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tyler.io

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Re: Broken

#481

Post by baq »

Aeolun wrote: post #393
jv22222 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal const…

Yeah, I’ve been trying to teach my organization that if the input to my team is crap, the chances of anything but crap coming out are fairly low. Crap >> Team >> Crap We’re front-end, and basically the lowest part of the pipeline, so literally everyones crap gets dumped on us.

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

    Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

Re: Broken

#482

Post by arondeparon »

snapples wrote: post #131

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

Perhaps a silly question, but if it is so broken, then why do you keep working there? Is it purely a money-thing? Is there still hope that things can improve?

Not judging, but I am genuinely curious about what drives engineers to stay.

Re: Broken

#483

Post by kelnos »

hrktb wrote: post #361
lol768 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here] I count 7 or 8 broadly unconditional "it works fine" child comments. 1 "it mostly works", 1 "I had to write my own ACPI driver", 1 "it works fine except HDMI sound switching isn't automatic sometimes", 1 "drivers were hard to set-up, WiFi is iffy", 1 "it's not perfect so try it first". IMO that'…

At my last job we had people very happy with linux, with the following caveats: - they didn’t care about moving it around half a day and keeping decent battery life, for most of them it was effectively a desktop. - they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME. - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had…

> they didn’t care about any CJK support. None of them would be bitching about chinese fonts on japanese pages or worse IME.

If they did care about CJK support, it's not a big deal. Most distros have CJK fonts packaged up (possibly not installed by default, unfortunately) that are a couple clicks or package manager commands away.

IMEs can be a little less straightforward, but I found adding ibus to an Xfce install to be pretty trivial; just a matter of installing ibus and the input methods I wanted, and then restarting (since GTK, Qt, etc. require environment variables to tell it what IM module to use).

It would be nice if this stuff was set up out of the box, but it's pretty easy to set up, at least compared to other complaints I hear about using desktop Linux.

Re: Broken

#484

Post by kelnos »

hrktb wrote: post #453
saghm wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - they didn’t need any peripherals outside of screens, keyboards and mices. We had to use a usb dongle to project into videoconf room at a client, I have no hope it would have worked on linux. You can actually buy Linux laptops with not just USB-C, but also USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet ports, etc. As someone with a Linux laptop who has never run into a peripheral issue and has coworkers with peripheral issues with their M…

Presence of ports doesn’t mean compatibility though. I have cheap USB-C - ethernet dongle I bought on amazon that works on my mac and windows. Is the chipset supported on linux ? who knows, but probably ? Now my USB-C to HDMI dongle ? hmmm https://www.reddit.com/r/GPDPocket/comments/8smhzy/so_hdmi_o...

For USB-ethernet dongles (even USB-C), I generally expect hardware support to be better (and not require external driver installs) than on macOS or Windows.

That reddit thread is odd, as I've been using the Apple USB-C multi-port dongle to do HDMI on Linux (no config necessary, just plug it in and it works) since before that post was made.

Re: Broken

#485

Post by goatinaboat »

Jobs was obsessed with design, but it had to actually work. “Real artists ship” was his famous quote and he was making tools for people who also had to ship. Cook and Ive aren’t making tools for working professionals, they are making exhibits for a design museum. This permeates the culture: no one in Apple management gives a flying fuck about the OS (or the keyboard) because you aren’t meant to use it or even switch it on. Just look at it and admire it, on your desk if you’re a pleb but preferably in a glass case in a white painted room.

Re: Broken

#486

Post by dharma1 »

outime wrote: post #17

I can add something to the list which is Sidecar i.e. using an iPad as secondary screen. It was a real nightmare to set it up as it’d not detect the iPad despite meeting all the requirements. I found no fixes online so I had the idea of logout & login again (iCloud) so that it might detect it. Well, it detected I had an iPad but the connection would time out every single time. After rebooting both the Mac and the iPa…

Had the same issue initially. Called Apple support who debugged it via remote desktop. Turns out Sidecar uses iCloud for handshake between the two devices (god knows why), and for some reason requires 2FA on iCloud to be turned on for both the iPad and the laptop, on each device. I didn't have iCloud 2FA setup completed on the laptop, so it didn't work until that was resolved.

Re: Broken

#487

Post by Paianni »

arboghast wrote: post #30
mherrmann wrote: post #22

Can I just say how happy I am with Xfce. It's a Linux desktop environment that looks like in the early 2000s. It's fast. There are no unnecessary frills. It just gets the job done. Its release cycles are measured in several years, and keep it minimal. I used to be on Windows, then macOS, then Ubuntu and now this. As a developer with soon to be 20 years of experience, it's the best environment I've had.

So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.

Therefore I got a 4K monitor at 24 inches so that it would be usable at 200% scaling. For 27-30 inches I would aim for 5K.

Re: Broken

#488

Post by TuringTest »

nostrademons wrote: post #335
baq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it isn't but who else will do that for them? Culture is only possible when people talk to each other and/or exchange thoughts in other ways. If normal people can't do that, there's no single culture, there's many little cultures. Remember that organizations are people and not some magical beings from a different dimension.

Culture is one of those things where once it's broken, it's usually easier to let it die than to fix it. Go join some smaller organization that doesn't have a broken culture and help it succeed. Once enough people do that, the small company becomes a big company, the big company rots on the vine and eventually goes bankrupt, and the cycle starts again.

That assumes that the big company doesn't have enough inertia to keep going on and on, strangling the small business or buying it outright (thus incorporating it into the broken culture, Borg-like).

Re: Broken

#489

Post by yuchi »

m12k wrote: post #294
snapples wrote: post #131

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

This sounds largely as I feared. The organization was built to serve the will of an omniscient god-king who knew better than anyone else. And now he's gone, and the organization is still set up to make orders trickle down from on high (despite no-one qualified or interested being there to make those calls) and hasn't learned make good decisions by communicating internally either. So the acolytes and high priests try…

If you read other insiders’ comments here you can notice that this is not the case at all. Under Jobs the Mac OS team was more open and collaborative, so probably this happened “by chance” and the death of Jobs was probably a force toward closeness.

Re: Broken

#490

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

flukus wrote: post #479
OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's face it, most of these "rough edges" are just excuse making, the sound exactly like the sort of things people say to avoid losing weight, quitting smoking, etc. In this comment you sound like you're absolutely convinced that linux is the best in every way, and as if linux is a goal, rather than tool to you. If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate…

> If these rough edges are "excuses" not to use the tool, then how is that not a perfectly legitimate reason not to use it? Because it gets a little old seeing people reason themselves into a position where they are stuck with apple and it's the fault of linux as the GP did. If only linux were better I wouldn't have to keep buying apple. If they aren't willing to jump ship then apple has zero incentive to change anyt…

This seems perfectly reasonable, and this is for me also part of the reason I'm using linux.

I do however still sympatise with devs and users that simply aren't comfortable making the switch because of these "excuses". I think their position of staying with proprietary software is also perfectly valid- although as you point out, this doesn't help the greater good.

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