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Everything's broken and nobody's upset

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Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#241

Post by Splines »

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…

Contact software is, IMO, trying to do too much these days.

I have a business contact on my iPhone that has a contact photo of one of my relatives. I certainly didn't set it this way, but I have no idea how this happened. Is it something that my iPhone did? Is it something that happened at Google (it's a Google contact)? Is it something that my Windows 8 contacts app did (syncs to Google contacts)? I don't know, and even if I did, I don't know if I'd be able to fix it.

Frustrating. We sandbox our applications, and the success of the iPhone shows that this is something users want. Why can't we sandbox the other parts of our computers? Sure, I could "delink" everything and maintain it all myself, but I wish it wasn't so "all or nothing".

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#242

Post by icebraining »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #82
batista wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down. You missed the AMAZING INGENUITY and BRILLIANCE that is also all the way down.

batista, I often find myself nodding in agreement when reading your posts on HN -- especially when you take a contrarian position. I do agree with you in this, also -- the hardware and software combination of a single PC or smartphone is, I guess, among the most complex systems humanity has built, and in such a short time frame. While my post was mostly me venting (bad Monday, frustration with people/clients/spouse/s…

"Nobody hates software more than software developers": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/nobody-hates-softwa...

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#243

Post by neutronicus »

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…

Personally, I just don't like dishwashers. They don't seem to save any work - I still basically have to clean the dishes in order to precondition them for the dishwasher, and now they create this monumental chore (put everyone's dishes away) that all the dishwasher users are constantly trying to avoid and foist off on the other dishwasher users. No, thank you.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#244

Post by jiggy2011 »

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.

Even git isn't perfect. I spend plenty of time in a three windowed merge tool figuring out which piece of code should go where when we have merge conflicts.

The solution would have to be to store everything in ascii formats (probably taking a hit in terms of filesize and performance) and get everyone to understand the ascii representation each of these data formats and how to merge them effectively.

The alternative would be to build a diff tool for every binary based format out there.

The simplest solution would simply be to implement locking on everything and have one authoritative copy. So you can have your data on any device you want and share it with as many others as you want but only one person/device can have write access at any given time and can only have that once they have updated to the latest version of that rescource.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#245

Post by hfsktr »

thebigshane wrote: post #195
nullc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bu…

Necrophiliac bestiality Umm, what? It appears to be a quote from... a movie or something but I am not at all prepared to google it.

I googled directly what he said and necrophilia(c) bestiality (google corrected the necro part). I didn't really find anything relevant on the first page. There was one site with jokes but I didn't read into it since only a word from each sentence got picked up. Hope he comes back because I want to know what he is talking about too.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#246

Post by AgentConundrum »

adestefan wrote: post #132
AgentConundrum wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The books, while the impetus for this particular comment, are only part of the puzzle. Music is pretty much entirely digital at this point in one form or another - how many people do you know carrying a discman? Movies are starting to trend harder that way too, as well as books.

Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting.

My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#247

Post by SageRaven »

barking wrote: post #236
joverholt wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yup. They can then have the kids wash the dishes. ;-)

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#248

Post by gknoy »

lotharbot wrote: post #235
thebigshane wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. I hate using Facebook, as I nearly never feel like posting anything, but it's nice to be able to say, "I wonder what ___ is doing", and then see their feed, or see some vacation photos, and not have to actually bother them and interrupt their day. With young kids, time is precious and often not at times which are convenient for socialization. :)

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#249

Post by stagas »

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…

I recently realized I was using FB only for that reason, keeping in touch with people I know in real life, mainly the chat. I don't need to see any of the stories. Sure some of them are fun but they are a huge waste of time. Then I realized I could add FB chat to Pidgin (an IM client). My time using FB website has been reduced dramatically, I can still talk to my friends there. I'm happy I did that.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#250

Post by res0nat0r »

GFischer wrote: post #152
nodata wrote: post #42

We need public open bug tracking. For everything. No more "put your bug in here, trust us, we'll fix it". They won't. They'll say you're the only one with the problem. Everyone will be so uninspired they won't report bugs.

Public open bug tracking is good, but sometimes the product owner still doesn't care. My own personal example is Issue 2600 in Android, which hasn't been fixed several years after it was first , and is a big issue for us non-English-character users (particularly the ñ spanish character ). http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2600

I'd attribute this to the product owner doesn't have enough staff or time for this bug which isn't affecting enough people to fix.

The good thing with open bug trackers? You can contribute a patch if upstream is ignoring your request or taking too long to fix it.

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