Scott Adams: The Problem With the Economy | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams: The Problem With the Economy

dilbert.com

31 pointscwan29 comments

Am I the only one who's pretty much always under-whelmed by Scott Adams blog posts?

I feel like if this had been written by a nobody, it would never have gotten any attention here.

"... It doesn't seem to matter what applications I use. And closing applications doesn't free up memory. This has been true on every computer I have owned, both Macs and PCs. Rebooting periodically is the only temporary fix. To which I say, "SERIOUSLY?? WTF???? IS THIS REALLY AN UNSOLVEABLE PROBLEM, LIKE FRICKIN' GRAVITY???" ..."

Though not perfect solution, Web Apps try to address this problem. One reason to read articles is they simultaneously show how crap desktop application (and operating system) software can be and how difficult it is to make good software. The ability to hold two contradictory statements in ones head is difficult but necessary. To understand why Adams wrote the post and find a solution is a recipe for Startups.

I wonder how much these problems are problems of information. The reason printers are crap is that most people buy them based on 1) price, and 2) listed features. As a result, manufacturers optimize for these. If people understood that most of the listed features would never work, the paper would constantly jam, the drivers would never be updated, toner/ink would be expensive, installing the printer would require adding lots of stupid software to windows, they would probably pick a more expensive printer with less features that actually works.

I have a HP 4100 laser printer at home for just the reasons you mentioned. Unlike consumer-oriented printers, it's marketed to IT managers who have to internalize all the pain associated with such purchases. These buyers ask the right questions.

I'd love to see hardware manufacturers offer SLAs on driver availability. "Support for all MSFT non-EOL publicly available OSes through 12/2013" or something similar. The actual quality of the drivers would be much harder to quantify.

The information asymmetry problem is really hard to solve for the "it just works" meta-feature. Could someone build a site that features it-just-works products in various categories? How could one crowd-source this information? When I tell people to buy a five year-old printer off eBay because it's the most reliable thing out there, they think I'm nuts.

Here's a site of product reviews that have a focus on quality and no emphasis on newness, i.e. things that just work. http://kk.org/cooltools/

One of either Scott Adams or I is really ignorant of the furniture market. I've bought

* A bed * Bookshelves * A table * Chairs * A desk * A couch

And I've never had to wait more than a week for delivery. The chairs, table, bookshelves, and bed were available to take immediately. In what universe do you have to wait 2 months for furniture?

>In what universe do you have to wait 2 months for furniture?

In the universe where your interior designer picks out specific fabrics and designs from niche, high-quality manufacturers.

Do you buy cheap stuff, IKEA or similar? It's really a different market if you do.

I bought a dining set from a furniture company in Canada through a retailer here in the Bay Area. It took 2 weeks to get delivered, then I had to return one item and get a replacement, which also took about 2 weeks.

Sorry, had to stop reading when he was complaining about his computers. My vista and linux machines can pretty much run forever without any memory problems. I'm pretty sure OSX is the same way.

That's rather like a mechanic saying his mid-80s American rust bucket is as reliable as a Camry. (/obligatory bad car analogy)

It doesn't disprove the experience of the majority. If anything, it reinforces the fact that something's not right when only technical people have a reasonable experience.

Same here (OSX and Linux). I had to go and double-check the date of the article when I read that line. Are people really still having this problem with modern operating systems?

Yes. You can apt-get or ports as many well-reviewed opens source packages are you like without problems, but when was the last time you downloaded any Windows shareware/freeware?

But for a normal person who wants to make a photo album or bingo cards, or have a nice screensaver, their first thought is to go to the internet and download a program. This is the problem.

Your or I would first:

1. See if the web site seemed legit. 2. Rule out anything with lots of Google adware or image ads 3. Find an open-source version.

But the crappy scammer site seems about par for the internet course to this person, so they download it and soon have viruses and registry entries that crowd out all their actual programs.

This happens every three or six months on a Windows computer run by a normal person, and is a huge part of why the iPad and its closed ecosystem is going to eventually take over the consumer market unless Linux geeks get serious about usability.

Wow. I remember XP being this way, but I kinda figured it was a solved problem with Vista/Win7 by now. I haven't had to do any Windows hand-holding since I got my parents an iMac about 5 years ago.

I'm feeling something that's not quite schadenfreude, but certainly along the lines having dodged a bullet with that move. :-)

Well that's a shame, had you been able to get past that and finish reading, you'd have seen that his point was people are spending too much time marketing crap products and not enough time building superior ones, which suggests lots of opportunities for the entrepreneurial sort that read Hacker News.

But since he's basing his lack-of-superior-tools position on what is most likely correlation and not causation, there's a good chance that there isn't actually a lack of superior tools that necessitate these scammer products existing. Usually, this exact complaint amounts to an inability to properly interpret, at least on Linux, the output from free and top, and similar tools on other operating systems. If there is a correlation between memory usage and crashing (and not just "needing" to reboot because you're overreacting from spending too much time looking at your computer's stats and not enough time working), it most likely has to do with a buggy program with a memory leak.

Here's some stereotypical examples, for linux:

http://expert.mandriva.com/question/72043

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/browse_thr...

Next thing you know, these types will find an OS that doesn't efficiently use memory, and they'll wonder why they have so much of this fast memory that isn't being used to start program faster or something.

So while it may be that scam programs and most products are complete and utter crap, we only have ourselves to blame for buying them and supporting the industries that kick us around. You want a chair in 6 weeks, don't buy a chair from a place that takes longer. But you're facing an uphill battle because everyone else continues to support these shitty providers -- people complained about Windows for years and yet no one switched. The Tragedy of the Commons applies to economic and market choice, too.

I think if you ignore his specific technical examples, he has a good point, that perception is being sold mostly and firstly, not reality.

The problem is that his specific technical examples are the reason he's seeing these scammers. He's looking for a fix to to the problem of "using too much memory," which, since it's not a real problem, doesn't have a real solution.

If I went from garage to garage looking for someone to take care of the issue that my car is causing too much downstream turbulence, I'm sure I could find a scammer to fix it for me.

And that's the way things have always been. This is not some new development. Look at newspaper ads from 80 years ago.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, but I'm not old enough yet to insist that everything was better back in my day.

Some of it's sampling bias. The stuff from your day that is still around was better. You've forgotten the cheap crap that fell apart long since.

That's a depressing thing. Too many people (me included) are working on software or to correct problems caused by software and it is not really that important.

For a rant about poor quality products, the knock about delivery times of furniture is totally out of place.

Five or ten years down the line, when the legs aren't falling off because you purchased a decent quality item, are you really going to care that it took two extra weeks to deliver? And how often are you even ordering furniture?

What an odd product category to use for that example.

Agree (although I accidentally down-modded you). There are many ways to measure quality, and timeliness of availability is certainly one. For a kid in a dorm room who just wants a particle board bookshelf, waiting two months would be absurd. However, I wanted some nice oak bookshelves for my office, and I wouldn't mind waiting a couple of months if they were otherwise what I desired.

Right with you on the custom furniture thing. Most skilled crafts-people are booked for months ahead.

The ones that I know don't want to scale because then they would not be making furniture, they would be running a business.

Interestingly, a furniture 'startup' is frequently a vehicle for one person to make a living doing what they love. Often after years of working as a professional in another field making money for the family, building a nest egg, tooling up, honing their skills and trying to develop a reputation and market.

I want it now. I want it cheap. It should also make toast. What do you mean quality will suffer!?

The I want it now crowd make me want to quit what I used to love doing.

The fallout from the last decade has been, an inability to discern quality, often using price as the yardstick, and a voracious impatience.

I make physical goods though, so your mileage may vary.

Very much the same in software. Now and cheap. I don't really mind though. While certainly there are superstar hackers who can provide quality and still make a buck under those restrictions, the majority are delivering crap (I blame the consumer most of the time) that eventually reqires someone to rewrite it under more realistic constraints due to lost revenue and increasing maintenace costs.

Sometimes anyways. Some people need to be beaten up by their bad decisions many times before the lesson really sticks.

Maybe we'll enter an age of quality soon.

To be extremely charitable, he is at best describing symptoms of the problems with the economy, not the problem itself.

I run gasp windows vista at work. I've never had to reboot my computer due to memory problems. It'll run for two or 3 weeks before our admin makes us reboot for windows update reasons....

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