Let's think about this for a moment. If you are deploying thousands of systems, you can set a standard and deploy a standard that is compliant with Linux. As for attached hardware, I guarantee you that any POS hardware shop would bend over backwards to make a massive sale to home depot. They are one of the 800 lb gorillas in retail so you'd think that they get a little flexibility from their vendors.
So now they get to pay licensing fees on all of those POS systems forever. What happens when Microsoft no longer supports the OS on your registers? Now you HAVE to upgrade, and outlay even more in support costs.
Good thinking... really...
In reality, I guarantee that this decision is the old, "nobody lost their job choosing microsoft", the more modern version of the same phrase that was applied to IBM originally. IF they went with Linux and it was a failure for whatever reason, the person who made the decision is SCREWED. IF they go with windows and it's a failure, they won't take the heat because they went with Microsoft.
Granted, if the Linux option succeeds they have the potential to look really good, but oh well...
Time compress it. It was 90 minutes and felt more like 3 hours. So if you time compressed it to say 60 minutes, then you'd have a movie that seemed like two hours and George Clooney would sound a bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks:)
The important difference with these guys is that they are pirating music to make money off of it. Consumers who make copies and distribute them are doing it for free. Actually, more acurately, consumers are PAYING to pirate the music since they have to have a broadband connection to be able to do it, a decent CD ripper/burner, etc.
What did Marc do really?
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things.
What exactly has he done that was truly innovative? He happened to be at NCSA when they happened to be writing the first graphical web browser. To the best of my knowledge, he's just been somebody who was at the right place at the right time.
What a pointless article...
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Wow, that was insightful. So you mean IT is overworked and that the it'd be nice if IT could become a more automated process? Wow Marc, you've really stunned me with your insights!
DUH! I mean c'mon, the reason why IT is such a mess is because all the IT staff are being expected to do more with less and do it faster. They are overworked fighting fires which means they aren't given the resources to do advanced planning and put together systems that would really get things right. He makes it sound like this is the responsibility of the IT people, but it's really the responsibility fo the business as a whole to have some foresight and help these IT people out.
Overworked sysadmins do what has to be done to keep something working RIGHT NOW. Sysadmins with some free time will spend their efforts writing scripts, automating tedious tasks, and making sure fires don't happen. When fires do happen, they have the time to deal with them effectively because they've had a chance to automate a lot of the other tasks.
I have known many a sysadmin and I have never met a one who wasn't constantly pissed off because he lacked resources. A friend of mine was sysadmin for a company that wanted to have 24 hour uptime for their systems. He was the ONLY sysadmin. That sort of crap happens constantly in the IT world because the other members of the company have the wrong atttitude about IT, that it's an expense. If they looked at it like they look at factories and buildings, as an infrastructure investment, then you'd probably see a lot more happy IT managers out there.
The fact is, if I want cable TV in another room, I have to pay for an additional cable outlet. If I want a phone for my daughter or heck, for myself in my office, I have to pay.
Actually, until the advent of the overpriced digital cable services, this wasn't true of cable. You would have one cable connection into your home and an infinite number of TV's connected for free as long as you ran your own cable. So until some company decided they could make more money by making people pay for multiple connections, it didn't work that way. Same thing here.
Now, I think the phone analogy makes more sense here and how they SHOULD do it. If I have multiple phones in my house, they can be used by multiple people, they just can't be used simultaneously. If they are wanting to make sure 20 people aren't sharing one copy, that's fine, just say that they cannot be logged in simultaneously. Or perhaps, not logged in simulatenously from more than one IP. This would provide the means for a family to share one account and all play at the same time, but would disallow the possibility of it being abused.
Now, looking at the legal reality, the fact is that the EULA disallows this. It disallows it in most of the games. Why? So that we can tell who actually did something bad. So that we are forming a legal contract via the EULA with one individual who is legally responsible.
It seems to me that the legal reality is that a 14 year old cannot be bound by the terms of a EULA because they are not an adult. Therfore, not having "Family" accounts run by a parent is actually opening them up to legal problems. If a child does something nasty and violates the snot out of the EULA, they have no recourse. If a child does so on a parents account, then they do.
I'll say it flatly--a character record in SWG is FAR larger than you think. There's a business reality to see here. We share fancy databases over multiple servers. Said fancy databases cost $X up to a certain size. Then they cost ten times that if you go over that limit by one byte because you have to buy the "next size up."
So basically they've invested in a database with a ridiculous pricing scheme and so this is the side effect. Damn shame for them that they didn't use PostgreSQL or MySQL.
I highly recommend speakeasy if you need another option. The provide good service and have the smoothest installation I've seen. I also got a free PS/2 out of them when I signed up:)
Or even simpler, just tell them what the problem is, bullshit your way through the diagnostics, and then tell them that XP is installed on it, wipe the drive and send it back to them:)
I just learned that you can't be completely honest with them.
Here's an unplesant thought of how they could make it illegal. In the next release of Office, make it dependent on some sort of DRM technology in the Windows operating system. If they did this:
1) Because that is security related, Microsoft could keep the knowledge of how this interface would work under the exceptions outlined in their settlement.
2) If Codeweavers was to reverse engineer it, Microsoft could claim that their implementation was circumventing an access control and take them to court under the DMCA. Moreover, since Codeweavers actually sells these products, they could actually be brought up on criminal charges.
Number two might make for an interesting court battle, assuming codeweavers has the resources to fight it.
Basically, are you willing to try to defend that sort of technicality in a court of law? I wouldn't advise it, but IANAL:)
Anyhow, the big advantage this brings isn't the savings in licensing costs on Office, but rather the licensing costs for Windows itself. Furthermore, it makes it possible to have an office running on thin client linux systems and still be able to use MS Office if that is a necessity. This allows for centralized management and all the benefits that brings.
Before you go and ship your copy of XP back to anybody for a refund, be sure the company that it to you will support your system if you have any problems. I have a laptop from one of the largest computer vendors in the world, and it came pre-installed with XP. It turned out that it had a hardware problem, it has some bad memory. I used some dianostic tools and indeed confirmed that it was a hardware problem. When I tried to call them up to get this fixed it did not go well.
Basically what it boiled down to is that they refused to provide any service under my warranty unless I ran the operating system that came with the laptop. I asked the guy, "is my warranty effectively invalid if I run Linux?". He said that, unfortunately, that was, in essence, the case.
So, just a word to the wise that if you don't install XP on your system, you may in fact be making your warranty irrelevent even for hardware specific problems.
Supply and demand don't happen in a regulated monopoly environment. Tell me, how many "broadband" providers do you have to chose from?
Well personally I use Speakeasy DSL because they have competitively offered me a package that lets me do what I want with the bandwidth and I pay a premium for that. I could use AT&T cable, or SBC/Ameritech DSL. I could get internet over a satellite. I can get DSL through a number of sources, though as far as CLEC's go, I've got 3 or 4 choices.
Granted, I live in Chicago, and so I get a lot of choices. In your situation, does it really make sense for the local bell to not offer you DSL services in the long run? If they have even a chance to charge you another $40/month, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to assuming that the costs for their infrastructure isn't going to be higher. The problem may be that, for whatever reason, it will cost them more to lay out the infrastructure in your area than they expect to make on DSL service.
The question you have to ask in citing the "monopoly environment" question is this: what possible benefit does their monopoly gain by NOT giving you DSL service?
There's no financial incentives here. People pay $10-20/month for their dial-up. Many haven't seen a clear incentive to pay $30-40/month for broadband. Can the ISP's afford to sell broadband at $10-20/month? I doubt it. The dial-up ISP's can barely afford the rates they charge, and they don't have to pay for nearly the same level of infrastructure as they would for broadband.
well first of all, I've never seen any hard drive evaporate:). But beyond that technicality, there's no such thing as permanent storage. There are relative degrees of permanence and generally, the permanence is inversely proportional to the convenience. Storing a book on stone is pretty permanent, but it's a pain. Even still, the stone will slowly dissolve over time, and you could accidentally drop it and have it shatter.
You need to determine what is good enough for your needs. Will a hard drive last 5-10 years in storage and still retain data reliably? What about a DVD? What about paper? I have a computer running as my router, the drive in that dates back to my junior year of college making it roughly 7 years old. Still works fine.
Even applying conservative estimates to costs of construction, the companies spent more than $570 million laying long-distance fiber cables across Oregon, and they shelled out at least $265 million more equipping the 5% of fiber that is used
It costs almost 10 times as much to light a fiber as it does to lay it according to these numbers. Most of the cost in laying fiber isn't the fiber itself, but the labor and the property rights involved in doing it. So, you may as well lay 95% more fiber than you really need because you might need it some day and it doesn't cost you that much more. You'd be insane to try to terminate all of those fibers though since they cost so damn much.
Furthermore, bandwidth is a matter of supply and demand, and as long as demand isn't increasing, increasing supply will force down prices and make your business less profitable. Let's say everybody started needing DS-3 speeds into their home. Somebody would come in and offer that speed for a hefty premium, but as demand for that service built up, people would come into lower the prices to get into that market. Eventually you end up paying the same amount for your DS-3 as you did for your DSL and you've got a few more of those fibers on the coast glowing.
The problem is that there's nothing driving bandwidth demand substantially above what it is right now. Most people will tolerate modem speeds, and those that won't are mostly pretty happy with DSL or cable. A few of us want more bandwidth, and because we aren't the majority of users we will have to pay handsomly for it. As long as the majority of users are content with the bandwidth they have there is no incentive to expand their networks.
At this point, it seems pretty clear that life is a pretty common phenomenon. The only ingredients that are seemingly necessary are water, and carbon. These are ingredients that are spread throughout the universe in vast quantities.
Some day soon, they will finally find bacteria on someplace like europa and we can put to rest any question that there is life out there. The conditions needed to support basic life are pretty minimal. The basic requirements for intellgient life are an entirely different matter. Can a civilization be built around hot thermal vents or two miles deep in ice?
It is worth noting that a number (don't know exactly what the number is) of the crimes committed with guns are using guns that were obtained through legal means. If there was no legal means, it would make it more difficult for criminals to get the guns as well.
I'm not strongly familiar with the statistics, but are there statistics of gun crime in countries where guns were legal and then later banned. The logic of this argument would suggest that gun crime would increase after guns were banned. I kind of doubt that but I don't have numbers to support it.
For the record, I support gun ownership though I don't personally want to own a gun. I just don't find that this argument has a lot of merit.
The fact of the matter is that watching more TV doesn't actually help the cable companies. If you never turn your TV on but send a $60 check to the cable company every month, they are pretty ecstatic. The advertisers might be happier except that, along with the PVR, comes commercial skipping, which means that their marketing may be adversely impacted even though more people are watching.
It might benefit cable companies if the usefulness of the PVR increases the desire of viewers to upgrade their subscriptions. If by getting Tivo, HBO suddenly becomes very valuable for me, then that's a big bonus for my local cable company. I'd be curious to see if the statistics support that conclusion. My thinking would be that a Tivo would allow somebody to make more effecitve use of less channels. Why get the premium channels when you can keep your TV schedule filled with all of the obscure programs from non-premium channels that you didn't know were on before.
The amount of spam you receive is directly proportional to the frequency with which your e-mail address is publicly posted. Most offices don't publicly post the e-mail address of their employees, therefore, they don't get much spam. On the other hand, private individuals throw their e-mail address all over the place. Be it registering for some on-line service, or posting on a blog.
No, what I'm saying is that, there shouldn't be some regulation, and that you should be able to run your network however you want. Then if somebody DOES use your network to cause havoc, you get to pay part of the price for their actions.
Create an incetive for people to maintain security and they will.
I think it's totally within your right to run your open network. Then when somebody uses your open network to cause havoc and destruction, you should be held liable as a facillitator of their crimes. Seems totally fair to me.
The constant comparison of software development to real world engineering is ridiculous. There is one very serious difference between the two concepts. Once a physical construct is created, it cannot be easily undone or changed. Software is infinitely malleable.
This difference, though seemingly small, makes a huge difference when it comes to designing of a system. If software was going to be designed to do one specific thing, and never change, it would be much simpler to develop bug free software quickly. But that is never the case. Invariably things are constantly being redefined as the software is developed and even after it's "done", there are several iterations of improvements and changes.
A bridge, but contrast, is designed, and then it is built, and when it's done, that's it until it starts falling apart, and then the same process happens again. The iterations are over periods of decades, centuies, or millenia, depending on how well you build the bridge in the first place.
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Let's think about this for a moment. If you are deploying thousands of systems, you can set a standard and deploy a standard that is compliant with Linux. As for attached hardware, I guarantee you that any POS hardware shop would bend over backwards to make a massive sale to home depot. They are one of the 800 lb gorillas in retail so you'd think that they get a little flexibility from their vendors.
So now they get to pay licensing fees on all of those POS systems forever. What happens when Microsoft no longer supports the OS on your registers? Now you HAVE to upgrade, and outlay even more in support costs.
Good thinking... really...
In reality, I guarantee that this decision is the old, "nobody lost their job choosing microsoft", the more modern version of the same phrase that was applied to IBM originally. IF they went with Linux and it was a failure for whatever reason, the person who made the decision is SCREWED. IF they go with windows and it's a failure, they won't take the heat because they went with Microsoft.
Granted, if the Linux option succeeds they have the potential to look really good, but oh well...
Time compress it. It was 90 minutes and felt more like 3 hours. So if you time compressed it to say 60 minutes, then you'd have a movie that seemed like two hours and George Clooney would sound a bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks :)
The important difference with these guys is that they are pirating music to make money off of it. Consumers who make copies and distribute them are doing it for free. Actually, more acurately, consumers are PAYING to pirate the music since they have to have a broadband connection to be able to do it, a decent CD ripper/burner, etc.
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things.
What exactly has he done that was truly innovative? He happened to be at NCSA when they happened to be writing the first graphical web browser. To the best of my knowledge, he's just been somebody who was at the right place at the right time.
Wow, that was insightful. So you mean IT is overworked and that the it'd be nice if IT could become a more automated process? Wow Marc, you've really stunned me with your insights!
DUH! I mean c'mon, the reason why IT is such a mess is because all the IT staff are being expected to do more with less and do it faster. They are overworked fighting fires which means they aren't given the resources to do advanced planning and put together systems that would really get things right. He makes it sound like this is the responsibility of the IT people, but it's really the responsibility fo the business as a whole to have some foresight and help these IT people out.
Overworked sysadmins do what has to be done to keep something working RIGHT NOW. Sysadmins with some free time will spend their efforts writing scripts, automating tedious tasks, and making sure fires don't happen. When fires do happen, they have the time to deal with them effectively because they've had a chance to automate a lot of the other tasks.
I have known many a sysadmin and I have never met a one who wasn't constantly pissed off because he lacked resources. A friend of mine was sysadmin for a company that wanted to have 24 hour uptime for their systems. He was the ONLY sysadmin. That sort of crap happens constantly in the IT world because the other members of the company have the wrong atttitude about IT, that it's an expense. If they looked at it like they look at factories and buildings, as an infrastructure investment, then you'd probably see a lot more happy IT managers out there.
The fact is, if I want cable TV in another room, I have to pay for an additional cable outlet. If I want a phone for my daughter or heck, for myself in my office, I have to pay.
Actually, until the advent of the overpriced digital cable services, this wasn't true of cable. You would have one cable connection into your home and an infinite number of TV's connected for free as long as you ran your own cable. So until some company decided they could make more money by making people pay for multiple connections, it didn't work that way. Same thing here.
Now, I think the phone analogy makes more sense here and how they SHOULD do it. If I have multiple phones in my house, they can be used by multiple people, they just can't be used simultaneously. If they are wanting to make sure 20 people aren't sharing one copy, that's fine, just say that they cannot be logged in simultaneously. Or perhaps, not logged in simulatenously from more than one IP. This would provide the means for a family to share one account and all play at the same time, but would disallow the possibility of it being abused.
Now, looking at the legal reality, the fact is that the EULA disallows this. It disallows it in most of the games. Why? So that we can tell who actually did something bad. So that we are forming a legal contract via the EULA with one individual who is legally responsible.
It seems to me that the legal reality is that a 14 year old cannot be bound by the terms of a EULA because they are not an adult. Therfore, not having "Family" accounts run by a parent is actually opening them up to legal problems. If a child does something nasty and violates the snot out of the EULA, they have no recourse. If a child does so on a parents account, then they do.
I'll say it flatly--a character record in SWG is FAR larger than you think. There's a business reality to see here. We share fancy databases over multiple servers. Said fancy databases cost $X up to a certain size. Then they cost ten times that if you go over that limit by one byte because you have to buy the "next size up."
So basically they've invested in a database with a ridiculous pricing scheme and so this is the side effect. Damn shame for them that they didn't use PostgreSQL or MySQL.
I highly recommend speakeasy if you need another option. The provide good service and have the smoothest installation I've seen. I also got a free PS/2 out of them when I signed up :)
Or even simpler, just tell them what the problem is, bullshit your way through the diagnostics, and then tell them that XP is installed on it, wipe the drive and send it back to them :)
I just learned that you can't be completely honest with them.
Here's an unplesant thought of how they could make it illegal. In the next release of Office, make it dependent on some sort of DRM technology in the Windows operating system. If they did this:
1) Because that is security related, Microsoft could keep the knowledge of how this interface would work under the exceptions outlined in their settlement.
2) If Codeweavers was to reverse engineer it, Microsoft could claim that their implementation was circumventing an access control and take them to court under the DMCA. Moreover, since Codeweavers actually sells these products, they could actually be brought up on criminal charges.
Number two might make for an interesting court battle, assuming codeweavers has the resources to fight it.
Basically, are you willing to try to defend that sort of technicality in a court of law? I wouldn't advise it, but IANAL :)
Anyhow, the big advantage this brings isn't the savings in licensing costs on Office, but rather the licensing costs for Windows itself. Furthermore, it makes it possible to have an office running on thin client linux systems and still be able to use MS Office if that is a necessity. This allows for centralized management and all the benefits that brings.
Before you go and ship your copy of XP back to anybody for a refund, be sure the company that it to you will support your system if you have any problems. I have a laptop from one of the largest computer vendors in the world, and it came pre-installed with XP. It turned out that it had a hardware problem, it has some bad memory. I used some dianostic tools and indeed confirmed that it was a hardware problem. When I tried to call them up to get this fixed it did not go well.
Basically what it boiled down to is that they refused to provide any service under my warranty unless I ran the operating system that came with the laptop. I asked the guy, "is my warranty effectively invalid if I run Linux?". He said that, unfortunately, that was, in essence, the case.
So, just a word to the wise that if you don't install XP on your system, you may in fact be making your warranty irrelevent even for hardware specific problems.
Supply and demand don't happen in a regulated monopoly environment. Tell me, how many "broadband" providers do you have to chose from?
Well personally I use Speakeasy DSL because they have competitively offered me a package that lets me do what I want with the bandwidth and I pay a premium for that. I could use AT&T cable, or SBC/Ameritech DSL. I could get internet over a satellite. I can get DSL through a number of sources, though as far as CLEC's go, I've got 3 or 4 choices.
Granted, I live in Chicago, and so I get a lot of choices. In your situation, does it really make sense for the local bell to not offer you DSL services in the long run? If they have even a chance to charge you another $40/month, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to assuming that the costs for their infrastructure isn't going to be higher. The problem may be that, for whatever reason, it will cost them more to lay out the infrastructure in your area than they expect to make on DSL service.
The question you have to ask in citing the "monopoly environment" question is this: what possible benefit does their monopoly gain by NOT giving you DSL service?
There's no financial incentives here. People pay $10-20/month for their dial-up. Many haven't seen a clear incentive to pay $30-40/month for broadband. Can the ISP's afford to sell broadband at $10-20/month? I doubt it. The dial-up ISP's can barely afford the rates they charge, and they don't have to pay for nearly the same level of infrastructure as they would for broadband.
well first of all, I've never seen any hard drive evaporate :). But beyond that technicality, there's no such thing as permanent storage. There are relative degrees of permanence and generally, the permanence is inversely proportional to the convenience. Storing a book on stone is pretty permanent, but it's a pain. Even still, the stone will slowly dissolve over time, and you could accidentally drop it and have it shatter.
You need to determine what is good enough for your needs. Will a hard drive last 5-10 years in storage and still retain data reliably? What about a DVD? What about paper? I have a computer running as my router, the drive in that dates back to my junior year of college making it roughly 7 years old. Still works fine.
Two points:
1) Tapes can physically fail too
2) If your hard drive fails in a way that does not destroy the data itself, a data recovery company can recover it.
If you want to have a reliable archival backup, you should probably insure that your backup is redundant.
Even applying conservative estimates to costs of construction, the companies spent more than $570 million laying long-distance fiber cables across Oregon, and they shelled out at least $265 million more equipping the 5% of fiber that is used
It costs almost 10 times as much to light a fiber as it does to lay it according to these numbers. Most of the cost in laying fiber isn't the fiber itself, but the labor and the property rights involved in doing it. So, you may as well lay 95% more fiber than you really need because you might need it some day and it doesn't cost you that much more. You'd be insane to try to terminate all of those fibers though since they cost so damn much.
Furthermore, bandwidth is a matter of supply and demand, and as long as demand isn't increasing, increasing supply will force down prices and make your business less profitable. Let's say everybody started needing DS-3 speeds into their home. Somebody would come in and offer that speed for a hefty premium, but as demand for that service built up, people would come into lower the prices to get into that market. Eventually you end up paying the same amount for your DS-3 as you did for your DSL and you've got a few more of those fibers on the coast glowing.
The problem is that there's nothing driving bandwidth demand substantially above what it is right now. Most people will tolerate modem speeds, and those that won't are mostly pretty happy with DSL or cable. A few of us want more bandwidth, and because we aren't the majority of users we will have to pay handsomly for it. As long as the majority of users are content with the bandwidth they have there is no incentive to expand their networks.
At this point, it seems pretty clear that life is a pretty common phenomenon. The only ingredients that are seemingly necessary are water, and carbon. These are ingredients that are spread throughout the universe in vast quantities.
Some day soon, they will finally find bacteria on someplace like europa and we can put to rest any question that there is life out there. The conditions needed to support basic life are pretty minimal. The basic requirements for intellgient life are an entirely different matter. Can a civilization be built around hot thermal vents or two miles deep in ice?
It is worth noting that a number (don't know exactly what the number is) of the crimes committed with guns are using guns that were obtained through legal means. If there was no legal means, it would make it more difficult for criminals to get the guns as well.
I'm not strongly familiar with the statistics, but are there statistics of gun crime in countries where guns were legal and then later banned. The logic of this argument would suggest that gun crime would increase after guns were banned. I kind of doubt that but I don't have numbers to support it.
For the record, I support gun ownership though I don't personally want to own a gun. I just don't find that this argument has a lot of merit.
The fact of the matter is that watching more TV doesn't actually help the cable companies. If you never turn your TV on but send a $60 check to the cable company every month, they are pretty ecstatic. The advertisers might be happier except that, along with the PVR, comes commercial skipping, which means that their marketing may be adversely impacted even though more people are watching.
It might benefit cable companies if the usefulness of the PVR increases the desire of viewers to upgrade their subscriptions. If by getting Tivo, HBO suddenly becomes very valuable for me, then that's a big bonus for my local cable company. I'd be curious to see if the statistics support that conclusion. My thinking would be that a Tivo would allow somebody to make more effecitve use of less channels. Why get the premium channels when you can keep your TV schedule filled with all of the obscure programs from non-premium channels that you didn't know were on before.
The amount of spam you receive is directly proportional to the frequency with which your e-mail address is publicly posted. Most offices don't publicly post the e-mail address of their employees, therefore, they don't get much spam. On the other hand, private individuals throw their e-mail address all over the place. Be it registering for some on-line service, or posting on a blog.
No, what I'm saying is that, there shouldn't be some regulation, and that you should be able to run your network however you want. Then if somebody DOES use your network to cause havoc, you get to pay part of the price for their actions.
Create an incetive for people to maintain security and they will.
I think it's totally within your right to run your open network. Then when somebody uses your open network to cause havoc and destruction, you should be held liable as a facillitator of their crimes. Seems totally fair to me.
The constant comparison of software development to real world engineering is ridiculous. There is one very serious difference between the two concepts. Once a physical construct is created, it cannot be easily undone or changed. Software is infinitely malleable.
This difference, though seemingly small, makes a huge difference when it comes to designing of a system. If software was going to be designed to do one specific thing, and never change, it would be much simpler to develop bug free software quickly. But that is never the case. Invariably things are constantly being redefined as the software is developed and even after it's "done", there are several iterations of improvements and changes.
A bridge, but contrast, is designed, and then it is built, and when it's done, that's it until it starts falling apart, and then the same process happens again. The iterations are over periods of decades, centuies, or millenia, depending on how well you build the bridge in the first place.