For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.
For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.”
Suddenly the car quits for no apparent reason, and they coast over to the shoulder.
The mechanical engineer opens the hood, puts his hand on the engine for a minute, and declares that a linkage has gone bad.
The electrical engineer examines a cable harness and declares that there's a bad electrical connector.
The software engineer kicks the tires, honks the horn, rolls all the windows down and back up, and tells the others to try starting the car again.
I have never understood this. Computers should just run.
I have a windoze laptop that I have to use for work (the only thing it does besides start up VMware and Mint 17 Linux is Lync, which I haven't been able to get Pidgin to connect to). The amount of resources taken up by managing such things as virus/malware scanners, updates, and sometimes stuff that I don't even know what it is (it just starts churning away on the hard disk for a long time) is absolutely astounding.
I run Fedora on my main desktop and it is pretty chatty as far as Linux goes with updates. If you look, there is almost always something to update. Of course, the only thing you actually have to reboot for is kernel updates, which I skip unless there is a critical bug, so it doesn't actually affect your use of the system.
If I had as much crap bogging down my linux box, I'd consider it broken.