Progress Breeds Sophistication --Along With Swarms of Bugs
It’s hard to think of a stronger stimulus for consumer activism than the near-universal impulse to toss your computer out the window when it freezes or kicks you offline for the third time in an hour. The source of PC rage: rising bug infestations.
Y2K, the mother of all bugs, gets most of the attention. But lesser members of the digital insect genus have spawned by the tens of thousands. The computer industry is the only one in which the more sophisticated the products become, the more problems they inflict on hapless users.
Bruce Brown, editor of BugNet (https://www.bugnet.com) and the closest thing we have to a software entomologist, maintains what may be the world’s largest bug database. The good news, he said, is that more than two-thirds of the serious bugs within or caused by Windows 3.X, Windows 95 and Windows 98 now have fixes.
The bad news: About 8,000 known bugs have turned up in those products alone. (Brown’s data show similar infestations related to Macintosh software.)
No one has estimated the overall effect of bugs on productivity, but extrapolate from your own experience and you’ll see that the cost is staggering.
BugNet’s biggest subscribers--Boeing, Merrill Lynch, AT&T; and the CIA--tend to have their own “swat” teams. Small businesses and individuals fare worse because they can’t browbeat a software company into fixing a problem. Instead, they call tech support, which is often a less-than-satisfying experience.
“They’re made to feel like idiots on top of everything else,” Brown said.
And it’s getting worse fast, Brown said, because of two seemingly inexorable trends in the industry: “Greater complexity plus less development time equals more bugs.”
What exactly is a bug? “Basically bugs are problems of interaction--with components, with other lines of code, with data, with hardware,” said Jeffrey Tarter, editor of the industry newsletter Soft-Letter.
For example, every year a range of new file formats disrupt seemingly innocuous computing routines. For example, there are at least half a dozen variations of the TIFF graphics file format; some just cause colors to shift, others crash the computer.
A flaw in Microsoft Office that was detected last summer can randomly insert text from previously deleted documents into saved files. For example, the password to your e-mail account might turn up in that Word memo you just sent to everyone in the company. The bug hides inserted text when the files are opened within the application that created them, but the text is revealed when the file is opened within another application, such as Windows Notepad. (Microsoft posted on its Web site a downloadable “patch” that fixes the problem.)
Notwithstanding today’s reverence for technological transformation, change tends to be destabilizing. As components are enhanced or features added--even when programs are debugged--they may operate better than ever until you try to exchange data with another program or cross paths with an obscure Windows resource file. Then, suddenly it’s time to re-boot.
“You’re not going to find bug-free software,” Brown said. Too many factors are outside the control of software creators. “The crucial thing,” he said, “is the vendors’ response.”
All technology companies conduct internal testing, but no company can foresee the full range of possible hardware or software conflicts, so they use “beta testers”--volunteers who try free, pre-release versions of a product and report problems to the vendor.
At a glance, it’s a curious relationship: “Detroit doesn’t send us beta cars and ask us to crash-test them. They use dummies,” Tarter said.
But beta testers get more than a bump on the head for their trouble. For large corporations, updating an operating system is an expensive undertaking. As a beta site, they find out whether a new product would be worth the effort.
But exponential growth in software complexity, combined with crushing pressure to beat the competition to market, means that more bugs than ever are missed or ignored. BugNet withheld its annual award for the best bug fix performance this year because no vendor seemed worthy.
“It’s an unending river of sorrow,” Brown said. Hyperbole aside, in effect we’re all paying for the privilege of being unwitting beta testers.
Of course, there are some common-sense ways to minimize the pain. Don’t buy version 1.0 of any program. Don’t upgrade just to stay current--wait until the new version offers something you really need. And look skeptically at products that offer only fee-based tech support.
Fortunately, many vendors post lists of known bugs in their products on their Web sites, along with patches. (But use patches with caution because they sometimes create new bugs.)
Until vendors start spending a lot more on quality control, though, the bug population will continue its explosion.
“It’s like tracking cockroaches in New York--or Los Angeles, for that matter,” Tarter said.
His comment brings to mind the “Far Side” cartoon, in which a harassed mother cockroach says to her husband: “Ed, I’ve had it! The dang kitchen is crawling with kids! In a moment I’m just going to start smashing them myself.”
Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at charles.piller @latimes.com.
