When I saw this my initial reaction was 'bleh. bloody #firstworldproblems'.
But then it struck me: One man's first world problem is another man's billion dollar company.
Everything's broken and nobody's upset
231–240 of 418 posts
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#232My 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…
A lot of people are surprised that you don't use a dishwasher. This I find surprising. I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned w…
> I do dishes as a fitness hack.
What does this even mean? How is this a "hack"? Is vacuuming a "fitness hack"? How about sit-ups? Or walking?
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#233My 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…
I wonder how much Kindle ownership and home size correlates. I was a strong proponent of owning physical books until about 2 1/2 years ago when I moved into a small Manhattan apartment.
Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that.
Playing with some rough numbers into I get about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks.
Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#234I 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…
Ten years ago everybody enthusiastically installed every piece of shareware (windows) or open source (linux) software they could lay their hands on. There were a whole lot of portals devised to desktop software. People's desktops had all kinds of weird hacks in it, tweaking every imaginable bit of appearance, user experience and features. But I think we all came to conclusion that it does not pay off. Yes, your 3rd p…
With package managers and text-based configuration, setting up my system from scratch takes 5 minutes of manual time (and some more unattended).
I just keep a git repository that contains my dotfiles, /etc and the output of 'dpkg --get-selections'.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is more to Facebook than the friend-feed (the broadcast mechanism). Person-to-person communication is mostly what I use it for; it has replaced email and IM for many people.
What does Facebook's person-to-person communication offer beyond email and IM? (Honest question) No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...
Facebook is my primary messaging system.
It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.
It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.
Of course, YMMV.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's therapeutic, for me anyway.
I agree, wife and I wash most of our dishes, she washes, I dry. It's a great time to let your mind wonder and think about problems. Mindless tasks like drying dishes and scooping the cat box give me a chance to actually think about things in a no pressure environment.
Just wait, kids change everything!
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#237I 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…
I completely concur. Careful pruning of your toolset will allow you to move forward far faster.
I have basically standardized on Pidgin, Firefox (minimal extensions), emacs, org-mode, and a terminal program. At home, I use Mail.app and the OSX contacts. I'd like to move them out to emacs though. :-)
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would seriously reconsider Kindle. It beats any kind of screen for reading, and beats any kind of paper materials in logistics. For me, personally, it's pure value; something I can't say about most of other electronics I own.
"Hey I read this great book the other day!" "Oh really? That sounds really cool!" "Yeah, here you can borrow it..... Oh wait never mind..." " :( " I don't think it really beats paper materials in logistics. You're buying proprietary books. 14-day lending to other people (who may not have a Kindle) doesn't really solve that.
But then keep bringing your 1000+ pages book and a few magazines with you to the bus, to read en-route...
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> 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 key point is who defines what "opportunity" is and, most importantly, why. There are opportunities to build new features, or opportunities to fix what's broken.
Who defines it? The business. Opportunity cost is a business notion (even if that business is making a non for profit OS software).
>The pride on creating a mighty fine piece of software should do it. I actually DO try to attack all the user facing (annoying) bugs on my projects, always. I may or may not be successful at that, but I'll never use "we are much better than 15 years ago" as an excuse.
So you "may not be successful at that". So why don't you stop 100% whatever else you're doing until you are successful 100% at that?
Because, obviously, you also need/want to do other things that you consider more important.
What I'm saying is: give the same courtesy to the makers of software you use.
>The bottom line is that I feel it's disrespectful to a user to tell him to put up with the annoying "life-wasting five minutes at a time" bugs, only because 60 years ago he would have been playing cards over candlelight instead of trying to sync his iTunes library.
Actually I find that the user throwing a fit is immature and disrespectful to what he is offered.
And you can see that sense of entitlement all too often in OS projects: "your software doesn't do X, or has the Y bug, it is crap, etc".
There are programmers that want to fix bugs, and programmers that just don't care. But it's not like the "just don't care" is somehow the prevalent attitude, or that bugs that are not fixed don't have a reason behind them not getting fixed (even if it is the simple: "didn't get to it, yet").
Neither are all those bugs "simple UX bugs" as you seem to imply, meaning that they have no backend or deep dependencies, or are trivial to fix. The bugs the article describes for example are syncing bugs, or bugs in working with video streams a non linear video editor. Those can be very complex and subtle, and may not even appear except in some very specific setups.
>It's like starting to pierce people with a pin and when they complain say "be grateful this is not the medieval times, because the pin would be a broadsword and you'd be already dead."
No it's not like that at all. For one, in this example you compare small pain now to bigger pain in the past. But what people get now is much more features (with some bugs), compared to less features in the past (with some bugs). So, if anything, it's exactly the opposite.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#240This stuff all bugs me. On my 4 year old Mac sometimes app's just won't start. They bounce once then exit. The only fix is to restart. No idea why. Been happening for years. In Firefox on Windows. I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes and there is nothing I can do apart from ctrl+alt+del. I really don't know why tab's aren't sand boxed to at least let you exit them. Photoshop has minor annoyanc…
I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes This one always gets me. The browser people are (rightly) obsessed with security, but a simple DoS attack like this has worked for years.
After a bit, Firefox pauses the script and asks if you want to terminate it. It's not a real problem in my experience.