When, Oh When will we get a stable OS?? 6

[guestgulkan]

Back in Win95/Win98, I must have done hundreds (dozens really) of clean OS installs to get the OS out of a mess.
In spite of the much hyped stability of WINXP and WIN2000 and WINNT, I still hear the dreaded phrase 'I've done a clean install' or ' do a clean install' all too often.
Millions of hours must be lost each year in computer downtime because of this.

To me this is nonsense, the OS should be able to protect, detect and repair itself. In other words have some sort of builtin immune mechanism.

 

[Craig0201]

So they should spend more on a fix than it costs to keep the bug? That would impress the shareholders.....

MS fix a lot of bugs and put them on the website. But how many times are the patches actually installed? And how many software engineers would have have for developing new products if they fixed every tiny little bug? Not many.

Basically, what I am saying is that you should apply some realism to this. Every business has finite resources, be they money, equipment or people. Utilising all the resources to bug fix is bad business. Fix what is important and leave the rest. For MS, their most limiting factor would be people but never expect them to spend more on a bug fix than it saves.

Craig

 

[drdebit]

Steve
I wasn't arguing that MS is either ethical or unethical.
This is an operating system thread in an ethics forum which started with a question about the quality of MS' product designing - the ethical issue being the amount of non-productive work poor design costs.

You were arguing in support of MS and also seemed to me to be arguing that it was inappropriate to argue against MS because hackers and crackers were a higher priority problem. I was disagreeing with your logic.

Another thread about the ethics of hacking and cracking would probably be quite interesting.

 

[drdebit]

Craig
When I go back and look at gulkan's "thread starting" post, it seems to me that he is both decrying a current situation and suggesting a long term fix.

You present a business reality from the software developer's point of view. Gulkan is saying that from the PURCHASER'S point of view there is also a reality of non-productive overhead costs in the purchaser's business because of poor software design and because they are design issues the developer is really passing some of their costs on to the purchaser. I think he's sort of suggesting "supply chain management" in that some new concepts in software design would be helpful in reducing the total nonproductive cost incurred by the combination of the software developer/seller and the purchaser/user.

 

[CajunCenturion]

Stevehewitt - I disagree that comparing the car and kidney dialysis to an OS with respect to stability as a poor analysis. The key factor is the cost to the manufacturer of damaages due to instability. If a car is unstable and as a result causes damage, then the liability cost to the manufacturer is quite high. The damage liability to the MS is not so high. The complexity of the product has no bearing on the issue of liability and its cost.

As Craig0201 has already alluded to, its a business decision of how to spend the money. Invest the money in a high quality completely stable product, or keep the money in house to deal with fixes and damages as they occur. And MS has chosen the latter because that is more profitable. It costs less to build and get to market early a slightly unstable product and pay for the fixes and/or damages later, than it would be to pay more for development for a more stable and later to market product. The auto manufacturer does not have this choice because of the extremely high back-end damage cost of instability.

We know this is the profitable manner in which MS has chosen to do buiness, so to me at least, the question is "Is the ethical way to do business?"

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[manarth]

To repeat what was said earlier, stability costs money. Nuclear power stations operate computer systems - these systems cost millions because they HAVE to be as stable as possible.

As a small business, would you want to spend twice / 3 times / 10 times as much in order to get the improvement in stability?

I'd rather have it cheap, and put up with reinstalling occassionally. say I doubled in price a 20 PC network: even at £400 per PC, that's an extra £8000. More than enough to cover the cost of reinstalling.

<marc>[ul]help us help![li]please give us feedback on what works / doesn't[/li][li]not sure where to start? click here: faq581-3339[/li][/sup][/ul][/sup]

 

[Stevehewitt]

CajunCenturion: The point I am trying to make is that M$ do a fine job. Many of the posts in the forum are correct, but its a personal angle that you have to look from. The price is one thing, the scale of M$ software is another, but most of all I think you should look at EXACTLY what Craig0201 said:

MS do a grand job. Simple to use, straight from the box, high uptime, low maintainence. Does it have bugs? Yes. But what software doesn't?

Steve Hewitt
Systems Manager

 

[drdebit]

But do we really know what it costs?
Manufacturing plants all over the world are using lots of spiffy buzzword techniques to evaluate production processes and product flow and eliminate non-value added work.
Perhaps the same concepts can relate to intellectual production/manufacturing as well so that the real development cost of stability is not as weighty as being assumed here. I don't know if that is a legitimate idea or not.

 

[Stevehewitt]

This goes back to the thing I was saying about Windows being used on 90% of all machines. Can you think of all the possible combinations of hardward and software that has to be tested to make in just 95% stable? Think of the costs, of people, time, paperwork, purchasing the stuff. The more reliable it is the more its going to cost to produce it. Like Marc said, systems that have to be superstable, regarless of the OS spend millions to be as stable as possible. Its not the OS, the OS is one of many factors in stability.

Steve Hewitt
Systems Manager

 

[palbano]

drdebit made a great point:
When I go back and look at gulkan's &quot;thread starting&quot; post

So here it is:

To me this is nonsense, the OS should be able to protect, detect and repair itself. In other words have some sort of builtin immune mechanism.

So, You're out of your freakin mind! LOL

IBM has been working on tech. like that for years now. Where is it? Well maybe soon... maybe a long way off.

Here's what i think has been stated in this thread without being acknowledged. You can't please everyone with a single OS. So guestgalkan's dream system might work for him and even a large percentage of users, it won't be accepted by everyone.

-pete

 

[CajunCenturion]

Out of your mind ?? Where is it ??

I suggest that you take a look at the Stratus Fault-tolerant line of machines.

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[palbano]

>> I suggest that you take a look at the Stratus
>> Fault-tolerant line of machines.

DOH… I was wrong, (that never happens LOL) Great! Problem solved!

guestgulkan, better start saving your money. And all the rest of the folks in this thread who are wining about their unstable M$ software, get a Stratus instead of crying in our forums about having to reboot and reinstall your Bill Gates OS.

-pete

 

[Tarwn]

&quot;Nuclear power stations operate computer systems - these systems cost millions&quot; - You would be surprised how many of the servers at Nuclear plants are running MS Windows...and not in a good way, luckily most of them are getting caught up with win 2k now, instead of running winnt boxes.

&quot;Manufacturing plants all over the world are using lots of spiffy buzzword techniques to evaluate production processes and product flow...&quot; - Hmmm...hate to break it to people, but a lot of manufacturing plants are happy if they can evaluate the hardware that is sunning at any given moment. The software has not caught up for them yet. So far they have some pretty interfaces into their hardware and some decent data reporting mechanisms, but as far as I have seen, less than average use of reporting from data historians.

Which by the way mostly run on Windows platform now

A lot of which also depend on MS SQL Server


My point is, yes it does cost a lot if a car malfunctions, but it costs more than most people think when Windows malfunctions. A lot of very important software is running on the Windows platform. We have machines who are allowed downtime every year measurable in hours, after that we start paying hefty fines for a small time, after that we pay more fines and they start talking jail time. This makes a bug very costly, and we pass it up the line.

Yes MS can afford to ignore the customer to a point because a lot of customers are stuck with their product, but their are a great number of customers who get them past that point very quickly.


Another point, a lot of the old MS ignoring bugs thing is left over from the times when they would ignore published bugs for months at a time. From what I have seen recently, once someone notices a bug they are very quick to get started on a patch for it.

-Tarwn

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[petermeachem]

A few years back I took the cats to the vets for a flu jab and was chatting to the boss vet. He showed me his computer. A network of, I think, three or four computers that ran the business (think there were several). Customers records, pets treatment, invoices, reminder letters, all that sort of thing, nice windowy screens. He said, watch this and pulled the mains plug out of the wall and pushed it back in. The computer restarted straight away (no long boot sequence), and displayed the exact same screen with the same data as when the plug was pulled.

He was using Acorn Archimedes computers,

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=75

Which shows it can be done. It may not have all the whizzy bits you get nowadays, but that type of device would do most of what most offices need i.e. a cross betwen a typewriter and a calculator.

I used to work on flight sims. Some of the really old ones used a computer called a Link GP4. Amazing bunch of kit, but some of these had been running constantly for 20 years or so.

http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk

http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/2003/03/24/geneva-convention.html

 

[guestgulkan]

I'm sure windows servers are present everywhere in nuclear power plants, but ACTUALLY controlling the power plant itself, I wouldn't have thought so.

Might be used for keeping the tea/coffee database (white & sugar, black no sugar, etc),but I'm sure that it's not for the serious stuff.

 

[Stevehewitt]

The bottom line is stop moaning. If you want a cheap, out of the box, easy OS which supports the most hardware and software on the market then use Windows 2000. Its stable enough for the majority of servers around the world - why are you so special? If you want something more spend more. Get you self a nice fault tolerent server which costs 3 times the cost of Windows. We should be greatful for what we have, nothings perfect, and everything can be improved but M$ seem to be listening, like Tarwn said, M$ seem to be getting patches out as soon as they have heard about them.

Steve Hewitt
Systems Manager

 

[palbano]

Ok i know this is not an OS issue but it's within the broad scope that this thread took on.

thread426-526852

-pete

 

[ThomasJSmart]

OS stabilty these days is , i believe, mostly defined by the user.

I see a lot of ppl getting angry at windows because it crashes.

I take a look at their computer after the reboot. aha! these 15 programs you have opening on boot are not realy helping Mr. Smith. and also, after running Addaware, these 16 different spywhere programs are not nessesary, and where is your virus scanner? you dont have one? ah...


this is a regular once a month scenario to me

I learned a bit yesterday, today i learned a lot, imagine what i'll learn tomorrow!

 

[Tarwn]

Heh, know the feeling k9logic...

Concerning stable systems and manufacturing (sorry spent all day doing interfaces at a plant kinda on the subject now)

I have had to do some programming for a few different manufacturing and power sites. They generally run about 2-3 years behind on Windows OS's and about as far behind on things like .Net and so on. As was mentioned above most of the patches from MS are security related, which doesn't cause many problems at these types of sites because if the control systems servers are even remotely connected to the rest of the networks at the site (which is generally not the caes) there are at least 3 to 4 firewalls between those servers and the outside world. And that is not the norm, usually the control system servers are not connected physically to the outside network, they have their own internal network and strict rules about connecting the internal network with outside access (through several firewalls) and the internal control network.

I have seen sites running control systems on Windows just fine, but I have also seen sites that won't upgrade from their Alphas. It's always fun when the AC dies somewhere and we hit ebay looking for a very specific 1Mb video card that costs upwards of $1000 from the manufacturer, or $600ish from some guy who kept a garage full back when everyone else was throwing them away and he just realized he had a personal gold mine...

-Tarwn

_{01010100 01101001 01100101 01110010 01101110 01101111 01101011 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101}
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