From the perspective of a tech support person, fluid in Novell debugger, familliar with the C language, but never really sat down and programmed, I can say that probably 90% of the programmers I've worked with may write beautiful programs with wonderful widgets and windows, and elegant workflow. But when something breaks, they have no clue.
It's especially cumbersome on Windows. Oops, something went wrong on this guy's 486 with 16 megs running windows 95. No intelligible return codes, say the process hung. No problem, let's fire up the debugger - wait, oh, um, okay we gotta install MS Visual Studio 6, um, got an extra gig of disk space for that, plus the symbols? (work around those issues), okay, debugger's running, reproduce problem, um, gee, I'm not seeing what's coming back, um, the OS isn't responding to this API like Microsoft's documentation says it should. um, try reinstalling the OS and see if that fixes it, 'k? By that time, counting phone tag with the customer, etc. a month has gone by, (if you're lucky). In short, they don't know what the f*ck is going on. The level of abstraction is so high right now, they not only don't know the underlying systems, they have no idea of how to get at them, so if something is fundamentally broken, there's no way to fix it. This is why some software ends up having bugs that live through several versions, because it's so difficult to fix now.
This is something I see the concept of "open source" having a shot at fixing. No application vendor can truly support their product on a platform that is not open to them. These highly abstract frameworks like MFC only serve to make things more obscure. (although now we're getting away from the language debate, because most programmers will agree that MFC != C++ programming).
What would be funny is, how this shaving-craze got started, I think, mainly due to internet porn, and a few pedophiles, (or maybe crab-lice avoidance among hookers), and now suddenly, it's a mainstream thing (see American Pie? I think the term is - "shaved"?). Now, a lot of chicks shave, and get tatoos, and peirced, all that stuff.
Would be funny if censoring software like this had the effect of making it fasionable for chicks to wear full-body paint. She's like a rainbow.
What we need is to PAY PEOPLE to look for porn, download it, submit it to a database where it's cataloged with it's MD4 signature, and then the filter can just filter out those files that match.
I volunteer for this job! (as long as I can make copies of what I download for my own personal, um, research.)
Those upgrade makers are pretty sharp. There was an older Mac that they made an upgrade for - the mac was supposedly not upgradable, but the upgrade plugged into the L2 Cache slot.
Next thing you know, you'll be plugging the damn things into the power socket (which may be the only plug left on them after Steve Jobs gets done with it all).
Maybe DuPont and Dow should clean up the atmosphere of CFC's. Maybe BPAmoco, Exxon, etc. should clean up the atmosphere of the excess CO2, and other crap, especially since it was proven that they basically forced the destruction of any public transportation infrastructure in America to promote the automobile. Maybe Monsanto should be liable to go through every individual plant organism in the entire world, and restore their genetic codes to what nature evolved, rather than what they picked up from GM crop pollen that blew their way. Maybe Microsoft should be responsible to go to every computer and remove all MFC and Visual Basic code polluting the info-environment. TV Broadcasters should probably be held responsible for travelling at faster than light speed to head off radio-waves from TV signals, and intercept them to prevent them from reaching an alien civilization which is liable to notice that we'd make an excellent slave-race.
Let's make these motherf*ckers PAY the real costs of doing business - not let them pass it on to customers while they profit.
nah, I flake-off and loaf. Read slashdot, while I'm supposed to be working for my taxes. When I'm working for money for ME, that's when the real productivity starts. Yessir! minesweeper!
Something tells me that "space junk" would be a great way to blockade a planet from interstellar trade. . .
Just release a couple million 1" ball bearings into the planet's orbits. With the added annoyance that these things will be raining down on their heads for several years thereafter.
No, wait, an advanced alien race would use centimeters, not inches. ..
You're on the right track - but an ion engine would mean propellant, which would indicate a set life-span for the equipment.
Since this device is intended to operate mainly in low earth orbit, why not use the earth's magnetic field, run a current through an extended tether, and bias the craft for a higher velocity? Solar cells provide the power. That would drastically improve it's longevity, and usefulness.
Frankly, $100,000 for suiciding to bring down a loose lug-nut seems pretty silly. With 68000 objects needing removal, that's $6,800,000,000 (plus the nontrivial launch expenses), I can think of a lot better things to spend the money on. that's a *lot* of money.
I think that an enforced independent standard would *eliminate* competition. Right now, nobody effectively competes with MS, because there's no point, they know they'll never dislodge MS.
With an enforced independent standard, MS might become dislodged as the standard, but then, we'll have nothing left but a million shitty word processors, all of them happy to compete with a shitty offering - no vendor willing to invest a sufficient amount of money in the product to make it truly great, because they will be unable to gain dominance easily, and once they do, there will be no way to assure continuance of dominance, because any other company could just come along and knock you off your hill. You couldn't capture the market with proprietary standards any more, and enjoy the fruits of monopoly-ness. So why bother. The only incentive to even produce a word processor under those circumstances, would be to bundle it with something else that you COULD leverage. (sound familliar?)
I'm just not convinced that open standards would be THE answer. While it would be a nice thing, and help stimey some of the abuses that are rife today - it would have the same effect as communism has on incentives to innovate.\ While it's true, some folks DO innovate, just for the thrill of it, or the fame, or for the philanthropy of it all. But most people do it out of greed.
My company is a marriage of a traditional Unix shop and an NT software company. I'm from the NT side. I used to be delighted when people would send PDFs around, and nobody on the NT side had a problem reading them. Acrobat is freely available. It offered several advantages over Word, the primary one being, speed. You could open Acrobat in about 1/10th the time it takes to open Word on the same machine.
People from our side of the company, of course, were standardized on.doc, and would send.doc out, and get complaints back from the other side, saying that they couldn't read them, they run Unix machines, don't have Word, etc. (this was pre StarOffice-Sun).
Some people on my side of the company actually obtained Acrobat writer, and started changing over to PDF. There was even a movement to switch over to HTML (unfortunatley, if you have diagrams or graphics, it wasn't a single, self-contained file.)
Of course, the tide has turned back for the worse now, as I'm seeing fewer and fewer PDF documents. People from the Unix side are now sending Word documents. It's a very sad thing.
What ticks me off is that PDF was better in so many ways. It offered better security for documents that were being published from a single source, it was faster, and more universal. Word just sucks. At least our internal distribution of manuals and stuff is still PDF.
What I really fucking hate is idiots who post technical specs on the web in.doc format. Instead of HTML or PDF. That fucking crashes my machine - so I have to carefully check file-formats before I click on links.
The fact that the case feels hot is a GOOD thing. It's doing it's job and dissipating heat. If it were NOT hot, that would mean that the heat is trapped inside.
Just like, you can tell, the well-insulated homes are the ones that have tons of snow on the roof. The ones leaking heat melt the snow.
Go to the Bungie.com site. Read the HALO press release from July of 1999.
The game was announced at a Macintosh trade show, demoed by Steve Jobs - as an example of a great software company, writing software for Macintosh.
This is yet another lame attempt to throw rotten eggs at Steve Jobs. Like the whole ANTZ/Bug's Life thing. A very expensive personal attack from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs.
And the team of what will undoubtedly be considered the greatest sci-fi game designers of all time, are the pawns in Bill Gates' childish plot. Of course, Halo will be delayed, and delayed even further for non-Windows platforms, and released sub-standard, complete with bugs that don't get fixed as quickly for the non Windows platform. And the sequel will undoubtedly be Windows only.
I can't believe this crap! Why doesn't somebody send these people to prison! I'm not upset that Microsoft is quashing one of the best Mac gaming companies out there, I'm pissed that Microsoft is quashing one of the best gaming companies period. Damn, Halo, on XBox? gimmie a fucking break!
My brother in law was a Marine, and he operated Hawk missile batteries. They could train the illuminator on seagulls a half-mile down the beach, and knock them out of the sky, basically cooking them in their own juices in seconds.
There are stories about burning people at range (without their knowledge), as a joke. But I think that falls under "urban legend".
I used to play this star trek-ish game on my school's commadore PET, (I think it had a Motorola 680x0 CPU of some kind?). The manual stated that for sound effects, you tuned an AM radio to a certain frequency, and it picked up RF from the CPU. It worked. You'd get all kinds of buzzing and whirring noises as the ship fired and maneuvered on the screen.
I guess you could induce current in the control line of a fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire system (heh! mess up your neighbor's Porsche 959!).
It would be a design flaw; a serious design flaw, to engineer a fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire system without sheilded cabling. (Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable unless it was fiber optic - which is why my car doesn't even have power steering or solid-state ignition).
Isn't it true that the french use this band for military purposes? (There was an early hullaballoo over Apple's AirPort device, not being approved in france or something like that).
I have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone, and it's a VAST improvement over the 900MHz phone it replaced. No noise, no static, no crosstalk, excellent range, I can take it out to my workshop and it still works fine. I can take it across the street to the neighbor's house, and it still works great!
I wouldn't even begin to characterize a product or service as holding a monopoly unless they were able to begin benefiting from "network effects", which clearly hasn't happened in the IM space yet. For any player.
At work, we started using some Lotus peice of shit, "Sametime". (Our vp used to work for Lotus, what a coincidence!)
It won't let me log in, despite the fact that my account and password are correct. I can't log in as myself, or as any one of three new accounts we created just for kicks, or as guest. It's just fucked, and they (Lotus support) haven't figured it out yet. It's been three weeks now. What gets me is we PAID for this - while all the free ones out there work just fine. (okay, so they don't offer the security Sametime does. . . some security, it's so secure, even valid users can't get in.)
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Re:Mattel and the Learning Company are screwed up
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 2
This is not necessarily wholly the fault of the software manufacturer.
For example, my company had this product, we tested it, beta tested it, we had a schedule, it was looking good to be completed by date X. We started the ad campaign, made announcments, gave eval copies to magazines to write reviews.
Then, the day we were to ship it, we all sat down and marveled at the quality and feature-set of our amazing creation, and signed the papers. Then, our IT group, who was running a large-scale test, noticed a problem. There was no backing out of shipment at this point, the master was in the duplicator, tens of thousands of dollars of manufacturing costs, plus our reputation with the press (all important in this competitive industry) were all on the line. We rolled up our sleeves and went to work on the problem. We loaded up debuggers. Programmers, who had just spent the previous six weeks working seven twelve hour days a week, were in on the weekend again. The problem could not be reproduced on any other hardware but this IT server. The debugger showed the calls to the OS, and the return codes just not coming back. The OS was NT. It was starting to look like a hardware problem. whew. Sigh of relief.
The problem is - whether we like it or not, bad hardware exists out there. Whether we're talking about a failing 5-year old 3com ISA network card in some secratarie's 486, or a brand new $50,000 RAID Array from Compaq. You'd think that universally, bad hardware should give software certain set responses, so the software knows enough to tell the user; "gee, I made a call down the stack to the network card, but the card didn't respond within the normally alloted timeout range, so it sure looks like your NIC is in need of replacement". But that's not always the case. Yes, properly designed software should have the heuristics to anticipate hardware failure, and behave accordingly, in a way that the user can tell what the fuck is going on, and do something constructive about it, rather than call our tech support and make us troubleshoot bad or misconfigured hardware. But in reality, that software sits on a peice of shit proprietary OS, and API framework, and is reliant on those for it's ability to do stuff - intelligent or not. And don't give me that "open source is better" crap, because there is NO operating system that is even remotely OK at handling these kinds of scenarios.
We ended up shipping the software. Fortunately, this time, the specific hardware problem that caused the error was unique to our equipment. But I've been in this industry for 8 years, and I've seen scenarios caused by bugs in the underlying OS (*cough* NOVELL *cough*) that lost us ten million dollar contracts, I've seen problems caused by a frayed SCSI connector that required me to fly to Dallas four times, because I was dumb enough to believe the IT guy who said he checked back there and everything was okay, and I've seen problems that only happened with OUR software, with one specific brand of network card, and it was because we had tried to push another vendor's broken standard. And, I've seen over zealous marketers push schedules so agressively, that the finished product would be classsified as pre-beta. (Marketers don't seem to understand that software is kind of like having a baby, you can't take nine mothers, and have a baby in one month). And, I've seen more cases than I care to count, where a problem is found in testing, but could not be duplicated, so it's left alone (everything humanly possible was done to try to fix the problem, but if it couldn't be identified, or localized, then what could be done), and the problem ends up cropping up in the finished product, on perhaps one in a thousand customer systems.
In the end, yes, shit happens at software manufacturers. Schedules are tight, competition is very fierce. But we're all forced to write software that runs on a crap OS, running on crap hardware, and no matter how much human effort you put into it, you can't polish a turd.
Does this industry need some kind of watchdog, some kind of consumer group and independent testing body? Absolutely. No doubt about it - so much is riding on it. But will it happen? Not while these companies are making campaign contributions to the lawmakers.
Which again, I state is the fault of all you idiots who voted for G-Dubbya in the republican primary, instead of McCain.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Re:Hands up who actually inspects it all
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 1
Nor is my mother-in-law going to inspect every line of code.
I think we need some good old fashioned consumer advocacy applied to the software industry, and pronto.
If we can't crack open the box, at least it can be tested by an independent source; government funded or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
shit! Then I'll just have to download the new version of the picture too!
See how this works?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
From the perspective of a tech support person, fluid in Novell debugger, familliar with the C language, but never really sat down and programmed, I can say that probably 90% of the programmers I've worked with may write beautiful programs with wonderful widgets and windows, and elegant workflow. But when something breaks, they have no clue.
It's especially cumbersome on Windows. Oops, something went wrong on this guy's 486 with 16 megs running windows 95. No intelligible return codes, say the process hung. No problem, let's fire up the debugger - wait, oh, um, okay we gotta install MS Visual Studio 6, um, got an extra gig of disk space for that, plus the symbols? (work around those issues), okay, debugger's running, reproduce problem, um, gee, I'm not seeing what's coming back, um, the OS isn't responding to this API like Microsoft's documentation says it should. um, try reinstalling the OS and see if that fixes it, 'k? By that time, counting phone tag with the customer, etc. a month has gone by, (if you're lucky).
In short, they don't know what the f*ck is going on. The level of abstraction is so high right now, they not only don't know the underlying systems, they have no idea of how to get at them, so if something is fundamentally broken, there's no way to fix it. This is why some software ends up having bugs that live through several versions, because it's so difficult to fix now.
This is something I see the concept of "open source" having a shot at fixing. No application vendor can truly support their product on a platform that is not open to them. These highly abstract frameworks like MFC only serve to make things more obscure. (although now we're getting away from the language debate, because most programmers will agree that MFC != C++ programming).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
life imitates art.
What would be funny is, how this shaving-craze got started, I think, mainly due to internet porn, and a few pedophiles, (or maybe crab-lice avoidance among hookers), and now suddenly, it's a mainstream thing (see American Pie? I think the term is - "shaved"?). Now, a lot of chicks shave, and get tatoos, and peirced, all that stuff.
Would be funny if censoring software like this had the effect of making it fasionable for chicks to wear full-body paint. She's like a rainbow.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I shouldn't have, because:
50 buzillion other people had already posted it further down the thread - I hadn't read that far yet.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
What we need is to PAY PEOPLE to look for porn, download it, submit it to a database where it's cataloged with it's MD4 signature, and then the filter can just filter out those files that match.
I volunteer for this job! (as long as I can make copies of what I download for my own personal, um, research.)
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Those upgrade makers are pretty sharp. There was an older Mac that they made an upgrade for - the mac was supposedly not upgradable, but the upgrade plugged into the L2 Cache slot.
Next thing you know, you'll be plugging the damn things into the power socket (which may be the only plug left on them after Steve Jobs gets done with it all).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
The US economy has a LOT more to do with cheap oil than some mythical dot-com bubble that's supposedly going to burst.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Maybe DuPont and Dow should clean up the atmosphere of CFC's. Maybe BPAmoco, Exxon, etc. should clean up the atmosphere of the excess CO2, and other crap, especially since it was proven that they basically forced the destruction of any public transportation infrastructure in America to promote the automobile. Maybe Monsanto should be liable to go through every individual plant organism in the entire world, and restore their genetic codes to what nature evolved, rather than what they picked up from GM crop pollen that blew their way. Maybe Microsoft should be responsible to go to every computer and remove all MFC and Visual Basic code polluting the info-environment. TV Broadcasters should probably be held responsible for travelling at faster than light speed to head off radio-waves from TV signals, and intercept them to prevent them from reaching an alien civilization which is liable to notice that we'd make an excellent slave-race.
Let's make these motherf*ckers PAY the real costs of doing business - not let them pass it on to customers while they profit.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
nah, I flake-off and loaf. Read slashdot, while I'm supposed to be working for my taxes. When I'm working for money for ME, that's when the real productivity starts. Yessir! minesweeper!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Something tells me that "space junk" would be a great way to blockade a planet from interstellar trade. . .
.
Just release a couple million 1" ball bearings into the planet's orbits. With the added annoyance that these things will be raining down on their heads for several years thereafter.
No, wait, an advanced alien race would use centimeters, not inches. .
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
You're on the right track - but an ion engine would mean propellant, which would indicate a set life-span for the equipment.
Since this device is intended to operate mainly in low earth orbit, why not use the earth's magnetic field, run a current through an extended tether, and bias the craft for a higher velocity? Solar cells provide the power. That would drastically improve it's longevity, and usefulness.
Frankly, $100,000 for suiciding to bring down a loose lug-nut seems pretty silly. With 68000 objects needing removal, that's $6,800,000,000 (plus the nontrivial launch expenses), I can think of a lot better things to spend the money on. that's a *lot* of money.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I think that an enforced independent standard would *eliminate* competition. Right now, nobody effectively competes with MS, because there's no point, they know they'll never dislodge MS.
With an enforced independent standard, MS might become dislodged as the standard, but then, we'll have nothing left but a million shitty word processors, all of them happy to compete with a shitty offering - no vendor willing to invest a sufficient amount of money in the product to make it truly great, because they will be unable to gain dominance easily, and once they do, there will be no way to assure continuance of dominance, because any other company could just come along and knock you off your hill. You couldn't capture the market with proprietary standards any more, and enjoy the fruits of monopoly-ness. So why bother. The only incentive to even produce a word processor under those circumstances, would be to bundle it with something else that you COULD leverage. (sound familliar?)
I'm just not convinced that open standards would be THE answer. While it would be a nice thing, and help stimey some of the abuses that are rife today - it would have the same effect as communism has on incentives to innovate.\
While it's true, some folks DO innovate, just for the thrill of it, or the fame, or for the philanthropy of it all. But most people do it out of greed.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
My company is a marriage of a traditional Unix shop and an NT software company. I'm from the NT side. I used to be delighted when people would send PDFs around, and nobody on the NT side had a problem reading them. Acrobat is freely available. It offered several advantages over Word, the primary one being, speed. You could open Acrobat in about 1/10th the time it takes to open Word on the same machine.
.doc, and would send .doc out, and get complaints back from the other side, saying that they couldn't read them, they run Unix machines, don't have Word, etc. (this was pre StarOffice-Sun).
.doc format. Instead of HTML or PDF. That fucking crashes my machine - so I have to carefully check file-formats before I click on links.
People from our side of the company, of course, were standardized on
Some people on my side of the company actually obtained Acrobat writer, and started changing over to PDF. There was even a movement to switch over to HTML (unfortunatley, if you have diagrams or graphics, it wasn't a single, self-contained file.)
Of course, the tide has turned back for the worse now, as I'm seeing fewer and fewer PDF documents. People from the Unix side are now sending Word documents. It's a very sad thing.
What ticks me off is that PDF was better in so many ways. It offered better security for documents that were being published from a single source, it was faster, and more universal. Word just sucks. At least our internal distribution of manuals and stuff is still PDF.
What I really fucking hate is idiots who post technical specs on the web in
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
duh!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
The fact that the case feels hot is a GOOD thing. It's doing it's job and dissipating heat. If it were NOT hot, that would mean that the heat is trapped inside.
Just like, you can tell, the well-insulated homes are the ones that have tons of snow on the roof. The ones leaking heat melt the snow.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Go to the Bungie.com site. Read the HALO press release from July of 1999.
The game was announced at a Macintosh trade show, demoed by Steve Jobs - as an example of a great software company, writing software for Macintosh.
This is yet another lame attempt to throw rotten eggs at Steve Jobs. Like the whole ANTZ/Bug's Life thing. A very expensive personal attack from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs.
And the team of what will undoubtedly be considered the greatest sci-fi game designers of all time, are the pawns in Bill Gates' childish plot.
Of course, Halo will be delayed, and delayed even further for non-Windows platforms, and released sub-standard, complete with bugs that don't get fixed as quickly for the non Windows platform. And the sequel will undoubtedly be Windows only.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I can't believe this crap! Why doesn't somebody send these people to prison! I'm not upset that Microsoft is quashing one of the best Mac gaming companies out there, I'm pissed that Microsoft is quashing one of the best gaming companies period. Damn, Halo, on XBox? gimmie a fucking break!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
My brother in law was a Marine, and he operated Hawk missile batteries. They could train the illuminator on seagulls a half-mile down the beach, and knock them out of the sky, basically cooking them in their own juices in seconds.
There are stories about burning people at range (without their knowledge), as a joke. But I think that falls under "urban legend".
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I used to play this star trek-ish game on my school's commadore PET, (I think it had a Motorola 680x0 CPU of some kind?). The manual stated that for sound effects, you tuned an AM radio to a certain frequency, and it picked up RF from the CPU. It worked. You'd get all kinds of buzzing and whirring noises as the ship fired and maneuvered on the screen.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I guess you could induce current in the control line of a fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire system (heh! mess up your neighbor's Porsche 959!).
It would be a design flaw; a serious design flaw, to engineer a fly-by-wire or drive-by-wire system without sheilded cabling. (Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable unless it was fiber optic - which is why my car doesn't even have power steering or solid-state ignition).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Isn't it true that the french use this band for military purposes? (There was an early hullaballoo over Apple's AirPort device, not being approved in france or something like that).
I have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone, and it's a VAST improvement over the 900MHz phone it replaced. No noise, no static, no crosstalk, excellent range, I can take it out to my workshop and it still works fine. I can take it across the street to the neighbor's house, and it still works great!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I wouldn't even begin to characterize a product or service as holding a monopoly unless they were able to begin benefiting from "network effects", which clearly hasn't happened in the IM space yet. For any player.
Regardless of marketshare.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
At work, we started using some Lotus peice of shit, "Sametime". (Our vp used to work for Lotus, what a coincidence!)
It won't let me log in, despite the fact that my account and password are correct. I can't log in as myself, or as any one of three new accounts we created just for kicks, or as guest. It's just fucked, and they (Lotus support) haven't figured it out yet. It's been three weeks now. What gets me is we PAID for this - while all the free ones out there work just fine. (okay, so they don't offer the security Sametime does. . . some security, it's so secure, even valid users can't get in.)
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
This is not necessarily wholly the fault of the software manufacturer.
For example, my company had this product, we tested it, beta tested it, we had a schedule, it was looking good to be completed by date X. We started the ad campaign, made announcments, gave eval copies to magazines to write reviews.
Then, the day we were to ship it, we all sat down and marveled at the quality and feature-set of our amazing creation, and signed the papers.
Then, our IT group, who was running a large-scale test, noticed a problem. There was no backing out of shipment at this point, the master was in the duplicator, tens of thousands of dollars of manufacturing costs, plus our reputation with the press (all important in this competitive industry) were all on the line. We rolled up our sleeves and went to work on the problem. We loaded up debuggers. Programmers, who had just spent the previous six weeks working seven twelve hour days a week, were in on the weekend again. The problem could not be reproduced on any other hardware but this IT server. The debugger showed the calls to the OS, and the return codes just not coming back. The OS was NT. It was starting to look like a hardware problem. whew. Sigh of relief.
The problem is - whether we like it or not, bad hardware exists out there. Whether we're talking about a failing 5-year old 3com ISA network card in some secratarie's 486, or a brand new $50,000 RAID Array from Compaq. You'd think that universally, bad hardware should give software certain set responses, so the software knows enough to tell the user; "gee, I made a call down the stack to the network card, but the card didn't respond within the normally alloted timeout range, so it sure looks like your NIC is in need of replacement". But that's not always the case. Yes, properly designed software should have the heuristics to anticipate hardware failure, and behave accordingly, in a way that the user can tell what the fuck is going on, and do something constructive about it, rather than call our tech support and make us troubleshoot bad or misconfigured hardware. But in reality, that software sits on a peice of shit proprietary OS, and API framework, and is reliant on those for it's ability to do stuff - intelligent or not. And don't give me that "open source is better" crap, because there is NO operating system that is even remotely OK at handling these kinds of scenarios.
We ended up shipping the software. Fortunately, this time, the specific hardware problem that caused the error was unique to our equipment. But I've been in this industry for 8 years, and I've seen scenarios caused by bugs in the underlying OS (*cough* NOVELL *cough*) that lost us ten million dollar contracts, I've seen problems caused by a frayed SCSI connector that required me to fly to Dallas four times, because I was dumb enough to believe the IT guy who said he checked back there and everything was okay, and I've seen problems that only happened with OUR software, with one specific brand of network card, and it was because we had tried to push another vendor's broken standard.
And, I've seen over zealous marketers push schedules so agressively, that the finished product would be classsified as pre-beta. (Marketers don't seem to understand that software is kind of like having a baby, you can't take nine mothers, and have a baby in one month).
And, I've seen more cases than I care to count, where a problem is found in testing, but could not be duplicated, so it's left alone (everything humanly possible was done to try to fix the problem, but if it couldn't be identified, or localized, then what could be done), and the problem ends up cropping up in the finished product, on perhaps one in a thousand customer systems.
In the end, yes, shit happens at software manufacturers. Schedules are tight, competition is very fierce. But we're all forced to write software that runs on a crap OS, running on crap hardware, and no matter how much human effort you put into it, you can't polish a turd.
Does this industry need some kind of watchdog, some kind of consumer group and independent testing body? Absolutely. No doubt about it - so much is riding on it.
But will it happen?
Not while these companies are making campaign contributions to the lawmakers.
Which again, I state is the fault of all you idiots who voted for G-Dubbya in the republican primary, instead of McCain.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Nor is my mother-in-law going to inspect every line of code.
I think we need some good old fashioned consumer advocacy applied to the software industry, and pronto.
If we can't crack open the box, at least it can be tested by an independent source; government funded or otherwise.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!