[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:48:09AM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/17/2012 10:29 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >LOL... I agree with the sentiment. My dad has a pair of Apple II's
> >from the 80's, and they still work. He does his accounts on them
> >sometimes.  Compared to a 3-year-old PC of today, which is probably
> >already dying a horrible death of HD failures, fan failures, CPU
> >overheating, software breakages that's gotten it into a state that
> >requires reformatting and reinstalling to fix. Apparently, this is
> >the crowning achievement of 3 decades of software development.
> 
> ?? I don't have such problems with my computers, and I tend to run
> them for 5 years before upgrading. The HD failure rate is about the
> same as in the 80's. Of course, we no longer have to deal with
> floppies that get corrupted often.
>
> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're
> still as bad today as in the 80's.

OK, I exaggerated a little. I'm just bitter because once I bought a HD
(from a store of questionable repute, I'll confess) that started making
clicking sounds 2 months later, and then proceeded to keel over and die
in the most horrible way, taking all my data with it. (But I shouldn't
be so bitter, though, 'cos RMA gave me a brand new HD.) Another time, my
computer started randomly rebooting for no apparent reason -- then I
discovered that the power supply was starting to fail. Which caused a
series of other failures like fan failures and CPU overheating. But this
is all just hardware, which is beside the point.

Reformatting and reinstalling, though, is a matter of course on any
Windows installation that I've ever seen. I've heard of such things as
stable Windows installations, but as far as my experience goes those are
mythical beasts. Things just fail the moment you start doing something
non-trivial, like anything besides read email, watch youtube, and browse
the 'Net. I've been spared this pain for the most part 'cos I swore off
Windows and have been running Linux as my main OS for at least 10 years,
but I do still get requests for help to fix broken Windows
installations. Most of the time, the thing's either unfixable (hood is
welded shut) or not worth the effort to fix 'cos reformat + reinstall is
faster (shudder).

That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its own problems, of course.
The libc5 -> libc6 transition is one of the memorable nightmares in its
history. There have been others. X11 failures can get really ugly (back
in the days before KVM, a crashed or wedged X server meant your graphics
card is stuck in graphics mode and the console shows up as random dot
patterns -- good luck trying to fix the system when you can't see what
you type). Once I accidentally broke the dynamic linker, and EVERYTHING
broke, because everything depended on it. The only thing left was a
single bash shell over SSH (this was on a remote server with no easy
physical access), and the only commands that didn't fail were built-in
bash commands like echo. So I had to transfer busybox over by converting
it into a series of echo commands that reconstituted the binary and
copy-n-paste it. It's one of those moments where you get so much
satisfaction from having rescued a dying system singlehandedly with echo
commands, but it's also one of those things that puts Linux on some
people's no-way, no-how list.


T

-- 
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This
means that only left-handed people are in their right mind. -- Manoj
Srivastava