Making computers work

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 05:24:24PM +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:

> because no matter how well it is fixed, it will still not work 100% of the 
> time, that is the nature of computers, an if something doesn't work, then it 
> would be nice for it to be fixable relatively easily

That's possibly the problem - the assumption that computers can't be 
made to work properly. It's fundamentally wrong, and it holds back 
development.

Computers behave deterministically[1]. Software behaves 
deterministically. The combination of these two things lets us produce 
software that works 100% of the time. That's harder than getting to 99% 
of the time, but even so accepting the "Make it work 99% of the time and 
add a bunch of preferences to let the 1% make it work themselves" 
approach is accepting inferior software. We aim high, and we fairly 
consistently hit. And that's how it should be.

[1] While some hardware has bugs, very (very) few of those bugs behave 
randomly.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org