Everything's broken and nobody's upset • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#141

Post by epo » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #92

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…

Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBoo…

"There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously." Why would anyone want to do this? It is feasible to display 20 or more TV channels simultaneously, but you wouldn't be "watching" any of them, you'd looking at them at best. I'll be charitable and assume you meant something like "using the same mechanism" but even that is barely less deranged as an advantage except for those so slow on the uptake that they can only memorise one way of doing things.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#142

Post by juddlyon » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

The more into technology I get, the more I'm amazed that anything works in the first place.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#143

Post by glassx » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:56 PM UTC

And it's not just with computers.

I have a Sony Bravia TV and with every update its "UI" got slower and slower, until I disabled updates. I know it's got a lot of cool features in it, but I just wanted a simple TV.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#144

Post by jpoehls » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:56 PM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #79

nodata wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get lots of technical people who want good bug reporting to want open bug tracking.

Or maybe better: create a tool for filing bugs with Apple which also files them in an open database. Make the tool super nice to use, the bugs super easy to browse and search (as in SEO), and market the heck out of it. If it gets enough attention, Apple will have to care.

I ran across Open Radar (http://www.openradar.me) the other day. It doesn't file the bug with Apple for you but it does provide the open database.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#145

Post by hollerith » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:57 PM UTC

The world would be a better place if we spent less time talking about disrupting other industries and more time examining our own industry with a critical eye like the OP does.

Just keep in mind that making too much use of the critical eye can cause depression. At least it does so in me -- and in the author of this next fine blog post:

http://telepatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-being-latency-monk...

A quote: "I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things."

I used to over-use my critical eye in an unconscious habit from childhood. The way I unlearned this bad habit is by "setting a background process" to watch for when I was enumerating or cataloging defects for no productive reason, and by "stopping my mind" when I found that I was. (I had to practice "stopping my mind" for 3 to 5 minutes at a time a couple of times a day for weeks before I started to make any progress.) In contrast, making lists of things to be grateful for never really helped me unlearn the bad habit.

To live up to my potential as a software professional clearly requires me to make some use of my critical eye, but my mental health depends on my using it selectively.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#146

Post by lifeisstillgood » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:57 PM UTC

Everything breaks and nobody is upset because we have evolved eco-systems that are minimally resilient.

And that is a good thing, and the right direction to go.

@luu - no we cannot prove even a tiny fraction of what we want to work, will do so. And the best approach is how biology has done it - failover, resilience, creative destruction, etc etc and all those good things.

I am often reminded by these sort of discussions of the anecdote of a Cabinet Minister chatting at the Russian Embassy in 1980. The senior Russian diplomat said "So, who is the person in charge of bread deliveries to London?"

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#147

Post by jiggy2011 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #94

gbog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much like-minded, here. > Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Was thinking the same but I had to do it, because I need a back-up and I need my music at work too. The only sane way: have proper files half-manually arranged in directories synced with a real solid linux tool (unison). Same for pictures. What I want to emphasize here is that the current trend against files is a dist…

Spotify is so much easier. Once you decide to only manage stuff you create rather than stuff you happen to own, then backup and management get so much easier as there is so much less of it.

Problem is that Spotify doesn't have all the music you want necessarily unless you also add your own files to it.

My solution to this would just be a dropbox folder full of MP3 files and a vlc playlist file. I don't use any monolithic player/organiser of music like iTunes or WMP but too a lot of people it seems like it has to be iTunes.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#148

Post by engtech » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

flatline wrote: post #128

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…

We have a new kitchenaid dishwasher with a fairly simple control panel (8 buttons). We already had to have the mainboard replaced by the manufacturer. Unless your dishwasher is really old, even if it appears simple, it almost certainly is not.

My old Kitchenaid dishwasher had to have the mainboard replaced 4 times.

One fix I found online was that if you have a hotter than normal water supply, the exhaust vent isn't big enough to let all of the steam out so the board gets wet.

The service guy crimped the vent wider after I told him about that one.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#149

Post by engtech » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:00 PM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #92

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…

Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBoo…

The big advantage I see to an ebook reader is when you are reading a 500+ page book.

Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#150

Post by andrewf » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

The same thing jumped out at me. Probably because of the months I spent in 2004, staring at the combined desktop + Palm OS databases helpful customers had emailed in, wondering how things had gotten to their present state.

We controlled the code and data 100% on both sides and I still never got it working really well.