Why Do Computers Still Crash?

geoff lane asks: "I've used computers for about 30 years and over that time their hardware reliability has improved (but not that much), but their software reliability has remained largely unchanged. Sometimes a company gets it right -- my Psion 3a has never crashed despite being switched on and in use for over five years, but my shiny new Zaurus crashed within a month of purchase (a hard reset losing all data was required to get it running again). Of course, there's no need to mention Microsoft's inability to create a stable system. So, why are modern operating systems still unable to deal with and recover from problems? Is the need for speed preventing the use of reliable software design techniques? Or is modern software just so complex that there is always another unexpected interaction that's not understood and not planned for? Are we using the wrong tools (such as C) which do not provide the facilities necessary to write safe software?" If we were to make computer crashes a thing of the past, what would we have to do, both in our software and in our operating systems, to make this come to pass?

Comments

OS X

[mysterious_mark]

Rarely crashes, have yet to see ir crash, a stbale OS is possible just not by M$. MM

Norton CrashGuard

[Ryu2]

Norton has a little program called CrashGuard for Windows which supposedly can detect crashes, and somehow "recover" the program, at least enough so you can do a "Save As..." of what you're working on. Does anyone know how it works technically?

Perhaps by somehow taking "snapshots" of program state in memory, and then "rolling back" when a crash is detected? (It's the only way I can think of without having application-specific knowledge about internal data structures, etc.)