Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything's broken and nobody's upset

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 418 posts

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#371

Post by nsm »

icebraining wrote: post #219
pyre wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then disconnect your data plan. To me, just having the Android Calendar & Contacts interfaces is a huge improvement over most dedicated 'dumb' phones. I guess that you still have to have the discipline not to connect wifi, but I don't think that would be too much of an issue. Disabling/enabling wifi on Android is fairly easy. This barrier, though small is probably enough to help keep you in-check.

Wouldn't it be better to get a cheaper, wifi-less Symbian Nokia? Or is the Android software that much better?

agreed! After a LOT of deliberation about what high-end smartphone to buy, I finally ended up on a Nokia 500 (Symbian Belle, Wi-fi, good sync support, super Nokia Maps) because I realised that I didn't want to always be connected, and I had no use of a super powerful phone, other than the fact that I could brag about it. I have no data plan. For most people the level of smart-ness offered by an entry level smart-phone is more than enough. Calendar/contacts/calling/messaging is pretty much the same quality across all mobile OSes. I think the whole app craze is propagated by social media junkies and corporates who want vendor lock-in or a Silicon Valley culture that values start-up invites and social wastes of time over everything else.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#375

Post by kfk »

squidsoup wrote: post #369
kfk wrote: post #199

Let 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.

But how difficult would it be to archive email texts in a database (sqlite?) and the attachments directly on the filesystem? Then you backup that and you are set.

Instead now you still have to archive (I have a 500 MB limit), but you do in a .pst file that you anyway have to use from Outlook that, again, does not have a good way of finding stuff (have you tried the search box on even only 6 months of emails?) or, even more important, to comment stuff (how many times I wanted to add comments to an email, nobody thought of that?).

Edit: Yes, I know what you are thinking: it takes more space! But hey, don't we have super sized hard drives anyway?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#376

Post by justincormack »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #176
justincormack wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of liberating yourself from trying to backup and distribute someone else's content is much greater than missing a few tracks. There is plenty of other stuff that you could listen to instead.

That's really quite a subjective thing. It might be true for people who just looking for anything to stick on in the background. People who are "into" music and have favourite artists that they are very loyal too or who are looking to discovered unsigned or indie artists are not going to want to be restricted to whatever is in the Spotify catalogue. Personally I'd say around 50% of the music I want to listen to is av…

I fill in the gaps with live music. And its not just anything, there is lots of great music thats not just anything. Its just not everything...

Pretty much all the music on youtube is illegal...

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#377

Post by yoshamano »

danielweber wrote: post #178
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…

Who sells laptops these days that aren't loaded up with a bunch of bloatware? I'd like to look at the System Process List right after boot and have there be no more than 20 entries, knowing exactly what each thing does.

Vizio

http://www.vizio.com/notebook/overview

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#379

Post by eric-hu »

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.

> Sync is a fundamentally broken.

It's for this reason I've been keeping my eye on Rich Hickey's Datomic. It's not open source or free, but the idea of immutable data (everything is attached to a timestamp--yes, everything), seems intriguing.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#380

Post by tesseractive »

run4yourlives wrote: post #275
drivingmenuts wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No dishwasher here, either. It takes 10 minutes, start to finish, to wash and put the dishes in the rack, if I've neglected to do them for a day or two. 15 total if I towel dry them. Yeah, the dishwasher would be more convenient, maybe, but doing it by hand is just plain faster and I don't have to multitask. Probably cheaper, too.

Call us when you have a family, Mr. ten-minutes. :)

Indeed. Our dishwasher is DOA at the moment, and for a family of 4, keeping the dishes washed is an investment of several hours a week, spread out in some fashion or other.

On the plus side, I agree that it's kind of therapeutic to do them. :)

Post reply on HN