Servers are lovely. They run 24/7, they do their work immediately, and they usually manage to do a few things at time. Beautiful.

Enters the engineer.

Suddenly it’s important that we batch process. For “efficiency”. Now our systems sit idle for 59 minutes an hour. Amazing.

There I am $14 spent at one of the largest most advanced tech companies in the world for a copy of a piece of software. A binary.

“It may take up to one hour for your purchase to appear in your digital blah blah blah” -Bad Website

What could they be doing. Credit cards take seconds not minutes to process. Even if they want to give me a unique binary to track pirating that would only take seconds. Alas I shall never know. But hopefully by the time this post is live my download will be ready…

PLEASE stop slowing down computers with human scale constraints. A computer scale batch (for a web server at least) would be in 50ms-1000ms range. If you ever find yourself using hours in computer systems there’s a good chance you’ve fucked things up.

P.S. Am I impatient? Yes. Is $14 a lot No. Is there any reason this shouldn’t be instant NO!