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All software sucks.  It's full of bugs, and rarely works right.

The general solution to this is to live with bugs, and fix them as you
see them.  Eventually, you've fixed enough of them that you don't care
anymore.  If one comes up, you just fix it.  Easy.

Today, my washing machine overflowed.  It has a switch on the front
that selects the load size -- "Small", "Medium", and "Large".  This
means there are three valid states, we'll call them 1, 2, and 3.  The
problem is that when the switch is not completely "on" one of the
states, it is acutally in a fourth state that means "keep pumping
water until Lake Michigan is completely drained".  The knob was in
this state today, and the machine dutifully tried its best to drain
the lake.

Clearly this is a bug.  Fortunately, it is easy to fix.  I would just
need to find the code that reads the switch and add some logic to
default state 0 to "small".

Problem solved; compile the code, pull the EEPROM out of the washing
machine, flash it, and enjoy a flood-free existence.  Now that it
works, I just push the code up to github, and everyone else can have
the bug fix too.

Oh but yeah, the washing machine runs on proprietary software, so I
can't actually do any of this.  I have to live with this retarded bug
for the rest of the machine's life.  (Or waste effort reverse
engineering it, which I Don't Fucking Feel Like.)

The feeling of not being able to fix buggy software is very
depressing.  Manufacturers of washing machines should ship source code
with every device.

(Come to think of it, I would also like to edit my microwave's
program.  I don't want it to beep when I press a button, but I do want
it to beep at the end of the cycle.  This is not an option, but would
be easy to add.  If I had the source code.)
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