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

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#161

Post by john_flintstone » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:12 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.

My dishwasher was broken for months - never got around to fixing it - and the reality was, it didn't take noticeably longer to clean up after a meal or after a day's meals. Might be different if you have a big family, but from what I remember growing up, the actual washing of dishes was the least time consuming part of cleaning up.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#162

Post by whelps » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

I hate it just as much as any developer when something doesn't work right. The problem is that making things work right takes a lot of time and the cost does not always justify the benefit. In many cases, shipping something and fixing later ends up making more business and financial sense than waiting until everything is perfect. This goes against our natural instincts as developers, but it is proven true time and again. Yes, Steve Jobs liked to delay product releases until it was perfect, but even he at one point stated that real artists SHIP.

Now, I think that you can take either side to an extreme and there needs to be a balance, but I think simply saying that broken code is the worst thing ever perhaps doesn't see the entire picture.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#163

Post by nullc » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

> There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.

'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'

If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?

I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#164

Post by krautsourced » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:17 PM UTC

He's hitting the nail on the head. As for the reasons... there are multiple culprits at work here.

- complexity of modern systems - reliance on third party libraries that suffer from all the same problems - underfunding - understaffing - QA next to non-existant or "sourced out" to support staff - unrealistic deadlines - incompetence (that was always a problem, but combined with the lack of QA becomes more apparent to the end user)

Basically the issue is we all want more, for less money, in a short amount of time. And I think we've hit the ceiling for that as far as the human factor is concerned.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#165

Post by jiggy2011 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:18 PM UTC

glassx wrote: post #143

And it's not just with computers. I have a Sony Bravia TV and with every update its "UI" got slower and slower, until I disabled updates. I know it's got a lot of cool features in it, but I just wanted a simple TV.

That's an issue I've had with my HTC Android phone and also with stuff like Java updates that want to install "Ask toolbar" and updates to Safari that want to install iTunes etc.

Of course I don't really want to disable updates altogether incase there is an 0 day out there and I need to patch. Problem is that a lot of things don't give me the option of saying "fetch security updates only , ask me before installing anything else and allow me to revert if I don't like it".

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#166

Post by motters » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:20 PM UTC

I think this could be rephrased as "Apple and Microsoft products are broken", and that's a problem because he's a Microsoft employee so he probably has no option but to dogfood. For less constrained users there are other products around though which are not as broken.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#167

Post by SoftwareMaven » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:20 PM UTC

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…

I have a mid-90s washer and dryer, which is the exact same design as the 80s versions. In 15+ years, I've had a few problems with them, but every time it was a relatively straightforward for me to figure out and to fix because they are so simple. If you have a voltmeter and an ammeter, you are set.

The inability for me to fix them is what keeps me from upgrading. As the OP noticed, everything is broken, so I expect I will have to get anything repaired. I'd prefer to save some money and do it myself.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#168

Post by Impatient » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:21 PM UTC

"How do we fix it?"

Pay for more stuff.

13 of the 20 issues are on freeware or free services. Gmail way exceeds my expectations, because I know I'm the product, not the customer.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#169

Post by zvrba » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:24 PM UTC

Bah, this post reads like a 5-year old bitching because he didn't get his ice-cream [1]. May it be that these problems aren't fixed because they arise from a subtle interaction of hung routers, failing hardware, other installed software that runs concurrently in the background [2], etc. How do you debug something that you can't reproduce in a "standard" setup? For how many CPU-eons should you run your networked application on a simulated network to be reasonably sure (NB! NOT prove!) that it'll handle network outages? HOW are you supposed to write software that behaves "correctly" when its preconditions aren't true? (e.g., that the OS's routing table is sane?) Etc, etc.

[1] Yes, Gmail is slow for me too; haven't used its web interface for years, and I've moved my correspondence to private domain. Some of his complaints are valid complaints about sloppiness. He also seems rather unhappy with Apple's SW, so I'm wondering why is he still giving shitloads of money to Apple.

[2] For example, a backup on my Win7 machine failed, with a mysterious message in event log urging me to look for other errors in the event log. I scrolled down and saw that AV (MSE) had quarantined a certain file. I deleted the file, and lo and behold, the backup succeeded!

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#170

Post by white_devil » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:24 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #123

cstross wrote: post #30

Reading his laundry-list of paper cuts, it looks like many of them (around 50%?) relate to one particular issue: synchronisation. It keeps coming up, time and again, from his email woes (seriously, folks, didn't we solve this one back in 1980?) through to the borked address books, contact lists, and photo streams. Sync software usually takes a conservative approach to deleting or merging records, and leaves duplicate…

I'm going to take an even harder line: Sync is a fundamentally broken. The only solution is to switch to technologies where merging data is a primary core feature. Thus why I use text files and git to manage the vast majority of my data. The sooner people realize that sync isn't fixable (or a good idea in many cases), the sooner real solutions appear.

Sync is a fundamentally broken.

Yep. It's weird that everything is built around just one button that says "Sync", when there are two different directions involved.

Either you want to save the state of whatever device you're currently using, or you want to revert it to the state stored in the cloud.

Export Import, pretty much.