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Too Much Tech Makes End Users Blink
There's a strange, somewhat funny story in The Washington Post today about how technology is probably going to keep outstripping people's ability to deal with it for many decades to come. It's a long piece, but please bear with it to the end; that's where Jaron Lanier (who some credit with inventing the phrase "virtual reality"), whimsically suggests that, in exchange for being granted U.S. copyright protection, commercial software publishers should have to pay users $1 every time their product screws up. "Instead of hunting down people who smoke pot," Lanier says, "they'd be hunting down people who sell business software that crashes. They'd owe people a buck or go to jail. That's what Washington should be doing."
Sure it's fair, with enough engineering it would be possable to make software that has no bugs.
Look at the flight control software for military aircraft and spacecraft. In the Apollo days the number of bugs in the Lunar Module software could be counted on one hand and the astronauts knew what they were and the work arounds.
How many F-16s, F-22s, B-1Bs, F-117s, Airbuses, etc have been lost to software issues?
The only ones I know of were the two Saab Grippin and the second F-22A prototype that had landing software issues...that have been fixed. Has the software on Galileo crashed yet since it was launched in 1989? Nope.
Bugless software can be written, it's just that engineers and marketing don't care enough for the end user to make something that doesn't crash.
...not Michael Lanier, who coined that particular phrase ("virtual reality").
-- Old Man Kensey
Why on earth does this article pit "engineers" against "people"?
Where do they get off making no mention of the managers who refuse to pay for real QA? Who micromanage their designers? Who insist "make it blue"?
Why is there no mention of designers who seem never to have heard the adage "form follows function"?
I confess more than a little irritation that "engineers" are taking the rap for their PHBs, for the airheads in marketting who care more about releasing a product at the right moment than whether that product is ready for prime time, for designers who care more that there's a cohesive colorscheme than that it presents the user with a compelling metaphor.
It has never been my experience that it was the techs on a project who wanted to get the project done faster rather than better. 99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code ("No, really, code freezes NOW.") Similarly, it's not the techs saying "gee, why waste the money on real QA specialists."
In my experience, coders have immense respect for usability (even those who don't know how to make it themselves) and robustness, but are never taken seriously when they say "no, that's not how we should be doing it; it would be better if...". To blame them as a class for the failures in robustness and usability of their code is salt in the wound.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I keep hearing about how we need all this human factors research to make computers usable, that interfaces must be "intuitive" and, most of all, standardized.
Then I get in my car.
Almost every adult in the USA can operate a car with little difficulty. Yet the interface is not intuitive - press one pedal to make it go, another to make it stop? Turn a vertical wheel to change horizontal direction?
And the interface is not standardized - a car may have from two to five different foot controls (at least gas and brake, maybe also clutch, parking brake, and high-beam switch), the shifter for an automatic transmission can be on the steering column or the floor, the headlight switch can be on the directional signal switch or on the dash...
So how is it that most everyone can drive? (Well, can operate the vechicle. People have many driving problems that have nothing to do with operating the vehicle.)
Partly it's because everyone is familiar with the basics through cultural osmosis - we grow up riding in cars, we see them operated on TV and in movies. And partly we expect and accept that a certain amount of training is needed; few people balk at the idea that a few dozen hours of classroom instruction and supervised driving are a requirement for basic competence.
Why do we expect computer software to be different?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
JAFR = Just Another Formulaic Rant.
First of all, the blinking "12:00" is the result of a poor user interface -- buttons with hidden functions that aren't immediately obvious, like using the channel up/down buttons to set the hour.
So the writer misses the point on that one.
But what really annoys me is the way the writer trots out the usual suspects: Stewart Brand, Jaron Lanier, Esther Dyson (Negroponte, Joy, and Kurzweil must have been off skiing or something), and adds Through the Looking Glass to show how confoozing this technology stuff is!
I feel like I've read this same piece a hundred times in the last ten years. Okay, let's take it as a given that there's always going to be a gap between humanity and technology, leaving some people frustrated and confused. And move on.
As for that blinking VCR, buy a clock.
Just Another Fucking Rant.
k.
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"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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crazy dynamite monkey
I recall watching a show on DSC or TLC about the increasing safety of cars causing people to be less worried about being injured in an accident since the airbag would most likely save them. A proposal was to put a giant spike on the steering wheel so that if you got into an accident, you were likely to get hurt majorly. Although sadistic, this method would actually work to make people more cautious and safe drivers.
This article is somewhat similiar in that it forces penalties for bad products. Unfortunately, I think it will take something like what is being proposed to make companies realize that stable software is important.
Jason
Will RMS be fined 1$ every time any of the GNU utilities crash, or Linus everytime Linux crashes? Sure it doesn't happen ofter, but with the number of people using it...
I'll stop writing free software the day a law like that passes...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization!"
I first heard this user mantra in `82 with my first programming job -- and they said that was an old adage.
The problem isn't programmers lack of responsiveness to users, as has been suggested for the last 40 years. If that were true, it would have been solved by now.
The true problem is the inhearent complexity of software, where any useful integrated program enters the realm of chaos, and exhibits behavior "as if at random".
It's digital nature makes it more susceptible. While you can plumb a toilet within wide tolerances, software must be exact. Furthermore, a broken toilet doesn't take the city's sewer system down with it.
It's ease of modification makes it even more susceptible. A problem in hardware will be there for years, we'll learn to work around it, and it may become the standard. But with software, the fix (and the next set of bugs) will come with the next upgrade or patch.
The fellows suggestion that "speech recognition will cure this" is another example of how requirements bloat, to solve "the problems of software usability", exacerbates the problem.
Some problems need to be blamed on the programmers and management: the Window's kernel hung around much too long. Microsoft kept adding mounds of complexity with small doses of functionality to keep the ever faster processors busy; it was no wonder you couldn't keep it up.
Open source has been the best solution so far. If it has a problem, the "open hood" policy allows your local mechanic can fix it, or determine what the original programmer wanted the user to do in the first place.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
Is it really fair? You can't possibly say your software is 100 percent reliable. No software is. Not even Linux. That's why the Open Source method is so effective. It weeds out the bugs.
No matter what you do, there's always something that will cause software to crash. What happens if someone's CPU fan dies, and their OS has a kernel panic because of it? Does the software company owe money even though it's the CPU fan manufactuer's fault?
Most importantly, where do you draw the line and say, "This is a stupid user error, not a software error." And who makes that call? I certianly would think scandelous home users can't be trusted to do this, nor can big software companies. And what merits a successful recording of crashed software? Logs on a machine that can be altered by the owner? If they couldn't be altered, would you WANT software like that on your PC?
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
involving the government. riiiiiiight....
Seriously, as long as software companies emphasize release date and features over correctness and user testing, bugginess will be the norm. Financial penalties are warranted and effective for some industries (e.g. automotive, where bugs in the system cause fatalities), but unless the software you're making has life-or-death failure consequences it probably doesn't warrant that level of intervention (and nobody ever died becuase Windows crashed while they were playing Quake).
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If windows changes how secret interface number 27 works, or one of thier public functions, in a future release of windows and that breaks my code, should I be out a buck?
If someone else releases a piece of software that crashes mine, who owes who a buck, and how would an end user know the difference?
Doesn't this just encourage computer software developers to make thier software fail as silently as possible, which software developers hate?
If you feel you've been ripped off, sue. Sue in small claims if you have to, and if you want revenge more than money, sue the president of the company specifically and drag him personally into it, possibly into the courtroom. We don't need new laws for this. We have too many unused or ignored laws as it is.
(Woah, 0.8 just finished compiling! I can get some work done now!)
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
"Instead of hunting down people who smoke pot," Lanier says, "they'd be hunting down people who sell business software that crashes. They'd owe people a buck or go to jail. That's what Washington should be doing."
Sounds like he came up with this idea when he was high as a kite...
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Oh c'mon...does this mean everyone who manages to set their VCR clock is automatically a member of MENSA, and will be among the chosen few whisked off to another planet when humankind dooms itself?
The problem is, as always, just too damn many stupid people.
Take a look at these two quotes:
Computer literacy is an excuse for techies to say, 'I don't want to actually have to think this stuff through.' "
Maybe the answer -- gulp -- is Washington. Perhaps the only way to create plateaus is to mandate them.
Which is scarier? A class of peeps who are afraid of thinking their way through a problem or a gov't doing it for them? His whole argument boils down to those two lines. I'll agree when he says UI's in general are immature. Fine. But the biggest problem is immaturity. Computers as they exist today are in an immature state where they aren't 'obvious' but gov't is as able to grasp these concepts as well as Joe Trailer-Park Sixpack. A voting body as messed up as congress/senate trying to nail down what "good" is scares the living shit out of me.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
I used to work at a print shop -- the kind that produces national magazines, like Time or Fortune. I've been in the pressroom, I've been in the bindery, and all those machines go down several times a day. When hundreds of distinct, interlinked processes are happening at once, the failure of one will often shut down the rest.
I'm sure this applies to factory floors of all kinds, not just the presses, and I might add that most of said equipment costs SIGNIFICANTLY more to purchase and operate.
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