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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

#331

Post by Karunamon »

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…

Probably because smartphones are now less about "phone" and more about "communicator". A phone that can only make calls is rightly seen as a huge anachronism. I daresay that I use my smart"phone" more for the applications I can run on it than making calls nowadays.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#333

Post by bpatrianakos »

I took this as whining. I'm not trying to be a dick but that's how it came off. The whole whining followed by "we can do better" is starting to become really cliche. Yeah, we can do better but we can also read some manuals, get some tech support, and you know, do some basic troubleshooting before proclaiming that these minor inconveniences should never ever happen ever.

We can make better software and we can make it easier to use and we can make everything more convenient but it'll never be enough. Making stuff better doesn't mean ridding it of all possible complications and minor annoyances. In fact, some of the things he complains about are actually features, not bugs and those cases the solution is to get a different product.

Everything is broken and nobody's upset? No. Everything is awesome and everyone's jaded.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#334

Post by toomuchtodo »

shanselman wrote: post #266
gav wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

I would say it correlates more to household income and education. Folks need to "get" digital books and feel confident that they will still own them. I've gotten tired of looking at physical books that full up a half a room so I've moved to Kindles and Comixology and haven't looked back.

If I want to "keep" my digital books, I'll dump them from my Amazon account and send them off to Fedex Office to be printed/bound.

At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#335

Post by sliverstorm »

prawks wrote: post #198
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier 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.

It doesn't beat paper materials in all forms of logistics, but it is superior in most of the ways I usually care about.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#336

Post by luser001 »

thetrb wrote: post #326
luser001 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What clothes washer are you talking about? Do you have a top-load washer? Those are notorious water wasters that probably can't wash well without huge amounts of water. As a counter point, I have a front-load 2011 Samsung washer and dryer. I even got some money from the Big Evil Government water district for the washer and IIRC from the Big Evil Power Company for the dryer. I am 200% satisfied with the wash and dryin…

Maybe you're lucky then. I have a similar issue as OP: I have a new dryer from LG that was rated very high by consumer reports but even at the "optimum dry" setting the clothes still stay wet and I often have to start a second drying cycle once the first one completes. I highly doubt that running through 2 cycles saves energy compared to doing it right the first time.

Sorry to hear about your experience.

Kinda like a dumb tech support q.: you're cleaning out the lint filter before each use, right? :)

Second: are you sure it's your dryer? Maybe the washer isn't spinning them as dry as they need to be. Try using a washer cycle that spins harder/longer. Did you replace only the dryer w/o replacing the washer.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#337

Post by jiggy2011 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #293
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…

I'm curious as to whether you really believe more testing is the issue? Half the problems on that list are directly related to political/business decisions. Chrome's installer sucks because Google wants to make sure you can install it with non-admin rights. It breaks basic Windows guideilnes because.. fuck you that's why. Ask google. Their war to get Chrome on limited users desktops is a business decision. When you'r…

Wow, congratulations. I think that one post just about summed up everything I hate about modern software.

It's actually gotten so bad now that I've found myself increasingly hacking together my own small apps and scripts to do some simple things that I want because it's often actually easier to build than figuring out how to use some of the software out there. It's actually an even better investment because I know my own stuff will never magically become shittier because of some update that gets pushed out automatically.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#338

Post by Benoit_ »

It's not specific to software.

The general issue is that the indirect costs of a product are not supported by the company that created it.

I explain: a company could generally earn more money by releasing new software (or features) than by fixing bugs, even if its users spend more time and money because of these bugs than it would cost to fix them.

We can see it everywhere: - unhealthy foods generating long-term medical care costs - short life products generating cost of buying new ones quickly (built-in obsolescence) - cheap electricity generating thousands of years of waste management - etc

If we find ways to make these indirect costs absorbed, we could improve software quality.

Ideas: - for proprietary software, include a kind of warranty to fix bugs when enough users ask for it (similarly to getsatisfaction.com) - for opensource software, I think of getsatisfaction.com coupled with a donation system to encourage people to fix popular requests

What do you think?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#339

Post by sliverstorm »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #246
adestefan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

So until music and movies are sorted out, you will not buy eBooks?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#340

Post by sliverstorm »

peterhajas wrote: post #232
yequalsx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The time has come to give up on the word "hack". I let go a year or two ago.

We're at a point where in general use it is inches away from a synonym of "modify" or maybe even simply "non-default".

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