seem contradictory to the design
goal of making it survive earthquakes. A very complex system, properly
designed and built, a celebration of human abilities if only the effort
is made.
Computer systems can be designed following the very same engineering
methods that have made other complex engineering projects successful and
reliable. However, the industry has come to not want to bother to go
through the sweat it takes to do such proper design. More than that -
the industry mostly prays on customers by delivering bad design in order
to sell fixes. That is what has fueled this industry and while this can
be observed to a degree in other industry, nowhere else is it endemic
but in the computer industry.
The common belief that computers are just too complex to be made
reliable is a myth supported by most vendors as it helps them to evade
responsibility.
If it is impossible to design reliable complex computer systems, how
come there is the Tandem Himalaya with 4096 CPUs all hotswappable, with
hotswappable memory, with an operating system that is not only called
NonStop but also truly deserves that name. How come we had Lisp
workstations in the 60s and 70s with a highly integrated object oriented
environment that would never crash but always branch out into a recovery
mode no matter what doom happened to it. How come we had VAXclusters in
the 80s, that significantly brought down the cost of high availability
and reliability. How come we have the Newton, with a truly document
centric UI where everything is highly integrated and it hardly crashes,
but even if it does the chance is you won't loose any work.
Face it - The computer industry hasn't much evolved since the pioneering
era of the 60s and 70s. All that has evolved is the amount of brute
force thrown at problems in a failing attempt at providing solutions.
> And that is before you add
> the user.
Too bad that computers are there for users.
> If you never added software or hardware to your computer, and if
> you never modified anything in it, it could go for a long time without
> crashing. If you used it carefully, and didn't quit programs, launch new
> ones, launch ones you already quit, you could go a long time without
> problems.
Unless of course you are dealing with a company referred to as M$ who
have never understood what memory leakage and resource sharing means.
Trouble is that more and more folks are being taught and even certified
by them.
> My wife uses about four programs on her Mac. When she turns it on,
> the launches them, and leaves them running. She can go for weeks without
> needing to reboot.
I am not as lucky as I am travelling a lot and have to switch various
settings according to where I am and which client I do work for. Under
the legacy Mac OS - even though they have a location manager
particularly for this task - it doesn't take long before a switch will
bring about disaster.
Also, leaving Internet Explorer running in the background (even offline
doing nothing) will bring about disaster and there are other very very
bad pieces of bad software hacking and patching out there which have the
very same habit.
> When she does crash, it is because a web site or her
> browser crashed on her (always internet related) The funny part is that
> she
> is using my old computer that I used to crash daily. She never crashes,
> and
> I haven't changed a thing. Only her habits are different. Computers do
> not
> crash, people crash computers. :-)
Well I grew up with computers that if you wanted to crash them you had
to be very very very smart. I remember one guy who I used to work with
in Switzerland. He was a VMS guru who had earned the respect of the most
highly rated engineers at Digital. He was one of a few people who know
how to bring a system down ungracefully, but he'd have to make an effort
to do so.
Moreover, even if you were smart enough to do it, you would have to be
lucky to do it in a way such that you wouldn't be found out. I used to
work for a French bank in their securities business in London, when a
new data centre manager was recruited from the outside. The chief VMS
guru there felt that he should have instead be promoted to the post and
he tried to make the new boss look bad by deliberately crashing the main
VAXcluster system. It took two engineers from Digital less than an hour
to give a full account of what had happened and within two days they
also provided a full account of two more occassions going back 5 years
where our saboteur had used his tricks before.
The guy was fired of course, but the point is that in today's IT world
with its Windoze dominance, you neither have the systems that allow you
to properly diagnose but also and possible as a result of it you don't
have the skilled people anymore. These days its brute force instead of
brains and that is why things break again and again.
rgds
bk
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