Friday, January 22, 2016

Why we can't have nice things on the Internet, redux

The Silicon Graybeard brings an epic rant.  You really need to RTWT, but this gives you the flavor:
A running joke in the electronics hardware business is that software is going to cause the end of the world.  The way the software business is run is so fundamentally different from the way that hardware works that most of us are perpetually astounded.  Can you imagine buying a car where many features just don't work right, and the companies have you return to the dealer to install new hardware?  I suspect that would raise a pretty loud howl from their owners.  How is that different from a software patch to fix something that doesn't work properly?
Yup.  Another old saying is that if you screw with it long enough hardware eventually breaks; if you screw with software long enough it eventually works.  Kind of.  Sometimes.

That's why I won't ever have a self driving car.  I'll never be convinced they've screwed with it enough to make it work.

2 comments:

  1. I've seen it said that, if builders built buildings the way programmers write software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Another good one is that if shoemakers built their shoes the way software is written, your shoes would exploded everyfourth Wednesday at 10:06 AM.

    ReplyDelete

Remember your manners when you post. Anonymous comments are not allowed because of the plague of spam comments.