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cellioNo, not hardware.
I had to reboot my car this morning. I still don't know what happened.
My car, like almost every car built in the last N years, has a remote control. There are buttons for "lock" and "unlock"; for the latter, press once to affect the driver's door only and twice to affect all doors. (A single press of "lock" affects all doors.) The car does not appear to preserve state for any significant length of time; I have not conducted experiments yet to determine the timeout between presses of "unlock".
This morning I needed to get something out from the passenger's side, so I pressed twice, retrieved the item, and a few minutes later got into the car and drove off.
Now when you lock the car using the remote control, the car's alarm system is supposed to automatically activate. You know that this has happened because of a little light that comes on. There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.
When I got to work and locked the car, the light didn't come on. I pressed the lock button again, thinking my car was somehow weirdly stateful after all; no change. I unlocked and relocked; no change. Eventually I unlocked the car, got in, put the fancy electronic key into the ignition, removed it, got out, and locked. That time it worked.
I still have no idea what happened. This is not covered in the manual, nor did the UI provide sufficient hints.
I had to reboot my car this morning. I still don't know what happened.
My car, like almost every car built in the last N years, has a remote control. There are buttons for "lock" and "unlock"; for the latter, press once to affect the driver's door only and twice to affect all doors. (A single press of "lock" affects all doors.) The car does not appear to preserve state for any significant length of time; I have not conducted experiments yet to determine the timeout between presses of "unlock".
This morning I needed to get something out from the passenger's side, so I pressed twice, retrieved the item, and a few minutes later got into the car and drove off.
Now when you lock the car using the remote control, the car's alarm system is supposed to automatically activate. You know that this has happened because of a little light that comes on. There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.
When I got to work and locked the car, the light didn't come on. I pressed the lock button again, thinking my car was somehow weirdly stateful after all; no change. I unlocked and relocked; no change. Eventually I unlocked the car, got in, put the fancy electronic key into the ignition, removed it, got out, and locked. That time it worked.
I still have no idea what happened. This is not covered in the manual, nor did the UI provide sufficient hints.
Re: can we blame Bill Gates for this?
Date: 2004-03-26 07:32 am (UTC)People work around low-level design flaws rather than insisting they be fixed in the first place all the time, doing more so the more complex the system in question is. People forgive random failures in software that they can work around quickly precisely because software is complex enough to do a lot of unusually cool things when it does work.
Not that better quality isn't a worthy goal, and not that a lot of design lazyness has crept into software development, just that this isn't really some new phenomenon that's unique to computer use.
[Now, the meme that if you aren't trying to make it impossible for anyone to break in you aren't serious about security, when in almost every other context known to history security's been a matter of making it generally cost-ineffective for crooks to break in, that we can blame on the world of computers... :-)]
Re: can we blame Bill Gates for this?
Date: 2004-03-26 07:34 am (UTC)He says, having let design lazyness creep into his writing :-)
Re: can we blame Bill Gates for this?
Date: 2004-03-26 09:42 am (UTC)Point -- though I believe side-whacking has its origins with devices that had actual moving parts that could actually become wedged, which is a little easier to understand than rebooting because your web browser froze. (I also don't have a sense of how common it is. Everyone who owns a computer has had to reboot it for mysterious reasons somewhere long the line, possibly many times, but how common is it to whack your TV or your toaster?)
People work around low-level design flaws rather than insisting they be fixed in the first place all the time
Yes. The perfect product doesn't exist and the individual doesn't have the power to force design improvements, so selecting a product revolves in part around deciding which design flaws are acceptable. This has been true long before computers, of course. Also, there seems to be a fairly short "burn-in" period during which you'll actually work to fix something; e.g. if you buy a house thinking you'll change such-and-such about the kitchen, you better actually do it within months or it'll be too late because you've learned to live with it. I think this applies broadly -- once you've learned to live with a design flaw, you no longer notice it as a flaw. It certainly applies to software. :-)