Noel Demos wrote:
> Richard Gambrell wrote:
> > But seriously, the real discovery of those 20 years is that one can
> > get rich by delivering sloppy code while following the "right"
> > business practices and delivering enough apparent productivity
> > boost while the machine stays up.
> >
> >
> I think you have to add here "on a desk top".  The reason Bill Gates
> can get away with sloppy code is because usually a "down" only causes
> a minor inconvenience on a desk top AND MS kind of knocks the problem
> by allowing you a set up option to save your work every X seconds.

The really ironic part is that these "timer related" bugs (both HP3000
and Windows) didn't show up for some time because they had to be
rebooted so often due to crashes, hangs, memory leaks, etc.  Not to
bad-mouth the 3000 of today, but back in the classic days it was nowhere
near as solid as it is now.  And Windows, I laugh at the thought of it
being up over a month without a reboot, especially on an active
workstation.  Dedicated servers can and do run fairly solid (as raven
does) but they are not tasked with a very diverse workload.

My current "pet peeve" with reliability in general (independent of
platform) is Java.  We are starting to evaluate Minisoft's Javelin, and
have researched WRQ's equivalent (EnterView?), both of which are HTTP
based java intensive applets.  And as I'm increasingly into networking
these days (an adopted/delegated responsibility) I'm dealing with Cisco
products like CiscoWorks which is very java-intensive, and their
Catalyst switch web management interfaces, also java-intensive.  I don't
have enough fingers to count my freezes, blue screens of death, and hung
browser sessions in the past week or two.  Java is starting to leave a
bad taste in my mouth - it may be "open" - but not that much more so
than Unix is open.  There are specific requirements and other
considerations depending on if you are using IE or Netscape, and which
version thereof, and if you're Mac or Windows, and which OS Release, and
which Java VM you have installed, and what is in your CLASSPATH (I
installed a Netscape plugin with some java classes in it and it prefixed
CLASSPATH, and completely hosed my previously working applets).  I
finally uninstalled it today, and things improved immensely.

But all in all, the majority of my crashes of late have been directly
related to javascript or java applets; the balance being IMAP quirks
between Netscape Communicator and/or our imapd daemon.  Everything else
works fine, even the CiscoWorks server on NT, where almost all of the
applications are java applications (not servlets or applets, but
full-blown applications).  They eat memory for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner, and plenty of snacks in between, but they don't croak.

Bottom line (and in summary), we can laugh all we like at the sloppy
code that allowed the timer overflow bug.  But in all honesty, bugs like
that will never be noticed until the reliability period starts to exceed
the software MTBF of the machine (as was the case, IMHO, with both the
3000 and the Windows bugs).

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>