Techies By Necessity, Not By Choice
from the things-are-changing dept
As computers become even more common, it seems that just about everyone has to become just a bit of a techie to deal with the various problems that come up. People are realizing that tech support lines are, for the most part, useless, and with a little fiddling around, they can often solve their own problems - even if they'd rather be doing something else. Near the end of the article, they compares this to the early days of electric wiring, parlor clocks, and cars. In each case, people had to become technical experts to handle them, since they often broke down, or presented other problems. So, in my mind, that leads to the question of whether or not we'll ever really get computer systems that don't require so much care and maintenance.
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However, those systems are thousands of times LESS complex than your usual computer combine with an OS and on TOP of the OS, several software applications running...we're talking millions of lines of code, millions of instructions running every minute to try and do what you want.
Big Software Corp. bashing aside, its extremely difficult for us developpers to design a foolproof system because we're in competition with a universe designing better fools...and the universe is winning. Add to that the mediocre skills of some, differing standards of hardware components, the complexity of the job itself, the endless money-grubbing by some (in the form of planned obsolescence, extremely unreasonable sales deadlines, cheap customer service etc..) and you've got yourself a guarantee that SOMETHING will go wrong somewhere.
Things WILL get better, they will never be perfect, I don't believe a foolproof/crashproof system of such complexity is possible, but they WILL get better as the industry matures.
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But even open-source software, which is NOT driven by profit and IS worked on by many many skilled programmers for the sake of doing something good isn't foolproof...you can't say profit motivates these people and you can't say that their skills are substandard for the most part.
Read a tutorial on programming (pick your favorite OS and language) and you'll see that even the simplest of code can have flaws easily...then consider the fact that even the 5-6 lines of code YOU've just written that make the computer say "Hello World!" relies on hundreds of thousands if not MILLIONS of software instructions coded by someone else (ie: a software library or various DLLs for the windows people) and THEN consider that the OS you're running on is also written with millions of lines of code infinitely more complex than what you've just typed in...then consider that these instructions rely on hardware specs (sometimes less than well-written) so they run on your PC.
I'm not saying its impossible...I firmly believe nothing is impossible...I'm just saying bugproof and foolproof is a VERY long way off.
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