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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

#341

Post by drivebyacct2 »

pyre wrote: post #257
danielweber wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't verified this myself, but friends tell me you can no longer get "free" phones from AT&T unless you get a data plan. At $15/month for 2 years and 2 lines, that's 720 bucks. And phones just aren't durable enough to last for 4 years. It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.

You can get an Android phone for a decent price if you don't care about top-of-the-line $500+ phones (e.g. the Samsung Galaxy Q here - http://mobilicity.ca/phones/ ). If all you're looking for a 'dumb' phone with some niceties... I'm sure you can find plenty to complain about with respect to things like browser performance, etc, but that's not necessarily a priority in this case.

Verizon won't even let you activate a smartphone without a data plan...

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#342

Post by parasubvert »

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…

I'm not quite sure I agree with you. User data is always accessible - I can get pretty much every aspect of my iTunes library in XML and there are plenty of 3rd party programs that can interpret it. Contacts on your phone usually sync with your PC contacts app (Outlook on Windows, Contacts on Mac OS X) or via iCloud. You could use those apps to export. On Mac, it can be exported as an "archive" which is a bunch of plist XML which is parseable. You don't bulk export directly from your phone because, I don't think too many people have ever asked for such a feature (beyond vCard, which does work easily).

Basically it seems to be sour grapes that consumers are finally getting what they want after 20 years of geek rule... It's not quite the 80s again.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#343

Post by csense »

RMS's original motivation for starting GNU was to address exactly the frustrations expressed by the article.

With open source software, if the universe of people with a particular bug is big enough, it'll contain developers who are capable of fixing it.

Or if a particular bug is hurting you badly enough, you can find and pay a developer to fix it.

See Linus's Law [1] (scroll down to point #8.)

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#344

Post by jwatte »

It's because the market competes on features. This leads to a race to the bottom. If you go slower and test more, you will be too late and too expensive, and nobody will buy your stuff. The market does not value too high quality.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#345

Post by parasubvert »

I don't deny problems with today's software, but perhaps the issue is that things are moving FAST, particularly in the mobile space, and like the last few software booms, sloppiness occurs. I mean, look at the pundits all complaining that the new iPhone 5 is boring, why can't Apple reinvent the mobile world every 2 years? Because they're having a hell of a time incrementally improving the current world, which isn't anywhere near perfect! There doesn't seems to be much excitement in "getting things perfectly right", it's about finding the sweet spot of "mostly right". This tends to cater to consumers and not geeks or power users with edge cases.

I don't get upset about today's software because it's much better than what we had before (even iTunes). I remember the 90s where my computer would lock up twice daily with a blue screen. Where my data would get corrupted regularly. Where I had to reinstall my OS bi-annually to deal with slow downs. I haven't had to experience these things in nearly 8 to 10 years. Now it's all more about annoyances than catastrophic failures.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#346

Post by parasubvert »

autophil wrote: post #74
lsc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With the terrifying state the planet is in, we should all be upset. Eh, really? What I find so amusing about people like you and me (and OP) whining about how imperfect the world is that the world has gotten so much better, even in our lifetimes. And yeah, if you are a white American-born male, it might not seem that way- in fact, the world might not have gotten better for you. If you aren't skilled, it almost certa…

I'm talking about the BIG things: our planet and ecosystem, clean water, liberty and human rights, they are all becoming irrepairably broken.

The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Nothing is irreparable. It may mean humanity shrinks quite a lot for several thousand years out of its own folly. The Earth will endure.

As for liberty and human rights, I concur with my sibling poster - the world has been getting BETTER with regards to those things the last 30 years, Americans are the ones that have been escalating the crazy lately.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#347

Post by drivebyacct2 »

shanselman wrote: post #260
npsimons wrote: post #187

Stream of consciousness whilst reading article: "Hmm, first one is about iPhone; next one is about Windows; I wonder . . . " Ctl-F "linux" - first hit is the comments, and I close the tab, contentedly.

Heh. Ya, I was going to put a few in around Linux audio drivers and Flash on 64-bit browsers.

I haven't been able to reliably watch Flash video or listen to Flash audio since early this year in Chrome 64bit Linux. Not to mention the awful (multi-)touchpad support in Linux.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#348

Post by ollysb »

neutronicus wrote: post #243
alexholehouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems to be a feature of kitchens in Spain that the cupboards for crockery double as drying racks. The shelves are racks and the cupboards have no bottom so that the water simply falls onto the counter. My cupboard is right next to the sink as well so that whole washing process is very efficient.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#349

Post by zdw »

nradov wrote: post #216
zdw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Synchronization in IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has worked quite well for 20+ years, so obviously sync is not fundamentally broken. More likely we've just failed to learn from history.

I'd love to know if the Notes sync method is documented somewhere. I don't doubt that there are some good implementations, but...

Does it do offline sync with multiple users whose changes may have different priority?

How about if time isn't set properly between multiple devices?

How about a multi-way modify/delete/rename where two records are given identical keys on more than one system, then both systems are reconciled?

I really need to write up a "Sync Gauntlet of Pain" that shows how sync implementations are incapable of making correct decisions, as they just don't have enough information, and giving them more information may not help.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#350

Post by dpitkin »

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 think I read this from HN but I use this as the best example of mission critical software, the Space Shuttle at NASA.

The most important things the shuttle group does -- carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code -- are not expensive. The process isn't even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering.

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

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