programmers and an analogy

[lodore]

hello,
i have noticed the following trend quite alot and would like your thoughts on the matter.

with windows you have to make quite alot of compromises to make your new bit of software work. if you was going to buy a brand new car and the aircon didnt work you wouldnt buy it. you expect the company to throughly test the product so that it does its job properly.
if i went out a brought a tv and half the inputs didnt work i wouldnt be expected to go in to some cryptic menu and extract some data to send to the company to work out what the problem was.
but people are always buying software and hardware that doesnt fully work and you have to wait for a fix.

why do we put up with this from programmers? we dont accept it from any other professon do we?

[TheAnimus]

but your new car wears out, compare it to the reliability of one made 30 years ago.

Its amazing leap.

The same is true with software, more and more use of managed code languages which prevent a lot of the problems of bad code in the older languages.

The vast majority of devs are cowboys, who often develope in only what their familiar with. its very odd and unlike most other proffessions.

[lodore]

just think that sometimes you have to disable tools bultin to windows. if you have to disable something bultin to the OS then its not compatible with the OS IMO.

[TheAnimus]

such as?

[lodore]

Hello,
off the top of my head installing secuurity suites which disable windows defender. sure its not very good but its still an inbulti utility and if it has tio disable it to work then its not a vista compatible app.

[TheAnimus]

so your complaining that the programmers disable something programatically thats superfluous because the tool they've programmed replaces it?

Theres a place for people who think that way, its called the iPhone. Basically (in WW2 german officer accent) you vill do it ethizer nowt at awll, ov yvou vill do it ouvr vay.

[finlay666]

The defender analogy is IMO like the following

You want to put new wheels on your car, so you take off your 17" wheels to put some 19" wheels on.

The original bit of software was ok, but you are replacing it with something better, so need to remove it in order to be able to use your new software.

[lodore]

that was just one example. not all secuirty products disable windows defender for there better product to work.
@finlay666, i can see what you mean about replacing one thing for something better. but if kaspersky internet secuirty and superantispyware can work along side windows defender on vista why cant for example bitdefender or mcafee?
im mainly saying that because windows security centre will nag like crazy because windows defender is disabled.
ever heard of not keeping all your eggs in one basket?
whats wrong with layering? keeping windows defender and also having your new antispyware product as well?


im mainly complaining that indivitials and companies pay lots of ££££££££££££££££&#16 3; for unfinished software and have to wait a while before they are fixed. best example is windows. vista comes out, for a year it has loads of problems. SP1 then comes out fixes qquite alot of bugs. now its been out for 2 years and it still has quite alot of issues.
where as new distrobutions of linux come out all the time and the bugs are fixed alot faster. just think linux is free so why should people pay for a half baked OS such as vista?
so mainly big corporate companies that charge huge amounts for half baked products and take ages to fix the issues.

[Lucio]

It's hardly surprising, you write a program that has to produce the output "Hello World" upon the press of the Enter key.

To test it you can either
a) Spend 5 seconds in pressing the Enter key
b) Press all the keys to ensure that only the Enter key produces the result, and that the rest don't do anything, not to mention that trying out combinations of keys such as Ctrl+Enter and so on.


So, for an incredibly simple program that takes a few minutes to write you're suddenly faced with a couple of hours of testing.

Imagine you're now faced with a typical program with a few hundred thousand lines of codes. To even perform the testing outlined in scenario a for this program will take many man-hours, so you cut back even further to emphasising the main goals of the product and ensures it meets those, ones that assuming it meets those, the rest of the product will theoretically work fine.

For example a calculator package, you test that the main functions work for a few sample problems, covering some very smallest and very largest sums it's expected to deal with. If those work, you can safely assume all the numbers inbetween do. You've managed to get your testing regime down to the very basics again.


It's not ideal, but the alternative is totally implausible for anything other than the very, very simplest of applications or equipment. So when something doesn't quite work the way you expect, you have to ask yourself was it really as avoidable as you first assume?

[finlay666]

im mainly complaining that indivitials and companies pay lots of £££££££££££££££££ for unfinished software and have to wait a while before they are fixed. best example is windows. vista comes out, for a year it has loads of problems. SP1 then comes out fixes qquite alot of bugs. now its been out for 2 years and it still has quite alot of issues.
where as new distrobutions of linux come out all the time and the bugs are fixed alot faster. just think linux is free so why should people pay for a half baked OS such as vista?
so mainly big corporate companies that charge huge amounts for half baked products and take ages to fix the issues.

Mate most software isn't finished fully working. IT's why patches come out, and it's the same for games now. Linux has to update on a regular basis as does most other OS.

And if you think you can write an OS better feel free to start your own. Imagine a sky box will probs have an OS made up of 10s of thousands lines of code, and testing that will be at LEAST the same again. Then imagine something as complex as a full operating system with all the other stuff built in.

[Salazaar]

I'd have to agree with Lucio; going back to the car analogy: The car only has to work on one type of road* with one type of air, so it's quite easy to get the aircon working. If you followed it through with respect to the PC, you'd have to be making an aircon unit that fitted on any car which, for all you knew, might have to drive upsidedown and underwater.


*Okay, so there are a lot of types of road, but they're all solid and sit under the wheels, that's my point.

[lodore]

Mate most software isn't finished fully working. IT's why patches come out, and it's the same for games now. Linux has to update on a regular basis as does most other OS.

And if you think you can write an OS better feel free to start your own. Imagine a sky box will probs have an OS made up of 10s of thousands lines of code, and testing that will be at LEAST the same again. Then imagine something as complex as a full operating system with all the other stuff built in.

I know that but i was mainly pointing out how much faster ffixes for linux are issued compared to windows.
just think about how many different versions say for example fedora has gone through in the time it took to make vista?

as for video games why do you think games consoles where invented?
there shouldnt be many issues there.
same console,normally same controller or at least same buttons. if you buy an xbox360 or wii or ps3 you can go to a shop buy a game for the console knowing it will work.
what im trying to say is that all the hardware for on games console is the same. so if your making a game excslusive to the ps3 it should be relitively staight forward.

video games on a computer is more complicated because your firewall could be blocking the .exe file from connecting to the internet for online mode, your antivirus program or HIPS could block part of the game so it wont load correctly. gaming on the computer maybe preferred by quite alot of people due to the better control with a proper mouse but as you know it can be harder to get a game to work with everything.

so i guess programmers really have got there work cut out.
this is where customer support comes in.
one problem with windows vista in the offical forums they reccomend reinstalling the whole OS to solve it. that it not good customer support.

[finlay666]

I know that but i was mainly pointing out how much faster ffixes for linux are issued compared to windows.
just think about how many different versions say for example fedora has gone through in the time it took to make vista?

ok lets think of a made up situation. cant think of a good situatuon that could happern atm.

Well judging by the fact that I have on my laptop Ubuntu (well...EEE Xubuntu) and have updates for that at least weekly I would say pretty often, there will also be differences in what are included in a patch, fedora is up to version 9 since 2003.....since 2003 there has been XP and Vista, so the MS products have a longer lifespan

Then there will also be minor updates, Service packs like in XP and Vista....there has been 4 for the MS operating systems.

And don't bother bringing Apple into this, their software only has to mork with certain certified hardware so some stuff wont work at all, but the combinations of pcs/laptops are huge

EDIT TO INCLUDE OTHER POST:

as for video games why do you think games consoles where invented?
there shouldnt be many issues there.
same console,normally same controller or at least same buttons. if you buy an xbox360 or wii or ps3 you can go to a shop buy a game for the console knowing it will work.
what im trying to say is that all the hardware for on games console is the same. so if your making a game excslusive to the ps3 it should be relitively staight forward.

video games on a computer is more complicated because your firewall could be blocking the .exe file from connecting to the internet for online mode, your antivirus program or HIPS could block part of the game so it wont load correctly. gaming on the computer maybe preferred by quite alot of people due to the better control with a proper mouse but as you know it can be harder to get a game to work with everything.

Have you seen the number of different peripherals available for a PS2? or a ps3 or 360? steering wheels, lightguns and goodness knows what else.

Hardware for games consoles are not the same. 360's and ps3's can have different hard drive sizes, or on the 360 not at all. N64 had the expansion port.

Have you actually done any game programming? Time critical programming is a fair whack harder than programming say a word processing document due to speed and other factors.

[lodore]

i didnt include apple in to the operating system point since they are more expensive and since you can only buy it from them all the hardware and softeare work together.

my main point about a games console was that up to until recently the games console is running one thing at a time the game in the disc tray. this makes it alot easier to diagnos problems. iff you are playing a lightgun game that should be the only controller plugged in so it shouldnt be to haard to diagnos the problems.

[finlay666]

Have you done any programming and testing at all?

If not then I doubt you will understand the scope of the level of work involved

[Mblaster]

... So, for an incredibly simple program that takes a few minutes to write you're suddenly faced with a couple of hours of testing ...

Summed it up pretty well in that post.

Anothe way to think of the ammount of testing needed to find all the bugs is that even after having millions of people using software for years, people still find new bugs. Software companies have to decide at a point where they feel the testing they have done is 'good enough'. Because otherwise you'll never release any software as you spend years testing it.