Re: Murphy's Law: (was Re: off-topic: scheduled backup to external hard drive

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

At 02:13 AM 4/6/06 -0400, George Scithers wrote:
>
>> For instance,
>> lots of times I've plugged the data cable to a drive upside
>> down.
>
>Then-Captain Murphy first formulated his law, "If there's
>anything the contractor's tech rep can do wrong, he will,"

I've spent years trying to track down Murphy's Law, and I will refer you to
the Murphy's Law web site and Wikipedia entry. Murphy's law seems to have
split into 2 tracks: it's developed into first a joke, about the peversity
of nature, and second a design principle, that many people will use your
product many times under many circumstances, and you have to design your
product to work right every time (rather than blaming the user for doing it
wrong). I prefer the second.

The aircraft engineers were the first to adopt that principle, because they
were dealing with the worst consequences for small mistakes. But it spread
throughout engineering. In anesthesiology a few years ago, the
manufacturers of different equipment used different controls, and when an
anesthesiologist went from one hospital to the next, he was likely to make
a mistake. A lot of patients died. When they standardized the equipment,
the death rate went down.

A friend of mine just called me last night for help with a program for an
Olympus digital voice recorder that wasn't working. The installation screen
asked, "Do you want to install this into a default directory, or do you
want to create a new directory?" (The first time I saw a message like that,
I didn't know what to do either.) He installed it into a new directory
called "New directory", and the program couldn't find the path. I guess
Olympus skipped the part about using testers who were not computer literate.

Norman

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Norman Bauman
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