221–230 of 294 posts
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A minor soapbox of mine: agile doesn't say anything about release cycle. What it says is that the goal is working software, not released software. Software can be working but not released until it's working well.
Very true, but I've yet to see it practiced that way.
I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a better understanding about the product(s). About sharing images, I find setting up a FTP-server is the simplest solution. Most file-browsers have FTP built in and allows features like drag 'n drop. The problem with usability in free services like Google, is that they…
I have my pet theory - the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction. Your CEO has a marketing team that probably outsources some of its work to marketing companies, which come up with asinine ideas of promoting your product. The CEO gets reports with (probably a little fudged) numbers saying the sales are going up, and he has little idea that your company is now shitting on its users in order to get more money from them.
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Upvote for "never rely on a service that you don't pay for"; I think that idea needs to be said out loud more often.
How exactly does paying come into the picture here. I'd bet that, for example, FoundationDB's customers would disagree with you.
If Starbucks gave away free coffee but monetized their restrooms, their coffee would eventually end up full of diuretics.
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I think you only captured half of the picture in this comment. Yes, there's ton of crap created because we screw up implementation. But then there's another ten tons of crap created on purpose. Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was e…
If we were buying a product/service, I firmly believe we would see incremental improvements, which things generally getting better each iteration (with the occasional mis-step). However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything. People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we ha…
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
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ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious. Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101: The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link. Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gma…
Greasemonkey script to restore direct links: https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408 It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.
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How exactly does paying come into the picture here. I'd bet that, for example, FoundationDB's customers would disagree with you.
Because it enables a very simple transaction: I am exchanging money for your good and/or service, so you try to provide me the best experience you can. If Starbucks gave away free coffee but monetized their restrooms, their coffee would eventually end up full of diuretics.
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November. Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main fu…
* Calls don't work. Had to reinstall OS a couple of times. Known Google bug that they refuse to fix on their own Nexus 4 phone. Bug also exists in Android 4.x. Yay!
* Contacts didn't show names. Had to reinstall OS.
* Bluetooth skips, sometimes fails to connect, and after disconnecting, always reconnects with no sound (though the song metadata is transmitted) - no solution that i've found so far
* Calls and texts sometimes do not alert, even when not in the quiet period - no solution / unable to replicate
* For a long time google apps just crashed, but I was able to finally solve that after reinstalling the OS and google apps a few dozen times
* Hangouts will not let you delete more than one conversation at a time
* No silent mode (speaks a lot to the idiocy of Google's product team)
* The new maps interface is incredibly slow and unusable at times (the article gets this one spot on), especially without a very fast connection (not limited to Android of course--the new slow, downgraded experience is available on all platforms from Google)
I'm pretty certain I won't buy any more Google hardware due to their lack of support (which seems to span all of their product divisions) and likely will avoid Android in general if at all possible. It's ironic because the Nexus 4 hardware seems to be quite excellent and well built--I haven't been able to break the phone yet even when intentionally smashing it into the ground as hard as I could multiple times because of the above (the bumper helps a lot, I think). The only reason I haven't made the switch yet is that a $649 starting price (really closer to $800 for a decent model after tax) for an iPhone is simply atrocious for a phone and worse than the horrific problems described above. For now ...
EDIT: Added newlines.
The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users? It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in…
well .. that bugfix have associated a few risks.. 1. let's suppose a user have a password: (note the space) " 123" 2. also you store the password using some hashing function, which prevents you from knowing the password. 3. two weeks later the bugfix goes live, the user cannot longer access the service. Also, you cannot easily estimate how much benefit/annoyed users your _fix_ will endup having .. which makes it a hi…
Fixing the space issue will help more people than it hurts. People that have spaces at the beginning or end of their password can simply reset their password or call customer support. Users forget or mistype passwords all the time.