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Everything's broken and nobody's upset

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Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#271

Post by prof_hobart »

tomflack wrote: post #136
prof_hobart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what mobile phone you currently use? Companies like Nokia made some great phone products that did the one thing (well, two if you include SMS) remarkably well in small packages, that had fantastic battery life. But then the iPhone, and Android, came out and virtually no-one was interested in the old, reliable phones anymore. They wanted the latest, shiniest gadget that they could get their hands on, regardl…

Currently, a GSM Galaxy Nexus. Previously, an iPhone 4. Various oddball WebOS and the like phones scattered over the past few years.

If you're after something that does one job and does it well, is there a reason why you've chosen those phones over a very basic Nokia model (or something similar)?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#272

Post by shanselman »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #259

Love the rant, answer of course is in the title "Nobody's upset" which isn't really true of course it should be that "Nobody is actionably upset." Much of this rant is a variation on 'craptialism' [1] and a number of the problems mentioned can be traced back to disk drove based storage. I've got a RAID6 appliance that I store stuff on and realized I was avoiding a lot of these bullets. (such appliances have their own…

> Nobody is actionably upset.

Love this.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#273

Post by prof_hobart »

thebigshane wrote: post #200
ganley wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. Like the grandparent commenter, I don't use any technology that frustrates or annoys me, which means that I don't use a whole lot of technology. The Kindle, however, has been great and fairly frustration-free - definitely a net positive. Related aside: The world seems to be making it more and more difficult not to have a smart phone (or, almost equivalently, to have a dumb phone). This sucks.

Has the Kindle become the new Kleenex and Google? Are the alternatives so insignificant that they aren't worth mentioning? I'm not talking about the Nook, I'm talking about a $50 Alturek e-reader that you can read text files and PDFs on. I think it's fantastic (but small).

Depends on what you're after. The Kindle is backed up by Amazon's huge catalogue of books, and has a ridiculously easy purchasing mechanism (sometimes too easy...), along with almost fault-free syncing to the iPhone/iPad apps for those 10 spare minutes when I'm waiting for a bus and wanting something to read.

Don't know about the US, but certainly in the UK there's nothing that I've come across that comes even close to the Kindle for my usage patterns - and I'm prepared to pay that little bit extra for that level of usability.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#274

Post by SatvikBeri »

Quality has a cost. There's usually a tradeoff between functionality and reliability. Do you prefer a phone that can surf the internet, navigate when you get lost, and send email, or a phone that has a 3 day battery and never crashes? Both choices are available.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#275

Post by run4yourlives »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #202
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…

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. :)

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#276

Post by larrys »

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…

"got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design"

Is that really true Ed?

Or is it possible you suffer from the same syndrome that prevented certain people from programming their VCR's? (Especially older people).

Perhaps you've noticed that even the youngest kids are really good at working the TV and the remote. Their desire to watch TV seems to increase their intelligence (and acts to prevent frustration) to the point where they are motivated to overcome any and all obstacles and can often (from my experience) do things with those remotes that older people find very difficult.

I say don't give up. In fact to me it's the opposite. Dealing with those things is actually good for your brain and keeping you young.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#277

Post by inafield »

shanselman wrote: post #266
gav wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much Kindle ownership and home size correlates. I was a strong proponent of owning physical books until about 2 1/2 years ago when I moved into a small Manhattan apartment. Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that. Playing with some rough numbers into I get ab…

I would say it correlates more to household income and education. Folks need to "get" digital books and feel confident that they will still own them. I've gotten tired of looking at physical books that full up a half a room so I've moved to Kindles and Comixology and haven't looked back.

My wife and I moved into a 600sqft condo and part of the downsizing were books from the past 10-15 years. Going forward we're going digital to save on physical space. Also, the puppy can't chew up our tablet as easy as a physical book ;-)

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#278

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#279

Post by luser001 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #270
aasarava wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "the energy-star hoax"? (Curious.)

To qualify for 'Energy Star' in the US, you have to use 10% less energy/resources (water) as last year. No standard; no other goal. Result: clothes washers that don't wash (my washer at least has a button to override Energy Star, obliquely named Extra Rinse or Heavy Duty), dishwashers that don't get dishes clean; water heaters that deliver luke-warm water. The goal cannot have been "Use less energy, even if it means…

What clothes washer are you talking about? Do you have a top-load washer? Those are notorious water wasters that probably can't wash well without huge amounts of water.

As a counter point, I have a front-load 2011 Samsung washer and dryer. I even got some money from the Big Evil Government water district for the washer and IIRC from the Big Evil Power Company for the dryer.

I am 200% satisfied with the wash and drying quality. It will take quite a bit to convince me that energy efficiency requirements are causing problems.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#280

Post by nitrogen »

pmjordan wrote: post #49

As a user of software, I get similarly frustrated as the author. ("user" here includes use of third-party libraries to build on) However, developing system-level software, I've come to realise that even if you really, really care about the quality of your software, you can still be bitten by statistics. Basically, developing error-free software is comparatively easy if your software effectively performs no I/O, that…

...Or a "file system from hell" that wreaks havoc with your file I/O. Fuzzing a program in such a way would likely uncover countless bugs....

Though you are probably familiar with them, there are I/O fuzzers like zzuf[0]. I bet it'd be relatively straightforward to write a similar tool that uses LD_PRELOAD to intercept and randomly delay various library calls. Sometimes I'll test my own network software by piping /dev/urandom over netcat:

  dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1K count=1K | nc [hostname] [port]
[0] http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/zzuf
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