Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com