POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : The Daily WTF [again] : Re: The Daily WTF [again] Server Time
13 Jul 2025 16:54:02 EDT (-0400)
  Re: The Daily WTF [again]  
From: scott
Date: 12 Feb 2008 07:03:15
Message: <47b18b03$1@news.povray.org>
> So what you're saying is that if hardware is complicated, it is impossible 
> to develop quality software?

No, but with complicated hardware, users expect complicated software, and 
with that comes bugs.  Sure, even I could probably write a word processor 
that rivalled what I had on my Acorn, and given a suitable amount of time 
could make it pretty stable.  But everyone would laugh at it.

> Why do we *need* multi-APIs for everything in the first place?

Dunno, just the way it is, because of the wide variety of hardware I guess. 
At least for graphics there's only DirectX and OpenGL now, there used to be 
3Dfx/Glide and some radeon thing IIRC.  I don't know what alternatives there 
are for DirectX for game controller input, sound, networking etc, but I'm 
sure there are some in use.

> Leaving aside hardware

But I think that's one of the key points.  Windows must work with every 
possible piece of hardware that's available now, PLUS it has to work with 
anything that might come out in the future...  Can't imagine Amiga coming 
out with a new 64-bit dual core machine, and then you being able to use the 
same Amiga OS you had before with it...

> [bad drivers can screw up any OS], what does Windoze actually do that 
> AmigaDOS doesn't? Well, let's see now. It has networking. It's multi-user 
> and has access permissions. It... uh... no, I'm struggling to think of 
> anything else new it has. That seems to be able it, really. (Unless you 
> count IE as part of the OS.)

Just have a browse through the services running on your machine...

> Almost all software possesses something you could describe as a "bug". The 
> point is, some bugs are more serious than others. Where I work, Word is 
> constantly crashing.

Oh yeh, you're still running Word 1985 or whatever :-)  Word only crashed 
here when we had a buggy printer driver (but then so did any other 
application that tried to print - it's just we mostly used Word).

>  The hours we've wasted because Word has crashed and eaten somebody's 
> work... I don't hear any stories of POV-Ray crashing half way through a 
> million-hour render.

POV crashed on me during a long animation render, gave me a "variable not 
declared" or something error, even though it'd just rendered 1000 copies of 
the exact same SDL file previously...

> Interesting. When I got my laptop, it crashed within 14 *seconds* of being 
> turned on.

And how many other XP machines exhibited this behaviour?  I've used XP 
(along with friends) right back from the pre-release versions of XP, and the 
only time I've seen that behaviour is due to bad hardware.  Once it was a 
faulty RAM stick, another time was a dodgy hard drive, and the third time 
was heat sink detachment!

> But even so, here at work I look after a large cluster of PCs. And usually 
> in any given week at least one of them will give be a BSOD.

So what's the most common cause of BSODs then?  Once a week on various 
machines sounds like some broken software/driver that everyone has 
installed...

> Indeed, just this weekend, one of the servers rebooted itself due to 
> one...

And what was the reason for that?  If it was my server I would want to find 
out exactly which driver/program/hardware caused the BSOD.


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