SILICON
SILIC
CHIP
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher/Editor
Nicholas Vinen
Technical Editor
John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.)
Technical Staff
Jim Rowe, B.A., B.Sc.
Bao Smith, B.Sc.
Tim Blythman, B.E., B.Sc.
Nicolas Hannekum, Dip. Elec. Tech.
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Duraid Madina, B.Sc, M.Sc, PhD
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David Maddison B.App.Sc. (Hons 1),
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Geoff Graham
Associate Professor Graham Parslow
Ian Batty
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Brendan Akhurst
Founding Editor (retired)
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
Staff (retired)
Ross Tester
Ann Morris
Greg Swain, B. Sc. (Hons.)
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ISSN 1030-2662
Editorial Viewpoint
Software: too many bugs,
too many updates
I can’t be the only person who is sick and tired of
the barrage of constant software updates. Between
Windows updates, Android updates, Adobe updates,
Mozilla updates, App updates, and all the other
software packages I use, I spend way too much time
dealing with them every day.
With some software packages I use only
intermittently, they bother me about updating virtually every time I open
up a file! And that’s the worst time to do it; I’d much rather they ask me
whether I want to update when closing the software than opening it. I’m
opening it because I have a task to complete, and I don’t want to stop that
task to install another *$(!&#<at> update!
It wouldn’t be so bad if these updates fixed bugs, but so often, not only
do they fix nothing, but they introduce new bugs. Windows updates are the
worst. Some of our staff suffered for weeks from constant ‘blue screens’ and
reboots when printing files caused by a Windows update that initially they
didn’t even realise had been installed.
It cost us a lot of lost productivity until one smart guy figured it out and
managed to uninstall that update on the affected machines (one of which was
brand new; we thought it might be defective). Microsoft apparently knew
about this bug and quickly released a patch to fix it, but the fix didn’t work!
I hate to be negative and sound like I’m complaining, but this situation is
just ridiculous.
One of my pet peeves is how software companies – including the largest,
richest ones in the world – prioritise adding features to their software rather
than fixing bugs. This sometimes results in serious bugs that cause frequent
crashes or otherwise break the software persisting for years, while they are
busy adding useless new doo-dads that we don’t need.
They are also far more interested in adding bells and whistles than
addressing severe performance problems, making the software virtually
unusable. For example, I have some software that can take literally hours
to perform certain functions, depending on the complexity of the files I am
working with.
I have developed workarounds to accomplish these tasks in a reasonable
timeframe, such as manually splitting the job into smaller chunks, then
reassembling it later. I shouldn’t have to do that. I believe these operations
could be completed in seconds (or faster) if the algorithms the software used
were implemented in an even vaguely intelligent manner.
I don’t know the solution to this, but I believe whether through user pressure,
legislation or otherwise, the behaviour of software companies has to change.
If you bought a car and it broke down several times a day, frequently slowed
down to unusable speeds and needed to be brought back to the dealer for
modifications every week to keep it roadworthy, you would ask for your money
back. Yet we pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a piece of software and
then accept that it behaves in the same manner. That is totally unreasonable.
Perhaps the open-source software movement will save us from this life of
misery. In some areas, there are already excellent free pieces of software that
provide most functions of their commercial equivalents, and they are often
less buggy. If the commercial vendors don’t get their collective acts together,
they might find themselves losing a lot of business to those alternatives.
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Silicon Chip
Australia’s electronics magazine
siliconchip.com.au
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