[High Praise! to Hope n’ Change Cartoons]
“Glitch” sounds small, cute, and sort of pleasantly quirky. But a “glitch” doesn’t cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. A “glitch” doesn’t cause human suffering or potential loss of life. A “glitch” is a minor mistake – not the inevitable result of botched human planning, shirked responsibility, and the decision to put a higher priority on politics than practicality.
Rather, what we’re seeing at Healthcare.gov should more properly be described as a “man-caused disaster,” a term the Obama administration originally proposed as a euphemism for acts of terror.
A graduate school classmate of mine who was possibly the smartest man I have ever know explained the difference between a bug and a glitch as follows:
“You get rid of bugs by debugging. You get rid of glitches by exorcism.” Bear that in mind when you hear Kathleen Sebelius or Barack Obama or any other Democrat talking about glitches.
at the risk of going off topic, sometimes you just need to interrupt:
http://www.southwestbaconfest.com/
Actually, the term “glitch” doesn’t apply to software at all – but it can apply to hardware where electrical transients can cause erratic behavior.
So, whoever started applying the word “glitch” to Healthcare.gov’s problems is an ignoramus.
Also, there are no “bugs” in software, either. They’re mistakes.
And lastly, “You can’t program something you don’t understand.” (Source: me)
It sounds like the contractors involved didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.
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back in the dark ages, when i was in college, we had a saying,
“to error is human, to really f*uck things up takes a computer.”
i bring you obamacare
@jw: FORTRAN? See also this cartoon.
Speaking of costing the taxpayers millions, did you here the story of the satellite that went into the ocean because of missing comma in a FORMAT statement?
To me, a glitch is a hardware bug. You get glitches in the design of physical computer hardware; they’re things like “clock skew,” or like the arithmetic unit in the original Pentium that could yield errors in arithmetic.
To me, a bug is a mistake or oversight in software, i.e., in programming. I’ve committed plenty of those.
But maybe other computer-science students and pro’s will object. The terminology isn’t set in stone, but that’s my usage of it.
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