The reason that Science and Math are so important and we no longer >live in
the Middle Ages is that we no longer have to try everything out
to see if it works.
And you were castigating Microsoft for shipping untested product.
You can't have it both ways. You know that an engineering
solution can look perfect on "paper" and can fail in the field.
The degree of complexity of the solution multiplies the unknowns.
Of course you've heard that before.
Yes our tools for design give us a leg up in that a significant
amount of rock-banging, to use your term, is eliminated.
Let's take something that is of a high order of complexity and
that requires a high order of engineering to execute. Say a
space shuttle. That system has an unacceptable failure rate.
Not because it wasn't designed by top scientists and engineers,
it was. But because there turned out to be factors that weren't
in the calculations.
Now we know more about those factors, but we didn't learn it
without sacrifice. The next time around it WILL be better.
But there will still be things we didn't calculate.
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