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

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#131

Post by mej10 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

alexholehouse wrote: post #122

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…

Clearly some of these are life choices, and important ones which almost certainly make sense to you, but one thing; No dishwasher? I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to…

Yeah, mine literally just has a dial that is only used to turn it on and off. No buttons, switches, anything. You just turn the dial like 0.2cm and it turns on. I can't imagine being OK with wasting time washing dishes by hand.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#132

Post by adestefan » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:44 PM UTC

AgentConundrum wrote: post #121

jmduke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize…

I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#133

Post by SanjayUttam » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:45 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…

I don't think the OP is being serious. Wash dishes by hand? Call me optimistic but, I kind of thought we perfected the craft of producing dishwashers.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#134

Post by zaptheimpaler » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #85

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your amazing feat of engineering car, with automatic transmission, ABS, a GPS, incredible fuel efficiency etc. stops in the middle of the highway sometimes. Your incredible display, which somehow manages to use liquid crystals to display beautiful 1080 HD video develops a jitter and bright line down the middle after a month. The machine gun which lets you launch tiny projectiles at speeds high enough to kill a pe…

Are they meant to be examples of complex tech that aren't allowed to fail and don't? Or examples of complex tech that does fail, but really shouldn't? >but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly It's not an excuse - it's an explanation. These things are complex, and complex things sometimes fail. The average…

They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P

My response to your comment is the same as the previous one:

>My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#135

Post by noblethrasher » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #126

Whenever I use windows there's always something broken. Example: old windows laptop dies and won't turn on. It's old so I remove the laptop drive and put it in an enclosure. Now I'll boot into Vista and share files off it and copy it to new Mac. Easy, right? Wrong! The thing won't let me share the files because I don't have access to them even if I am adminstrator on my windows machine. After waiting for permissions…

Please take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacls

Hopefully it will help if you're ever in a situation where you need to make bulk changes to file and directory permissions.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#136

Post by tomflack » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #88

tomflack wrote: post #16

I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Optimise. Improve. This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.

Can I ask what mobile phone you currently use? Companies like Nokia made some great phone products that did the one thing (well, two if you include SMS) remarkably well in small packages, that had fantastic battery life. But then the iPhone, and Android, came out and virtually no-one was interested in the old, reliable phones anymore. They wanted the latest, shiniest gadget that they could get their hands on, regardl…

Currently, a GSM Galaxy Nexus. Previously, an iPhone 4. Various oddball WebOS and the like phones scattered over the past few years.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#137

Post by timtadh » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:49 PM UTC

eps wrote: post #93

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 forme…

My impression is the Microsoft of the 90s has little to do with the Microsoft of today in terms of QA, testing, and security. This impression is "secondhand" (I have never worked for Microsoft). Reforms were made, so if you information comes from the 90s it may be time to update it.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#138

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #100

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 :-)

I just got rid of mine and went back to a dumb phone.

I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#139

Post by jws » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

SanjayUttam wrote: post #133

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 don't think the OP is being serious. Wash dishes by hand? Call me optimistic but, I kind of thought we perfected the craft of producing dishwashers.

We will have perfected it when you can again expect them to last 20 years without failure and at failure there is a diagnostic code that tells which reasonably priced part needs to be replaced.[1]

They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.

Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always.

EOM

[1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#140

Post by instakill » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #88

tomflack wrote: post #16

I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Optimise. Improve. This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.

Can I ask what mobile phone you currently use? Companies like Nokia made some great phone products that did the one thing (well, two if you include SMS) remarkably well in small packages, that had fantastic battery life. But then the iPhone, and Android, came out and virtually no-one was interested in the old, reliable phones anymore. They wanted the latest, shiniest gadget that they could get their hands on, regardl…

I've got an iphone 4 and two dumb phones, a Nokia C1 and some cruddy samsung thing. I by far prefer the latter two because the batteries last a week, they phone, they sms and they run twitter. You get over the shiny stuff very quickly.