Well, ...
1 - I always put the maximum possible memory into all my computers
immediately when I buy them.
2 - I never shut down any computer unless a system or software
upgrade/install requires it
3 - I never had any crashes or freezes on my Unix or VAX gear
4 - I and family members have experienced plenty of crashes and freezes
on Macs with legacy OS
5 - I have had almost no trouble on any Mac after OSX 10.1
exception: IE sometimes disappears when left open for days and sometimes
it starts looping.
Under OSX, having all the Unix tools available I can actually show that
it loops and also I can proof that it has a memory leak.
other exception: Mail.app sometimes disappears (but not for at least a
month now) and on my wife's iBook it sometimes ignores Japanese input
for no apparent reason - relaunch fixes the problem.
This, I can live with. Also bugs where certain functions behind certain
menus that are supposed to do something but instead don't do anything
(as long as it is not the save function ;-) ... I can tolerate that as
well.
But hickups where out of the blue the entire GUI locks up for seconds to
minutes as with OS9 - Or certain actions that you know will break the
system with a near 100% chance, like opening certain documents with
certain software packages or searching for text containing certain
characters (was it % or & or * I don't remember) in Acrobat, changing
the location in the location manager, using Personal Web sharing and a
whole bunch of other stuff that leaves OS9 in some dreadful state and
that I am now luckily starting to forget about as I am not using OS9
anymore ... No that kind of stuff I cannot tolerate and if it wasn't for
OSX I would probably by now be using a Sony Vaio with Solaris x86 or
FreeBSD running on it and at home I'd probably have a SunBlade instead
of the G4 tower.
I have made it a habit to record incidents of computer aided work
destruction on my Newton.
What always strikes me is how soon people forget the trouble that they
had. They are always surprised if you show them the figures how much
time was wasted at the end of the week or a month. And the ones who look
at the records and do the numbers for themselves always say how amazed
they are by the fact that their own mind is playing games with them in
an attempt to loose bad memories of those troublesome incidents.
I was taken aback myself when I found out that Macs weren't as good as I
thought they were. I started to record incidents and their impact on my
Newton because I wanted to proof that complaints towards the Macs were
nothing but a product of bias. But the outcome was that the Macs weren't
up to the job. They were better than the Windoze boxes but not as good
as Unix based workstations.
As a result, when I take on a project with a timeline that falls into
the category of "mission impossible" the first thing I demand is that
all Windoze systems are thrown out and everything be replaced with Unix
boxes. This costs a bit of money in the beginning, but in the end it
turns out cheaper and instead of slipping, deadlines tend to be kept;
Nobody complains about computer problems and lost work.
I also do a lot of stuff by hand, either on paper, or the whiteboard or
on the Newton. My yardstick is if I can do it faster by hand then it's
no good using a computer. I then make a photocopy or take a photo with
my digital camera and give it to some data input slave to recreate it on
a computer but that is for mostly for distribution and archiving
purposes; the actual process of thinking and creating was done without
the desktop either the old fashioned way or on the Newton.
There are also those incidents where you haven't got any freezes nor
crashes but spend hours and hours on some tiny little detail that
refuses to be accomplished. A font that simply won't show up, a footnote
that always comes out wrong or is invisible or it's mere presence on the
page screws up the bullet points in a seemingly unrelated chapter 30
pages later, a vertical line that won't be there anymore once the
document has been saved, a diagram that when pasted into a word document
will require the entire 100 page document to be reformatted, a file that
cannot be saved, etc etc etc
On Unix systems those things are extremely rare. Applications often have
less features than those on desktop systems, but the features that are
there work all the time, no matter what constellation of content there
is in a given document, no matter how big the document is, no matter
what format the document is in. If a document is within the specs of the
application all features usually work on that document and if not then
the document is usually refused in the first place and there are no
surprises.
On a desktop system you would have your friendly support tell you
something like ....
"But of course! if you use red color in combination with the Helvetica
font in a document created on a Friday afternoon which has since then
grown to more then 30 pages or 400 KB and you have changed the numbering
into plain bullets and back twice then insert a footnote on page 11
after you copy pasted something in Courier font smaller than 8 pt etc
etc etc well THEN of course this is a known irregularity for which no
service pack is yet known and you should not have been working on that
document in the first place, so now you have lost all your data and all
there is to do is do it again."
I am always amazed by how much especially Windoze users know about all
those known bugs and patches. I always wonder how much time it must have
taken them to memorise what kind of weird problem requires what kind of
weird workaround or patch.
rgds
bk
On Tuesday, January 8, 2002, at 12:11 , Jon Glass wrote:
>
> on 1/7/02 11:28 AM, BK at bk_newtontalk_at_yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> You read me backwards. The myth is that computers are inherently
> unreliable.
> :-) If you were to purchase a computer new, and use it as it came, you
> would
> have almost zilcho problems. In fact, if you simply used them in a
> simple
> manner, you would have few problems. Unfortunately, computers aren't the
> product of a single entity, but of a plethora of companies and
> individuals
> scattered all across the world, writing completely different software,
> often
> at cross-purposes to each other. That is the nature of the beast.
>
> Of course, the worst aspect of all this is the "nut behind the wheel"
> so to
> speak, meaning the user. If we drove our cars like we drive our
> computers,
> we would be mangled meat. That is the truth.
>
> There is one other factor--memory, or lack thereof. We think of the
> great
> behemoth of the Saturn V rocket that carried men to the moon. What most
> people don't know is that while everything else worked well, there was
> one
> item that caused problems, and caused it at the most inopportune times.
> That
> was the ship's computer. It had less memory than a stock VIC 20, and
> had a
> weird interface, but it would bomb out when it was needed the most. The
> reason? Memory overload. See, you aren't unique, and your problems
> aren't
> new. :-) When you add these three items together, you can have problems.
>
> For myself. I seldom crash, and my wife crashes even less. My
> children's'
> computer never crashes. In fact, I don't know when was the last time
> their
> computer crashed. Computers crash, not because they are unstable or
> unreliable, but because those who _use_ them make them that way.
>
> Yes, there is a lot of shoddy workmanship out there in the way of
> programming, but most of the time, you don't need to use that stuff. We
> choose to, in spite of the flaws. In that case, we again are to blame,
> because we encourage it by purchasing the garbage. ;-)
>
> BTW, I use Macintosh, and have 8.1, 8.5.1 and 9.1 on our three main
> computers.
>
> YMMV :-)
> --
> -Jon Glass
> Krakow, Poland
> <mailto:jonglass_at_usa.net>
> <mailto:glasshaus5_at_aol.com>
> "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and
> murders
> itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
> --John
> Adams
>
>
> --
> This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net
> To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or
> mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
>
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 16:02:03 EST