3 Dec
2006
3 Dec
'06
4:08 p.m.
In article <m1Gqe60-000Iz0C at p850ug1>,
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes:
True. That's why I said 'in the same sense'. It's quite possible for
hardware to have worked perfectly for 20 years, and then to stop working
(and not work agian until it's repaired) because some component has
failed. I think it's very unlikely for software to work fine for 20
years, then crash and not run again because of some latent design bug
(unless said software makes use of the real time/date, of course ;-))
-tony
[...] I like scheamtics of old
computers for 2 reasons, firstly to learn how they worked, and secondly
to be able to repair them if something failes. Only the first is really
applicable to software, software doesn't fail in the same sense that
hardware can.
It fails in the same sense that a hardware design bug would be sitting
there permanently annoying you until you fixed it. Machines tend not
to ship with hardware bugs because they typically aren't useful with
hardware bugs. They do however ship with lots of software bugs, even
on older machines.