I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin | Hacker News Reader

I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin

crunchgear.com

49 pointsKeepTalking35 comments

It's frustrating as a computer engineer when I see people much smarter than myself trying to do simple things with computers and failing horribly. They understand that there is a learning curve, but can't comprehend the random behaviour of their computer. It makes me think as engineers we've got to do better than this.

Conversely, one problem is that people buy the cheapest computer possible, and then don't understand why the operating system is hard to use and crashes, and the hardware is badly designed and of poor quality. There's a certain company that has decided to make excellent hardware, offer good support and a relatively sane operating system at a higher price than most computer systems. So sometimes you get what you pay for. :)

I agree with a lot of this. For me, it's mostly Windows computers that I hate. Issues like bad capacitors and flaky memory are of course OS agnostic, but it seems to me a bulk of his complains go away with OSX or Linux.

A lot of his complaints are Windows-specific, but some are general, like the filesystem thing, or application-specific "computer classes".

Edit: Well, since you edited yours...

Yeah, a lot of the problems go away when you get away from the PC world, or from Windows. And some, like the error message thing, are by design: if a more descriptive error would actually help you, you probably know how to look in the log file to find it.

But no platform is perfect. I've had Macs do ridiculous things (like only keep a Firewire drive mounted for about ten minutes until I have to replug it), and even though the state of the art has come a long way, computers still aren't perfectly usable by people who don't understand them.

But, I mean, neither is anything else.

For me, Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu all suck. They try to do stuff to "help me", get it wrong, and then make me do more work as a result.

I've fucked over my Debian unstable system more times than I can count over the last 10 years... but it's never annoyed me much. On the other hand, my Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu machine annoy the living fuck out of me every time they say "updates installed, you must restart".

I guess I hate sitting down to use a computer and having it tell me, "sorry, I did stuff without your asking, now you need to clean up the mess". I still haven't fixed the nvidia driver on my Thinkpad with Unbuntu. I tried, failed, and just put the machine in a closet somewhere. It worked a few times, but now I can't get it to work, and I don't know what steps to take. Everything is so magical, and all I can do is be helpless.

With Debian, I make the mess myself, so when I have to clean it up, I am already in the mood. (And of course, the nvidia driver works perfectly. Yeah, I had to build it with module-assistant. But that always works! Every step in the process exists for a good and logical reason -- there is no magic. And magic is what makes me mad.)

He also mentions that new tools designed to alleviate problems and up just causing more. I think this is a symptom of inflexible computing "architecture" -- what Alan Kay refers to in "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Our own tools cause incidental complexity -- complexity arising not from the problems, but from the way we solve them. And so it becomes harder to build things, as we strain against architectural limits.

100% on this one. I just upgraded to Windows 7 (i.e. bought a new box with Windows on it) and the default patching behavior was to reboot every few days. Problem is that I keep windows open to mark places in tasks, and always have. It is not OK to reboot without asking me.

It is for this reason that I use Arch Linux. Building a system from the ground up is, quite honestly, a wonderful experience (it does get tedious after four or five installs on different computers, but meh). I don't have any Crappy Crapware, or Auto Updates (sometimes this bites me), or Evil Bloat ... like a desktop environment. It's a breath of fresh air. As you say, there is no magic.

I don't think I could ever move away from Debian... but Arch is indeed nice.

My Windows partition is slowly dying. First I had to set the clock back on it to avoid doomsday for Windows 7 RC1, which of course breaks all sorts of date-reliant security certificates. Then, Google Chrome starts pissing all over me (Gmail.com is a redirect loop, really?)

* "All Programs" in the start menu doesn't work (search function still does)

* My Creative audio card sometimes doesn't work, I have to reboot.

* Will occasionally boot into some sort of auto-user and not my user account. Known Windows 7 RC bug.

* Java has flipped its shit and updates every 15 minutes (exaggeration there, bucko) but doesn't work.

* Steam does all sorts of things wrong all the time. Like, 30% of the time it doesn't work and I have to restart it.

Fortunately most of my main stuff isn't affected: DrScheme, Emacs, foobar2000, Firefox, and mah g4m3s still work. I'm still using Windows because i <3 games and because I can watch Netflix on it. I wish I wasn't using it, though.

tl;dr windows sucks lol, but at least it gamez dude.

You admitted that two of the problems you listed were known RC bugs. Have you upgraded 7 from the release candidate?

While I use linux more and more (archlinux), I kinda like Windows because it's straightforward to use. Linux is much more powerfull, and it can do wonders, but to unlock this potential you have to spend hours learning the innards of it's working. And it ain't pretty.

Most software nowadays are incredibly complicated, and what Windows does in essence is hide this complexity from you. That comes at a steep cost as you lose control over the machine. But let's face it, the common user rarely needs more than windows has to offer.

Also, what this article bash is complexity, and I dare say that Windows is simpler than Linux. Perhaps not under the hood, but Windows gives you a neat interface to the machine. And under it everything mostly works, sometimes it doesn't and you get a piece of frustrating error message. In Linux on the other hand, you need to have a hand at everything to keep things smooth, but you can shape the interface any way you want and fix almost everything. The problem is I have found the rate of software failure to be much more important on linux which kind of cancels this effect out.

Finally, when you see that the article states

"But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve."

It's hard to defend that switching to linux would help like computers. Ancillary software has more to do with linux 10.000 libraries at a package each, than with crapware, which is not required and can easily be removed.

I'm right up there with this guy, the only problem: I'm writing the software and I can't design an interface anyone would enjoy using.

I'm not I sure I could write an interface I would enjoy using.

That's what I was getting at, anyone includes myself.

His issue doesn't seem to be with computers _per se_, but rather the interaction of all the junk that comes either on a new Windows system or via the default installation process for new software. Even a well maintained Windows machine accumulates crapware over time. It's just the cross you have to bear if you want to run Windows.

While I disagree fundamentally with the heavy-handed approach Apple has taken with the iPhone, I think part of their motivation is to protect the phone's ecosystem from threats. Imagine a world where we have malware infection rates on cell phones equal to, or greater than, the infection rates on personal computers. It would be ugly indeed.

Why isn't there consumer RAID? Consumers seem to be buying a lot of cheap laptops lately. RAID would increase weight, heat, noise and power consumption as well as add $1-200 to the price of a $3-600 machine. The only selling point for that feature is "less likely to lose your data", which tends to imply that the standard model is likely to lose your data[0]. It's not popular because nobody would buy it.

[0] Of course, that's true. Still, it's not something the marketing department can say.

Not really. It would add the cost of one disk, which is around $30-$50 these days.

Now for laptops, space is an issue, and that's why SSDs were invented. Light, low-power, fast, and much more reliable than rotating disks. Perfect for laptops.

"It would add the cost of one disk, which is around $30-$50 these days."

Plus the RAID card, if their working in hardware. Nice one's aren't cheap, and they're bulky for something being put in a laptop.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...

A RAID card is totally unnecessary. Software RAID is orders of magnitude faster than any disk it is going to be managing. We aren't talking RAID 0+5 for your credit card processing database. We're talking RAID 1 so that when your disk dies from all the soda you spill on it, you don't lose your porn stash.

I use 3-way software RAID 1 for my homedir, and I don't regret it at all. It automatically fixes bad sectors when they occur (since the other disk has the correct data), and reads are 3x faster than they otherwise would be. And two disks can fail (and have), and I don't lose any data. It's great. For the cost of an extra disk, I would recommend the setup to anyone.

Agreed, I had software RAID on my last setup and it made a huge difference.

Trick I used to use was to have RAID 1 for my homedir, and then try 3 different mounts for /tmp. The first was RAID 0. The second two were trying to mount the two RAD partitions. It made /tmp larger and faster at the cost of a reboot if I crashed. Which seemed to be a worthwhile trade-off on a desktop.

RAID mirrors are a poor alternative to proper backups. They don't protect you from catastrophic file system problems, accidental deletion/corruption, flood, fire, theft, etc. I suppose for people on the road a lot, away from an IT staff, there is some benefit to having higher availability but in a world of <$500 laptops $30-$50 is significant.

There are only two problems with this article. First, of the significant number of applications I have installed under OS X, I can count on one hand the number that came with a util for removing them. There are ways around this (eg, lsbom|xargs rm), but they are messy. Second, writing an operating system with a UI on top of that has to be a monumental task. Something that only a really small percentage of people can do (and an even smaller number can do well). In order to design systems, they have to think a certain way, become familiar with the systems... and it all looks completely obvious to them. Otherwise, "Me, too."

Makes me wonder if Microsoft uses "focus groups."

Most OS X (and Mac OS in general) apps can be uninstalled by dragging the Application from the Applications folder to the Trash.

Not always true. I've seen a number of apps leave cruft on the filesystem when dragged into the Trash.

You mean, except for everything the app leaves under Library, and except for any application that used an actual installer instead of drag-to-desktop.

I can't believe how often I find myself telling my wife I hate computers. Usually it's when she starts asking me how to do something and I immediately know it's something that should be easy (if she can't figure it out, how many millions must be right there with her?) but that is going to be very difficult.

Just two examples.

Printing to a shared printer on a Windows network. Requires a login once per reboot. Trying to print (the logical think) won't prompt, it just queues up the document silently. To get a prompt, you have to know to navigate to the host in the network neighborhood. Then the queue prints.

Posting edited photos from Picasa to a Blogger blog. There are three ways to do it, all with various limitations and complexity. And then a Chrome bug puts double line spacing between her paragraphs.

"Maybe I'll become a plumber," indeed.

I have a problem with this attitude, which is why I think most sysadmin types suck. Computers are the most complex devices we interact with on a daily basis. A basic NetBook with Windows running Google Chrome is hundreds of orders of magnitude more complex than the most complex automobile for instance. It is amazing to me that they are reliable at all.

Have some respect for these machines, spend lots of time learning why they are the way they are (read kernel source, learn assembly, take apart a disk drive) and eventually they'll treat you right.

Or as John C. Dvorak has repeated, "Require a license/permit to use a computer."

He really hates windows, not computers. I do, too, and stopped using windows in 2002, all for the better.

That's part of it, but he also talks about how fragile hardware is, how cumbersome RAID is, and other things hardly specific to Windows.

It seems like the cure to this problem is usability testing.

This is why the iPad will win.

So, what he's really saying is "I hate Windows." Switch to Linux. Dummy.

Most of his complaints are related to UI and how it communicates errors to users (read: not well at all). I don't see switching to Linux solving it at all.

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