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Everything's broken and nobody's upset

hanselman.com

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Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#101

Post by jasonkostempski »

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…

I assume you're just doing your own dishes. I went without a dishwasher for about a year with a family of 3. I wish I could get that 220+ hours of my life back.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#102

Post by philjohn »

taude wrote: post #76
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…

I was complaining to someone the other day about how needlessly complex washing machines, driers, and other home appliances have gotten. I bought a luxury refrigerator (LG) about 5 or 6 years ago. The motherboard/controller unit had to get replaced 3 times in the first year. I'm still using a washing machine and dryer from the early '80s that I somehow inherited. No one's ever said to me my clothes aren't clean. When…

On the other hand, I've got an 8 year old fridge freezer that's still going strong, and a 5 year old dishwasher that's still going strong. Sounds like you got a dodgy model that had problems, but don't tar every modern appliance with the same brush.

I also haven't seen a dishwasher with 40 buttons, as claimed in the parent post, and my modern Bosch washing machine doesn't look any more complex than the Miele one my mother had 25 years ago.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#103

Post by acqq »

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 in the world do you think you need to buy new laptops every &@! year? Is it because "it becomes slow" after you installed too much? The performace of my notebooks or PCs doesn't degrade that fast.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#104

Post by koide »

batista wrote: post #72
mattmanser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've totally missed the point of his post. You're talking about Scott Hanselman here, he does understand all that.

I don't think so. Read his postscript: "Is this a speed problem? Are we feeling we have to develop too fast and loose? Is it a quality issue? Have we forgotten the art and science of Software QA? Is it a people problem? Are folks just not passionate about their software enough to fix it? I think it's all of the above. We need to care and we need the collective will to fix it." I.e, he attributes things to lack of: ca…

  Plus, the kind of bugs he describes are not that important compared to 
  what we have actually achieved and DOES work.
Bingo! This is one perfect example of the problem he's referring to about people not being passionate enough to fix the problems: "Those bugs are not that important."

That's a lame excuse. Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago, the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases and that nobody cares enough to fix, because "bah, it's not that important."

The problem is not that the bugs exist, but how fast and how well they are being solved.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#105

Post by gbog »

It should be noted that not everything is broken, and some people are happy.

See the many posts about vim, git or command line tools on HN. I have never caught a grep bug, for instance, (cat is pretty reliable too).

The problem might be because the level of expectations raises faster that the technology. Chrome was amazing at the beginning, and now people are unimpressed.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#106

Post by lnanek2 »

Doesn't Facebook say move fast and break things?

I know, personally, I have an Android app that gets about 12k new users a month, and I see exceptions reported all the time that I can't reproduce from the buggy as hell WebView, web content control, in Android. Especially when used with AdMob/Google ads, so much so that I use other advertisers instead. I could spend a week copying the source code for WebView into my app and fixing all the bugs if I'm lucky, it may use some private things I preventing it from being copied or something. I know it has threads and databases and all sorts of bizarre stuff. But still that would help like just a tiny, small percentage of the actual users. I'll get far more users working on something that applies to everyone like better graphics or multiplayer play, etc..

I did spend all weekend filing hideously long bug reports with sample code at work, though. So once you are talking about millions of users, it can make more sense, I guess. Which I suppose is where someone from Microsoft is coming from. They are famous for supporting even old bugs in their software for things like SimCity so it wouldn't break across upgrades.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#107

Post by Smudge »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #101
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…

I assume you're just doing your own dishes. I went without a dishwasher for about a year with a family of 3. I wish I could get that 220+ hours of my life back.

I only ever wash dishes by hand when I need some time to clear my head and relax. The other 5 or 6 days of the week I'm incredibly glad I have a dishwasher. I think this appliance saves me more time than anything else (in the kitchen).

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#108

Post by pbhjpbhj »

taude wrote: post #76
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…

I was complaining to someone the other day about how needlessly complex washing machines, driers, and other home appliances have gotten. I bought a luxury refrigerator (LG) about 5 or 6 years ago. The motherboard/controller unit had to get replaced 3 times in the first year. I'm still using a washing machine and dryer from the early '80s that I somehow inherited. No one's ever said to me my clothes aren't clean. When…

>needlessly complex washing machines, driers, and other home appliances //

Presumably the companies don't want to compete on longevity as shareholders want short term returns and so aren't interested, generally, in long term stability and good stewardship of resources.

That just leaves quality and features to compete on. Quality costs money and features are relatively cheap.

So the companies stuff in features and pretend it's a quality product all the while hoping it breaks down the second it's outside warranty ...?

Too cynical?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#109

Post by jiggy2011 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #99

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…

Problem is that you probably can't use each of these devices in complete isolation. For example you want to browse to the web app you are developing and run a debugger inside the browser. You're certainly going to want to copy and paste stuff between them. You also probably want to display it all to one or two outputs rather than having 5 screens in front of you all the time.

So you're back to the tricky problem of syncing state between them.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#110

Post by icebraining »

jmduke wrote: post #92
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 eBoo…

Maybe we don't feel the need to talk to three or more people simultaneously? I'd rather give proper attention to each, even if it takes a little more time.
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