It's almost kind of endearing,that even digital tools still have bouts of human error, albeit to a lesser extent than something like vintage/analogue electronics.
Everything's broken and nobody's upset
361–370 of 418 posts
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#362The 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…
" Big buggy apps with dumbed downed features designed to lock user data as deeply as possible."
Apple uses a lot of sqllite and xml for your user data. I'd be curious as to what part of your data you are unable to get access to?
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
But most engineering projects don't have hundreds of millions of moving parts. At that scale, standard practice becomes intractable. The Space Shuttle went up the first time with a few K of core memory. The software effort was really pretty trivial compared with systems today.
The article is from 1996 but even then they were far beyond a few K. "Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages."
My point exactly. That process can't work unless you have millions to spend.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everybody askes that. Yes, I know how to operator a dryer too. And mine leaves the clothes wet too. After a diligent effort to make the damn things work, they still suck.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reconci…
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-Domino_Re... http://www-12.lotus.com/ldd/doc/tools/c/8.5.2/api852ug.nsf/8... Yes it does offline sync with multiple users. Changes aren't prioritized but you can configure what it does with conflicts (merge if possible, discard, or leave the conflict). Time synchronization between multiple devices has been a solved problem for years. Not worth worrying about. Creatio…
Cool, thanks for the links!
This looks like a really good system, and far more transparent in how it works vs. the "Black box" approach most systems use.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
" Big buggy apps with dumbed downed features designed to lock user data as deeply as possible." Apple uses a lot of sqllite and xml for your user data. I'd be curious as to what part of your data you are unable to get access to?
If there's no way to export it, its locked down.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is apparently a thing in Scandinavia as well. I'm a little jealous. (I do my dishes by hand and use the dishwasher as a passive drying rack. Well, at least I'm using tools for one relatively simple purpose only.)
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#368The 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…
While a system as complex as ACL2, Coq, or Isabelle most likely will have bugs, the really interesting question is if the proof verifier that is run on the generated proof is too complex or has bugs.
In my view, one should preferably have several independent proof verifiers that have been manually inspected for there to be sufficient trust. It is ok if such verifiers are slow, simplistic, and use lots of memory, given that they should preferably be used as a final check that the verification process worked correctly.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#369Let me take 1 example: MS Outlook. It really, truly, amazingly, sucks. Badly. It is done to handle few email, few enough that you can remember about them. Good luck if you work in a corporate environment and you need to find an email from even only 1 yr ago. Is this an issue? Yes. Do people care? Not enough apparently. What do you do? You either accept it or you find a solution at a low enough price that people start…
I think this is a problem with mail clients in general, particularly on large networks. Mail.app and Evolution don't fare much better, in fact I would say Evolution is significantly worse.
Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset
#370As a Microsoft employee, OP has access to the private symbol server. Open up windbg and for a lot of MSFT products you can file a bug and send a dump straight to the team... all with a single command and without leaving the debugger.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the author's writing style, it was a good rant