Adobe allowed me to better understand bug-ology by helping me with problems with Premiere Pro, an amazingly powerful piece of video-editing software that, alas, seems to crash more than I had anticipated. One particular crash, involved with making screen titles, seemed especially crude, and Adobe thought it might involve a video driver.

Adobe 公司曾帮助我解决Premiere Pro的问题，这使我对程序崩溃这门学问有了进一步的了解。Premiere Pro是个功能超乎想象的视频编辑软件，然而它崩溃的次数也超乎我的预料。其中一次崩溃是在制作屏幕标题的时候，这个毛病好像尤其顽固。Adobe公司猜测它可能跟视频驱动有关。

It didn't. The next step was the lengthy process of turning parts of the system off and on to see what made a difference. It's the computer equivalent of taking endless allergy tests to see what's making you sneeze.

然而却不是。接下来一个漫长的过程开始了，他们把系统的各个部分逐一打开、关闭，看看前后有何区别。这情形就好像你打了个喷嚏，却要无休止地做过敏测试以便 定原因，只不过这个测试现在拿到了电脑上而已。

I declined. Frequent saving of my project was easier.

我拒绝做测试。我情愿多花时间在电脑上保存工作成果，也比这样省事一点。

Adobe support engineer Mitch Wood told me about a bit of Premiere Pro sleuthing he had just finished, with a user who couldn't import video. It took many hours to figure out that a piece of software from a small company had mislabeled one of its tiny graphics routines. That slip-up cascaded throughout Windows and ended up keeping Premiere Pro from doing its job. That sort of complexity is part of what makes the personal computer so exciting. But, as the story shows, it's also one of the main causes of all the errors that drive users nuts. There is just so much that can go wrong.

Adobe 的技术工程师米奇•伍德(Mitch Wood)向我透露了一点他刚完成的一个Premiere Pro错误追踪情况，该Premiere Pro用户的问题是没办法导入视频。伍德花了很多时间最后才发现原来是某小公司生产的软件错误标示了一个很小的日常图片操作。这个小错误渐渐波及整个 Windows，最后导致Premiere Pro瘫痪。这种复杂性正是个人电脑如此激动人心的部分原因，而同时正如这个例子所反映的那样，这也是那些能让用户气得发狂的主要错误之一。能出毛病的地方太多了。

Why, then, do so many software companies make it even worse with their Napoleonic software? (That's my phrase for half-pint programs that crown themselves emperor by insisting pridefully that they launch when Windows launches, or by sticking a miniversion of themselves in memory at all times.)

那么，为什么说如此多“拿破轮一世式”的软件使得这种情况更加糟糕呢？（我常常用拿破轮一世式这个词语来形容那些自视过高的小不点软件，这些软件的开发商要么坚持在Windows启动时他们的软件也同时启动，要么总是在内存里留下一点他们自己的影子）。

The latter is supposed to speed their own start-up, but in addition to adding to the system's complexity and thus its tendency to crash, these programs play a cynical zero-sum game. The time saved launching the program must, of necessity, be transferred instead to Windows boot time, which we all know doesn't need to get any longer.

他们的后一种做法旨在加快其自己程序的启动速度，不过除了让系统更 杂、更容易死机之外，这些程序正在玩一个愤世嫉俗的零和游戏。启动程序节省的时间必然会转加到Windows的启动时间上，而我们也知道Windows的启动时间是不能再长的了。

Companies sometimes do this to be able to push out program updates every few weeks. Had Dante used a computer, he surely would have created a special circle of hell for programs that gratuitously update.

有时，这些公司这样做是为了能每隔几周就能将其程序升级一次。如果但丁也用电脑的话，他一定会为这些无理的升级设想出一个特别的地狱。

Worse, these often also make you reboot. Windows, properly done, rarely needs rebooting, but because of slothful updates, they can be a daily curse. In an update, all the old versions must be shut down. Programmers can write some code to do that, or they can have users do it for them by taking five minutes out of their busy lives to reboot.

更糟糕的是，这些程序也经常迫使你重启电脑。Windows在正常使用的情况下很少需要重新启动，不过由于这些缓慢的升级在作祟，你可能每天都要遭受重启电脑的煎熬。程序升级的时候，所有旧版本都必须关掉。程序员可以自己编写代码来实现这一点，或者让用户帮他们一把──在繁忙的生活中抽出五分钟来重新启动一下电脑。

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, who teaches computers at Carnegie Mellon, says it's impossible for software to be defect-free. Still, he thinks Microsoft folks would be better off if, in open-source fashion, they let others see under the hood. A million eyes beat two dozen any time.

卡内基梅隆大学的电脑教师马哈德夫•萨特亚那拉亚南(Mahadev Satyanarayanan)认为，软件是不可能完美无缺的。不过他还是觉得，如果微软能公开源代码，让别人看清楚程序背后的玄机，微软人的日子可能会好过些。毕竟一百万双眼睛总比二十多双眼睛要强。