Chuck Norris Stares Down His Books

Chuck Norris stares down his books.

On Wednesday, I wrote my mid-term for Philosophy. In an earlier post, I lamented the fact that I had lost all my notes, which are still locked up inside my iPad thanks to a recent Word update from Microsoft that causes that app to crash every time I open it. Feeling a bit discouraged, I was walking through the tunnels at Carleton, when I saw this wall painting and took some inspiration from the artist.

While the satirical comment indicates the Chuck Norris "doesn't read books", the reality for University students is that there is a lot of reading and note taking. Losing all the notes you've taken in a school term has happened to others, but the information will not come back by "staring down" the books. You have to open them and read them again and again. The image is also appropriate in a digital age where more and more books are now downloaded. In the future we might even say "we download them to our embedded memory chips until we get the information we want". I wonder what that type of memory crash would look like?

Software didn't use to be that way. I know because I was a software developer that designed point of sale systems and databases, and my software was thoroughly tested before it was installed. Thirty years ago, memory and storage were expensive commodities and if you found bugs you had to re-write the whole program since there was no space to just put in a patch. The program had to fit in the available, non-expandable memory, usually about 4K worth on the first machines I worked with.

Cheap memory, unlimited storage, faster processors have all made programmers lazy. Instead of taking the time to manually write out programs on coding sheets, as we used to, then having them key-punched, then compiling and debugging them, programmers type code directly into terminals without any organized flow-charts or documented plan. This type of coding is analogous to traveling to a destination by car without a road map or even a gps - just a general instinct of the compass direction you wish to take and what the final destination should look like. The chances are your journey will not be as smooth as you would like.

We rely on media of all types to be delivered by working technology every day. We can't watch TV if the cable service is down. We can't surf the Internet if the modem can't connect. If our computer or tablet crashes, we lose everything saved on the internal hard drive. More and more we rely on our electronic media connections to stay informed, stay in touch and stay up to date with personal information stored in our digital filing cabinets. Banks and utility companies no longer send us printed statements - we get digital copies instead. Requesting paper copies results in a charge.

What worries me is the growing laissez-faire attitude of government towards corporations that continue to market incomplete and buggy software. No one is held accountable and it's only a large consumer outcry that spurs large corporations to respond. Most of the time they work quietly in the background, patching errors when they find then on a priority list they dictate. In my case, I've heard little about when the issues will be resolved. In the meantime I'm storing multiple copies wherever I can, and trying to rely less and less on Microsoft for the software I use on a day to day basis.