Philosophical Questions on Computer Science!

Hello !

The problems we have (me first!) With the instability of MFS 2020, have led me to some thoughts on IT.

Take me out of a doubt! Is it the man who imagined such a system as computing?

It is Alan Mathison Turing and his British and American colleagues who developed the ancestor of modern computing!

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, computer scientists, helped by their employees develop a computer system (invented by man) which becomes a global monopoly.

Where my thoughts go is why man cannot make a perfect system that is reliable!

Why the Windows system is always evolving, 90% perfect but still 10% imperfection not perfect!

Why since Flight Simulator X (2006) computer engineers have not known and wanted to improve a system that has no computer improvement?

Flight Simulator 2020, apart from the great breakthrough in landscape level, has nothing to envy to its predecessor!

These reflections lead me to tell myself that the computer systems of the states must be better than that intended for the general public!

And that behind this maintained obsolescence there is a phenomenal bizness!

Here are some thoughts, which make me take FSX, P3D, MFS with a certain distance.

Regards,
Marc Roujansky

If you delve into Computer Science in any way, you’ll see that it’s a very complex topic.

Getting a computer programme to be bug free requires correctly anticipating everything that could happen to it, and all the possible ways it and all its parts can interact, as well as all the ways it can interact with all possible combinations of other hard and software running at the same time. This is practically impossible to do, and thus software contains bugs.

Software available to states is no different. Between 1980 and 1995, 16 severity level 1 software errors were discovered in released control software for the Space Shuttle. Severity level 1 means the error could produce loss of the Shuttle or its crew. 8 of those errors remained in code that was used in flights, although the errors were not encountered during flight. 12 errors of lesser severity were triggered during flight, of which 3 threatened the achievement of the mission (N. Leveson, ‘Safeware’)

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The exponential nature of errors is just part of the problem, the nature of software complexity is also exponential:

In “the good old days” you could write a machine code that instruct the hardware almost directly to do something. Now say you want to draw a shape on screen: to do that you need to call the library function that create the shape, the math library to calculate the size and position, the display library to forward it to the screen etc. Each library calls other libraries which again call other libraries. Each software piece and each call can contain errors.

Likewise when you write software: You write in some high-level language that reuse library elements before everything is translated and end up as machine code. Also here you have exponential complexity and “built in” errors.

On top of it you have Windows, which was the worse contender at the “OS wars”, but unfortunately won.

Windows won the desktop, but on mobile devices Android, which is a Linux derivative and iOS are the big winners. On servers Linux is also pretty popular. Personally I run both Windows and Linux. Both have their pros and cons.

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The main complexity is the support of one million hardware devices also the cheap ones. That’s the difference to MacOS.

OS/2 Fanboy? :wink:

Philisophers consider all aspects. You forgot Aerofly and X-Plane. :wink: And don’t forget Konrad Zuse.