Yesterday's computer mess

Yesterday served as a reminder to me of how computer dependent we have become. I still work part-time and we were shut-down until late afternoon. A bit of a back story. I never really did anything with computers until the company were I was an engineer started using Auto-Cad. I was 34 years old. Little did I suspect at that time that by the time I retired I would be spending at least 6-8 hours out of my 10-12 hour workday on a computer.
Are we better off with them? At 71 years old I'm not really sure. There seems to be about as many negatives as positives to me.

I have not heard a good explaination of how such a critcal and obvious error (blue screen of death) that crashes the OS was not found during testing, prior to mass release. Someone cut some serious corners.

From what I've read there must not have been a lot of testing done.

The typical attitude of "get the product out there and make some money with it". They'll let us be the field test and deal with the problems on the run, as it were.

What slays me is their claim that it wasn't a cyber-attack, just a glitch or bad command in a software update. I suggest the software "update" WAS the cyber-attack.
Somewhere there's a hacker smiling to himself.

Roger

This is a test, this is only a test......

These were major companies with etensive IT departments. They don't let 3rd parties just push their new S/W, when they want. They determine that. That leads me to believe this was deployed a while ago, and the fault was pretty much a "time bomb".

Years ago while at a training facility to be instructed on 3D modeling as a design tool I was told. The reason we have major crashes is be cause of the increased storage capacity of computers. The reason is instead of rewriting code to make a correction it is just patched with a work around. The source code becomes so large and complicated, it's impossible to predict all possibilities. Result is certain key strokes or number combinations can trigger unheard of consequences.
are

Unfortunately, computers have now become a necessary evil that we are being forced to live with.
They have their place, but now that almost everything is computer related, they have created a whole new realm of problems that can lead to some very adverse outcomes, some of which have to be seen yet!

I was a computer science major in college. Our advanced assembly language professor made one thing very clear, “If you crash my computer you will fail.” Not bragging but, I got an “A” while about 30 out of 35 students failed the course. If these numbers are consistent across the industry there are a lot of bad programmers out there.

I had plenty of bad code along the way but none of it ever left my desk. Sometimes getting it right meant totally scrapping the project and starting over from scratch. Most businesses are not willing to do that.

Let’s fast forward a few years and AI is rolled out into our safety systems. A bug at this point could easily kill people.

Still Afloat said:

I was a computer science major in college. Our advanced assembly language professor made one thing very clear, “If you crash my computer you will fail.” Not bragging but, I got an “A” while about 30 out of 35 students failed the course. If these numbers are consistent across the industry there are a lot of bad programmers out there.

I had plenty of bad code along the way but none of it ever left my desk. Sometimes getting it right meant totally scrapping the project and starting over from scratch. Most businesses are not willing to do that.

Let’s fast forward a few years and AI is rolled out into our safety systems. A bug at this point could easily kill people.

Click to expand...

I think we are actually past that point by far. Many people are dead due to computer glitches, failures.

Still Afloat said:

I was a computer science major in college. Our advanced assembly language professor made one thing very clear, “If you crash my computer you will fail.” Not bragging but, I got an “A” while about 30 out of 35 students failed the course. If these numbers are consistent across the industry there are a lot of bad programmers out there.

I had plenty of bad code along the way but none of it ever left my desk. Sometimes getting it right meant totally scrapping the project and starting over from scratch. Most businesses are not willing to do that.

Let’s fast forward a few years and AI is rolled out into our safety systems. A bug at this point could easily kill people.

Click to expand...

Only did assembler when taking microprocessor classes. It was only C and C++ when I actually did any coding in the work world. Spent my career in “near real-time” systems too. Sometimes someone had to write some inline code for some drivers.

They were the Secord largest cyber security company.

CRS said:

Years ago while at a training facility to be instructed on 3D modeling as a design tool I was told. The reason we have major crashes is be cause of the increased storage capacity of computers. The reason is instead of rewriting code to make a correction it is just patched with a work around. The source code becomes so large and complicated, it's impossible to predict all possibilities. Result is certain key strokes or number combinations can trigger unheard of consequences.
are

Click to expand...

Several years ago my plumbing wholesaler started using a new system using bar codes on inventory and such. Worked great for a week until one counter guy decided it would be a good idea to scan his drivers license. Company who sold the system said so sorry for your loss. 40,000$ gone..

All the companies I worked for had a lab in which they loaded updates to test before applying the update to production systems. This included microsoft updates. It was primarily to determine the impact to other critical systems, not to test microsoft's update. It sounds like the airline industry and hospitals treat their critical systems like an iphone update that is done automatically as soon as it's pushed to the public. Penny wise and pound foolish. This bad practice cost the economy billions. There is such a push to get the "latest and greatest" there is little software quality assurance. Companies don't want to spend the money on a good QA department.

BTW, they also don't want to spend the money on good security for our data.

Billy H said:

I think we are actually past that point by far. Many people are dead due to computer glitches, failures.

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The Insurance Companies went to AI and people started getting denials for medical procedures due to the AI system, big law suit going on because of that crap. It's insane how we have allowed computers to drive every bit of our lives!