Have we forgotten anything based on computer technology is unreliable ?

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

It seems anything based on memory chips and software is inherently unreliable even if it is not connected to the internet.  When I took out 12 RC helicopters this spring (weighing up to 15 lb, not drones) and the transmitter I put in storage after testflying them in September 2018 all but one had to be reprogrammed and many were not programmable any more, junk.  The TX was only 2 years old and retails for over 2.000 $ so not far from what you pay for a keyboard.  If that happens "on the shelf", what can you expect of a keyboard that is switched on and off hundreds of times. 
I have to pay a PC expert for remote help quite often. Why can we not understand and accept that computer-keyboards have similar problems ?  And  BTW, my Selmer Tenorsax needed very expensive service regularly.

Cheers

Kaarlo

[SeaGtGruff]

I think the only completely technologically reliable keyboards are xylophones and marimbas-- no mechanical parts to break down, and no electronics to fail.

[mikf]

Not sure what Kaarlo's point is. Pretty much everything has a reliability less than 100%, but considering their complexity, these keyboards are IMHO surprisingly reliable. Most people have them years without problems. But of course problems do happen sometimes.
Mike

[Tyros5Mad]

I have to respectfully disagree. I was involved in the computer industry since 1977, long before the PC was even a thing. I evolved through being a computer operator, then a computer programmer (all on Burroughs and DEC Vax "big iron" mainframes).

I saw the advent of the humble but ground breaking IBM PC, which prompted me to switch to knowing all about them inside and out. To cut a long story short when I retired in 2014 I had watched and been involved in an industry which has given rise to the SmartPhone, Ipad, mind-blowing PC speeds etc.

How many of you use and depend on your phone? More than 90% I will bet. How many of you depend on your GPS to get you from A to B? More than 90% I will bet.

Would you rather be stuck in a time where you had to find a phone in the event of an emergency? I will bet not. Would you rather be stuck in a time when you had to stop at a gas station to get directions to where you were going? I will bet not.

I won't even mention the massive advancements in medicine,  astronomy, vehicle safety etc, etc, etc. need I say more?

Problems do happen. Without problems I would not have been able to run a computer business. Unfortunately most problems are created by the user. If I let a computer sit in a cupboard for a year and then turn it on and find the settings are all garbled, I probably should expect that. Why? Well the battery used for backing up for the settings went flat. My fault.

The same goes for any technology. It has to be used, pampered and updated all the time otherwise strange things happen.

Regards,
Richard

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

Computers will always have problems.
So much to go wrong
Look at the Uk. Hospital equipment goes wrong and Airports have come to a standstill, banks have problems all caused by computers!!

Frightening to thing how much a new car management system would cost if it went wrong!!

The only reliable electrical items in my opinion is electrics without moving parts like amplifiers,or something that cost the earth.

[Lee Batchelor]

I agree with everyone !

The Genos and its predecessors - Tyros, PSR... have been very reliable. On the other hand, my 2018 Honda Odyssey has been redesigned to incorporate SO much computer technology that the company's collective heads are spinning from so many electronic and computer related failures. There are two recalls I must make time for: The car may slam into Park at highway speeds and the two side sliding doors may open on their own at any speed. Yikes! Both of these things are under the control of a computer or electronic technology. What's scarier is, this is the groundbreaking phase of the totally autonomous car. I'm getting off the roads the day we start relying on computers to get us from point A to B.

Richard is right about the advances that have been made possible in important areas, through computer technology. Personally, I think with quality components we can expect very high reliability, as Yamaha has proven. When computers fail, it's usually the buzzard brain behind the software development who needs a kick in the backside.

[Dromeus]

I'm getting off the roads the day we start relying on computers to get us from point A to B.

Well, with currently 1.250.000 fatal accidents per year worldwide (and much more seriously injured), maybe we'd better stay away from the road today Humans are inherently unreliable 

[andyg]

Funny thing. I've just got one of my fleet of radio controlled tugs out of storage for use this summer. It's been stored for three years, along with its radio control and batteries. The boat was cleaned, repainted and a few minor cosmetic repairs made, and I charged up the batteries for the boat and the radio control. All the electrics worked perfectly first time, and the radio control had even retained its memory settings for the boat. The only 'issue' I had was that as the radio control battery had been fully discharged all that time, it took a few charge/full discharge cycles to hold a full charge. So I think Karlo is unlucky with his radio control sets.

As for unreliability, we form our opinions based on our own experiences for sure, but I'm typing this on an 11 year old PC that hasn't skipped a beat. My laptop's also several years old and is fine. I have two large, complex ham radio sets with digital circuitry that came back to life perfectly after a 25 year break in use and I regularly teach people on instruments that have been superseded many times but are still going strong.

Am I just lucky with all this?

[mikf]

The reliability of all these complex things that surround us in day to day life is so good now that in some ways we react more when something fails. Our expectation is so high. But it wasnt always this way. Reliability problems are almost the norm when the the technology is early stages or when we drive it into tough conditions. I basically used to expect my car not to start or break down in winter in the 1960s.  I worked on some very complex electronics in the 80s which was had to survive in very tough conditions. For many years we would consider it a victory if kept working more than 3 or 4 days.
Mike

[MarkF_48]

To those here that are touting/bragging how reliable your electronic/computer gear is........ you've all just put a curse on yourselves 

[Lee Batchelor]

Fun topic, guys . And then there's Microsoft!!

[Toril S]

Don't even start, Lee! 
When it comes to durability of gadgets, I suspect they nowadays have a little chip implanted in every machine, that starts to make trouble after the warranty has run out, making the machine unreliable They need us to make new purchases. I also think they go for cheap, unendurable materials in many gadgets. What makes me really upset is that to repair things often is almost as expensive as buying a new product. That is not good for the environment!

[StuartR]

...I have two large, complex ham radio sets with digital circuitry that came back to life perfectly after a 25 year break in use...

Nice to see another ham radio operator here.

Stuart.
WA5US

[Lee Batchelor]

Fully agreed, Toril!

It's so sad that we live in a throw-away society. I remember buying electronics in the 70s that would last an easy 15 years. My friend collects tuners and receivers from the 70s that can still make music sound very warm and pleasing, and we're talking about 45 year old gear!!!! We can buy good quality today, but the moment a device is released, the company can't wait to entice you with the "new and improved version."

In the 70s, the sign of a good company rested on their ability to produce a rugged device that would last. Today, a good company is one that turns over high profits through devices that only last a few years, and then crap out. Sad.....

[panos]

Could nowday's electronic products be more reliable and all from the older ones,
if they had the same ratio between price and the average salary?
I believe not.
Today they would have been better by far

How much reliable were the keyboards back in the '80's?
I remember i saw a video where you had to reprogram everything from the start before you start playing because there was not enough memory for sounds,effects,arpeggios etc.

Today we just push a button and if it takes a couple of seconds more than usual to load something:  "ah! that stupid program!"   

As for the roads...well if I see someone who is driving calmly and predictably as he should.
then he probably just got his license and still remembers the very basic rules for driving safely.
I don't think the rest of us follow any of them

[SciNote]

I had a Yamaha DX-7 in the 1980's, and while I never went gigging with it, I played it almost every day.  It never gave me any trouble during the time I had it, which was to when I sold it around 1991.

There's no doubt that the capability of today's electronics is just astonishing compared to those of a few decades ago.  There is something called "Moore's Law" that states that computer power essentially doubles every 18 months, and this has more or less turned out to be true.  In the 1980's, my personal computer (TRS-80 Color Computer) had 32K -- yes, that's KILObytes -- of RAM, NO hard drive, a clock speed of less than 1 MHz, and an external floppy drive that could store about 160K of data on each disk.  Today, computers are regularly coming with 12, 16 or even more GIGAbytes of RAM, storage space is now often greater than one TERAbyte, and speed is greatly enhanced by GHz-range clock speeds and a much wider bit path, as in 64-bit processors, instead of 8-bit like my old TRS-80, as well as "multi-core" parallel processing.  All at a cost that, when adjusting for inflation (in fact, even without adjusting for inflation) is substantially less than the original cost of my TRS-80.

But, yes, glitches can occur.  I have a new smart TV, for example, that will sometimes turn on with sound, but no picture.  Turning it off and on solves that.  I may call the manufacturer about it.

[Lee Batchelor]

Bob, I wonder if the extreme power, RAM, and storage put into computers today is the result of desire or necessity. The software today often contains so much bloatware that the computer needs to be super-powerful for the user to get the expected results. Any veteran IT person I've talked to, and I've talked with a lot of them in my profession, say that software developers often over-automate everything. This why we need such massive computing power.

Which came first - the chicken or the egg . I guess one could argue that the increased capabilities of computers also necessitates increased hardware function.

[Tyros5Mad]

Progress is unstoppable. Unfortunately it will also be the undoing of humanity because, in our relentless progress we are using up the resources of the planet at an unsustainable rate forgetting or not caring that the resources are finite. There are also too many of us around, currently 7.7 billion people and counting.

Some say we won't last another century. I am glad I won't be around to see the demise of the human race but I am sad that future generations will suffer greatly.

Enjoy what we have now my friends.

Regards, Richard.

[Ed B]

Nice to see two other Hams
VE3KHA
Ed B

[travlin-easy]

Ed, add me to the HAM list - W3JKL - yeah, I'm that old! I got my general license at age 12, though I have not messed with HAM radio for decades since. Way too many things going on since then, marriage, children, boats, and now at age 78, I'm out there sailing on a 45 year old sailboat with a equally old engine.

Additionally, after 30 years on stage as a pro entertainer/musician/singer I never had a keyboard fail - not one, and I owned a lot of them, different brands. Did have an amp fail, once, though. Still managed to get through the night with the internal speakers of my old PSR-2000.

All the best,

Gary

[rogerc]

Actually I'm looking forward to self driving cars. Imused to ride motorcycles and couldn't believe how bad the average driver was.  Drivers have become very bad over the years. I've been able to drive in a couple of self driving cars. To me I felt safer than driving with some of my relatives.

[Robert van Weersch]

Modern keyboards like a Genos, a Pax4, Tyros etc run on operating systems which comprise of hundred thousends lines of code. Being a 20+ years experienced software engineer myself, I can assure you that systems this big will always have bugs. On the plus side: those systems have given us amazing instruments with astonishing playing options, which were not possible a decade or longer ago. So would you sacrifice all of these exiting new features, just to go back to more "stable" keyboard? I wouldn't, that's for sure!

[JohnS (Ugawoga)]

I for one thing would not get in a driverless car 

[pjd]

Modern keyboards like a Genos, a Pax4, Tyros etc run on operating systems which comprise of hundred thousends lines of code. Being a 20+ years experienced software engineer myself, I can assure you that systems this big will always have bugs. On the plus side: those systems have given us amazing instruments with astonishing playing options, which were not possible a decade or longer ago. So would you sacrifice all of these exiting new features, just to go back to more "stable" keyboard? I wouldn't, that's for sure!

Thanks, Robert.

I'm a former developer, too. New features increase product complexity and the possibility for bugs, especially when modifying old legacy systems.

I recognize that new features (code) will have some issues to be fixed. Thus, I don't get too hysterical about bugs as long as they get fixed. I also am not afraid to report an issue (here and directly to Yamaha). A good solid bug report is not a slam on the instrument or Yamaha -- it's just a way of helping the developers get things right.

All the best -- pj

[Tyros5Mad]

Not to worry folks,

In the not too distant future the machines will fix and improve themselves.  

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

I agree with everyone !

.... I'm getting off the roads the day we start relying on computers to get us from point A to B.

I will join you in case I have not already moved to the eternal hunting grounds 

Cheers

Kaarlo

[Toril S]

No, on the contrary, I can't wait to see the day when we get computer driven cars. Because, THEN I CAN HAVE A CAR TOO! With my guide dog sleeping in the back seat

[Kaarlo von Freymann]

.......Am I just lucky with all this?

Yes you are, but we are comparing utterly different things. A DJI Ace One, Wookong and Naza with GPS are a bit more complicated and so are to-day' s  FUTABA transmitters.

https://www.futabarc.com/systems/futk9512.html

I started out with an American made Kraft transmitter.  (I later was the KRAFT importer for Finland and after Kraft went down the drain the FUTABA imporer for Finland)  It had no chips and no memories. I still had one 1968 model in 2008 and it worked and might still do so today had it not been destroyed by a waterleak in my cellar.  The fridge and radio  - no memorychips  - I bought ca. 1990 are still working.

Of course what we deem reliable or not is a matter of how we want to look at it.  If you want to call the Genos very reliable, so be it.

My PC,  (and my friends both young and old have the same problem whether  Windows XP, 7 or later )  every now and then prints out  word documents  having been saved after spellchecking with errors in spelling. 

I call that unreliable just as I call my Genos unreliable because  it will not remember memory banks correctly.  IMHO my Range Rover's  and my Merceded 300  are NOT reliable.  If you park them close to a very strong cell phone relay-station the Range Rover will have to be towed 50 yards to "unlock" the  "motor disbled" status, the Mercedes will  warn me that brake fluid level is less than minimum.  It is filled to the rim and the message disappears after driving 50 yards. I never had these problems with cars that had no electronics. But my wife's son in law who builds these relay stations has the guts to say, he has never heard of these problems. I remember reading the Genos was faultless at OS 1.1. 

Cheers

Kaarlo

[travlin-easy]

Kaarlo, and others, there is no such thing as 100-percent reliable. Even the human body fails and it is always when we least expect.

Your old, upright piano frequently goes out of tune, particularly with changes in weather.

My guitars had to be tuned between sets when I used them on stage.

My sax player was constantly changing reeds.

My fiddle player tuned his fiddle between sets, and sometimes the bow had broken hairs hanging from it after he performed a hot bluegrass song.

My voice would sometimes crack when I was singing at the top or bottom of my vocal range.

My bicycle needed some tuning and it cost me $65 at the local bike shop to get the derailer fixed, plus some new brake pads.

I went sailing a couple days ago and noticed that the refrigerator circulation fan no longer functioned. Same was true with the solar power exhaust fan in the head, and the engine compartment fan. Tomorrow will be spent fixing that stuff, things that rarely go bad, but then there is this year when they all decided to take a dump.

When it comes to reliability, our arranger keyboards are about the most reliable thing we own. Everything else, including ourselves, will eventually break down. The best advice I have is a song title "Don't Worry - Be Happy."

A lot of folks claim they wish they could go back to the good old days. Well my friends, these are the good old days! Back when I was a young man and fresh out of the US Navy, I considered myself invincible. Hell, I was gonna live forever. Cars were considered incredible if they got 6 miles per gallon, and lasted to 80,000 miles - most, however, never lasted that long. Everything was less expensive, but someone that made $100 a week could support their family and have money left over to put into a savings account. Today, $100 won't buy enough groceries to last more than 4 days for a family of 4, but as a percentage of our income, groceries are a modest expense for someone making $1,000 a week, which is the upper end of average these days.

My only fantasy now is to be shot in the back of the head on my 100th birthday by a jealous husband as I leap from a second story window with my trousers down around my ankles and a 19-year-old fashion model screaming "Don't leave me, Gary - Don't leave me! That's not working out very well, though.

Be happy and play some music  and post it on the forum,

Gary

[Lee Batchelor]

My only fantasy now is to be shot in the back of the head on my 100th birthday by a jealous husband as I leap from a second story window with my trousers down around my ankles and a 19-year-old fashion model screaming "Don't leave me, Gary - Don't leave me! That's not working out very well, though.

Gary, if you can arrange that, let me know. I'd love to video it for your funeral !