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To: damnlimey
Greed, laziness, ignorance, and stupidity.

For more than 10 years I have watched with amusement as PCs that are much faster than the old ones take LONGER to boot up -- typically, a 1.2 MHz PC XT vintage 1986 would be fully ready to go in a few seconds, and the current models are more than 1000 times as fast and take nearly 10 times as long because they are doing 10000 times as much computational work!

But the REAL problem with software bloat is not the slowness, it is the complexity which makes applications almost impossible to properly debug. NOBODY I know, and I know a LOT of computer types, makes any attempt to fix Microsoft-related errors themselves as they would with Unix or Linux, nor do they bother trying to get Microsoft to fix them because it just won't happen; instead they just shrug, reboot, and work around. A certain level of "Your program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" and a (lower) level of total freeze-ups and blue screens of death are simply accepted as a tolerable inconvenience.

But every single time this happens, there are one or more theoretically identifiable HUMANS who made specific MISTAKES that could be tracked down and blamed on them. The practical difficulties of this are sufficient that most of us are willing to simply let them be condemned to hand-simulate the infinite loops of their own programs in programmers' hell after they pass on.

12 posted on 12/17/2001 5:14:30 AM PST by VeritatisSplendor
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To: VeritatisSplendor
Good reply about debugging. But there is a bright side--when I introduce a bug, I can always blame Windoze and my users just eat it up (of course, I am honest about it--I only blame the OS--which was a misnomer until W2K--when I think it caused the problem). If it is my bug, I just shrug and say, "Hey, Word for Windows (97 I believe it was) was reportedly released with 5,000 KNOWN bugs." They buy it.
123 posted on 12/20/2001 3:42:13 AM PST by jammer
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