A log of articles I found for later reading. ...................................................... ..............................Not necessarily my point of view though.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Computer and car

I own a car, probably one you'd not expect me to have (got it for little money used after my old car was broken in an accident):

Yesterday it wouldn't want to start so I had to call the ADAC (which is a club in Germany that, when you're a member, comes when your car is broken and tries to fix it or tows you to the next repair station for free).
I don't know a thing about cars. I know where the key goes, where I put in the fuel and other required liquids, but that's it. I just never invested any time into learning anything about cars cause it just doesn't interest me: My car is something that can transport me from A to B without me getting wet. I don't care whether it's pretty or clean (oviously ;-)), I just want it to run.
So the guy came, my car miraculously started again and probably something hidden is broken that will fuck up some day soon for me (yay!). I guess this is how many people see their computers, they just want them to run without investing anything into learning how they work and after me telling you this short story you might think I support them and their position. But I don't.
My car is old, it has pretty much no electronics in it, it's simple. I don't care about it, because there are people that know that kind of stuff and can fix "bugs", but when I don't know about the internals I can still fully use it. When I run into a problem I might have trouble getting from one place to another, I might have to call a cab or walk or buy/rent another car but that's it. Inconvenience.
When you don't understand your computer and you run into trouble it's more than inconvenience: You lose access to your data, the binary representation of the things in your head. You often cannot just buy another computer cause you will have trouble getting to your data: When my car dies the Place I wanna go to is still there, when my computer is down, I might not be able to access the data I need and that might not be anywhere else (Yes backups rock, I got them, but how often are you called by people who wanna hand in their thesis paper and can't access it cause of a fucked up computer that don't have any backups).
Cars and computers are different because of one thing: A car is like a function. It doesn't keep internal state that matters to you (of course it has internal state), it just offers one functionality to you. A computer is like an Object: It offers functions but also keeps internal state that you care about.
You could turn your computer into a car-ish state if you moved all state data, all your files, all your settings, all your everything away from it, turning it into a thin client, but that just creates the problem of a server to administer and connectivity problems (plus what happens when your network connection is down?).
Cars and computer analogies are wrong.

via http://the-gay-bar.com/index.php?/archives/222-Cars-and-computers/