Here's an autoblog thought from last night's dinner conversation*:
Dean: You know what most software gets wrong? Its not fault tolerant. Computers need perfection.Paula: ... but humans are fault tolerant.
Dean: Yeah - exactly. You can flub your words, misspell, whatever, and humans figure it out. This is why people like google. I can type in micsrosoft and it still lists www.microsoft.com at the top of the search results.
Paula: That's also why I like google maps. I can type "Krispe Kreme, Washington DC" and Google finds me the nearest source of hot doughnuts. Mapquest has better directions, but I have to always type the street address... ok now tab to the city text box... crap, VA is at the bottom of the state dropdown box...it's too hard.
Dean: This is where everyone goes wrong in software design. They expect smart users. But people are dumb and lazy. That's why they prefer humans to machines. Humans are fault tolerant - computer software should be too.
* unfortunately, since autoblogger is still run by pet monkeys who type our conversation up, this is heavily paraphrased. Spelling and grammar errors are the fault of the monkey.
1 comment:
Hang on, now! I didn't say people were "dumb and lazy". (That must be a error made by our typing monkey.) What I said was that computers expect precision, and people are not precise. We approximate. We take shortcuts. We match patterns. Other humans get the drift of what we're saying without us having to connect all the dots, so it's a major hassle to work with a computer. We have to describe in excusiating detail exactly what we want done and how. That sucks.
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