Everything's broken and nobody's upset • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#91

Post by Tichy » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:46 PM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #79

nodata wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get lots of technical people who want good bug reporting to want open bug tracking.

Or maybe better: create a tool for filing bugs with Apple which also files them in an open database. Make the tool super nice to use, the bugs super easy to browse and search (as in SEO), and market the heck out of it. If it gets enough attention, Apple will have to care.

Isn't that what companies like getsatisfaction provide? How are they doing on the Apple front?

Edit: to clarify, I was under the impression that there are already companies that provide "complaint forms" (bug trackers) for products of other companies. So I was wondering if they provide such a tracker for Apple and how much activity it provides. I thought getsatisfaction was such a company, but maybe it was another one.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#92

Post by jmduke » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:47 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

Two things in particular I'll attack here:

> - No Kindle

You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.)

> - No Facebook

There's a huge meme of 'Facebook is worthless' both on HN and on Reddit and other tech-oriented communities that I fail to grasp. There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#93

Post by eps » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:47 PM UTC

luu wrote: post #35

The blurb on the sidebar proclaims Scott's MS experience. It's surprising to see someone with a Microsoft background making this complaint. MS spends more effort than any software company on testing, not only in just plain hiring lots of testers, but also on formal methods. They have some of the top formal methods people in the world doing research for them, and armies of people trying to put that research into pract…

Re: Microsoft and testing

Perhaps things have changed now, but previously MS had a setup with 2-4 testers per one developer whereby latter would churn out code as fast as he can (of a respective quality) and testers were expected to identify critical bugs so that the dev can plug them, in the same speedy manner as he'd code the original. I had few close friends work for Microsoft in the 90s and the impression I formed after chatting with them was that the MS products routinely were something that was hacked and hammered into a state of not crashing too frequently. So while Microsoft might have a strong focus on testing, it was used to be completely misplaced and misguided.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#94

Post by justincormack » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:48 PM UTC

gbog wrote: post #39

mrb wrote: post #28

I completely relate to that feeling. This has led me to use less of everything over time. One day I realized this, that I was in fact applying the KISS principle to my life. Fewer apps + fewer features + fewer gadgets = fewer bugs irritating my day-to-day life. Examples: My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash b…

Very much like-minded, here. > Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Was thinking the same but I had to do it, because I need a back-up and I need my music at work too. The only sane way: have proper files half-manually arranged in directories synced with a real solid linux tool (unison). Same for pictures. What I want to emphasize here is that the current trend against files is a dist…

Spotify is so much easier. Once you decide to only manage stuff you create rather than stuff you happen to own, then backup and management get so much easier as there is so much less of it.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#95

Post by perrywky » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:51 PM UTC

why should we care about these rarely happened bugs? They just happened in a complex scenario, which is hard to reproduce and those bugs really doesn't matter. I think it is not worth the effort to deal with these bugs.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#96

Post by brendanobrien » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:51 PM UTC

first. world. problems.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#97

Post by creativityhurts » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:53 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

Why 2 laptops though? So you can bitch about crappy Skype or email clients twice? :-)

Your setup is quite radical in my opinion although I know that are even more extreme ones and this is not a way for most of us. Several years ago we used to memorize contacts and birthdays or keep them in a (paper) notebook but that's not an alternative for most of us nowadays.

I keep my setup as minimal as possible and I'm still frustrated by these bugs and limitations.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#98

Post by fmavituna » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:54 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

Funny enough in countries like Turkey there are plenty of washing machines, dish washers with literally one or two buttons that costs only 200$

Somehow I can't find this kind of machines in places like UK or Netherlands.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#99

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:54 PM UTC

As modern life becomes more complex -- and that's both complex in terms of both computers and social/government structures -- we are swimming in edge cases.

When you used to interact with 4 or 5 complex systems every day, it was a rare thing when one was whacked. System designers got things working 90-95% of the time and the rest of it wasn't worth chasing down. But now that we're interacting with hundreds of complex systems each day, we're constantly running into oddball situations where things frustrate us.

Worse still is what I call an "edge case tsunami" where multiple oddball situations combine to create a PITA or disaster much worse than any one of them would individually.

It's an interesting problem. We can't make everything perfect to a 99.999% accuracy. The economics simply don't work out.

To edw519's point, I think the way to go is to toss out the general purpose computer. Have a device for books, a device for music, a device for programming, a device for surfing, and so on. Not only does this decrease the possibility of a cascade, it also allows us to physically separate our technology habits.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#100

Post by flexie » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 12:55 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

Smart phones add so much value. In fact, I think it would be hard for most who have lived through the iphone age to go back to the world before. Almost like going back to the times before electricity :-)