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Quality Control In Computer Companies
Ant sent us a
Salon feature that talks about the (lack of) quality control in computer manufacturing, and then talks about it being "the American way of techno-capitalism". I've not had nearly the problems that people in this article allege, but I can sympathize.
I sold computer systems at a major retail outlet for nine months. I can't say which company but lets just say my store was store #297 (to give you an idea of how large this retail chain is). About a month after I started they began checking machines before finally giving them to a customer (a kind of last step in quality assurance). You know what's funny? Over 30% of the machines we sold would not boot up out of the box. These weren't no name junk, machines like HP, Compaq, Emachine and ofcource Packard Bell (which later merged their product line with NEC). These machine's died because of component failures. The most common were: Power Supply and Hard Drive failures. Simply put the manufacturers DO NOT CARE. They buy the cheapest Korean components, slap it together and hope the stores sell expensive service plans on the products. From my experiences over 60% of the machines we sold came back for repair within two years. And you know what? This makes perfect business sense. It's simple, Joe User doesn't have a clue. It goes like this: You buy the machine and no service plan, it fails in two years and you have to go out and buy a new machine (Manufacturers win). You buy the machine and an expensive ($200+) service plan, it fails in two years and you take it the store for repairs (Store still wins since parts cost them a small amount and at 11$ an hour technicians are dirt cheap). It's the perfect "You scratch my back I'll scratch your back" system. Maybe no one will believe this and I'll loose some Karma but after what I saw I build all my machines myself and maybe you guys should too.
it's all about cutting corners to trim the overhead right? who cares if you company's product doesn't live up to it's expectations or there are known security issues... we live in a society where marketing dominates
take pokemon for example... 100% marketing genius
as far as the author's gun analogy.. granted the ak-47 is one of the most abusable guns around... but you need to pick the right tool for the job.. if you want decent power, cheap costs and high reliability in varied enviornments then you would pick soemthing like the ak47
higher cost, small design, equal durability and more common ammunition.. try the uzi
the m16 might be jam prone but it is far more accurate at long range than the ak
me personally i like the hk-mp5 for it's high reliability and versitle configurations....
(not that i like guns mind you)
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Funny, I never encountered any problems with it, contray to some other companies I won't mention by name as they're the ones signing my paycheck:-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I don't know about everyone else, but I wasn't that surprised. The y2k bug was made out to be far worse than it actually is/was.
Of all the software out there, not very much relies on the date being correct such that it would be a critical failure point. The biggest risk I can think of would have been banking, and even that's not as horrible as people made it out to be. All those interest calculations are done and finalized with each itiration. Any miscalculations of funds would have begun on january 1st. They would not have been applied retroactively; your account wouldn't vanish because the system suddenly thought you hadn't opened it yet. It's more likely the software would crash or otherwise halt on error because the data is invalid (any bank using software that can't recognize the error conditions of negative interest/deposits, positive withdrawls, etc would have deserved what they got, IMHO).
A full-blown case of the y2k bug would have been an extreme annoyance at worst. Hardly a panic-worthy disaster.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
The problems described here are a result of a Capitalist economy. In a Communist economy, central planning deploys resources to fulfill the needs of the people. If quality is lacking somewhere it is not 'hidden' but solved. If solutions are necessary they are implemented based on 'Need vs Desire' not the pocket book of a corporatist whore. They only produce what is needed, there are no 'artificial cycles' in the economy because production is measured to meet need.
/youritemhere/. Not profit - not marketing - not advertising. If a deficiency is seen in an industry greater resources are spent by central planning to meet those needs ie:
The goal of a Communist economy is to produce quality, lasting articles of
Problem: PeeCees are arriving at peoples homes with defects, caused by lack of control during assembly.
Solution: Improve control systems during assembly & implement quality checks offline.
Method: Remove engineers from successful widget manufacturing, re-assign. Remove Q.A. people from yadda manufacturing, re-assign.
Which plan sounds like a better method to satisfy the needs of the people of the planet? What is the purpose of producing 'things'? To satisfy the needs of people -or- has the goal strangely become to 'expand the economy' and make profit? We are increadibly productive workers as a result of (technology) productivity improvements - why aren't people benefiting? Isnt the problems described here a natural product of a capitalist system? Competition Increases. Quality Decreases. (Price Decreases - irrelevant).
Matrox had a major nightmare with a set of their digital video cards (Matrox Studio) they released some time ago (believe it required NT 3.51 to run, so pretty old).
They did not appear to care then about releasing beta drivers and crap software onto an unwitting public.
Of course, I suppose the argument could be made that Matrox learned from that experience...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I'd say your post is much more trollish than the parent. :)
First, a computer does one thing. It rund programs. They can be audio, video, 2d3d design, internet browsers, etc, but they are all ust programs.
PCs are built to work in thousands of different configurations -- sound cards, modems, hard drives, programs, can all be interchanged/combined, and the PC is still supposed to work.
Unless you have a model I've never seen, this is not the case with the refrigerators. You turn them on, and they keep your food cold.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Oh yes, definitely. It's not the workers per se, it's not the need for "innovation", it's the process.
Yes, as someone pointed out, look at Honda. Why is it a best seller? Because even if _slightly_ more expensive, it's damn good and reliable.
It's not like Honda cars lack innovation, heck they're practically at the front!
And it's not like you can blame it on the union workers or whatever, because Honda churns out cars from US and Canada, and these are way more reliable and better initial build quality than cars churned out by, say, GM.
Personally, I use GNU make from the cygwin package to fire off an nmake session. It's a little hokey, but if you can send the build profile off to nmake, it works well. By itself, nmake is very painful to use.
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"Finally, perhaps a written test should be required before allowing the purchase of a computer."
No question! I also believe anyone who wants to drive a car should know how to do at least a brake job (including turning rotors/drums and bleeding the hydraulic system), perform a front end alignment and prove their competence at diagnosing common steering problems, show that they are able to mount and balance a tire, and generally do most maintenance tasks using no source of information other than the documentation supplied with the car when it was purchased new.
This would lead to much better computer code and more reliable hardware because a majority of people in the IT industry would no longer be able to drive and could concentrate on making their products better and easier to use.
It would also solve most of the traffic problems in Silicon Valley and, as a side effect, cut the accident rate and car insurance prices there by a huge amount.
Meanwhile, yeah, let's start a mandatory training program for computer and Internet users so that they can all diagnose their own problems and stop bothering tech support.
And I'll keep on driving my 1994 (reliable) Jeep Cherokee (since I used to fix cars professionally and have no problem keeping it up), and I'll keep on using my trailing-edge computers (a 500MHz Celeron does all I need), my one-generation-back Linux kernel and one-release-old Mandrake distro, and I will keep doing all my important writing in clunky, inelegant, feature-free NEdit because it may not be as cute as [your favorite word processor here] but has never crashed on me, not once, not ever, while I was typing and saving copy.
- Robin
Since we started doing this, our defect rate has decreased dramatically. The difference between before having the process and after having it is like night and day. Since we started using a good process, I have seldom worked overtime. Before we had the process, we would be working 60 to 80 hour weeks continuously, but the team as a whole was less productive than it is now.
I don't feel my "creativity" has been stifled. My creativity is now expressed elsewhere. Design is now heavily peer reviewed. Coding is reduced largely to a mechanical implementation of the design, and that's the way it should be. (And the code is peer reviewed, too).
To use a horrible business buzzword, it's a "win-win" situation. Our staff turnover is very low. I've been on the project for five years now, and I'm still happy. Had we carried on as we had before instituting the strict process that we have done, I doubt I would have stayed.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We already had a big software disaster - remember Y2K? Arguably one of the largest engineering "projects" in history, and its seems we got through it with nary a scratch. And who is most suprised of all... the engineers themselves. Most of us geeks expected at least a little bit of hell to break loose when the clock struck midnight on January 1st, even though we were the ones who apparently fixed the problem. I'm utterly shocked that things went as smoothly as they did, considering most Y2K repair work was probably horribly hacky. And have we matured much because of it? Nope.....
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
The cost difference is everything when it comes to quality control. One could hire thousands of dedicated testers to test Minesweeper, if people were paying $10M+ for each copy of it. At current software prices, that's just not possible.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
BS! I have a Powerbook G3. You still have to be careful what you install on it, cause it flakes out and crashes sometimes.
What caused me the most grief? Ahem...upgrading from MacOS 8.0 to MacOS 9.0. You'd think _that'd_ be tested thoroughly by Apple, right?
The point is that nearly all major software companies do _not_ have a good process for generating error free code.
And partially, that's our (the consumers) fault. Do you go out and buy the latest version of Microsoft Office, even though the only "improvements" are a whole whack of features you never use? Or
Do you think the general public would buy a new version that was advertised as "no new features, but we made it faster, smaller and cleaned up all the bugs!"
The car companies are under more pressure than software companies at this time. Their products can kill a person if they fail. Some cars are going to have steer and brake-by-wire (with no mechanical backup, as you see in many of today's higher-end cars) in a few years. If these systems fail, you're putting the driver, passengers and other people in danger. As a company, you put yourself in a position for many big lawsuits if you get the system (hardware, software, network) wrong. You had better bet that they are going to use a good process to make these things right, because finding out in the field (like you might with unnamed software companys' mass beta-level software distributions).
What scares me, however, is the interconnection of the different networks. Yes, there is a firewall between my engine's fuel injector, the brake system's network, the multimedia/communications network (*with* integrated cell phones -- cars that phone home when the airbags deploy are already out there). These systems have to be designed to be robust if something breaks, but they may also have to worry about attacks from outside. Good software design methodologies, like the upper levels of the CMM model described (but not named?) in the article, can help you get there. It's not a guarantee, but it definitely makes me more likely to trust that the cars on the road will operate correctly (to some definition of correctly).
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Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
Well, the article makes it pretty clear that India is shaping up to give the US software industry a wake-up call real soon now.
I can see the fnords!
Example: Ultima Online, the age of the Beta Testers. This is the longest age: starting from before Catskills was up, and still going...
You're right, but that's not necessarily the problem. Think about Windows 3.1 - its been around for what, 8 years now, so it must be nearly perfect, right? The problem is that the development focus in the tech industry is on the bleeding edge, and stuff thats more than one year or so off the bleeding edge gets virtually no attention. Sure, there are exceptions (the 2.1.x series Linux kernel comes to mind - Alan Cox is still releasing new versions, and even though the series in ~5 years old), but on the whole, the industry tends to lose interest in older tech, because the money is on the bleeding edge.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
"... and do that because we must make the impossible deadline, come hell or high water."
This is precisely the instruction that we recently received from a client. So in October and November, we pulled graveyard shifts and rattled up a gazillion lines of code to just get the features in, one way or another, buggy or not. More likely the former.
So now we have a bug list that runs to about five or six hundred bugs. Not too surprising, if you ask me, considering the size of the project and the insane rush to get all the coding done, but now all of a sudden they're hugely worried about quality, and have frozen all features until the bug list is significantly reduced. So they had to put off the deadline after all!
The cause of all these problems is the huge pressure to reduce time to market. You've got to get an edge on the other guy, and everybody's rushing ahead so frantically that you can only keep up by letting QA fall by the wayside. And the squeeze just keeps getting tigher and tighter, as if there's no limit that will ever be reached. But we've already reached it -- software quality has simply come up too short in too many products.
There is another way, you know, but too few vendors are willing to take the chance -- be a little later than the competition, but aggressively market your product as superior in quality. It might work, but who has enough confidence to try it?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Gee, you Apple zealots are funny. Apple puts out a defective product and you get hostile towards the ones who point it out.
Gee, Service Source lists a new part number for the front panel board.
Maybe that's because Apple knows that the original boards were garbage. No, it's just for some "added feature" right?
Could it be, you're one of the shitty AASPs that needs to be purged from the system?
If by shitty you mean "Annoyed by the fact that Apple is selling known defective products to my customers." I guess that the answer would be yes.
Yes, Apple solved the issue. No wonder they want to open their OWN stores..
Yes, if they open their own stores they can force the employees to sing the praises of Apple no matter how badly their screwing their loyal customers.
Apple and Sega have a long history of stranding their customers with useless products. Neither company will get another cent from me again.
I notice that you didn't touch the issue of the power buttons in the iMac DV or the Power Supply/Analog boards in the summer 2000 iMacs.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That's the way it is. I'm not saying that's the way it should be. Honestly it pisses me off. But the most I can do about it is spend extra $ and go for whomever has the product with the least faults. Unfortunately that means buying just about every competing item and testing it. I don't have that time. Very few people do. Those that do run sites like [H]ardOCP or whatever. And still there's nothing that's exceptional from a quality standpoint. It's pretty sad.
Actually, EA Sports (a big player in the Sports Games field) is located in Vancouver, Canada.
:-)
I remember hearing a while ago how Japanese companies are buying all the American companies. But guess who's buying the Japanese companies? The British.
The Australians dominated the Olympics. The British are taking over the corporate world. The Canadians are plotting a military assault. The Commonwealth will rise again!
My first computer was an SGI indy, that I bought used without a HD. I spent four months screwing around with it and finally got it to work. I then made the mistake of buying a compaq cheapo to do my homework on. Wotta joke. A month and a half after I got it, the NS processor literally went up in smoke. it burned a dime sized hole in the top and melted the cooling fan on the heatsink. When I took it in to get it fixed, the store told me I had to replace it with the same chip. I told them the damn thing wasn't in any book and I needed a real chip to do the things I needed to do, and they tried to sell me a k6-2 for $200 installed. I laughed in the poor schmucks face and went and got meself one for $85. put it in and a month later it wouldn't shut off except by a hard shutdown, and when I took it in for that, the jerks told me I voided the warranty. The bitch won't take an aftermarket vidcard, and I went through three nics before I found one that would work. cheap, cheap, cheap. I will never buy a production machine again. The bitch wont even run linux right. Lesson Learned.
-- Defenestrate Microsoft!
I can certainly relate to crappy hardware. I decided to get a Compaq from Best Buy because I am tired of maintaining my home hardware. First thing that wen was the network card. I didn't even realize it, since the diagnotic tool didn't give an error, so I thought it was a problem with my ISP. The guy from RoadRunner replaced the card and everything worked well. So I figure "That's not too bad. I'll just leave it like this." A week later the disk drive goes. Now I'm SOL, since my Mavica uses disks to store images (currently I'm using my laptop to save the images). I dont want to send my machine back because there's no guarantee that I'll get the same hard drive, and I have a lot of crap already installed on this one. I realy don't want to have to install it all again. At least there is a CD-RW, and, in the worst case, a network connection to my laptop and linux server for when I do backup. It's just such a pain in the ass.
-no broken link
Companies want someone to blame when software fails. They want to be reassured that their software is good. They pay thousands of dollars for this reassurance. Now, what's sounds more reassuring..software produced by a company used by 90% of the world, traded publicly..or software created by a few guys in their spare time for free. In the case of free software, they basically receive it with no guarantee it will work properly. Most companies will not gamble in this way. It's corporate culture, and that's bigger than most governments, much less the comparably puny "free software" movement.
Furthermore, most software companies arent going to bother porting their software to linux or developing for it. Why? Because of the linux culture. Linux culture is based around the GPL, which is about as business-friendly as communism.
That's right, the GPL is the licensing equivalent of Communism.
Now before you turn your ears (or eyes) off, realize the similarities between them. I'm not anti-free software, and i'm not anti-communist. They represent moral plateaus, and i think free software is excellent. But no company will ever base their product line, or even dedicate that many resources, to developing for a culture that's based around the GPL. It enforces that software must be free. Business is about making money. Therefore, something inherantly free, does not go well with the profit-needing business. This is why corel, adobe and other big names are dropping their linux programs. This is why companies like red hat are sliding into danger..investors have realized the fundamental flaw of combining making money (business) with something you cant legally make much money with.
So how does this all tie together? Well since big companies are going to barely support linux, if at all, other companies arent going to want to invest their critical systems in software that's unsupported by other big companies.
And that's the catch. Linux will always have it's place, as it should, but it will never dominate. And it's just downright dumb to base your business off it.
-
What I find more insidious, however, are the legal intricacies computer (and software) manufacturers employ to shield themselves from responsibility.
Anyone remember Hill vs. Gateway 2000?. In this case (I'm going from memory here), Gateway offered a 10th Anniversary Special computer to consumers that wasn't all it was advertised to be -- i.e. Gateway's ads said the speakers were "surround sound" and they weren't.
Mr. Hill took Gateway to court, and discovered, to his surprise, that the shrinkwrapped EULA inside the computer box prevented him from suing the company, regardless of their bad faith. Instead (according to the EULA) he was forced to submit to arbitration, which inherently negated any class action status for the thousands of other consumers who were blatantly defrauded by Gateway's false claims. Furthermore (due to the nature of arbitration), the verdict was kept secret, preventing anyone else who had been ripped off from benefiting from the arbiter's decision.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
I'd say on a typical HP or Compaq, you get as much performance boost from the re-install as you would doubling your RAM... which may explain why they're loaded that way
11*43+456^2
While I agree with you, this doesn't excuse the companies that produce crappy code or products. Certainly a computer will have problems after it has been modified, new software installed, etc. The problem is when you get a brand new computer, only use the hardware that came with it and you still have problems and crashes. That is unacceptable
This article essentially boils down to whining from a particularly clueless user about how she can't manage to get her computer to work.
(Bitch Bitch) Yeah, you know what. As a fairly technically competent user, that's pretty much it. I want my computer to work. But you know what since purchasing my computer from a well-known mail/phone/net order company, the damn thing often doesn't work.
First Day:
Monitor defective (sent back)
Since then
On 3rd Monitor (ok I spilled coke on one but don't tell them that)
My scanner died and after getting a new one, has started scanning poorly
The thing won't go into sleep mode (hasn't since the day i got it)
Fan makes a shit-load of noise now
Needed to replace memory 3 weeks ago
Likes to crash when i put a zip disk in my zip drive
Suddenly stopped turning on the other day (They sent me a new power adapter which didn't help...Also when I asked, do I have the plug in backwards? should i try it the other way..I got a yes... Luckily my computer didn't catch on fire)
Oh, and here's my bet. If it was the IRQ's and if the tech support just decided to send someone out there, I'll be it was because she was female. Seriosly, tech support people (often) treat women and female callers as if they're stupid. In the end anytime a female friend of mine has a problem I have to get on the phone and talk. (UGG!)
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Maybe I'm re-iterating something already said, but is it not true that the true mission critical (tanks, missiles, nukes, aegis, etc) system are written in a VERY old language (ADA)?
Is it not true that the stealth aircraft MUST work? Everytime, regardless of dates, times, or stupid-ass pilot input?
Some code IS bullet-proof, some code isn't even baby-proof. Maybe there *should* be a d/kloc rating available online SOMEWHERE. I'd be willing to start one, are you????
Just a thought.
Part of the problem is all the bleeding edge features being added to current software is not really being used. How many more features can be packed into a word processor? It's not just bleeding edge technology that is having problems. What about the new air traffic control system? Didn't a software bug destroy a rocket that was being launched in Russia? 22% average failure rate for personal computers is accepted. What happens when they start doing climate control for our houses or perhaps opening windows and doors? That was the point the professor from Carnagie Mellon made. I don't think the author called Japanese perfect. Sure the Playstation 2 had some bugs, but were they really that bad? I mean one bug let you enter a code to play other region DVDs. Not exactly a showstopper. I think you're doing a disservice to the legacy of Japanese influence here. You can attribute increasing chip yields to Japanese quality. Didn't American companies accept 50% yields in the early/mid 80s? I do agree with your bottom line, what I don't agree with is that the problems we're seeing with software quality is entirely related to pushing the edge.
Result: Napster. Result: indie music turning away from what was once the only access to media at all. Result: serious risk of losing the status quo and being forced to compete with totally unforeseen competitors on a basis of quality. It may never become priority one- marketing will be that- but it will have to be in there somewhere if there's enough competition.
By the same token, look at the software industry. The PC. DOS. Windows 3.1. Windows 95, 98, ME, and arguably an even lower quality/marketing ratio than the music industry.
Result: Linux, the continued survival of the Mac despite network effects, and again, serious risk of losing the status quo to competitors who just grit their teeth and _lose_ the 'first to market!' race in order to put out products that have a somewhat better chance of being lasting, useful values, the sort you get word-of-mouth on. You can't sell new versions of Linux every 16 months if the old versions stay perfectly good and useful and supported- but how many of you first heard about Linux through word of mouth?
Quality control gets dealt with- one way or another.
I work a computer store/isp/repair shop. We had someone bring a machine in once, about 3 years ago, that they had just purchased from Gateway. She was a nice older lady who didn't really know anything about computers and got confused by the tech support on the phone so she brought the machine to us. What we found inside was astonishing, the cards and the memory were just loose inside of the machine. I believe it was a video card and a sound card, just laying in the bottom of the case along with the memory.
It was all quite astonishing.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Actually, at the time you mention, 1993, Apple was just beginning to suffer a particularly bad quality control problem, which lasted over two years. CEO John Scully finally managed to get a handle on it, but he still got canned for it... well, for that and for still being around when Jobs came back.
I can see the fnords!
mistake #0 (you know techs start counting at 0)
was buying at future shop.
whenever i go in to pick up blank cd's or something, i see a salesmen helping a family out with a compaq with printer, scaner, and a pile of god knows whatelse. the facts are
1. salespeople are clueless
2. are paid on commision, so theyll sell you the kitchen sink
3. cost people more money then they need to spend to be able to send email and word process
i work in a computer store as a tech/sales and im amazed by the number of people who want to replace a computer that doesent work (wont boot) rather then fix it.
fixing it is usually a mater of reinstalling windows over itself and it works fine..
I know this is a troll, but i will bite.
First, a computer does one thing. It rund programs. They can be audio, video, 2d3d design, internet browsers, etc, but they are all ust programs.
Second, What can you or an average home user do on a PC that I can not on my Mac? I encode/listen to mp3s, edit digital video, WORK (graphic designer), play (UT, Diablo) and balance my checkbook/finances (Quicken).
Oh, wait, you mean I can not telnet, or run a website or some such? Like most users do anyway. Besides, with OS-X, I also have the tools to do this, should I desire.
Now, go away, troll.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
The whole Demming/Japan thing is about doing the same opperation in exactly the same way, time after time to produce the desired physical product. Sorry, but industrial CD production pretty much has this problem beat. And that's that's the only physical part of software "production". If you're doing exact repitition while coding, you're ether an idiot or you're paid by the line.
Whenever a programming task gets close to this level of repetition, someone writes a tool for it.
"The best example I have is from a History of Science class I took involved railroads. Americans would build many miles of track per day, at the expense of quality, as the tracks would break often, and sometimes they even ran them on top of the snow(!). When it would melt, the track would have to be rebuilt. The British, on the other hand, took their time and built tracks that would last. "
You haven't been to the UK recently I take it. A recent fatal crash near Hatfield when a train was de-railed by a cracked rail has seen a spate of speed restrictions and cancellations across the whole country. I heard that there were in-excess of 90 places that required the replacement of faulty rails. Maybe 90 places doesn't sound much when you consider how many thousands of miles of track their are, but they can be a major pain when they coincide with major routes, e.g. a normal 4 hr journey from London to Edinburgh taking more than 9 hours.
The author makes it sound as if all the software coming out of India rocks - but quite to the contrary, the developers I've worked with (over 100 now) from there are as close to retarded as I've ever worked with. One place I worked had a whole division over there because it was cheaper than here, and the code we saw from there... I can't even begin to explain how bad it was - but one of the smaller things was no error handling at all - if there was an error, just ignore it and the program would magically continue to run... I'm sure there are companies such as the ones that author points to that are fantastic - but I'm sure there are companies such as that in any country, even the states. I peronsally dread it when I hear we are going to be working with a group from India - not in any sort of racist or cultural elitist way, but just in that I've worked with so many bad coders from there - I'd love to see that change, but I haven't so far.- ------
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There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Companies don't make decisions: individuals do. Individuals who believe - often quite accurately - that the benefit they derive from making a decision that increases this quarter's profits by 75% will far exceed any harm done to a company of which they may well not even be an employee three years down the line. (Or, if they are an employee still, they may be in another department.)
Large business have no stake in thinking ahead that far, because all the stakeholders can take the money and run while it looks good.
Quality control is expensive. Just slap on a warranty and let the user test it for you.
I get problems opening a slashdot story when i have mod points. i browse -1, nested. and most of the time, there's mod boxes randomly spread out oall over the page.. in both ie 5.5, and netscape 4.76 :/
Yeah, but if you payed proper attention to quality control when you made the jam you wouldn't have to spend any time sorting out the bugs afterwards.
I can see the fnords!
Sorry if this sounds chauvinist or something, but, after reading most of my fellow /. contributors, I think I need to mention this: I've already noticed that Americans don't pay much attention about what is going on in Europe and prefer to think that the next big thing will come from an emerging country (typically India or China), or that, if it comes from a highly developped country (Japan), it will come from Asia anyway.
FYI, my American friends, India may be a serious threat, Japan may be a serious threat, but your most dangerous competitor is actually the old and boring world, aka "socialist" Western Europe, which is filled with excellent engineers and mighty investors, and where the quality standards are culturally higher than in the US. Ok, this is old news, but what recently changed is that Europeans made a pretty good job in learning from Americans a few things about business, while avoiding many of the bad ideas, and that the EU has progressively built a pretty well-designed economic zone, with a huge market and healthy competition between the different countries.
So, I know this doesn't sound as romantic, and I apologize for this, but please note that Cisco's most serious rival is probably Alcatel, Time-Warner's most serious rival is Vivendi-Universal, the cellular phones leaders are Scandinavian companies, the best performing car corporations these days are the Volkswagen and Renault groups, the leaders in video games are British and French, etc...
That makes me wonder about "closed system" games like Playstation or N64. Are the beta cycles on these things incredibly intense, or are the coder just that good? Or is it something inherent to the closed, proprietary nature of the platform that makes it easier to qrite bulletproof code (ie. a PC game has to support 3 different CPU types, dozens of video cards, input devices, sound cards, video modes, etc, whereas the feature set of a console is pretty much etched in stone)
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Pulled the tower out of the styro-foam, and heard "clunk". Sounded like an ISA card was loose
Speaking of "clunk"...
Bought a few system from TC Computers in 1997:
Machine #1: CPU (P2-266) loose in case, tethered only by CPU Fan cable.
Machine #2: Received a modem instead of a sound card (no onboard sound even).
{The Real Kicker: }
Machine #3: Case/Power Supply full of dust. Dust caked on fan blades. Obviously used.
Yeah, all problems were corrected but 0/3 fully functioning systems upon arrival is pretty bad. Also, while I undertand mistakes, selling me something in new condition that is obviously used is a sure way of making me shop somewhere else.
There are entirely too many opportunities for a third party to cause a computer to "break down" or become inoperable. As a software developer, who has (many times) caused Windows to hang because of errors in my code, I doubt that a user would be able to determine that it was my code, not their Microsoft, that caused the blue screen.
A computer owner who takes their monitor to a repair shop to find out it was hopelessly dead would report it to consumer affairs as "broken monitor" completely unaware that the "Quake Optimizer" their son downloaded had set a refresh rate too high for it to handle.
When a VCR can change it's OS to support recording your oven or refrigerator can be upgraded by your neighbor to reach absolute zero, I'll consider placing them in the same QA category as my computer.
Where quality is more important than new features, quality rules. Notice the author isn't complaining about bugs in her car's brake system.
Several years ago you would have never seen an article here about how bad tech support from one of the telcos-trying-to-be-an-ISP is: it would have been a given and not needed discussing.
Why? Principally because it would have been understood that /. readers all RTFM, understood TFM, and got collaborative help from newsgroups and maillists, not from calling the 1-800 number on the box of shrinkwrapped [whatever] that they'd just purchased at CompUSA.
Several years ago you would have never seen an article here about how bad consumer-level PC's were built because it would have been a given and not worth discussing.
Why? Principally because it would have been understood that /. readers probably did build their own boxes, or customized a stock box if they bought one, or could certainly fix/upgrade it as necessary (SEE: point above re: tech support..)
But not anymore.
In the last year /. has degenerated into one more consumerist, mass-market hangout, where (once again, IMNSHO..) the only thing that counts is the volume of posts, since this is the core commodity that the owners can show to the advertisers.
And so it goes...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Here is an example of a company that needs quality control Desert Devil
www.droppingdimes.com
"Make your software idiot-proof, and the world will build a better idiot."
Time to die, nerd-boy!
Since there are way too many deadlines !
"- No more "Word 97 for Dummies" books"
nah... there will always be stupid people in this world... no mater how smart you make a system someone will break it and blame someone else
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
There's a reason why NASA still uses computer equipment from 15 years ago - the new technology just doesn't handle the rigors of space. We all hunger for bigger better faster more, and rigorously tested product does not equal cutting edge. So suck it up and pay your $500 for 'guaranteed POS' or go dig your Commodore 64 out of the closet.
---- Just another spud server.
One hint to technicians and system admins; get regular quotes from a variety of vendors. This will keep them extremely honest and on the ball. If not, your soon at their mercy. You might experience shoddy assembly (I recieved and order for 12 complete systems, all without video cards) or non existant support or both.
Just today we took posession of a server and raid array, which we ordered and waited a few extra days to have the disks installed, and it came without disks installed. Now this vendor has to send a person out to install them. It's not that we can't but because we paid and expected them to be installed.
Most of all problems can be avoided
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I think the inherent problem here is that the majority of our technological products (just like software) has gotten much more complex. It would cost far more to do "perfect" Quality Assurance (QA) than it would to make money off the product. A company that doesn't make money goes out of business (or hope it gets bought out). Example, in 1979 the 8088 CPU had only 29,000 transistors in it and I'm sure only a handful of engineers had a hand in making/designing it. Only 10 years later, the 486 had 1.2 Million transistors!!! That's 41 times more transistors! That's a large jump in complexity. It makes me wonder how our computers run as well as they do. (it also makes me wonder how AMD stays in business charging only a few hundred per chip.) QA is a very important part of your business, but unfortunately, it's usually the first part that is skimped on. It's the state of capitalism, I guess.
... are not designed to work around quality control.
If you work in software, you want non-obvious bugs that are eventually found and require the $59.95 (or higher) upgrade version, or require all new purchases. These keep your revenue stream coming in for a long, long time, and let you technically get away with calling your release a 'new product' without actually changing many of the features (See Microsoft Office).
If hardware is your game, you want your hardware to cease to function after two to three years, right after the warranty runs out. That way, the customer has to take their computer into Ma and Pa's computer repair, and Ma and/or Pa has to try to fix it, and it turns out that the new video card for your computer needs a different bus, so you need a new motherboard, so you need a new processor, and you need faster ram, etc, and in the end you are screwed. Everyone in the industry benefits from everyone else making shoddy hardware. The customer is mad in the end, but what can (s)he do about it?
I worked field/bench service for 2 1/2 years, and had way too many of these types of problems to deal with. PCChips, Amptron, the now somewhat defunct Packard Bell, HP (pavilion series), Compaq (Presario series), and Acers were the biggest offenders. The Amptron and PCChips boards (which are from the same manufacturer) were the ones that we carried, because unless the customer asked for better, they wouldn't know the difference and sooner or later they'd be back. If they went to someone else because our hardware died, well, the chances were likely that a customer of another shop would come to us. Everyone juggled everyone else's customers, and in the end we all made a marginal profit off of screwing people perpetually.
I refuse to buy components that I don't have experience with now. I work in a QA department, with mostly industrial PCs, and of all that caught me off guard, the cheap SIS AGP video cards are actually pretty damn good for 2d uses. The obvious ones like ASUS and ABIT and 3Com and such stand out, and we get to really pound stuff. If you really want to know what to put in your PC, don't ask your friendly neighbourhood service technician, ask someone who works QA with servers and high end workstations. That way, you'll get a real answer.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
It is interesting that the main objection that comes up when there are talks about Quality in software is that computer programs are too complicated, well, building a skyscraper is IMHO just as complicated, but if the Empire State Building falls down, you can't just release Empire State Building Service Pack 2, can you ?
IMHO the main problem is that the discipline of creating computer programs is still very 'new' compared to most of the others (architecture etc.) and after it will mature a bit more, everything will be just fine.
Many (bad) programmers complain that QA stifles their creativity, now I wonder how many city planners would use the same excuse (no, really, multiplexing sewage with water in the same pipes is better, since it will take up less space. What do you mean I can't do that ? You are infringing on my creativity !)
-- the cake is a lie
Corporate mentality is to be the "first to market", and the suits make impossible deadline promises to customers and stockholders without having any knowledge of the product, how it works, how long it takes to build it, or the status of the current build.
Half the problem with today's corporate world is that the SUITS never "worked their way up the ladder", so they have no CLUE on how their business model operates. I've seen so many executives shoot themselves in the foot making foolish decisions because they have no idea about their corporate work model, and then take their aggression/stress/frustration out on the IT people because they didn't meet the impossible deadline that HE had promised to some customer...
[Connection closed by foreign host]
The complete cluelessness regarding quality assurance is pretty widespread. Heck, even when you have billions to throw at it like certain big companies, the slacker attitude is pretty hard to get around.
so what do you expect when you have companies who do not have billions to throw around? Their business plans will not have things like QA built into them. Maube just a lick and a promise. When it does raise it's ugly head, the bean counter types scream and foam at the mouth. By then, it is way way way too late to stem the leak of cash. Who wants to double their estimates of development costs?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems
While certainly all us programmers should be reading it, much of the material is accessible to anyone who knows how to use a computer, and so really should be read by anyone who uses computers for anything of importance or makes policy decisions that involve computers.
While the complexity of todays software systems make it unlikely that we'll ever have truly bug-free software, the situation can be a lot better than it is today. One thing that's needed is for the public to wake up and demand that software companies take responsiblity for their products, and to understand that they're being ripped off.
Someone who's working towards that end is Mark Minasi, the author of the book The Software Conspiracy:
Also see my own essay The Cross-Platform Manifesto: The Cross-Platform Manifesto was really an early attempt at collecting some thoughts on the subject of how we could use cross-platform application frameworks to promote a better software industry and make life better for developers and end users. My much briefer and I think better stated discussion of this is found on the ZooLib at Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles.Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
No question about the complexity of the configurations out there today. I've been saying the same thing for years but there was always someone who would come back with the same question:
"What's Apple's excuse then? Why does my stock PowerMac with nothing but Apple Hardware and Apple software consistently crash for no apparent reason?"
You know what? It's a great question. Yes, it's near impossible to test all of the possible configs out there for the PC. But Apple controls what goes into their base systems and they code the OS, yet it's still crash prone.
I can think of another quality control problem with the line of PowerBooks that melted down. I'm sure that there are several more (and I'm sure someone will post them too) but my point is, and I'm picking on Apple because they're as American as apple pie (lame pun intended), that here is a manufacturer who controls almost every aspect of what they ship from the ground up and they still have serious problems shiping a low defect product.
I have to agree with the author of the article for the most part: the corps don't care so long as their stock is on the rise.
To the Mac fans out there: please don't take this as a flame against Apple. It's not. You should be ticked off everytime your Finder bombs out. I think Apple is a typical example of what the author is griping about. I'm sure there are many others.
see here.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Look here, folks, this is why rampant capitalism doesn't work well. It's too bad the stupid people who make money for the sake of making money will find some way to dodge the next recession. Here's to a crash!
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Apart from nmake, you can call Visual Studio from the command line to do building. That's how we've got it set up here. Seems to work.
Do you really think that the parts in cars are really any different? After market I get a muffler from Midas, brakes from Meinke, Air Filter and Oil change from Jiffy lube, new tires from Goodyear, and new spark plugs from Firestone. I might do this over the course of a couple years, but I don't expect to find out that my spark plugs are incompatible with my air filter. A cpu is useless without a MOBO, storage device of some sort, and memory. There is no excuse for manufacturers not to be testing thier components against other manufacturers. If QA does not do this, then it is a farce.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
First up, Acer sucks no matter where you buy it from. My Acros was the most unreliable piece of sh__ i ever used - and my previous machines were free hand me down CLONES. No names, no manuals, they were put together from scraps.
Second, most people choose to buy than fix because it is too difficult to fix. Most new windows computers come with the recovery disk crap, and some choice ones with no instructions(or cd instructions). A first time user will not go looking for a recovery CD, and most users do not know they exist - in my experience.
And each company produces their own cd, which may or may not be tailored to the specific machine. Then there is the problem with booting CDs, and finding out if your computer can do it. There is also a really big problem if the CD is lost. No CD driver.
I think Windows on CDROMs and recovery disks, have made installing windows too difficult. There is also a problem with a partially bad system, e.g. sound driver screws up ocassionally - you leave it because you don't want to have a non working system.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
The computer salespeople at Future Shop shouldn't be your one stop center for advice on how good a computer is.
A friend of mine applied for a job there, they turned him down because he knew too much about computers, basically he knew the crap systems they sell are just that, crap.
You want a good and reliable machine, build one, find an OEM shop close to you or order online, use reliable and brand name parts (ie, NO ZOLTRIX!), research on usenet before buying, see what trouble others may have. It takes a little longer but you pay less and have something you can be proud of as well, not some cloned clunker.
These days building an ATX is easy, our office manager is looking at getting a new computer, I gave her a list of parts, she plans on buying those and then putting it together herself. Of course I will lend a hand where needed but I really think she'll be able to pull it off on her own.
Anyone who simply drops by the local Future Shop, listens to a salesman for advice and gets stuck with a lemmon deserves it, those stores pray on average Joe consumer who'll believe anything the salesman tells them, most of his recommendations are made to up his commissions.
Take it from someone who walks into Future Shop and is purposely ignored by the sales people until I ask for something, after a while they figure out you know more than them and leave you alone to browse. I buy the odd part from them but I'd never grab an entire computer off the shelf.
What the hell are you talking about ? Your comments are superfically sensible, but on reflection, utterly insane.
....
> But creativity isn't necessary here. Just implement the function that's needed.
If it's the same function, then it doesn't need to be implemented at all, you just use it again.
If it's slightly different, then the common patterns need to be identified and factored out. Any time you write a new function you need to be creative, otherwise it doesn't need to be written at all. If you're writing a lot of similar functions, then you almost certainly haven't factored out the common stuff, which means that the code is longer and more bug prone than otherwise.
Software should not be comparable to production line work when replication is free. The fact that it is indicates part of the problem.
There is an equivalent to production line programming, but only by crappy coders. Good quality software is inherently creative - a lot of the creativity goes into finding ways to simplify, minimize, and increase flexibility, reuseability, generate good regression suites etc.
> The fact that Chennai's Advanced Information Systems company has achieved the astonishingly low 0.05 per kloc defect rate, and that 22 of the 28 companies with a SEI Level 5 cert are in India, demonstrates
It demonstrates nothing except that this stupid process has got fuck all to do with producing good quality software. Where does good software come from - more than anywhere it comes from start up organisations who are at "level 1" on the Humphries scale, or from open source developers who would also register at "level 1". The larger and more tightly managed software organisations become, the worse their software. This is no accident - it's because the focus on process results in the actual product being forgotten. Level 1 works, level 5, works, levels 2,3,4 produce nothing of value.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Actually, VCRs, TVs, et al. use a LOT of different components. A TV will probably use amplifiers, tuners, a tube, microprocessor, power supply regulator, etc. each from a different company, much like a computer. And, the vast majority of computer users keep their computers as delivered from the factory and don't replace components.
From your reasoning, all these products you described are Tower of Babels. I think computers could be much better. Have you met some of the guys that call themselves test "engineers"? Some of them are professional but way too many only know how to run Excel scripts someone else wrote for them.
As if that will stop us!? Haw-haw-haw!! Think again, fool!
Time to die, nerd-boy!
This is so true. All of my early projects were ones that I had to maintain. It made me very cautious and careful. I have radical, innovative designs for things, but they're radical innovative designs that I've carefully thought through every implication of.
My software is not defect free, but it doesn't have many. In fact, most of them are caught by me in unit testing by assert failures.
If I succumbed (and I seem incapable of doing so) to the pressure every company I've worked for puts on me to produce software extremely quickly, I'd have made very buggy, crashprone software.
One of the reasons I think Open Source software is often good in the reliability arena is the lack of pressure to produce now! now! now!
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Gaming, and its interaction with video drivers (in particular), could definitely use more Q&A.
It's gotten to the point where users may need to keep around different versions of video drivers for different games due to various incompatibilities of uncertain nature.
Games are also usually, it seems, released with obvious, often rather drastic, bugs. I don't have to have the CC2:ABTF source in order to notice that AI-controlled 60mm mortars should NOT be able to reliably land rounds on the heads of individual men running towards the mortar crew, at 50m and closing. I don't have to spend weeks beta-testing HOMM3:ROE to notice the fifth-miscellaneous-artifact bug that was introduced in a patch. It was clear in the original SMAC that the AI could lob planet-busting missiles from infinite range. And so forth.
At least some developers are darn good about soliciting feedback on boards, and producing solutions. But not enough...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Much agreed. Honda is a great example of how quality assurance and checking is simply superior in Japan, and how their products do not lag behind US products anywhere near the degree reflected in the article.
:) I still *love* the car (and it is in better condition than a friend's 1998 Kia Sephia, and she is very gentle with her car), but the mechanics of any 12-year-old vehicle that has been blatantly abused (but i had fun abusing it!) are going to become substandard.
I have an '88 Honda Civic that i getting retired this month. It's been running hard (and i mean HARD) for the last 12 years, with only the expected maintenance. I managed to snap the axles, crack the radiator, and flood the car, but that's because i'm an absolutely insane driver.
Its replacement is an Acura Integra, which is another Honda vehicle. Obviously, you know why - you brought up the relation in the first place... It's just raw quality. The consumers that choose to spend a little bit (and it's normally a VERY little bit) more money for a higher quality product have a much lower rate of problems.
In a commercial environment, You get what you pay for. Linux and most open-source software "goes against" this cliche, but there are other factors governing its success.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
One of the articles other analogies was that airplanes are also very complicated pieces of equipment and they don't fail with anywhere near the regularity that computers do. This IMO is a fairly valid point despite the cost differences.
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
This is a great argument for Open Source. With these closed solutions, even the best of us have trouble figuring out why the ( windows) box freezes at random. All the diagnostic tools in the world won't help you when your computer freezes 50 seconds, 2 minutes, or 3 hours after boot when you haven't even touched the keyboard or mouse.
We have quite a bit of information on hardware manufacturing for a specific product. Even buggy firmware becomes known.
It's the OS itself is difficult, though. The precompiled, closed-source binaries are what this article is really talking about. Sure there is poorly-designed Open Source programs, but it can be audited and fixed or replaced.
When one Open Source project is quite poorly written, another one pops up to replace it.
anyway,
rhadc
rant:What's more galling is the amount of time you waste on hold being forced to listen to someone else's appalling taste in Adult Orientated Rock (or, as I faced today, 101 Christmas Hits from groups that should have been strangled at birth), when all you want to do is tell them you need to swap the graphics card because its knackered.
Then, when you finally get through, you have to go through a tedious process of diagnosing the fault you've already diagnosed, even though the first thing you did was explain why it was the graphics card that needed replacing. (The second thing was to explain to the person at the other end of the phone that the 'keyboard' is that big grey flat thing infront of them with all the buttons on.)
Quality control of the 'technical support' staff wouldn't go amiss either.
caveat:It's not the poor guy on the end of the phone's fault either - the companies don't want to invest in training them up to do thier job properly. Poor sods, I think it must be one of the most soul destroying things to have to do day in, day out.
FACT - to most people, computers and networking are 'magic'
I'm not saying that some stricter QA methods aren't necessary in some computer industries (gaming!), but you always have to look at who's doing the complaining...I had one guy call me and tell me he couldn't get his web browser or his email to work over his phone line. Of course, he just connected the phone line to the computer...he didn't bother to log on to his ISP... -Demonix
when all is said and done, all a man has left are his blades and his honor.
Quality control has interesting problems in the computer industry. The issue is this, what happens if something breaks? In the case of a standard PC, not much. You lose time and lose money but in the end no one is hurt or dies. Plus with the companies declaring that they aren't liable for the reliability of their products in their licensing, nothing can be done to make them liable for the cost of this lost time and money. Hence the computer industry isn't changing, especially sice consumers have aquired a tolerance for Windows crashing occasionally. Some sort of large scale legal argument for making software and hardware companies liable for their work might be nice though.
Also comparing a computer to a VCR is a false comparison. In terms of equipment and design, a computer is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a VCR with significantly more and more complex moving parts like the various components of the disk drives. The truth is that computers are assembled by computer companies but the parts are much more frequently built by someone else down the line. If a part breaks it is more likely its manufacturers fault not Dells. This is also not quite true for VCRs or toaster ovens.
I also find it interesting that the author spends most of the last page of the article complaining about his Dell laptop and how crappy their tech support was. I think I'm seeing his personal motivation for this piece. Nice to see someone scratching his itch.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
until the buggy software actually kills someone. It is unfortunate but true that engineering disasters forced engineering fields to mature. But as software is pushed into more and more life critical roles (medical, aeronautical, automotive)
Software Engineering as a discipline has to be taken more seriously and good engineering practices as well. There is a big difference between a carpenter and a Civil Engineer, just as there is a huge diference between a programmer (or coder) and a Software Engineer.
I sincerely hope India does drive many US software out of business. Only through pain will the lesson s be learned.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
A computer is something that accomplishes 100's of task so natrually it would need more maintanance than products that only accomplish one... Not sure if there is any point to reading the article any further after a statement like that.
A computer, when you get down to brass tacks, still only does one task - crunch numbers and give you the results. The amount of maintenance is related to the number of components and the failure rates of those components. While the former might not be controllable, the latter is to a large degree.
I think the whole point of the article, actually, is that it is a matter of careful, methodical design. There are still brands of TVs 60 years after its invention, for example, that fail 22-25 percent of the time, according to Consumer Reports. What's appalling is that 22% is the industry average for computer failures.
If you look at some of the other categories, you will see the exact same process occurred for them as the author predicts for computers. TVs, VCRs, other personal electronics, automobiles - all were American-dominated industries until they got lazy and sloppy. Then some other nation's industry, more intent on improving both price and quality, ate their lunch. As the article points out, it will probably be Japan in hardware, and India in software. The real question is, will it take 20 years for the U.S. computer industry to recover like it did for so many others?
Right...
very concerned about maintaining our high standards of software quality control.
Sincerely,
Steve Ballmer, President-Vice
Microcrap Corporation
This is nonsense. Any industry that releases new generations of every more complex products every one and a half years or shorter is bound to be riddled with bugs and flaws. Flaws are especially prevalent if the product uses lots of untested new technologies.
Japanese perfection? To us it may look that way, but for many of brand spanking new products released in Japan, they are hardly error free. Often before a Japanese company sells to the foreign market, they will release it domestically for over a year to try to work out the bugs. An example: The Playstation 2 release in Japan was full of flaws. By the time a Japanese product gets to North America or Europe engineers will have found and fixed most of the most glaring errors in the design and manufacturing process.
Generally every new technology will have flaws as everyone gets used to the new tech and while we refine the manufacturing process from the lab to the factory floor, such as 0.13-micron lithography. Today >1GHz CPUs have small yields, in a year the yields and reliability of these chips will be far higher as the technicians tweak the manufacturing product. Just the same way as we can build a 100 MHz today with almost 100% yield.
The bottom line is: If you want perfection and something that is incredibly reliable, you as a rule cannot get bleeding edge equipment.
Have you patented your Hot Grits today?
Its pretty pathetic if a company's rationale for not having QC is to cut costs. That to me seems more of a lack of responsibility. If the company truly believed in their product - they'd have the sense to make sure it works before it heads out the door to the market. I'd hate to see the almighty buck override pride in our work.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Compare that to the tape deck I worked on from a few years ago. I open it up, and it's basically one custom-made IC attached to a cheap motor and a few flimsy metal parts. It's not just that unit, either, practically everything you buy anymore short of the very high-end is like that. It's actually sort of ironic that they're advertising the "new" 19 inch width of VCR's as a feature, when in fact the total amount of space used within one of those cases is about 10 cubic inches.
Bring back the good old days, when things worked, and when they broke, at least replacement components existed!
Well, at least some of /.'s readers are programmers, EEs, sysadmins and the like. And as someone in that group, I'm interested in the state of the software industry. Mostly how it needs to be cleansed by purifying fire. But I digress.
The fact is: software development takes time. Lots of it. And it takes more time than even the designers and programmers themselves expect. Is there a market for almost perfect, expensive products that do not ship before they are tested sufficiently? No, because the users wants the software for a task or problem now - he does not want to wait nor does he want to pay astronomous amounts of money for it. The whole marketing process really relies on this simple principle: sell it. At this point I totally agree with the author of the article, but the ones to blame are not the techies, but the users and the sales managers. They decide about the features and when the product should be available. Techies can only match these conditions by producing half-finished, roughly tested software - sorry about that!
As a tech support agent, you of all people should know that your last sentence is completely false. The user, having been burned by cheap hardware, will call every tech support number they recieved with anything they own, starting with the free, 800 numbers, then the free, area-code+ph number, and then finally to the ones they have to "pay for" support on. When noone can help them or fix their problem they take it to some 3 bit computer repair shop where the repairman demonizes everyone from their case manufacturer to their ISP, sells them the part they should have gotten to begin with at a 500% markup, and then everyone is relatively happy.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
The author in this article talks about "Japanese perfection" and harps on a few of India's software houses having less then .05 defects per 1000 lines of code.
I have personal experience proving that the latter example is utterly false. Work we've contracted out to India has returned in an appalling state, and, in many cases, was rendered totally useless. It's my opinion that the writer of the original article is a bit too imbued with the "Asians do a thorough job" myth when the truth is really "Asians (in fact any non-Americans or non-Europeans) do a cheaper job" is more the truth.
PHBs & industry "consultants" know that the latter is true and so perpetuate the myth of the former to tone down the risks presented by the latter. Risks that make "proposals" look less watertight.
So the only question in my mind is, who will be the next Japan?
Who says it has to be a country? It may be just a development process, one that we happen to know and love well (hint, hint). After all, haven't a few products produced by that process beaten the tar out of buggy products produced by a certain unnamed company?
Then again, it might be something else too :)
I switched from a TNT2 card to a G400 card once. I've never had so many problems with a card in my life. I ended up having to rebuild the entire system, just to switch back to my TNT2 card. The thing I have to say about Matrox is that they have very *responsive* tech support. The responded quickly to my questions with many different patches and drivers and bios upgrades. None of them worked right, so I wouldn't say tech support was effective. The best out there is Nvidia, really. Great cards, great drivers.
It seems to me that the writer of that article was venting his personal frustrations as much as he was presenting facts. It wasn't necessary for him to mention Dell specifically in his rant about 'missing work time'.
;)
Another to be considered is the Windoze factor. I rarely have any problems with Linux software, but the Blue Screen of Death is a regular occurence on my parents' machine. The problem he mentions with 1/4 of laptops going down in a year surely has something to do with the fact most of those machines run Win9x. Just another ringing endorsement for our favourite OS
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
You mean the strategy of "charge as much as possible and deliver as little as you can get away with?" Yeah - and the market has come to accept it, too. I can remember the 70's, when Japanese auto imports began to claim more and more of the market. People were amazed at how much car they could get, and how reliable they were, for the price. The American consumer was unused to such value.
We still are. But then again, we have access to some of the best bargains on the planet. There aren't many other places where a consumer can get as much for their dollar (or ruble or ecu or yuan) as we do. Sure, most "durable goods" aren't as durable as they should be. Maybe our electronic gizmos deliver function, but suffer flaws in the interface, utility, workmanship and/or materials. But at least we have access to them.
After the discussion of the influence Japan had on Detroit, it should come as no surprise that of all the commodities introduced since the industrial revolution, the auto, and its ancillary products, are the only things where the US consumer gets a real value for his money. Got $10k? If you shop smart, you can buy a car that will run reliably for more than 10 years, at over 25 mpg, with average annual maintenance costs of just a few hundred a year. That's a deal!
Need gas? It's the cheapest anywhere in the world except for places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Auto services? At $40/year, AAA Membership is one of the best bargains in America. In very few other countries can an individual own and operate a car for such a small fraction of his income. The only better value an American will find is in pre-industrial products: food and apparel, primarily.
But consider this: In most places on this globe, people spend more of their income on sustenance than we Americans spend on our autos.
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
I can see the fnords!
I took a class on Software Project Management from Prof. Don Remer, and one of the things he talked about was how Sony has done Six Sigma for their manufacturing and design processes. They look at why and where things break, and fix them. It's a process of continuous improvement, not just some big push to get all the bugs out of a design. You're going to miss some bugs anyway, and if you fix them afterwards, the cost is huge. Anyway, according to him, Sony no longer turns on the TVs coming off the assembly line to see if they work. Believe it or not, this is a sign of good process.
The reason is that they have put a lot of effort into making sure their development process is good and it results in a refined manufacturing process. They don't turn on the TVs because they don't have to! The failure rate is so low that it costs more to test than to fix the one in a million (give or take an order of magnitude) that don't work. Software ain't got nothin' on that.
Well, unless you count all the times software is shipped without any testing, but that's for a different reason....
Walt
If you're interested in the history of the downfall of the US auto industry, check out 'The Reckoning' by David Halberstam.. (NYT requires login,
And keep in mind that the auto industry's huge problems regarding responding to the foreign challenge were largely installed plant, static management and unionized workforces. Software has none of these, and as a result, is poised to be able to turn 'on a dime' and fix its problems should it become necessary.
I don't think the software industry will undergo anything comparable to the fall of the auto industry, but it will definitely continue to be volatile.
Your Working Boy,
The funniest thing just happened to me. As i was reading the title of this article thenews on the tv started to talk about the Firestone recall and that some of the tires that were not reacallec should have been and that the reason they didn't recalll them was because of simple economics. Most companies are penny wise and pund foolish. This i think comes from the simple problem that they need to think of the future in terms of quarters. They want to save as much as they can in the present so that the sheets look good at the end of the quarter. Another thing with computer equipment becoming crappier is that the cycle of computers is beoming longer so an older computer will stay in use longer and the owner will not need to upgrade as soon. This is happening because the needs of computer users are being met by what was available before and not too many programs keep pushing the need for bigger faster computers. Sure Quake and what not do but not everyone is a video game player. For example I know a 71 year old man who bought his first computer recently. all he uses it for is for email, some web browsing and for word processing. Im prety sure that his laptop can do those tasks well enough that unless he begins to want to do something else besides these tasks he will never have to upgrade. So if people don't have to upgrade whatr do you do? you make them crappy so they have to replace them. The crappy materials will inflate your quarterly earnings and the crappy materials will shorten the upgrade-replace cycle.
Uh...
Let's take a step back here, and analyze what this article is really about. The writer had a problem with two modems and a printer driver--but bitched until she got somebody to come on-site to replace the motherboard and the entire printer. Her solution to these problems is to cite examples of Indian enthusiasm for software engineering.
There's just one little problem--software engineering has ZIP to do with the problems this not-quite-up-to-speed writer had. Her modem problems? I'd bet money she had IRQ conflicts, but the tech on the phone couldn't walk her through fixing them. The simple solution was to send a human out there--hence, replace the motherboard. The real solution: a legacy-free box that connects a modem without hardware interrupts. Her printer driver problems? Yes--there are crappy drivers. That's a marketing problem. But a printer driver problem is not solved by shipping a new printer--and for an allegedly experienced computer journalist to have to wait months for a CD-ROM to arrive with a printer driver (what--she couldn't find how to download a LaserJet driver from www.hp.com?) is simply laughable.
I'm a big believer in software engineering. But I'm also a big believer in quality journalism--and this article most definitely isn't quality journalism at all. This article essentially boils down to whining from a particularly clueless user about how she can't manage to get her computer to work. The solution she suggests--software engineering--has nothing to do with the problem. All the software engineering in the world isn't going to solve her IRQ problems with her modem--a USB port will. The best software engineering in the world may produce the best printer driver in the world--but printers will still need drivers. Updating a printer driver will always require replacing the driver--not the printer.
Bottom line: the article is a waste of time.
In retrospect I probably should've realized there were two more pages to the article before I posted that. :-)
kugano
Traditional Quality Control theories use cost reduction as their justification. Six Sigma is a particularly popular quality system at moment and cost reduction is very central to it.
Icebox
Seriously I have to open it up so often now I don't even put the screws back in.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The article makes a number of excellent points. It is hard to answer the question: How much more would I be willing to pay to get something that actually is very likely to work correctly the first time? How much more am I willing to pay for something that will last? This is cost is of course going to vary significantly from person to person, but in general I think that people tend to underestimate the value of things working Right the First Time and Actually Lasting. Saving $50 by getting a cheaper brand of hard drive is great, but if one out of 20 hard drives that you get has a defect that takes more than an hour to diagnose and fix, then you have to factor in the cost of sorting out the problem and it may longer be not such a bargain.
That being said, the guide for manufacturers of products is the marketplace and what everyone else is doing. Why risk being late to market by actually doing a thorough job when you know that your competitors are not going to worry about high quality? Who wants to be the better product that didn't catch on? These are issues for all manufacturers, not just software, of course. And there have been too many instances of better-engineered, higher-quality products that did not suceed in the market for companies to err on the side of caution. I don't think you have to look hard to find very popular, very sucessful, inferior products in the computer world...
The article is overly critical and I believe takes some remarks by Guy Kawasaki out-of-context. He often speaks in kind of ``commencement speech" mode (and does in fact give commencement speeches) so I suspect his comments about just getting something out the door were meant to encourage the creative spirit, rather than be a guideline for how much to focus on quality in the software industry. You can't blame him when he says ``Do not believe that the first version has to be perfect. If the software industry were honest, they would tell you the algorithm is: ship, then test." That does summarize the attitude of the software industry, but they are not doing it because Guy Kawasaki told them to do it, but instead because that is what is economically most sensible.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
ATI's drivers are almost always immature at shipping.
I've just spent a couple of minutes perusing a "tech support" horror stories site (www.techcomedy.com) mentioned in a different article today. There seems to be a tremendous disconnect between what most people use their computer's for and what they are actually buying.
I think most people need appliances not computers. One completely self-contained box for handling email (maybe through their television). A completly separate word-processing box with a built-in printer.
In other words, the interaction of all the various components makes the computer much less stable than it needs to be for most uses. This is a programming/design problem, of course, but it is also a marketting problem, an advertising problem, and, perhaps most importantly, a user problem.
Finally, perhaps a written test should be required before allowing the purchase of a computer.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
(snip)
Actually, you're a little off on that... Perhaps one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the NY skyline, the Citibank building, has just such a flaw in it. The way it was originally designed, if it had encountered winds over 78mph it was at serious risk of collapes (due to poor design of the steel framework, IIRC). Shortly after it was finished, and a rare hurricane was headed towards NYC a the builder secretly replace and/or modified many beams (bolting them instead of welding them), essentially providing a "service pack".
One of the lessons I remember from an engineering class. More information is available here.
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Well heck, it compiles... lets ship it.
I think you missed the point. You expect the refrigirator to keep your food cold... How many things do you expect a computer to do? Maybe if you want something simple you should buy a mac. However if you want something to do everything and anything under the sun there are always going to be conflicts and problems.
The problems, at least for the manufacturing companies I've been involved with, occur when the sales force tells upper management that they think they can sell 5000 widgets next month. Management goes to the manufacturing people and informs them that they must increae their production of widgets but must be careful not to spend too much money. The production lines fire up and start cranking out widgets. Unfortunately, quality was not foremost in the minds of the people who designed the production line (capacity was) so many of the widgets have defects. The Quality people start catching defects and they decide to either make some changes to the process or to start rejecting a few widgets. Manufacturing goes to management and cries a lot about how the Quality people are causing them to exceed their budget by scrapping widgets. Management learns that if the Quality people keep scrapping widgets at the present rate, no one is going to make any money this month, thus they lower their standards for what constitutes a good widget.
This can be applied to virtually any process, software development included. People are short sighted. They want immediate satisfaction, particularly in the tech industry.
Icebox
I've worked for Apple, Compaq, and IBM authorized warranty repair centers over the years. I have to say that Compaq is the worst. It has even gotten to the point when someone will call and say "I have a Compaq that needs warranty service." and we'd respond "Broken Presario huh?". We were right about 90% of the time.
Apple has recently been running a close second. The new iMacs, the summer 2000 and the earlier iMac DVs were plagued by power problems. The early iMac DV has a design flaw which causes the power button to become stuck so that it can't reliably be powered up when it's pushed. The summer 2000 models have been blowing power/analog boards like nobody's business. I have personally done more power/analog board replacements than I care to remember. Lastly the PMG4s have a problem with the front panel board. This can appear to be a power supple problem, you put in a new power supply and guess what? Problem still exists. A $0.50 board is defective in lots of these machines.
Apple & Compaq have to know that there is a problem with these machines, but still they do nothing about it. Instead of going through the expense of a recall, they just fix them as the blow out. I think that's shitty. Some people depend on these things to make a living and when your machine is down for a week because of a flaw that they know about, Apple & Compaq abdicate any responsibility for the lost income.
I think that's dirty, they shouldn't treat customers like that.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
When was the last time I called tech support?
I can't really even remember.
When/what was the last computer I bought?
A 1991 GW2K 80386 that's running RHL 5.2 at home right this very moment as I type this. (I'm not *typing* on the 386 - I'm at work..)
Every computer I've had since that one, I've built from parts.
C'mon guys: is this "News for Nerds" or pap for cyber-consumers?
Make up your minds...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
As for SEIs procedures, some professors have begun teaching them at even the lowest level CS courses here at CMU. A friend of mine had one of those professors. Teaching quality is important, but she should have taught the class how to program first.
And finally, I did QA for the software division of a company last year. It was actually kinda fun: click until it breaks, then figure out why; or look at the spec, look at the screen, what doesn't match? It's amazing how many bugs I found.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
In 1996, I bought an extremely overpriced Acer Aspire from Future Shop in Moncton, NB, Canada.
The salesman told me that the New Cyrix 6x86's were great, so I bought it, and took it home. (mistake number 1, although, I never had trouble with the chip, other than being extremely slow).
Pulled the tower out of the styro-foam, and heard "clunk". Sounded like an ISA card was loose or something. Took the machine back to Future Shop, and they gave me another machine. Took that machine home, BSOD'd on the first boot, and I kept getting BSODs. Called Acer tech support, waited for 45 minutes on hold, got a tech who barely spoke english, explained the problem, and he declared that the RAM in my machine was bad. Gave me a number to call to have it replaced. Called the number, the repair shop told me that it would be up to 2 weeks before I could have the machine I've never used fixed, so I took it back to Future Shop, and had it replaced after arguing with the sales manager.
So, I'm on machine 3, which is working alright, but I notice that the hard drive is incredibly slow, so next time I'm in the store (a week later), I mention that to the salesman, and he tells me "oh yeah, the Acer techs were in here earlier this week, and they did some stuff to the hard drives. Bring your machine in, and I'll switch you for a good one." Machine number 4.
6 months later, my CDRom fails.. I sold the machine after having the CDRom fixed.
Needless to say, I think twice before buying Acer, now.
That wasn't a troll, moron.
--------
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
And how, pray tell, do you know this? Sounds like you're just spouting the old saw from the anti-communist propaganda that people here in the US seem to somehow regard as the truth, without ever questioning whether or not we've been lied to about these things.- ----------------
----------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
Hey, I'm one of those test engineers at a big (OK, huge) hardware manufacturer, and I can tell you we DO look for root cause here when we encounter failures. And when we find them we fix them, and we at least try to make systemic changes so the same failure can't happen again. And we pay for it in time-to-market, big time. We aren't the first out the door for ANYTHING except products nobody's ever thought of besides us. But our reputation for quality is considered a company asset, (one that gets us a price premium) so we act to protect it.
Companies that haven't developed a reputation yet need to compete on some other basis, and they usually start with price which means using lower-quality parts AND reducing testing. Note that the really cheap products usually come along after the first-movers have created a market. Once this hypothetical cheap manufacturer has a market toehold they can start competing by getting products out sooner. Quality still isn't on the radar. You hope that once this company has a semi-secure position that it will START going for quality, but of course not all do. But that's the only way to grow beyond a certain size, at least in hardware manufacturing.
One of our big problems comes in validation testing after we know our product works on its own. There's such an infinity of other products out there that we have to pick a subset to do interoperability testing with and hope those are representative. Inevitably we miss something--there is no way to test a motherboard against every available video card, every sound card and hard drive (hard drive manufacturers discontinue and replace models 4-6 times PER YEAR), etc. You'd be validating forever and never ship anything.
Jennywl
"Once it ships I don't want it EVER coming back!"
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
I know. However, I didn't want to get all worked up into a long rant about why capitalism sucks (it would be more eloquent that that statement, but you get the idea).
At a global level there is always the risk of economic meltdown due to America's (and the western worlds', really) ridiculous materialism and lack of perspective, not to mention our current implementation of capitalism. But this wasn't the article to discuss that.
The US government has guidelines specifying how many bug parts per [unit] for different types of food. So, your strawberry jam does probably have a partial fly's wing or segment of beetle leg in it. Even our food isn't bug free, and it will never be bug free, why do we expect our programs to be bug free?
Manufacturing mostly. The percentage of GDP all kinds of manufacturing represents has been falling for 25 years or so. Specifically we can see great downturns in automobile, ship and steel manufacturing.
Cept of course for the user, who spent a month of weekends on the phone while all other techs pointed fingers at each other; and who also just blew $180 on a 3com modem from their local tech trying to make a buck.
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
I'd add that as your product gets larger you want to *engineer* your code, not go through all night hack sessions. One isn't as fun as the other but one is definitely more reliable. Unfortunately, market pressures and timetables often dictate how strongly you engineer a product.
Another point, creative code tends to be bad because it incurrs too much maintenance overhead. Unless this is the super duper optimized inner loop of your app it's almost always a better choice to go with a plain method of code contruction than one that takes shortcuts and is 'neat'.
Sadly, programmers aren't being exposed to Software Engineering principles as much as they should. And when they are it's too little, often only a token gesture. An example: my former university is creating a Software Engineering degree... it's in the School of Engineering, not Computer Science. Which one would one suppose has future programmers, hmm.
I'd like to see if sites like SourceForge, which provide many of the tools needed for a good engineering process, can affect how many of us 'garage developers' create their products.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Exactly. Microsoft *is* doomed. The car-company analogy is a very good one, and as the Big Three found themselves in Big Trouble, so will Microsoft in this decade, perhaps the next, as companies in Japan, China, and India figure to be the next Datsun, Honda, and Nissan. And then you'll see Microsoft and the feds acting together, instead of in opposition, a la the Chrysler bailout in 1978.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
Read your own quote. They are talking about software innovation, not hardware or cars. How many apps are you using started off in Japan? It is indeed the Japanese software industry that has, does, and always will lag because to release software with the amount of bugs present in American software is just NOT culturally acceptable.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You are absolutely correct, but most computer (l)users seem to have a higher tolerance for failures of computer equipment (be it hardware- or software-related) than your average geek. They accept that it's going to fail periodically, or even expect it. When it does, they hit the reset switch like nothing happened and keep going. Most people don't seem to realize that it doesn't have to be that way. If they had to pull over to the side of the road and reboot their car every couple of hundred kilometers, how long do you think they would tolerate it? But for some reason, they do the same thing with their computers and never even give it a second thought - just hit the button and get a cup of coffee while it reboots.
So I guess my point is that not many people are going to vote with their pocketbooks as you suggest, since they believe that poor quality is the norm, or even inevitable.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Akron, OH (Disassociated Press) - The Brimstone Tire and Rubber Company announced suprise plans today to enter the software market. In a press conferance held by company CYAO Jonathan Blowout, officials told startled stockholders, "In light of recent consumer product liability costs, we have reviewed our product positioning and concluded that the software market has a much better fit to our risk/reward profile. We will begin phasing out the tire sector and should announce our flagship product, Brimstone "Doors" and a compatible office suite very soon now. Consumers will soon be able to enjoy the same high quality of engineering they have come to expect from out automotive products on their personal computers." Analyst quickly upgraded the stock from "dump" to "sell", citing research indicating that, unlike the automobile parts sector where quality products usually achieve market dominance, the software industry has a long standing history of being dominated by shoddy, defective and incomplete products.
A former stockroom clerk, recently promoted to Systems Architect and speaking on terms of anonymity said, "Hell yeah! If a tire explodes and causes an accident killing a little child, you have a big problem. But if a database engine has a defect that deletes that same child's entire medical history and backup records, pfft, that's just too bad, you can't sue us! Besides, anytime that happens is a great time to remind consumers that a seperate, documented license, invoice and proof of purchase is required for each workstation per UCITA."
Brimstone closed at 3 1/4, down only 3/8.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Most of the "sloppiness" the author refers to is attributable to:
A) User error
B) Obscure interactions with obscure software
C) Corners cut in design and manufacturing
At the present time, solving each of these problems has an associated cost.
A) You set up a system that gives users (and developers) so few choices that they are unable to make mistakes.
B) You set up draconian nonsupport criteria that explicitly list the software that users can have on their machines, and/or force all developers to only use your API's.
C) You charge more, mediate performance, and lag the rest of the market.
I have little sympathy for Ms. Barron's plight. She could always buy a Mac, and Macs do a better job of fixing the above problems than do Wintel boxen. She might have to learn a new (and highly constraining) interface, but I can almost guarantee her problems would go away. There's less software written for it, and it's more expensive, but dem's da berries.
You know, vi is free and it doesn't crash. If there were money to be made by holding users hands to a greater degree current UI's do, odds are we'd be using Apple IX's right now.
Ive received 3 HP 4500N Colour LaserJets in the last 2 months, $7000CDN each - one was DOA.
Of the 300 or so Dell Desktops my OA people put out, 15 were DOA.
Do you know why computer manufacturer X can't tell you why your modem didn't work? 'Cause it would probably take many times the cost of the machine you bought to test every single component, test all the drivers etc. It's just not feasible to do this. The complexity of the hardware alone in a modern PC is pretty mind boggleing. Your cpu has millions of transistors on it. Would you like me to test all those for you too Mr Salon? Are you nuts? When nasa had to upgrade the chips on the hubble telescope do you think the hubble got the latest whiz-bang pentium? No. It got a 486 (or something like that, I can't remember of the top of my head). Do you know why? Because NASA wanted to thoroughly test the chips before they put them up on the satelite. And after two years of rigorous testing they still didn't test every machine state. And you want me to "test" your system to tell you why your modem isn't working. What a joke.
Now onto the topic of software (your op-ed piece switches between the two fairly regulary, even though they are quite different. I will too.) Suppose you want to thoroughly test a program that allows a name (up to 20 chars) an address (20 chars also) and a phone number (10 digits). This program is so rediculessly simple testing it should be easy right? There are 26^20 combinations for the name field, 26^20 combinations of input for the address field, and 10^10 combinations for the phone number field. This gives a total number of possiblites as approximately 10^66.(I borrowed this example from Steve McConnell's Code Complete btw). Even if you miss one of these test cases you cannot authoritavely say that your code is bug free. So what if you take a sensible approach and test all they types of input, make sure your test cases cause all paths through a function to be executed, test all your boundary conditions, use some utilities to fill all the memory on your system with "data" so you can test for un-initialized variables etc, etc. What then? Move on and do the same to the operating system? The drivers? Ultimately the complexity of the whole system is so great that no-one has the resources to test everything.
I certainly agree that more rigourous quality assurance measures have to be put in place. I think open-source software/free software is certainly a step in the right direction, but ultimately the systems you're dealing with are insanely complex. What we need is new testing methodologies, not vague winging from someone from salon, just because they had a problem with their modem.
History shows us that poor quality control can be overcome by effective marketing.
Crappy product? No prob! Make some clever commercials and keep a well-compensated sales and marketing staff!
I've been part of several races against completely artibitrary deadlines, (how do execs come up with these?) and have happily survived in a merely broken but not dead condition.
Having taken part in the creation of something crappy makes me consider other career options. A crap project that could have been killer with a little more time... now that's a heart-breaker.
The Open Source movement is (at least in part) an expression of rebellion against the "Ship Now, Test Later" IT/corporate sentiment.
But this problem isn't unique to IT, as the article shows. I just can't wait for the "Ship Now, Test Later" sentiment to be used in bio-tech! Wheeee!
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
Without seeing the specific questions they asked, it's hard to know what to make of their numbers. What do they mean by "break down"? Is this hardware "break downs" only?
But, even if we did know exactly what questions were asked, the results can only be generalized to subscribers of PCWorld magazine, as that was population sampled. For all we know, PCWorld subscribers are different from the average PC User. I think we can certainly say that the average PCWorld subscriber is quite different from the average Slashdot reader.
The only thing that seems particularly meaningfull from the PCWorld survey is how well major resellers treat their customers. Dell seems to do well, while Gateway seems to suck.
(Taken from the Salon story...)
"I am talking, for instance, about the unsurprising message in PC World's July issue -- based on responses from 16,000 subscribers -- that computer owners are having more trouble than ever with their machines, and that very few of them are happy with these products or the quality of service from their makers."
Wouldn't it stand more to reason that there are more and more consumers purchasing computers than at any time in history, and that ANYONE can buy one? If you purchase a car, you can not take it on the road unless you have at least rudimentary grasp on how to use it (unless you live and drive in Boston... then you just need the car). Not so with computers. Anyone can buy one, but nobody can make sure that person knows how to use it. I had the misfortune to work for a computer retailer, so I speak from first hand experience when I say that the vast majority of complaints about "broken" computers are machines which have absolutely no problems whatsoever. I'd bet any amount that of those 16,000 subscribers, more than HALF got the machines home and immediately installed all sorts of useless crap and promptly trashed the system. Now, I've yet to have any issues with a computer that I have not been able to resolve either through re-installing the OS or taking it back to the retailer and getting a part replaced due to not to negligence, but simply hardware failure. Yes, I have heard horror stories but I am sure it is nothing like author makes it sound.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to take a hint from software manufacturers when it comes to hardware? Like, on a the side of a box of software it will tell you "Requires: 486 or higher. 16mb RAM" etc.
How about
"If you:
a) Can not tie your own shoes
b) Think 'Tater Tots are one of the 4 major food groups
c) Regularly watch/are featured in 'COPS'
d) Intend to use AOL
e) Do not have even the most remote idea how to use a computer and have no intention to actually learn
...you should not be purchasing this computer"
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
To see a good demonstration of lack of QA, look no further than computer games. Hundreds of thousands of patches abound, many soon after the game is released. And a majority aren't "let's add this cool new feature" patches but "oops, that's one hell of a bug we missed" patches.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If I was to place a bet, I'd put a lot of the blame for actual hardware failures squarely on those horrid 'computer hutches' -- I'd say if you put your computer into what amounts to a closed box, you deserve your lump of melted silicon.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
I used to think I had flaky computers, then I got Linux. Suddenly, my slow cheap junk started doing things for me again and routine tasks became enjoyable. A nicer 650 Athalon runs like a dream, compared to my fromerly lowered expectations. Only one of my computers running any version of Linux has ever crashed hard, and that was because the room was too hot.
I can compare this record to NT where I work. There we have finely made machines with expensive parts that run like crap. "Software updates" are an almost weekly occurance, and uptime of more than a few days is rare.
VCRs, TVs, dryers and refrigerators are tested as entire, complete units. There is little variation from one unit to another as it comes off the assembly line.
Computers are built from a Tower of Babel of separate components. The CPU, motherboard, memory, graphics and hard drive may all be high quality, tested components on their own. Combine them all into a single unit and you end up with a flaky problem child with all kinds of unforeseen interactions and problems.
It just shows that computer technology is still in its infancy. It's a wonder any computer works given the way we cobble them together.
Actually, the car industry is an excellent example of why things MUST change. Look at the American automotive industries in the 1940's-1960's. Detroit was pumping out beautiful cars with innovations up the wang, and absolutely dominated the world automotive market. The problem was that by the late 60's-early 70's, quality had gone downhill. If you asked a Detroit engineer about it at the time, you would have got a response like "Well, that's just how cars are! People won't pay for a high quality automobile". And what happened next? The Japanese stepped into the market and introduced inexpensive, well built, and RELIABLE automobiles, and nearly killed Detroit in the process. Thousands of American workers lost their jobs because they refused to pull their heads out of the sand and fix the problems.
I fear that the computer industry today is at the same point the automotive industry was 30 years ago. Quality is poor, but nobody sees a reason to fix it because there's no alternatives and low quality is considered normal. It was only in response to higher quality competition that American car builders finally cleaned up their acts and began building better products.
So the only question in my mind is, who will be the next Japan?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
"techno-capitalism" is just the current manifestation of the way American capitalism has always worked. I mean this quite literally, it's been this way all the way back to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
The best example I have is from a History of Science class I took involved railroads. Americans would build many miles of track per day, at the expense of quality, as the tracks would break often, and sometimes they even ran them on top of the snow(!). When it would melt, the track would have to be rebuilt. The British, on the other hand, took their time and built tracks that would last.
In the modern day things are even worse, because of broadcast technologies that gave rise to the advertising industry. Now companies waste money convincing you that you need product x, regardless of how good product x is and if you even need it. They do a good job of convincing, too. It has brought our economic system to a new low, in my opinion, as far as the effect on our society.
Whether or not this additude will harm the US in the long run remains to be seen. Mentioning India as a threat seems to be a stretch right now, they have a pretty limited industrial base as far as I know. Japan and Germany seem to be the obvious threats (personally I view them as healthy competition). The focus in Germany is on making a good product at the possible expense of profit. In America it's the other way around. Japan seems to have a better balance somewhere in the middle, although that doesn't explain the recession/slow growth they've had over the past 11 years.
Hopefully competition from other coutries can "keep it real" for american corps as Japan did for the automakers.
"'Act fast and fix the problems later' is how we operate here," Regis said. He showed me a Stanford Computer Industry Project study whose conclusion was that Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant. Unlike Japanese computer companies hobbled by elaborate quality control and testing procedures, the Stanford researchers found, American companies accept "good enough" quality for the sake of speed.
So, is this why my Honda drives better than and will outlast your Saturn? Sorry, I don't buy it and neither did the author or should you.
Greed and class strife are killing US industries, not "innovation". Japanese labor now makes more money than US counterparts. That's what happens when you focus on product rather than marketing, and co-operate. My wife and I have seen little innovation in most software since the days of what she calls "Windows 93".
I have not noticed much of the hardware reliability problems lately. In fact, most of my hardware is running better than ever. The software, mostly Free, has revealed the flaws in previous software from Redmond.
Yes, it's a sad condition... What's really scary is that it applies to hardware, too.
:)
Back circa 1985, if you bought yourself a computer (Lets just say you get a Mac SE), the rate of failure out-of-the-box was extremely low. In the case of 40 particular Macintosh systems bought in 1985-1987, I know that only one of them needed hardware service at all by 1991. However, in 1993, the same company bought 13 new Macintosh systems (to replace some of those old Mac SE's that were STILL running), and had hardware problems with 3 of those 13 within a year.
Apple has statistically held a much better defect/failure rate than most IBM-clone PC manufacturers (the big ones, like Gateway, Dell, Compaq, etc), let alone all the independent stores building machines themselves.
I can say from personal experience (formerly being a system production manager for such a small company) that the return rates on computer hardware are absurdly high. Our store was among the best (sadly) with an average of a 10-12% return rate for components. If you statistically sum up all the 10-12% possible breakdowns of components in a computer, that should give you a clue as to how many of our full systems we saw back - more than 50% within the year. Talk about depressing...
Personally, I think that the software situation is worse in that respect, but it's just a lot easier to upgrade a program than it is to solder a new north bridge on your motherboard.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
This article goes back and forth between hardware and software issues, poorly written code and poorly manufactured products. It was obviously a novice user grabbing quotes wherever she could to help vent her 'tech frustrations'. Hey, figure it out yourself if you want to 'diagnose'.
People who have witty things here blow.
you're link was very descriptive, but I think it has at least a few things wrong in what is now becoming an urban legend.
The structural engineer William LeMessurier spoke at my school, and I was there. First of all, he said it was an intern of his, not just a student told to study the building. Second, without the reinforcement it was something like a 70 year wind, the chances of it falling right away were greatly overstated by you and your link.
And another really cool thing about that building is those skinny supports - they were perfectly strong enough, but the architech said they couldn't be there, they were too skinny, people would run away. So they put a fire escape around them, to make them LOOK stronger.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The customers don't choose to buy quality, they buy the first on the market with the new sparkly things on it. My company makes some very good products, but the best technology never makes it. Why else would so many people run Winbloze?
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
How reliable do you think a fridge would be, if it were a PC ? Just as the designer finishes working on a spec with a workable interior light that has the colours of "on" and "off", the market decides FridgeTetris players need more colours and so the 24-bit colour lamp becomes available as a plug-in. Then when the fridge has been installed for a week, the owner decides they need more space to store beer and they plug in a second door that's 16 times bigger than the first.
And how much would newfound productivity in other functions affect this? Could it be that we'd get better products, cheaper, overall?
OK, what could the people who're no longer needed to patch the crap put out by computer industry do?
People writing the Dummies books are useless anyway, but perhaps they could write material for teaching to use the software efficiently..
Tech support would still be needed, but the personnel would need to be trained with focus on other aspects of the software than just "Reboot Windows". And as they know the sofware (or other product) quite well, there are certainly positions where they would fit nicely.
I don't think having quality software would really cause this massive unemployment some people predict. It's the same with many other issues: if this or that would be done differently, there would be massive unemployment because the people who currently do the job wouldn't be needed anymore. I'd guess they would find new jobs, and any restructuring would create new jobs. Rising productivity would mean that companies could afford to pay decent salary for jobs that don't exist now because they would be too expensive.
His?
Have You ever needed to upgrade firmware of any hardware component in Your computer? I've done it several times. Usually it helps. It's also one of the first pieces of advice given to me after the support notices that I won't be content with "Reboot Windows" -type answers..
While some components in the computers are "pure hardware" in such way that their software can't be upgraded by the end user or a retailer techie, the trend seems to be towards upgradeable software in hardware components, too.
The hardest to diagnose properly problem I've had was with SCSI channel that seemed to have termination problems (bad cable or terminator) - upgraded firmware and it started to work OK. I was sure that the cable and terminator were good, because they worked with different SCSI host adapters - 4 distinct models from two companies.
Yes, I agree with the closing statement, too. Have You ever tried to convince any manager that while it might seem that producing better quality is more expensive, it will in the end produce higher profits? How many managers see more than the next 12 months?
Even when the management agrees that the procedures to produce quality will lead to higher profits, there are customer requirements: everything, now, cheap. Even if we manage to do quality work cheap, it will take time. That's the hardest problem..
What I worry about the most is receiving a product only to have it recalled. If a firm made sure to begin with that their product was in good working order (under all conditions) it would save them money in the long run. I know that sometimes bugs only pop up after months of use, and that should also be tested. I recently bought a machine that had a bad logic board. This had been a known issue. After two months of use, the board had a circuit that fried. It took two weeks to get the machine back. I'm sure that the company doesn't like having to pay for warrantied work. More extensive tests would ease some of these problems. Is there really no way to ensure more quality yet still be "first to market"? I know it's a cut-throat industry, but customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal.
You sir are a Gental man and a Scholar, thank you.
-------------------------------------------------
Good, fast, or cheap.
Pick any two. Those are your options.
There are multiple comparisons to existing industries in this article, but they are not relevant from the standpoint of cost v/s complexity. Of course, aircraft are complex systems, and they are now produced with very high levels of quality. But look at the facts:
- They cost hundreds of thousands to millions each.
- They do not produce a completly new model of the 747 every 6 months to counter Airbus' new model.
- The operators of these complex wonders are licensed and trained to do so.
- When they came out, there were a lot of people who either fixed the defects in the machines themselves or died. The one's that died are not around to talk about the poor quality of production in the earliest days of flight.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
I respectfully disagree. First, auto assembly is dramatically different from software engineering (aka programming); the latter consists almost entirely of design activity. Being a programmer is more like being, say, an architect. And a good architect is being creative all of the time.
Second, the best auto companies apparently support their line employees being creative all of the time, too. Those bottom-up process improvements would be the result of time spent thinking creatively while doing assembly work.
Lack of mastery of the basics and inattention to detail are problems, as you say, but they are not caused by excessive creativity. Rather, the problem is lack of experience and judgement, and (as usual) above all, bad management.
I believe that creative thinking is required to develop a fine engineering judgement about questions like just when certain kinds of sorts are and aren't appropriate and why.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
But car components do not have particularly complicated interfaces; they fit together in 3 dimensions. Computer component interfaces are far more complex because of the temporal relationships.
Cheers,
john
From the article:
In analysing repair histories of 13 kinds of products gathered by Consumer Reports, PC World found that roughly 22 percent of computers break down every year -- compared to 9 percent of VCRs, 7 percent of big-screen TVs, 7 percent of clothes dryers and 8 percent of refrigerators.
A computer is something that accomplishes 100's of task so natrually it would need more maintanance than products that only accomplish one. The author seems to overlook this entirely. Not sure if there is any point to reading the article any further after a statement like that.
"Fiduciary responsibility" is just another way of saying "I don't get paid to listen to my conscience".
Or to quote a Dilbert cartoon: "A big fat bonus today, is worth more than the entire company tomorrow."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
The problem where this breaks down is that even though all a refrigerator does is refrigerate, and all a computer does is compute, a computer also has programs ('food') and the programs themselves can go bad. People don't blame the refrigerator when their food goes bad. So in that sense a computer (with it's software) does do much more than a refrigerator.
Now, certainly computer hardware should not be prone to a high level of failures, and it'd be great if software wasn't prone to such problems, but the two combined are much more complex than a VCR or any of the other devices mentioned in the article. Certainly a computer's software does a lot more than a refrigerator's hardware does, too.
The nice thing about real world problems (skyscrappers, VCRs, etc) is that there are lots of components, and those components can be tested individually. We can then put them all together, and we know that they'll successfully work and function properly - because all the components are correct and we understand how they fit together. We obviously need more componentization in the computer word, and less Office suites.
PC World found that roughly 22 percent of computers break down every year -- compared to 9 percent of VCRs, 7 percent of big-screen TVs, 7 percent of clothes dryers and 8 percent of refrigerators.
People that have no idea how to operate a computer probaby have a lot to do with this. Give a computer to the average person and in a month take a look at how much shareware garbage has been installed and uninstalled, system files deleted, etc. Now maybe there's a program in the startup menu that doesn't exist, and an error message is generated at bootup. Is this a break down? Maybe, maybe not.As we continue the clueless user starts poking around, not knowing what they're doing, but doing it anyway. "oh here's regedit.exe, let's see if that'll fix it....hmm now it won't boot....Damn fscking Dell!"
Hemos said he hasn't had nearly as many problems as the article states...neither have I. The reason probably has to do with the user. We know what we're doing, many people do not.
Christmas radio @nopants.org
My Dad did this because he was sick of wrangling with things under windows. Now he makes a journey down to our local Mac shop where he bought his iMac almost every other week for them to fix some problem (mostly hardware, but some wierd problems with iMovie) that has arisen. Sure, you can go and say that my dad is a clueless idiot. You'd be wrong. He just thought getting the system to work souldn't take longer than the things you intend to use the system for. That's why he bought a mac. I don't think he'll be in a hurry to buy another one.
I don't remember the exact story, or where I first saw it, so I can't give proper credit, but that was the gist of it.
9.5 on the Pimp-O-Meter! The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
The n64 has a 3 month beta cycle. If ANY bugs are found the game is sent back and it has to start the entire 3 month cycle again.
FunOne
FunOne
I love this stuff! And I quote:
... Advanced Information Systems is churning out software with just 0.05 defects per 1,000 lines of code -- "better than the space shuttle's software"
Hey, me too! In fact I churn out only 0.0049 defects per 1,000 lines of code! And they are easy to count, too, because:
A) All my bugs are the reult of only _one_ line of code each.
B) I program in basic so my line numbers make the bugs, sorry, defects easier to count.
C) No one ever uses anything I write except me so I don't have to worry about some luser ever doing something in the software differently than I would, myself.
I'm expecting my "Level 5" certification in the mail any day now.
Hey, nobody ever said English was logical; just memorize it and get on with your life. - Paul Brians
Planned obsolescence is here to sray...it's obvious that computer manufacturers don't make 'em like they used to. Some of the mainframe hardware I've seen at work has been running for 20+ years, with minimal service. Your average desktop PC is a cheap piece of junk in comparison. Why? Because the manufacturer knows that you'll outgrow the machine just slightly after the warranty period ends in most cases. Companies are on two and three year replacement cycles now, so that's how good they have to make them.
Do I agree with this? Yes and no. Hardware manufacturers shouldn't knowingly release junk, especially heavily advertised junk. That's no way to keep customers, and no way for newbies to start out in the computer world. However, manufacturers do realize that most people upgrade or trash their PCs frequently, so it's natural for them to want to skimp a little.
Oh, I thought they ment when a product was too good and they'd have to cut down on quality... =) My mistake
It should be among the fastest clock cycles, lots of RAM, a huge hard drive and lots of software all for three easy payments of $19.95! (Insert cheesy announcer/local computer retailer schpeal here)
If they can't get one computer company to build one for them that they like, they'll find some other company that will sell them crap, as long as it's at the right price. Hopefully these people learn after their first purchase.
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
Is there no one else here who builds and maintains their own boxes?
"Troll"
Yeah..
Hey! this'll show up in the post statistics to show the advertisers at the next marketing meeting.
Don't knock me! I'm doing my part for /.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
In our lab, we have a G4 running MacOS 9. It gets rebooted daily (scheduled to happen at 3am, right before it indexes the harddrive).
At home, I have a PC with BeOS and WinME and a iMac running OS X. BeOS, has yet to crash. Windows has ONE third party application on it. Just one. HalfLife. I have had to reinstall Windows once since I bought it 4 months ago. I have had to reinstall Internet Explorer 3 times, and my Sound Driver Once. Where as I haven't rebooted my iMac since I installed OS X (I ordered it the day it was available).
To blame software companies in general is silly. Name names. Embarrass the companies. This and this along is why:
1. reverse engineering should be legal
2. Shrinkwrapped agreements should be null and void and software should NOT have limitations on what you can do with it. (i.e if i want to run a gigantic web server on Win2K upgrade, let me)
3. And last but not least all bugs, security "issues", and assorted corporate violations should ALWAYS be release to the public in full form-regardless of who is still vulernable to it. Let THEM screw their customers with their shitty software, it's not your fault the bug is there.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I've always insisted on high-reliability computer components for my own personal stuff. However, at a former job (names deleted to protect the innocent), reliability was second to cost. A distant second.
As the (entire) IS staff for the company, I butted heads several times with the company president and his insistence on buying cheap (in both price and quality) components. The hardware philosophy of the company was essentially "Buy cheap. If it breaks, have it fixed while using a backup system." As the person who returned the faulty components to the store, set up the backup systems, called customer support, etc., this was a real pain in the neck.
Some anecdotes:
Anyway, my point is: computer companies might just be responding to market pressure. Component quality won't improve unless businesses (not individuals) demand it.
BWAH! I've only purchased *one* Matrox card, a G200. I wanted to use it for OpenGL, which was advertised on the box.
OpenGL didn't properly arrive on the card until just before their next generation came out, and even then it was subpar.
As a result, I bought a TNT1. I've been happy with nvidia ever since.
Sure, Matrox may test extensively, but they certainly didn't bother to finish the job.
if these folks cited in the article, and the author, are so unhappy with te quality of the their computer then they should buy MAC. there is a reason they are more expensive. they are thoroughly tested, all 3rd party hardware has to meet standards, as well as software. if people cared more about quality and less about $$$ then the PC clone industry would choke on its own lousy products.
-ps i use cheap hardware becuaz i am cheap
-- Hail Eris
One thing that bothered me deeply about the article is that the author made very little distinction between hardware and software quality problems. I realize that this probably reflects the majority, non-tech view of computers (the computer is a unit that succeeds or fails as a unit, not as hardware or software) but it made the article less comprehensible. Most of the specific problems that he talked about sound as though they were hardware problems, but the experts he consulted were talking about curing software reliability. This is probably reasonable, since reliable, high quality hardware is available, and the companies that produce junk often go out of business when people stop buying their crap. Of course high quality, reliable software is available too, but most desktop PCs don't use it. I'm inclined to agree with the closing statement of the article: we won't get high quality software until companies suffer financially from putting out crappy software.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I think they also installed a big inertial stabilizer on the top floor of the building. It might not be the same building though. Also, IIRC, the Hancock building in Boston had problems with windows falling down from the external walls and for years the pedestrian areas under the building had to have protective ceilings installed.
This critic misses the whole point. There are places for creativity. Two good examples are the R&D department and process review and improvement meetings. But creativity is not necessary when crafting a quality, reliable product. In fact, it gets in the way of reliability.
Now, I know this isn't going to be a popular argument on Slashdot, but sometimes good medicine tastes bad. Consider it this way: how would the auto industry appear if autoworkers felt it was their perogative to "be creative" while doing assembly line work? This is exactly what programmers act like. The smart auto companies give their line workers time to be creative, during process review, so that they can concentrate on quality the rest of the time.
I know, the analogy between autos and computers breaks down quickly, and it breaks down pretty damn early with software. But there's still a point to be made. Many programmers (and engineers), especially young ones, are too eager to be doing the "elite" work, that they don't pay attention to detail. They want to go straight to designing better suspensions instead of just installing the struts. (I know. I've been there.) But it builds character to do the rote, mundane work - you learn how to check your work as you do it, and fix errors as they are made, so that you or someone else doesn't have to come back and fix it later. This talent is especially necessary in programming.
Perfect example: If your attention is focused on writing the slickest, most 31337 bubble sort for the product your team is developing, you are going to introduce more errors than if you had just instantiated the algorithm you've used a hundred times before. But creativity isn't necessary here. Just implement the function that's needed. If they had needed a high performance sort function, it would have been in the requirements handed to you when you started. As the first Project Engineer I worked under used to say: "Better is the enemy of good enough."
The fact that Chennai's Advanced Information Systems company has achieved the astonishingly low 0.05 per kloc defect rate, and that 22 of the 28 companies with a SEI Level 5 cert are in India, demonstrates that the Indians understand this point, and proves the "techie reviewer" dead wrong. He sounds just like another 'leet code jockey who's whining because Humphrey's telling him he can't doodle in your POS transaction software anymore...
I can see the fnords!
The thing that pops into my mind as far as quality control is concerned is "Matrox". They are just about the only VGA-card producing company that refuses to bring the card on the market before the drivers are finished, extensive testing is complete etc. This results in them launching their cards later than the competition and relatively expensive, causing them to lose a big bite out of the profits. The upside is that a lot of semi-knowledgable users who switched to Matrox never switch back, so they do have a loyal user base. BTW, they're not entirely on their own, ATI does a pretty good job on testing before the selling as well...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I wish the article had given some more specific details. I've never encountered a problem like this, and don't really know anyone who has, either. So I have trouble swallowing all the article has to dish out solely on the grounds that the Gartner Group says that some laptops fail, sometimes.
kugano
Write and customize your programs. Sort data using tools that have been around for 30 years. I could go on and on but its obvious by your use of the word troll your a moron.
You need to update your hot grits link
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The government is not my daddy.
I know it's a cut-throat industry, but customer satisfaction should be the ultimate goal.
Nope, it's the almighty buck that's the ultimate goal. $$$$$$$$$$$
--
Delphis
God forbid we toot the horn of free software here. ;-P
It seems to me that the tradition and philosophy of free software lends itself to smaller programs, ones that can fit into one person's head and be maintained by basically one person. Sure, we have teams working on GNOME, etc., but essentially those projects get broken up into pieces.
The (closely related) *nix philosophy is to use hundreds of small programs in concert; each program does one thing and one thing well.
This type of system promotes far more stable software in the long run, since modularization and testing is inherent in the methodology. Let's face it, when we discuss bad software, 90% of Slashdotters conjure up images of Windows, little boxes with stop signs and the dopiest, vaguest error messages man has ever written, and blue screens.
What we need to do as a community is insist that the commercialization of Linux does not involve the adoption of bloated programs into *nix-space.
I'll give you an example that is fresh on my mind - the up2date program on Red Hat that keeps your system in-sync should not be a GUI+CLI program as it is now. They should separate it into two parts, a CLI program that does the grunt work and can be used from /etc/cron*, and a GUI program that interfaces to it. At the moment if you install the up2date .rpm the system will moan and complain if you don't have GNOME, X, etc. installed, despite the fact that you might plan to only use it in CLI. And --nodeps is a silly cop out IMHO. (Fix rather than diagnose as the article author would say.)
Just my $0.02.
To make money, suppliers must give consumers what they want. (This does not stop suppliers by creating a false demand but that's not my point).
My point is, most shopping for technology is price oriented, not quality oriented... and the suppliers have responded.
-... ---
If you push up the software quality, make sure it rarely (never?) crashes, and you do proper studies to make sure it works the way people expect it to work, then our economy goes bust!
- No more tech. support jobs
- No more "Word 97 for Dummies" books
- No more "Learn Windows 95 in 1 week!" books
- Much less upgrading because that word processor you purchased 5 years ago still works like it should and there are no bugs to fix, contains _only_ the features you use, so no upgrade needed
Look at the car industry. All you ever do is gas up and take in for maintenance every 12-24000km.
(Okay, unless you're one of those dummies who bought a Chevy Cavalier...)
This article smacks of incoherent thought.
They begin by discussing how inherently buggy software was become. This is a given, but how can you compare software to CARS? Software's an entirely different beast than an automobile. I mean if an automobile "crashes" "out of the box" than it doesn't goto market. If software "crashes" "out of the box" there's always more reasons than the software to blame.
I've had many a time where I've met people who complained to me some software didn't work on their computer. Did you read the minimum requirements I ask? "The what?" they reply? Yes, no wonder say for example, Office 2000 crashes when you try to run it on your P120 with 8 megs of RAM. You idiot.
"In analysing repair histories of 13 kinds of products gathered by Consumer Reports, PC World found that roughly 22 percent of computers break down every year -- compared to 9 percent of VCRs, 7 percent of big-screen TVs, 7 percent of clothes dryers and 8 percent of refrigerators."
There is no definition of what a "Repair history" is given here. Computers are entirely different from VCR's, TV's, clothes dryers, and refrigerators in their complexity. A user cannot modify their refrigerators operating system, upgrade it's CPU or add more RAM in the wrong way. I work in Tech Support and a large majority of calls I deal with are due to user error.
Is this repair history hardware repairs, software repairs, or what? The common person doesn't know jack about fixing their computer. If a program doesn't load the person think's it's "broken". Many a time I've heard comments to the like of "We should just throw it out". It's a computer, not a VCR! VCR's are straight forward, they work or don't work. With computers you have people with many more variables they can screw up.
Until there's a study done on computer "repair history" with more detail, I can't take this article seriously.
Also, I'll take it this guy had the Home Service option for his Dell laptop? Otherwise, when's the last time you heard of a computer manufacturer making housecalls? At work with our Gateway laptops, if they have hardware failure we send them off to a repair center in Texas, and they show up in about two weeks fixed. This exageration is an extreme stretch of what usually happens.
Why would anyone take this p.o.s. seriously?
The cure for 1933 is 1917.
So, computers must fit together in hyperspace by your logic. Seriously, cars are more difficult than computers, by far. Try to change an alternator (or spark plugs for that matter, if the dorks who built your car put stuff in the way of them). Also, if you have to consider electrical distortions when popping in a proc. or video card, then that component has /problems/. Each manufacturer should take care of all those problems in each individual component, so the whole of them will end up not interfering.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Intel Engineer: A new processor built by my company boots up somewhere running at 1.3GHz. A hardware glitch causes Windows to lock up. The computer crashes and burns, taking a mission-critical database with it. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of processors in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Woman: Are there a lot of these kinds of crashes?
Intel Engineer: You wouldn't believe.
Woman: Which computer company do you work for?
Intel Engineer: A major one.
This is not a Fugazi
Sort of -- it wasn't a design flaw, but a contractor error. Rivets were specified, but bolts were used instead. The bolts would shear, rivets wouldn't.
The wind problem wasn't just winds over 78mph, but winds at a 45 degree angle (corner winds). NYC code didn't specify for these winds, which normally wouldn't matter. The problem arose because the land owners (Catholic church) specified that the church on the corner couldn't be torn down. So, the main structural supports were in the middle of the sides instead of the corners. That's why corner winds were a problem.
The really COOL part of the building's design was a "dampener" on the top floor. It was a several ton block of concrete that moved opposite to the buildings sway, thus dampening the sway of the building.
The repairs were made in secret, but as the hurricane approached, the public was alerted to the problem. Luckily, repairs were finished, and the hurricane wandered off into the Atlantic.
(Girlfriend's an architect -- we watch a LOT of TLC/Discover/et.al.)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The building was designed to be contructed with welds, not bolts, but then the contruction crew decided it was cheaper to use bolts, and so they did. Once, the designer found out about what had happened, he figured out a way to fix it, because not doing so would have caused the building to fall over, and take out a good portion of Manhattan.
At least that's the story that was told in my Engineering Design class.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
It's already happening: Just substitute Seattle for Detroit, and Finland for Japan.
When was the last time I called tech support? I can't really even remember.
when was the last time someone reading this page worked in tech support? i'm in a call center right now, and i'd be willing to bet there's two or three dozen people reading slashdot right along with me right now.
When/what was the last computer I bought?
when was the last time a self-proclaimed geek was involved in the production of a computer or a piece of software? and what are the odds that he or she reads slashdot too?
computers aren't an object for the 133t 386 users like you any more. they've changed culture. not always in good ways. that's why these stories are plenty applicable to the "news for nerds" headline.
--saint----
Poor quality software is the savior of procrastinators and slackers around the world. If software stops crashing all the time, we're going to have to think of new excuses. And I don't think "My dog ate my ethernet!" is going to cut it.. :(
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Do not anger the worm.
Putting Things in Perspective:
Success is-
At age 4.....success is...not peeing your pants.
At age 12...success is...having friends.
At age 16...success is...having a drivers license.
At age 20...success is...having sex.
At age 35...success is...having money.
At age 50...success is...having money.
At age 60...success is...having sex.
At age 70...success is...having a drivers license.
At age 75...success is...having friends.
At age 80...success is...not peeing your pants.
Quality generally takes time. Gen X-ers sitting around drinking expensive coffee whipping out Java code looks cool and exciting, but this is a distortion on the way the world works. Operating systems are rarely built my new college grads. It takes years of plodding and experience to do it right. (Obligatory Linus reference - although young, he stands on the shoulders of giants.)
Take a look at the AS/400. It's not sexy. It's not cutting edge; in fact, it usually lags behind the latest and greatest. But it's scalable, it's been 64 bit for years, and it is highly regarded as rock solid. We have a structured environment for development. We stress quality early. We fix our bugs, not tell people to wait for the next release. Contrast this to the Microsoft way.
You get what you pay for.
Airplanes require tremendous amounts of maintenance to achieve this level of stability!!! A small aircraft requires 10-20 to inspect before each flight. Aircraft have complete engine teardowns so many hundred/thousand hours. This is expensive and is justifiable only in light of the harms associated with aircraft failure. The cheapest aircraft you can buy will cost in the 6-7 figure range.
Cars are a much better comparision. Cars fail all the time, new ones included. They're very complex, but we put up with it. They also cost a reasonable amount of money. It's a tradeoff. With the exception of some mission critical machines, computers are like cars, not airplanes.
Yea, I thought that was a daft statement too, especially considering the relative dates of invention of these products too. It takes a number of years to perfect things, and the basic designs of those other products haven't changed all that much in many of those years. Certainly not to the same extent of computers.
--
Delphis
Okay.. I have a few comments. (I work as a hardware tech for a company with 10,000 systems)
.02 cents, from what I have seen daily.
1) what are the criteria they use for "breaking down".. does that mean critical hardware failure? or does it mean "I installed AOL 7 and now it doesnt boot"
2) one cannot judge desktops and laptops by the same scale.. face it.. desktops dont suffer the abuse that laptops do.. they seldom get dropped, dont have the heat or miniaturization issues, or the sudden shutdown problems on a regular basis that a laptop does.
3) As someone said earlier "slap on a warranty and let the user test it".,. not exactly true. THey (I am fairly certain) all pass the standard rigorous BIOS test and diagnostics, they do what they are supposed to do at the factory. IT takes days, weeks, and even months to discover a cold solder joint error, or chip creep issues (hello Dell) and other things.. they probably DID perform fine at the factory.
Just my
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
No, the comparison is ridiculous. A computer is intuitively more complex than a refrigerator.
.000001% failure rates?" is not the question we should be asking.
The complexity of a computer is on par with what: a car, an airplane, maybe.
Both have very high failure rates compared to simpler machines. Both have high rates of failures with unkown causes, where a fix is applied without knowing why it's needed.
Think about it. All cars need regular maintenance. New cars have equipment failures at fairly high rates. Old cars have even higher failure rates. We keep taking cars to the mechanic for repairs, we don't complain that our cars should never have problems.
Computers are even worse, because we often expect more out the older ones than they're supposed to give. A Pentium I with 16 MB of memory running Win98 and relatively new applications is gonna crash. If I took an old car and regularly drove it as fast the speedometer would go it would also experience regular failures.
With aircraft, failure is avoided/minimized by labor. Aircraft undergo insane preventive maintenance - including an occassional complete tear-down (computer equivalent- reintsall the OS and everything else). If a commercial/military aircraft develops any problems in flight, it is immediately taken out of service for maintenance. So a mission-critical machine is closer to an aircraft than a car - it's prone to failure, but plenty of resources are devoted to combatting this problem.....
We need to accept that IT is a failure-prone industry, just like aviation, automobiles, insturmentation, etc. We need to draw lessons from the failure-prone industries, not the failure-free ones. How do these people keep failures to an acceptable level? How to they deal with them when they occur, so the effects are minimized? "How do act like cheap plastic toy makers and achieve
That pretty much sums everything up - all the other examples are just icing on the cake. The computer industry has no reason to change thier practice as long as the consumer is willing to shell out money for buggy code.