🚀 go-pugleaf

> There has arisen this feeling that PC's should boot up flawlessly out
> of the box and run with nary a problem, crash, or lockup until there
> is a power outage or you unplug the system prior to running it down to
> the Salvation Army to donate.
>
> Balderdash.

I wonder if anybody has ever done even a back of the envelope
calculation of the cost in man-hours (not to mention the frustration)
from what is at best a fledgling technology.

With a nod to Frederick Brooks and the lack of silver bullets and the
abundance of werewolves, I won't even delve into functions that don't
work as you expect or that invoke the Law of Unexpected Conequences in
their interactions with one another, in complicated software -- I'm
just talking about severe bugs.

Consumer PCs are about where cars were in the 20s:  starting to get
fairly fast and able to get you places, but you still have to crank 'em
by hand and know how to adjust the spark and whatnot and be prepared to
spend a lot of time changing tires.


> to expect a commodity machine to perform so is ludicrous.  There is no need
> beyond delusion that such a performance level should be required.

I'm not comparing this particular commodity to aerospace or biomedical
or other high-consequence scenarios; I'm comparing it to readily
available and increasingly viable alternatives.  Some of those
alternatives give me uptime measurable in months (just how many months
I dunno, since with recent editions of Mac OS 10, the alternative with
which I'm most familiar, I  have to terminate the experiment  for an
upgrade, or electrical maintenance on the building, or somesuch, not
because of an OS crash or an application crash that takes down the OS).


Cheers,
--Joe