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Re: [OM] OT - Software bloat

Subject: Re: [OM] OT - Software bloat
From: David Thatcher <davidt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2013 01:22:45 +1030
On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 10:00:49AM -0400, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> Paul has it right.  Machine capacity is dirt cheap these days and 
> possibly much cheaper than trying to find/fix at least some of the 
> inefficiencies in massive software systems.  

*Warning, long post from sour old network tech*

Chuck,

You are *very* correct, of course, but it is a vicious circle. More
capacity means less care in keeping it tight. Less care in keeping it
tight means that it needs more capacity. That said, the assassin hiding
in the wings is that even the compilers/interpreters are now so complex
that they are also bug-ridden and exploit vulnerable nightmares - a
slang word for coffee springs to mind :)

I know these things are complex and BIG, but a little care in
engineering and testing at a module level wouldn't go astray - and would
save big $ for everybody. Unfortunately the corporate care factor is no
longer there.

I was part of a situation just over 10 years ago where a tiny little
company in Adelaide was pointing out the careless errors in some basic
arithmetic in the router code of a large IT company... parked in front
of the heater at 5:30am in mid-winter on a conference call, talking with
software engineers in Sydney and Raleigh (NY) discussing IPSec, packet
fragmentation (or not -  if the DF bit is set), and the need to count
those few extra bytes in the MTU calculation. :)  In the end we had a
winner!

Even now, big companies foist half-baked vapourware on their channel
partners, and what should be 4-hour install turns into a week(or
more)-long  nightmare for some ulcer-afflicted (and by now
self-doubting) field tech, just because a software FIFO queue manager
can't count. We got them to admit it and build us an engineering release
- too late, we'd lost the client's confidence (2011). :( NO compensation
from the manufacturer, either. 

The most recent event (2012) was one whre every time we made a change to
a configuration of a device (a network router), another bit of the
config (3 lines) would replicate itself over and over. Over time these
made the config so large that it cannot be saved on the device's nvram.
The fix for this glaring bug is considered to be an 'enhancement' and is
not on the vendor's roadmap (personally, if I'd written this barf I'd be
embarrassed and be falling all over myself to fix it - and probably in
my own time).

davidt






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