Loper OS � The Hardware Culture, or: What They Build, Works! Can We Say the Same?:

Hardware really does tend to be the product of a more… adult engineering culture than software. I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a piece of computer hardware which was a steaming turd of sheer dysfunction (non-deterministic behavior, illogical/undocumented operation, simple defectiveness) in the same manner the average piece of software of any substantial complexity almost invariably is.

Via Gruber's Fireball.

Though note this comment to that post:

Yeah, I’m with Jason — it sounds like you just haven’t encountered much hardware at a deep enough level. Look hard inside the Linux kernel (for example) and you’ll find all sorts of documented hardware breakage, with software workarounds of various degrees of grottiness. Sometimes the workaround is to (say) completely turn off features. A particular multi-core embedded ARM processor I know of has totally broken multithreading, so it’s being run single-core. The Intel Poulsbo chipset has to run in linux with the “no-pentium” flag, because its hyperthreading cache coherence had race conditions that could only be turned off by page table features introduced back in pentium days. Check out the errata for any processor of any sort of sophistication and you’ll find a long list of wont-fix bugs. 

That makes some sense.  I mean, I know the 6502 had some illegal opcodes.  It's not like CPUs are always getting it done right.

What's important for hardware isn't so much that it's bug free as that the "legal" opcodes work.  If they do and you use something else, well, that's your problem.  And apparently not even the legal stuff is perfect.

Ah humans.  What does Maynard say?

Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.

Slightly less morbid effects here, but same angelic confusion, I'm sure.