There has been a lot of craziness over the last ten days or so, and I feel I should at least acknowledge one of those events. The one I feel is the least objectionable. So, there was a huge computer outage last Friday when a security firm did an automatic update of their software over the cloud. While the update had been tested, it somehow didn't interact quite right with a tiny bit a code. This glitch prevented many computers from automatically restarting after the update. Strangely enough, it was only systems using Windows that seemed to be affected, not those running other operating systems such as Linux or MacOS. From what I've seen on a few Facebook groups that I occasionally lurk, not all Windows systems were affected equally. Whether these systems either didn't update automatically or used a version that wasn't affected, I don't know. Anyway, the computers had to be restarted manually. Each individual one in the network. I don't know what I am more afraid of--that so many huge corporations and government agencies still use old versions of Windows for their networks or that so many important networks use Windows as their foundation. As a longtime Apple enthusiast, I don't see how Windows, a weak but simple knock-off of the original Mac operating systems, became so dominant? I am not even sure why such a system is being used for such large networks. From what I can remember, it wasn't the best fit for such things, but I could be wrong after such a long time from hearing about it years ago. Now, I am the first to admit that Apple can have some problems too. I believe I mentioned here about how I lost the functionally of my Apple internet browser app Safari during an update back in April. For some reason, the app wouldn't launch and no one I talked to at Apple support or locally could figure out what to do. Other apps that used the internet still worked fine, such as the App Store, Apple News, my games, Mail, and even the Dictionary. Functions that used Safari directly, such as Help and Siri, didn't work either. Fortunately, I had installed Firefox for grad school, as the online courses apps didn't really work well with Safari, so I could still search the web. I had to wait about another month for the next update to come out to see if that could fix it. Well, it did, mostly. Safari can take a little longer to launch than it used to. Most of the time, it won't close in a timely manner, taking a minute or more. I frequently have to force it to quit, especially when I am in a hurry and can't wait for it to close on its own. So, I know about glitches from updates. Most systems were back up and running fairly swiftly, especially after the security system came up with a correction that directly fixed the original problem. That is a main reason why I hate computers. Used to, software would be fully functional for almost everyone when it came out with almost no interaction problems or bugs. Now, software is only about 95% finished when it is released, if you're lucky. People now expect problems, and fixes coming out later. A layer of laziness in both the designers and customers has set in. So few make a truly finished product any more that no one expects it. They settle for almost good enough, willing to pay for extra content when it should have been there from day one. Now, security software is an exception, as extra safety concerns demand an update. But the feeling that "good enough" is good enough should never be acceptable in the first place.
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