Everything's broken and nobody's upset
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Sync software usually takes a conservative approach to deleting or merging records, and leaves duplicates lying around rather than risking deletion of vital user data. This is a good thing. What's bad is that the tools for housekeeping -- merging and deleting duplicates -- are generally rubbish. (I have the same problem with my phone's address book: masses of duplicates due to sync processes that conserve stuff. And trying to get rid of them using the tools provided turns out to be a tedious pain in the neck, requiring multiple mouse-clicks or focus changes per record.)
Further down the list we get into identity management issues. Nobody seems to have a really good handle on how we manage identity across multiple machines, much less how we manage esoteric stuff like family relations for delegating access to photos or music purchases or whatever.
The tradeoff is a more reliable "less messy" world, but much less innovation.
This doesn't mean that software requires less QA or design, just that it's a trade-off of two different modes of operating.
Sync is a fundamentally broken.
The only solution is to switch to technologies where merging data is a primary core feature. Thus why I use text files and git to manage the vast majority of my data.
The sooner people realize that sync isn't fixable (or a good idea in many cases), the sooner real solutions appear.
Yep. It's weird that everything is built around just one button that says "Sync", when there are two different directions involved.
Either you want to save the state of whatever device you're currently using, or you want to revert it to the state stored in the cloud.
Export <--> Import, pretty much.
'sync' somewhat makes sense, but two sync options labelled easy to understand would go a long way to clearing this up, but... would likely introduce other issues as well.
'sync' works fine, except for when it doesn't. :/
Does it do offline sync with multiple users whose changes may have different priority?
How about if time isn't set properly between multiple devices?
How about a multi-way modify/delete/rename where two records are given identical keys on more than one system, then both systems are reconciled?
I really need to write up a "Sync Gauntlet of Pain" that shows how sync implementations are incapable of making correct decisions, as they just don't have enough information, and giving them more information may not help.
Yes it does offline sync with multiple users. Changes aren't prioritized but you can configure what it does with conflicts (merge if possible, discard, or leave the conflict).
Time synchronization between multiple devices has been a solved problem for years. Not worth worrying about.
Creation of identical record keys — while theoretically possible — really never occurs in practice.
This looks like a really good system, and far more transparent in how it works vs. the "Black box" approach most systems use.
The solution would have to be to store everything in ascii formats (probably taking a hit in terms of filesize and performance) and get everyone to understand the ascii representation each of these data formats and how to merge them effectively.
The alternative would be to build a diff tool for every binary based format out there.
The simplest solution would simply be to implement locking on everything and have one authoritative copy. So you can have your data on any device you want and share it with as many others as you want but only one person/device can have write access at any given time and can only have that once they have updated to the latest version of that rescource.
Many of the same methods can be applied to other types of synchronization, but it's more effort than most people can spare when they're in a hurry to get something released.
It's for this reason I've been keeping my eye on Rich Hickey's Datomic. It's not open source or free, but the idea of immutable data (everything is attached to a timestamp--yes, everything), seems intriguing.
We controlled the code and data 100% on both sides and I still never got it working really well.
I have a business contact on my iPhone that has a contact photo of one of my relatives. I certainly didn't set it this way, but I have no idea how this happened. Is it something that my iPhone did? Is it something that happened at Google (it's a Google contact)? Is it something that my Windows 8 contacts app did (syncs to Google contacts)? I don't know, and even if I did, I don't know if I'd be able to fix it.
Frustrating. We sandbox our applications, and the success of the iPhone shows that this is something users want. Why can't we sandbox the other parts of our computers? Sure, I could "delink" everything and maintain it all myself, but I wish it wasn't so "all or nothing".
- 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.
- Wash dishes by hand. (Fuck the 48 buttons on the dishwasher.)
- Use Firefox.
- Use dedicated Casio camera with USB interface.
I don't use any modern technology that replaces perfectly good methods with something unnecessary just because everyone else is doing it.
...but no smart phone? Blasphemous.
I also haven't seen a dishwasher with 40 buttons, as claimed in the parent post, and my modern Bosch washing machine doesn't look any more complex than the Miele one my mother had 25 years ago.
Presumably the companies don't want to compete on longevity as shareholders want short term returns and so aren't interested, generally, in long term stability and good stewardship of resources.
That just leaves quality and features to compete on. Quality costs money and features are relatively cheap.
So the companies stuff in features and pretend it's a quality product all the while hoping it breaks down the second it's outside warranty ...?
Too cynical?
The inability for me to fix them is what keeps me from upgrading. As the OP noticed, everything is broken, so I expect I will have to get anything repaired. I'd prefer to save some money and do it myself.
And no issues with it in 5 years. It replaced a dirt cheap, super simple 1980s style single-lever, single button model that failed after <1 full year of usage.
Not everything is broken, it's just cheaper and possible to make shitty things en masse. You can still pay for quality (see: Porsche reliability vs. Chevy reliability).
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.
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.
I used to pirate all my books, but it got to the point where I realized paying $6 for the pleasure of a properly-formatted, error-free book was a better deal than pirating and ripping them.
I don't think it really beats paper materials in logistics. You're buying proprietary books. 14-day lending to other people (who may not have a Kindle) doesn't really solve that.
All that minimalism but still using an iPod?
What is real value? Why is value important? Is fun a part of value?
> - 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 eBooks on your laptop.)
> - No Facebook
There's a huge meme of 'Facebook is worthless' both on HN and on Reddit and other tech-oriented communities that I fail to grasp. There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.
For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this.
DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated.
It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive.
It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time.
Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :)
I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable.
Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files.
This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable.
My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB?
Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs.
(That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)
Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting.
My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not.
In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/
My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products.
I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways.
As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent.
I hope that made some sense.
That's basically (a) time saved on shipping + (b) money saved since those books are in the public domain + (c) no trees were cut for me to read those books + (d) storage efficiency.
That or some sort of company library for tech docs.
Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.
'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'
If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?
I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.
No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...
It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.
It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.
Of course, YMMV.
For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.
It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.
Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.
Necrophiliac bestiality
Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.
As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? : "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."
"My helo-elephant is the _only_ peanut powered mode of transportation with automatic mouse avoidance!" True, perhaps, but when someone asks why you need a helo-elephant it's often not informative to just say what it does with more words... they're often looking for you to justify why you need to do those things (or do those things at once).
How many times in your life have you moved house to somewhere far away? What you wrote here makes it sound like it probably wasn't very much.
My whole family uses Facebook for keeping up with people we don't live near anymore. I use it for keeping up with college friends whom I don't live near anymore (moving across the state will do that, let alone moving halfway across the world).
You might ask, why am I keeping up with college friends? The answer is: because I'm 23, so they're still a large fraction of all the friends I have.
As I recall, there was a rather frightening New York Times article once posted to HN on how even decades after college, most people still haven't made that many new friends to replace their friends from adolescence.
Scary stuff, hence: Facebook.
Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.
No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.
It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.
Sure, if I really, really, really cared about my friends, I would practice calligraphy, hand-make my own paper, and train a flock of messenger birds to deliver them.
But there's a lot I want to get done, and a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with, so if there is a decent way to do so that is more efficient than the 14th-century technology that I could use, then I'm going to use it.
If you have aesthetic objections to new-fangled things like the telegraph, the horseless carriage, and Facebook, by all means don't use 'em. But don't go pissing in other people's soup just because you don't approve of the dish they ordered.
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 about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks.
Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.
At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.
As someone used to moving around a lot, I carry around much of my book collection and a selection of important research papers on my Kindle. It's damned useful to lug one Kindle instead of 20 kg of physical paper.
Your setup is quite radical in my opinion although I know that are even more extreme ones and this is not a way for most of us. Several years ago we used to memorize contacts and birthdays or keep them in a (paper) notebook but that's not an alternative for most of us nowadays.
I keep my setup as minimal as possible and I'm still frustrated by these bugs and limitations.
Somehow I can't find this kind of machines in places like UK or Netherlands.
I forget how much mine cost, but I don't think it was more than $300.
But I agree they are fantastic, except the prices for the high end are usually ridiculous.
I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.
I guess that you still have to have the discipline not to connect wifi, but I don't think that would be too much of an issue. Disabling/enabling wifi on Android is fairly easy. This barrier, though small is probably enough to help keep you in-check.
It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.
There are one button dishwashers out there.
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 grasp how an example of a bad dishwasher user interface is a barrier to all dishwashers (at least in terms of UI - clearly you may have environment reasons).
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.
My sink is right by the kitchen window and I can look out past our rose bushes and watch assorted wildlife gambol and frolic. (Mostly bunnies and birds.) Kind of idyllic I suppose if you ignore the all-same-look suburban houses.
If there are a lot of dishes I'll wash certain things and load others into the dishwasher for later. But I sort of like washing dishes in my house.
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.
Estimate how much you need by hand. Filling up the sink, 5-10L? And then rinsing it all afterwards, another 5 at least. Keep in mind that a dishwasher does about 4 meals while you usually do one at a time when you do by hand.
On the plus side, I agree that it's kind of therapeutic to do them. :)
My water comes from a well. Its plentiful and free. Its pointless to save a gallon, and make me hand-wash half the dishes. </rant>
Doesn't you dishwasher have any adjustment to set the temperature or length of the cycle? What model do you have?
My appliances are all "A" rated (EU energy label), but to get that rating for the dishwasher I have to use the "eco program", and I'd think there was something similar in the US?
There are plenty of buttons on the washer (which is a user-interface nightmare of its own). Two help a little: 'Heavy Duty' and 'Extra Rinse'. Selecting both leaves the clothes smelling slightly less of sweat and dirt. And of course when the cycle completes, it turns off to save (miniscule) power. Turning it on results in the default settings again!
Googling it, I see no hack to defeat the settings. Just a lot of talk about strange error codes and how to reset them. Sigh.
Mine (front loaded) has a pre-wash (2 hour program) or "soaking" mode for extra dirty clothes (4h), and I can select temperatures from 0-90 degrees celsius, but most clothes get clean at 40 degrees.
I had to do an obscure button trick described in the user manual to have it remember the previous settings after a completed cycle, though.
Maybe I can find a trick in the manual; thanks for that idea.
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_produc...
It seems to me, you just bought a crappy appliance. Go buy a better one. That will solve your problem; inaccurate ranting about energy efficiency efforts will not.
Hope this helps. IIRC I saw an article on Popular Mechanics about this a few years ago and tried it and it works.
Another tip then, I don't just open it a few inches but all the way and pull out both racks. That way all the steam escapes within a few seconds and you can close up the dishwasher again. You do need a bit of ventilation but I just open my balcony door. And then, there's a few cups or glasses that have concave bottoms so they gather a bit of water. If you blow hard on them while everything is still hot, the drops will fly somewhere (it's just water), and those glasses will become fully dry thanks to the last bits of heat.
Another tip. If you wrap it up real good so no soap can get to it, you can easily cook a piece of salmon in your dishwasher. It's not a great way (cooks too hot, for too long), but it does work and that's awesome.
Another tip. If you got a compartment for a "shining agent", you can put a mix of white vinegar and ethanol in it. It works. Both of the substances easily evaporate in the heat so you won't get a vinegar smell or anything (unless you use balsamic--good luck with that). An expensive commercial shining agent might work even better, I never tried them.
Yet another tip. Maybe you have a built-in water-softener whose ion-exchanger needs recharging by pouring dishwasher salt into another compartment. The only difference between table salt and this stuff is that the granules are big so it dissolves slower. So, buy big granules table salt instead (the stuff used in table salt grinders), which is much cheaper.
Another other tip. You'll probably still do some cleaning by hand, when you need a specific utensil or something. If you use a plastic dishwasher brush, you can put that one in the dishwasher as well to clean it. I'm unsure why, but I find brushes to last a lot longer when I occasionally clean them in the dishwasher.
If you can trust your dishwasher to not leave weird residue on your stuff, you can also use this method to clean plastic hair-combs every once in a while.
A dishwasher really is a magical device. You can even put some lines of source code in the cutlery rack, and they'll come out with less bugs. True fact.
F&P is built sturdy (e.g. feel difference in the rack). Unit is built as two drawers that are operated separately, so you can start the washer with smaller loads. No multi-level racks. Has 3-4 duration-of-wash settings (up to 2+ hours), but for normal dishes I never had to use anything but fast (20 min).
They are pricey but in my opinion you should get a similar quality dishwasher or not get a dishwasher at all.
http://www.fisherpaykel.com/product/dishwashing/ Warning: website is terribly designed
Scraping off stuck stuff, the whole process of cleaning the sink, plugging it and filling it with water, sorting dishes by category (do the glasses first! Pots last!), running out of room to put the dry dishes so dry hands and put some away, then back to washing.
Its not unpleasant, but just lots of work and the dishwasher does a decent job with 60 seconds of effort (put dry clean dishes away; rack dirty dishes, push a button). I do it before leaving for work.
Of course, now with the energy-star hoax I'm starting to regret buying a new dishwasher, but that's another discussion.
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 sucking". The goal was actually "Get a sticker on your product, for marketing reasons." Thus, a hoax.
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.
The guy at the applicance store was completely sympathetic; he hears it all the time. The washers are a widespread disappointment.
I highly doubt that running through 2 cycles saves energy compared to doing it right the first time.
Kinda like a dumb tech support q.: you're cleaning out the lint filter before each use, right? :)
Second: are you sure it's your dryer? Maybe the washer isn't spinning them as dry as they need to be. Try using a washer cycle that spins harder/longer. Did you replace only the dryer w/o replacing the washer.
The duct was jammed full of lint. So, no air was flowing out. The dryer had a safety interlock that disabled the heater. This is why the clothes took so long to dry. It is also why we didn't start a fire and burn down the house.
Now we clean the ducts every 18 months and the dryer works great.
So it is likely to change over time.
It's worse than that, companies save on Federal taxes by making these progressively worse appliances. Whirlpool is infamous for not just paying no taxes but getting "tax benefits" (credits they can carry forward) for 2008-10.
And my GE washer rations hot water quite fiercely. If there was enough commonality in the various model's firmware I'd sure like to join a group that reprograms them in a sane way.
They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.
Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always.
EOM
[1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.
I suspect you mean they've been optimized for the shareholder's benefit.
That said, they're definitively more expensive. We only got them because they came with the house.
I would still agree that cost optimization has certainly done its part in trampling all over maintainability.
"Perfected" is a tricky word. :-D
I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned way; stirring constantly so that nothing burns to the bottom of the pot. I don't use a dryer. After washing clothes (no I don't do this by hand!) I put clothes on a drying rack. I fold clothes right away after they dry.
Overall these little hacks have made me less lazy and have given me a feeling of having more energy.
Which is all good, either way.
What does this even mean? How is this a "hack"? Is vacuuming a "fitness hack"? How about sit-ups? Or walking?
We're at a point where in general use it is inches away from a synonym of "modify" or maybe even simply "non-default".
As some others said, I would reconsider the "No Kindle" though. This cheap device saves a lot of space for me.
I'd like to look at the System Process List right after boot and have there be no more than 20 entries, knowing exactly what each thing does.
Apple.
Sometimes it's also about focus, too.
Same with my digital camera, Microsoft Word, Excel, et cetera.
Don't master. Learn what you need to get the job done.
Twist ending: I do the dishes a lot, and I end up washing them by hand anyway. Why? Because it's tedious labor that gets my mind away from coding and technology. I consider it meditation. My wife hates that I don't use the dishwasher.
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.
Examples:
My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash browsers).
I installed exactly 4 Android apps on my phone (after flashing it to cyanogenmod to get rid of the bloatware): gmaps, youtube, barecode scanner app, some app to write notes on the home screen (NotesWidget). Everything else sucks and is a waste of my time. But even the dead-simple NotesWidget app author managed to mess it up with enough bugs that I am considering writing my own(!) I have tried at least a dozen other notes-taking application and am not satisfied with any of them.
I don't maintain a music library. Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Personal libraries "in the cloud" don't work because I am not always online. I just listen to satellite radio in my car.
I own no TV, no game console, no tablet.
And yet, I am a tech enthusiast. I accept a little "complexity" where it makes me happy: I program GPUs/FPGAs, I have a home theater set-up at home, I maintain my own website/blog on colocated servers, etc.
> 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 disturbing regression, and can only end in a complete mess or loss of the things you own. I have kids pic in my folders, and I owe to my kid to still have them in 20 years, if nothing else.
This discussion reminds me of something weird that occured to me when I was following lifehacker: it had so many advices and nice tricks and apps you should install to your system, and at the same time was very voical against the bloat and the clutter.
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.
People who are "into" music and have favourite artists that they are very loyal too or who are looking to discovered unsigned or indie artists are not going to want to be restricted to whatever is in the Spotify catalogue.
Personally I'd say around 50% of the music I want to listen to is available on Spotify. There's also a fair number of "big name" artists who's music isn't licensed to them.
The solution for a lot of people seems to be to simply use YouTube as their music player since pretty much anything seems to be available there. On the other hand I'm not sure what the legality of this is.
Pretty much all the music on youtube is illegal...
People's desktops had all kinds of weird hacks in it, tweaking every imaginable bit of appearance, user experience and features.
But I think we all came to conclusion that it does not pay off. Yes, your 3rd party file manager is much more powerful but does installing it on every of your PCs in life pay off? It does not.
The whole experience becomes much more generic and throwaway. Yes, I tune some programs, but I'm ready to leave the whole setup at any moment and start with a blank screen again - and I actually have to do that every 2-3 years.
No longer I use dozens of programs and have 5 DEs installed but just a few and exactly one.
I just keep a git repository that contains my dotfiles, /etc and the output of 'dpkg --get-selections'.
It's a perfectly legitimate position, but it's not really helping progress, is it?
Some of these problem reports are just going to written by people who are all doing something wrong. Others might be legit bugs.
I can't think of any technology that I own that doesn't have some issue that drives me nuts.
I have basically standardized on Pidgin, Firefox (minimal extensions), emacs, org-mode, and a terminal program. At home, I use Mail.app and the OSX contacts. I'd like to move them out to emacs though. :-)
One thing to add to the gripes re iOS - I've found that it works beautifully when it does, and horribly when it doesn't. His point on notification clearing reminded me of the Mail app when you have connection failures: I had 5 accounts tied into it, and when the networking failed it would throw 2 modal dialogues for each account. The amount of time I spent glued on the spot hammering away at notifications so I could move on felt staggering after a while.
I had a glut of other misc. quirks and persistent crashes that cut through the gloss on the device, this in combination with a string of Windows 7 bad behaviour (started python development, started hating python development) led me to switch onto linux (started loving python development) and a droid handset. Guaranteed they will have just as many warts and bad behaviours, but it feels more reasonable because I'm expecting them, and on linux, have an opportunity to fix them.
There's two aspects to being a "power user" (not entirely but I try) that I could never take for granted - this capacity to fix things that don't work, but also the opportunity to work with the more atomic tools. There's nothing more soothing than stringing commands together, writing a script, or organising things in a text file or database: mostly because if something breaks, I broke it, I can see the breakage, I can fix the breakage. Minor bliss!
Addendum / edit to this to provide context - I think coming from a control systems background has coloured a lot of my opinions in regards to innovation. I've seen fistfuls more value delivered (in this field, potentially applicable to others), by creating small, clean, highly polished, iterative and well integrated systems as opposed to large, sprawling and constantly evolving...messes. The sometimes popular fail first / fail fast / iterate like crazy mantra makes me itch. I've seen successful lean / agile approaches executed that focus on quick delivery without being so flippant about quality.
Absolutely!
But you are not alone on Linux, and in the 'everyone sees this' scenario, be assured someone will be working on it somewhere, or something slightly similar...
Ubuntu actually run a 'papercuts' bug fixing programme designed to get new people interested in developing...
A lot of this is spoken as a total newbie to both platforms and someone who didn't look into them seriously before changing (coming from a long term Windows 8 / Windows Phone / iPhone background).
Androids intents make it feel much closer to a real operating system in the way it allows applications to interact with each other (compare chrome browser integration on android vs iOS). Linux (Mint in this case) feels incredibly low friction when getting started thanks to apt-get, and a lot of the screw ups that I lived with in Windows seem to fail more spectacularly on Linux, with the caveat they can be fixed to the point of being quite polished by digging into configuration or updating libraries.
Under Windows and iOS it feels like you start at 80% working and finish at 80% working. With linux and derivatives it feels more like starting at 65% and being able to tune your way up to 90%. Prefer the latter at the moment.
Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down.
You missed the AMAZING INGENUITY and BRILLIANCE that is also all the way down.
I do agree with you in this, also -- the hardware and software combination of a single PC or smartphone is, I guess, among the most complex systems humanity has built, and in such a short time frame.
While my post was mostly me venting (bad Monday, frustration with people/clients/spouse/stuff in general), I have to say that I still agree with Scott. Too often are we putting up with things not working. I use Android, Gmail and Google Calendar. Yet, when I get a calendar request, it shows up in the official Gmail client on my Android phone as
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Whenever a family member asked me about something failing in a similar manner, I used to feel slightly attacked: This is my line of work and major hobby, and I know that the reason shit fails is, well, shit is hard. I would perhaps try to explain the probable cause and so on, but to what avail? It still doesn't work.
But now, I rather shrug and say yeah, I know, it sucks. It happens to me too, all the time. I just get used to it, and deal with it. Isn't that all we can ever do, after all?
Lately, I've started trying way harder to remove complexity. I constrain myself on purpose, I get rid of software and file formats, and basically, the last thing I ever want to do is to add a new piece of software. If I am convinced I need a new piece of software, it has to be implemented with minimal change to the rest of the system.
Well, that was a bit of a rant. Anyway, in no way do I mean to disrespect any of the programmers who built this ingenious, brilliant piece of shit. I feel for them and, well, the brilliance sometimes shines through. We're still running the world's financial, communications and distribution systems on layers of shit.
Don't look down.
A, thanks. I mostly take a contrarian position when I comment, because at things I already agree with I don't feel the need to comment on (yeah, have the silly urge to correct "someone wrong on the internet" as my motivation).
>This is not helpful at all. Does nobody at Google ever get a calendar request to their phone? The only way for me to respond to such a request is either to get to my computer and open it in web mail, or call back and ask what time the meeting is.
Yes, that's a perfect example of what the article SHOULD BE talking about (far better than the examples in the article). With those kinds of things, I agree, you tend to see neglect like this in all apps.
I just disagree with the particular examples given in the original article, which are far more complex and bug-like, and most of all with the notion of the article that because of those bugs (syncing, FCP crashing, etc) "everything is broken".
Some of the "layers of shit" (e.g, a pet peeve of mine, the traditional UNIX application installation directories and standards such as /usr/bin etc instead of self-contained, versioned, app directories) have historical reasons, and not necessarily incompetence, and it's very difficult to remove them without major financial and time investment.
Each of the products mentioned are huge HUGE projects layered on top of hundreds of other projects. A browser has a various networking stacks themselves built on OS stacks themselves built on device drivers etc etc. Pick any part and it's literally counting on millions of lines of code to be flawless. Interact across the net and now you need the software on all parts of that network to be flawless as well
Can you name anything with so many parts that just works?
It's possible it could get better but it seems unlikely. Each year the new stuff is built on top of the old stuff making the hole deeper and deeper as we go. That's why a 1.6ghz atom with a gig of ram sometimes feels slower than my Atari 800
A brand new smartphone or a fresh install of Windows always feels like a well oiled machine for the first day or so.
Would you rather be using a modern OS like OS X , Win 8 , Ubuntu 12.04 or would you rather have a rock solid version of Win 95?
I did kind of hoped that when we got an open source Linux desktop, back in the 1990s, that these things might improve. But they did not make it debuggable, even for an advanced user. I can debug hard server stuff, but I have no idea where to start with most desktop software. It didn't help that its all compiled, would be much easier to add sane debug hooks in say Python than in C++ for this type of software. The web at least has got that right, with far better debug tooling than any desktop environment.
Optimise. Improve.
This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.
Look at the iPhone 5 discussions taking place. The most common topic you'll see is: it doesn't have enough new features. That kind of thinking is one of the reasons that refinement doesn't take place as often as you and I would like.
I think from one perspective advertising refinement is perceived as perpetual incompetence with respect to your capability to deliver a quality product. Horrible inversion of logic.
It would actually be a list of things that were wrong with the previous product - so what's wrong with that?
From a literal perspective, not much, but in terms of perception and marketing I'd estimate a whole lot. Each product is still representing your brand and a potential option for buyers. You want to encourage someone to be excited about moving to your new product or platform without presenting the case that the old one is inferior or somehow deficient.
Consider if they iPhone was released with a strong focus on the improvements and bugfixes on the existing features without many new additions. Personally this is amazing, I'd be excited about that, but for many (average joe consumer) people I'd estimate it raises some key questions - why was there so much wrong? What will be wrong with the new one? Why do these products have so many issues?
Consider if iPhone was listing fixes and corrections and phone x was advertising all of their new features and updates with no mention of any rectification - personally, I'd be tempted just to pursue the one that was "best". Especially in a flooded market where it's hard to make a legitimate choice, it's much easier if one thing looks broken and one thing looks wonderful.
Most companies are really just going through the process of iterative refinement but I think you need the feature icing to sell them to people, or really: to take the focus off of the fact the product needed rework, and on to the fact there's super super shiny new things! You quickly forget to engage your critical thinking when being dazzled with this kind of thing.
To be hyperbolic with the example - consider cars. When a manufacturer releases a new model and advertises the safety and performance enhancements, it may be likely that they were addressing issues with the previous model, but presenting them as new functionality. This is much more appropriate for a brand than saying "we've addressed the issue with our brake and suspension package that was contributing to people losing control of the car" or "we've redesigned the porting of the heads on the engine so it's not running as inefficiency". If you have the choice between the perceived perfection of one brand versus the other admitting a few people wound up wrapped around trees and they needed to iterate their design (even if both companies are following exactly the same process), it becomes a pretty easy choice, right or wrong.
I know "make something small but better" is a nice motto, but will it work for Apple, Microsoft? Heck, even for a proven startup's product, is it a good long term strategy, or a long term gamble?
There aren't much examples of 37Signal's model of "don't implement features but keep polishing" approach.
Having said that, I'll point out that Sparrow (like every other non-webmail client I've used) seems to fall over when dealing with massive volumes of email. I'll get into the office with 500 new emails, skim and archive 490 of them over five or ten minutes or so, and then a few minutes later half of them will just show back up. Overall still a very solid product, so I too was disappointed to see it eaten up and killed off by Google.
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, regardless of how good/poor it was at doing the basic job of making calls.
And I'm a little unclear why you feel like playing "gotcha" with me here anyway...
My point isn't an attempt at a gotcha - it's a comment that if this is how you really feel, then the only way that companies are going to take any notice is by putting your money where your mouth is and buying the more robust and optimised versions of those things that do the basics well rather than buying the models with the advanced features.
And it's not an attack on you specifically - it's something I see time and time again. My parents complain that the new TV they've bought, which is internet-ready, has apps etc, is too compicated for them to use. Meanwhile the old TV that did nothing more than show TV programs got thrown out a couple of years ago, despite still working fine, because they wanted the new model. They complain that the new version of Office that they use is too complex, but they've still got the Word 95 discs sat around somewhere (and they've rarely got any need to share documents with anyone else). And they are far from an isolated example.
Some people want the shiny new stuff - I know I do - but I accept that if I'm going to be on the bleeding edge of tech, I'm probably going to have bits of it that simply don't work properly. And as long as both you and I are out buying these things, rather than the boring but stable stuff, then this is what the market is going to build for.
Every company is different, every product is different, every user is different. Attempting to speak in absolutes like you are simply doesn't work.
As for your suggestion I forgoe a decade of advance in phones... uhh no. A moderately buggy phone from 2012 is still a thousand times better than your puritan "calls and texts only" ideal phone.
The thing is, it could be much better with a little attention to detail.
If that's not what you meant, and instead you were trying to say "I've been thinking for some years now, that a little bit more time was spent on fixing existing features rather than always focusing on new features", then I'd probably agree. Although I would say that most companies are, in reality, already doing this and their doing it to the level that they believe the market is really prepared to pay for.
> A moderately buggy phone from 2012 is still a thousand times better than your puritan "calls and texts only" ideal phone.
Indeed it is - but that is far from the message you seemed to be saying in your first comment.
Despite me pointing out that I was simply replying to your black and white statement ("I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there"), and pointing out that I would agree with a far more nuanced position, you're continuing to pretend that that I'm the one who was trying to make it black and white.
I'm guessing from this that you're not actually massively interested in having an adult discussion on the fact that despite continual complaints from consumers about too much complexity, not enough focus on quality etc, the actual purchasing behaviour of those same consumers is driving companies to focus far more on new features than on perfecting their existing ones.
You don't need to abandon a decade's worth of advances to ask that, for example, the Google IME team all get on the same page (Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese IMEs all work slightly differently and appear different) before implementing say... face unlock.
I'm a big fan of single-purpose tools, but if you tried to have EVERYTHING in your life a single purpose tool, you'd need a shopping trolly to carry it all around with you.
Do you think that the average punter is more likely to buy their next phone based on new feature like face unlock or because they've fixed an occasional bug in mail sync?
In Firefox on Windows. I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes and there is nothing I can do apart from ctrl+alt+del. I really don't know why tab's aren't sand boxed to at least let you exit them.
Photoshop has minor annoyances. If the color picker is open new files don't open. Been like that for 4 versions.
For some reason Filezilla refuse's to open a directory sometimes and hangs for about a minute before letting you retry. To speed this up you can press the disconnect button. Been like this for ages across all my computers..
I have some bugs in my product which are simply too time intensive to fix with the current schedule of features which I need to implement. If I was running things these bugs would be cleaned up first but.. sales is running the show and the next feature will kick start a new promotion and so on. For us at least, there is too much demand to move forward and not enough developers to maintain this development speed. This is why bugs creep into the product and this is why some of the more obscure ones can still be found in the product 30/60/90 day's after being reported.
This one always gets me. The browser people are (rightly) obsessed with security, but a simple DoS attack like this has worked for years.
Thing is once you start implementing stuff inside the browser to handle these situations your browser is moving away from being a document reader program and into the realms of being a full blown OS in it's own right running on top of another OS with shared state between the two.
That adds a load of complexity on it's own.
Browsers stopped being document readers well over a decade ago, even if they seem like one to the user.
I guess that would depend on the speed of the computer it is running on. If it's a very slow computer then stuff is just going to be slow whatever you do , doesn't mean it's crashed.
Otherwise you'd end up with a situation where you have to say "sorry , your computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements to view this webpage".
Also expectations are going to differ depending on the use case. For example if I load up a huge 1GB spreadsheet I can live with the fact that the spreadsheet program is going to be unusable for a minute or two while it loads the data. On the other hand if I click on a link and the page on the other end has a buggy flash applet or whatever then having my browser suddenly lock up is way more frustrating.
I suppose part of this stems from the fact that sometimes a browser is a document reader and sometimes it's an application runtime but there's no way to tell which it should be for a particular page. You could add a header or something but that would just get horribly abused.
In Chrome they are, that's why I switched. Try it and see?
When you used to interact with 4 or 5 complex systems every day, it was a rare thing when one was whacked. System designers got things working 90-95% of the time and the rest of it wasn't worth chasing down. But now that we're interacting with hundreds of complex systems each day, we're constantly running into oddball situations where things frustrate us.
Worse still is what I call an "edge case tsunami" where multiple oddball situations combine to create a PITA or disaster much worse than any one of them would individually.
It's an interesting problem. We can't make everything perfect to a 99.999% accuracy. The economics simply don't work out.
To edw519's point, I think the way to go is to toss out the general purpose computer. Have a device for books, a device for music, a device for programming, a device for surfing, and so on. Not only does this decrease the possibility of a cascade, it also allows us to physically separate our technology habits.
So you're back to the tricky problem of syncing state between them.
There are a lot of silly problems with the software and hardware that we use everyday and most of these problems are noticed by us, the power users. It's like with the Twitter-ad-supported saga: the power users bitch about it, look for alternatives but the regular Joe sticks with it and he's very happy. I know a lot of people who don't see any problems with Skype or Outlook and are very happy with them.
Today I was at the bank and the clerk wanted to print something and I had to literally wait there 20 minutes because the Adobe Reader was updating and some guy from IT was logged in remotely to make sure everything went fine with the update. She apologized telling me that "you know how it is with these computer programs nowdays" and that she was very happy with the old setup. I chuckled and thought of that Adobe Reader update meme[1] but deep inside I wept.
I know, personally, I have an Android app that gets about 12k new users a month, and I see exceptions reported all the time that I can't reproduce from the buggy as hell WebView, web content control, in Android. Especially when used with AdMob/Google ads, so much so that I use other advertisers instead. I could spend a week copying the source code for WebView into my app and fixing all the bugs if I'm lucky, it may use some private things I preventing it from being copied or something. I know it has threads and databases and all sorts of bizarre stuff. But still that would help like just a tiny, small percentage of the actual users. I'll get far more users working on something that applies to everyone like better graphics or multiplayer play, etc..
I did spend all weekend filing hideously long bug reports with sample code at work, though. So once you are talking about millions of users, it can make more sense, I guess. Which I suppose is where someone from Microsoft is coming from. They are famous for supporting even old bugs in their software for things like SimCity so it wouldn't break across upgrades.
This was also a time when there were comparatively less apps and games available on the PC, or at least ones that were widely used. So it was probably practical for them to test their new OS with just about everything on the market.
Now, however there's no way in hell it's possible from MS to go through and test everything that every ISV produces with Windows 8 for example.
No more "put your bug in here, trust us, we'll fix it". They won't. They'll say you're the only one with the problem. Everyone will be so uninspired they won't report bugs.
If I have a problem on a Mac, I can report it. I will get no feedback, and maybe the problem will get fixed. If it does get fixed, I will get no information about if my bug report led to the fix: the feedback loop is missing - there is no incentive to report a bug.
Open source hardware is a problem, agreed - I hope in the future there will be more of it available. Even open source houses, why not. If there is an open source plan for a house, maybe there will be a community fixing common problems with it.
Your solution to the dead-end of reporting bugs to Apple, is to recommend that I don't use a Mac?
No, the solution is that Apple open their bug reporting up.
If it gets enough attention, Apple will have to care.
Edit: to clarify, I was under the impression that there are already companies that provide "complaint forms" (bug trackers) for products of other companies. So I was wondering if they provide such a tracker for Apple and how much activity it provides. I thought getsatisfaction was such a company, but maybe it was another one.
Seriously, more often than not the feedback is an excuse why they aren't going to fix it. Look, if you aren't going to fix the bug then you aren't; so be it; your choice. But don't tell me your excuse. I don't want to hear it. It will just annoy me and tempt me to get into an argument and waste both our time. Just throw my bug report in the recycle bin and we can both get on with our lives.
(Mind you there has to be a feedback capability for the rarer occasions when the programmer needs to ask for clarification about how to reproduce the bug.)
My own personal example is Issue 2600 in Android, which hasn't been fixed several years after it was first , and is a big issue for us non-English-character users (particularly the ñ spanish character ).
The good thing with open bug trackers? You can contribute a patch if upstream is ignoring your request or taking too long to fix it.
And somehow you left a comment, using an OS and a browser, on a international network, that put it up so everybody in the world can read it, and I read it in a totally different country.
All totally unimaginable for the common folk just 20 years ago.
And all that with huge color flat monitors, optical mice, mp3s playing in the background, wireless networking, and tons of other stuff going on at the same time. Heck, you might just left the comment from your mobile phone, or I might just read it in mine.
How's that for "nothing ever working"?
Wireless is working right now, that's great. It might stop working sometime today. Things like that tend to happen, on every network more complicated than "I'm sitting two meters away from my home router".
That might have been unimaginable 20 years ago, but somehow, things are about as unreliable as they were 10 years ago.
(I have to admit, optical mice and huge screens are nice, though. But expensive hardware with a single precise objective tends to be reliable, compared to software).
10-12 years ago:
1) Windows was Windows ME (not even in the same league as Windows 7)
2) OS X was 10.1 (or before that). Most people still used OS 9.
3) Linux was not quite ready for heavy enterprise use or home use, had worse memory management, filesystem, window managers, desktop environments, drivers and userland.
So, "about as unreliable"? I beg to differ...
1) I've been on the non-believing end. You think "how could this possibly happen?" and without standing over the user's shoulder and watching them click/tap around, it's inconceivable that the problem exists.
2) I'm sure there's a problem, and you've provided me the screenshot showing the result that indicates a problem, but I can't reproduce it. Usually because the user doesn't know how to explain reproducing the problem.
I really think both of these have to do with people's lack of detailed logical analysis. I get it, you're the bank teller and your job is to count the money and count it correctly, not to analyze pixels on the screen. I see this as a failure of developers and designers to create systems that don't have these headaches.
tl;dr - I agree with the author's final three bullet points, but I can see where the tech[nician|nologist] involved doesn't have nearly enough information to solve (or even to see) the problems.
I work for a hardware company. Bugs are really, really, bad. If we find a hardware bug in real silicon, at best, we catch it the moment we get the first chip back, and it means that we have a multiple month delay as we fix it and tape out a new chip, not to mention the cost of throwing away all of the partially fabbed chips we've got, plus the multiple million dollar cost of a new mask set. At worst, we have a recall [1]. We take testing very seriously, and we do a lot more formal verification than most software companies.
The only things you can be sure about are things that have been formally verified [2], and the list of things that you can formally verify is tiny. We formally verified our adder. It took months. Then we did the multiplier, which was much harder. It took about the same amount of time because of the experience we gained doing the adder, but it wasn't easy. Division took a lot longer, even with the experience of doing addition and multiplication. To think that we can advance the state of the art of "things that work" from something like a multiplier to a complex piece of software with "care" and our "collective will" seems overly optimistic.
Everything's going to be broken for the foreseeable future. Putting more effort into testing and less into features is a difference in degree, not in kind. It won't even prevent articles like this from being written because, if all you want to do is find ten bugs in all the software you use, that's still going to be trivial. Considering how much progress has been made in formal methods since 1970, I expect that finding 10 annoying bugs in all of the software I use will be trivial for my entire lifetime.
[1] Well, you don't have to do a recall. AMD had a hardware bug that could be fixed by a patch that degraded performance by 10%. Sun famously didn't include ECC in their L2 cache, which resulted in transient failures for a number of customers, and they made customers sign an NDA before replacing their parts. Guess how much people trusted AMD and Sun afterwards?
[2] Even then, you're never really sure. How do you know the formal verification process itself isn't buggy? It's turtles all the way down. I know some folks who were trying to build a formally verified OS, and they stopped using ACL2 after discovering a few bugs in it. After all, how can you trust your proof if the proof system itself has bugs? ACL2 is old and crusty, but that's precisely why it's used for more hardware FV than everything else combined, outside of Intel and IBM (both of whom have their own, excellent, internal tools). It's old enough to have great libraries. There are newer systems that have better architectures, but they don't have anything approaching the same level of library support for hardware. Yet another tradeoff of time to market vs. correctness. It can't be avoided.
Say you're an engineer who's worried that ACL2 is too buggy for your company to use. You tell your manager. She points out that maybe five ACL2 bugs are discovered every year, and they get more minor each year, as the system gets cleaned up. Moreover, none of the bugs discovered in the past three years have affected any of your proofs, and you wouldn't expect them to have an effect on any proof techniques you're going to use. So you stick with ACL2. And, because you do, there's a tiny risk of a bug. What does this example have to do with the original post? Bugs come from making little decisions like this. No single decision is sure to cause a problem, or (in a company that's serious about testing) even likely to cause a problem, but multiply that tiny probability by the number of times you have to make a tradeoff and the number of lines of code, and it's a statistical certainty that you'll have bugs.
Reading through Scott's article, he points out that it's not uncommon for an issue to be raised by many users and ignored by the product owner (my personal pet issue at the moment is Google Calendar no longer allowing me to accept invites sent to non-GMail addresses).
It might not be cost-practical to fix issues that affect a small section of your audience, but I'd like to think there's a certain qualitative aspect that comes into play, and if the issue affects 'n' people it should get a banner regardless of whether 'n' is only a minute percentage of your audience.
We have many new shiny FM tools now, though, that are far closer to regular programming languages. In particular, Agda, Coq, Isabelle are fairly easy to pick up for people with an FP background (rather than a formal methods background).
The breakthroughs in SMT solver performance have been astounding to watch, and their use for "brute force" FM is certainly growing.
Of course, verified code is still many times the cost of unverified code, but the gap is coming down.
Perhaps things have changed now, but previously MS had a setup with 2-4 testers per one developer whereby latter would churn out code as fast as he can (of a respective quality) and testers were expected to identify critical bugs so that the dev can plug them, in the same speedy manner as he'd code the original. I had few close friends work for Microsoft in the 90s and the impression I formed after chatting with them was that the MS products routinely were something that was hacked and hammered into a state of not crashing too frequently. So while Microsoft might have a strong focus on testing, it was used to be completely misplaced and misguided.
I studied in Eindhoven under a pupil of Dijkstra and my father studied under Dijkstra; formal methods are kind of a natural thing for me since I was introduced to computers 30 years ago, but no clients are paying for the kind of time needed to write these proofs. Well, rephrasing; no client of us.
I think there needs to be a breakthrough in the way proofs and software are written; now it's not very practical in most cases.
There are plenty of cases when developers do avoidable things that will almost certainly cause issues. And then those things do cause issues. And then developers change nothing in their behavior, and continue doing those same kinds of things - because they don't care. I see results of this almost every day.
The other issues are easily addressed by stopping to cater to lazy users so much. Do we need yet another bloaty app to do basic things? Look at itunes. Its a monster. I'm not even sure how to get a CSV of contacts off an iphone. In the past this was trivial with any contact manager because the feature was baked in. Now that's a feature for "enterprise admins."
The remaining things on his list are the 'appification of everything.' Everything is now a shitty touch app that's incredibly dumbed down and buggy. Why try hard, especially when you userbase is locked down by 2 year carrier contracts? Or when all their music is trapped in an itunes database that can't be moved anywhere or given to anyone.
Apple won. This is "easy" and "just works." Big buggy apps with dumbed downed features designed to lock user data as deeply as possible. We've entered a new era of vendor lock-in. It the 1980s all over again. We need open protocols to work just enough for web and email. Everything else is up for grabs.
Get used to it, this is what the market has chosen. Meanwhile, I have to somehow train my users on how to use Windows 8's new tablet-based GUI on their standard PCs. This ain't progress. This is fashion.
It's actually gotten so bad now that I've found myself increasingly hacking together my own small apps and scripts to do some simple things that I want because it's often actually easier to build than figuring out how to use some of the software out there. It's actually an even better investment because I know my own stuff will never magically become shittier because of some update that gets pushed out automatically.
Basically it seems to be sour grapes that consumers are finally getting what they want after 20 years of geek rule... It's not quite the 80s again.
Apple uses a lot of sqllite and xml for your user data. I'd be curious as to what part of your data you are unable to get access to?
Making complicated stuff work is hard. There is a reason some people design tools to do one thing and do it well - it's easy to be sure it does that one thing correctly all the time and easier to check it keeps doing it.
Maybe we're betting our simplicity on the stack we build upon (I certainly build a lot of simple stuff on top of very tall stacks of mostly simple stuff), I'm not sure there are no surprises hidden in it. However, we should strive for making things (machines, software) that are simple inside. When we do that, it's easier to make the simplicity transpire and become an elegant form-follows-function kind of design. It will not be possible to avoid all bugs, but by making conscious decisions against complicated designs, we may make some lives less miserable.
The bug gets punted because it's on a non-critical path, there's no data lost, it doesn't crash the entire application, and there's a workaround, even though the workaround sucks. Next time around, the bug is weighed against new feature work, and judged based on how it aligns with the product's core pillars. Not important enough this cycle, maybe next cycle.
Next cycle comes around, and the team no longer knows how to fix the bug, because it's no longer fresh in anyone's mind, or the person who wrote it doesn't work there anymore. The broken module is now essentially a black box, and the cost of fixing the bug has increased drastically. The bug gets punted again until the next release, because hey, we've got a workaround.
The project will be cancelled before the bug is fixed.
Not all big companies work this way, but enough of them do, or have subgroups within them that do, that it creates usability problems like the ones in the article. It's not that the problems don't get found by QA, it's just that nobody can be bothered to address them.
it most certainly won't be cancelled, despite multiple farked edge cases, if the critical path is providing business value. the customer increases revenues, the software company turns a profit, the managers and developers get nice bonuses to give their children a nice education, our 401k's get stable returns, the world gets buggy software but not THAT buggy, and everyone is happy except for a few cranky developers who get paid a lot of money to maintain shitty software from 9-5 inbetween disney world trips and cruises.
The most important things the shuttle group does -- carefully planning the software in advance, writing no code until the design is complete, making no changes without supporting blueprints, keeping a completely accurate record of the code -- are not expensive. The process isn't even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering.
The Space Shuttle went up the first time with a few K of core memory. The software effort was really pretty trivial compared with systems today.
"Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages."
-- http://www.popsci.com/node/31716I don't know how applicable the NASA way is to commercial firms. They have different goals. National Mission Success vs. shareholder returns. The commercial firms are still making money and happy shareholders with a lot of bugs. While a single unit conversion bug on the Mars Climate Orbiter resulted in the loss of a multi-billion dollar spacecraft.
In my view, one should preferably have several independent proof verifiers that have been manually inspected for there to be sufficient trust. It is ok if such verifiers are slow, simplistic, and use lots of memory, given that they should preferably be used as a final check that the verification process worked correctly.
Having someone get back to me or notify me of a change may never happen entirely, but I'd have a centralized record of all my issues. And other people could search them if I shared them (by default, perhaps). And vote them up, or add their own notes. Or give me an answer or workaround.
Perhaps this is sort of what stackoverflow is or where it's going, but I think there's another approach to tackle this issue, and there may be room for multiple approaches(?)
I think one of the results of having company and software specific bug trackers, a lot of them private, is that people don't really know how buggy a piece of software actually is until they pay for it. And by then, it's too late.
I rarely get problems of that magnitude. The only unreliable thing I have is my ADSL connection and that's not a problem as I can use my phone as a backup.
I went from struggling to read a few pages of a book or write some code every evening to currently working on postgrad eduction, other certifications, volunteering, etc. It's not as literally simple a transition (lots of changes in motivation and practices in the mix), but every single device comes with a level of cost in terms of time and cognitive "energy". Stack them all up and it turns into a pretty big percentage of your capacity each day.
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 issues of course but that is a different rant)
Its my hope that people will stop 'adding value' with software hacks to things like dishwashers (do we really need a ringtone to tell you its done? really?) focus on function, but that only happens when people actionably respond to these problems. They return them for their money back.
One of the truths in the consumer goods industry is that returns is an excellent signal for going to far. These things live on very small margins to begin with and returns reduce that margin still further. So folks returning 'broken' products incent the manufacturer to fix them. Its a pain though, that I truly understand.
[1] Crapitalism is the effect of racing to the bottom in terms of price to achieve market penetration / dominance. Sadly it often leads to products that are cost reduced to the point of not being functional.
Love this.
Reality is dirty, everything tries to break down all the time, hindered by the traces of its past, and the ambivalence of its future use. We make stuff dreaming of a prefect neat existence. This keeps us going, like moths around a light bulb. And we should keep on doing this nevertheless.
If consumer software companies were working more like, say, people working on Curiosity (Mars' robot) or aircraft navigation software, you could have a phone that does much less but without bugs.
The reason why it is this way is because people usually prefer to cope with minor bugs that giving up on features. Plus, when you buy a product, you usually know the list of features but not the list of potential bugs.
So you can make a company that sells phones with 0 bugs, with a 2004 set of features. Or an OS that focuses purely on providing a bug-free experience, but 5 years late.
Not sure all that would sell well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Everything's amazing and no one is happy by Louis CK
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?"
As irritating as all these bugs are, you, the consumer, will not wait for a perfect product but will instead settle for the crappy one that's already available. Maybe this will change for areas where innovation reaches some kind of plateau, marginal utility of new whizbang features will fall and marginal utility of bug-freeness will rise.
It's a kind of, sort of our fault situation because as time has gone on we've stopped caring too much about companies sitting down and just going "Lets get this stuff sorted out and fixed, and improved and more awesome", but started caring about "How many features does it have? Can it do X in Y and Z situations?" which is great, it pushes the state of the art forward. I think companies are spending too much time trying to get stuff out the door, instead of spending the time improving what they've got.
But we end up in a weird situation where we actively want companies to stop adding new features, but a lot of us are like magpies drawn to the new and shiny. It sucks, it's their fault for not getting stuff done properly the first time, and it's our fault for expecting a new shiny thing every few months. And "move fast and break things" needs to stop being a thing.
As an engineer who has spent invaluable hours combing over end user bug reports through services like Windows Error Reporting and the like, I am incredibly thankful for each and every user that took the time to click 'Report'. And I owe my firstborn to the benevolent few who choose to write detailed comments to accompany their reports.
But alone, in the dark, ready to edit a photo or browse Reddit- I click 'Ignore'. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. My rage at uncaught exceptions bubbles up into my brain and the stack reports, "you shall not get any info out of me." This is clearly wrong, but it's my impulse. That's all.
Our machines have layer upon layer of firmware and software. Users are allowed to install and configure whatever they want. It's all expected to run perfectly and, for the most part, things do run pretty well these days. Features are constantly being added. Everything is changing all the time. Unexpected combinations of things still happen and with complex software there are just cases that slip through the QA cracks.
Though I do get annoyed when something crashes, it has to be a bit of a two-way street sometimes. Both sides fail at this. Not all users are good at reproducing bugs and sometimes they are downright dishonest about what they are doing (out of embarrassment, or attempt to "skip ahead" in the diagnosis and other reasons I'm sure). But in the case of big companies like Apple and Microsoft as a user I do feel like they don't provide a way for a knowledgeable user to provide them reproducible errors either. Well, they have their bug report mechanisms but it feels like yelling into the grand canyon when I do submit bugs.
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.
So..... I boot into Linux. 20 minutes of googling how to share files with macs, an apt-get or two and I'm copying off the files. Same goes for things like cd ripping. On Linux it just works, on Windows you have to get ad encrusted dodgy apps that sort of work and demand money every 5 minutes. Basically, if you are a power user, Linux rocks. Yeah I know....but Grandma will revolt! Fine, get her a mac or an android tablet. Why people who aren't forced to still use windows, I have no idea.
Hopefully it will help if you're ever in a situation where you need to make bulk changes to file and directory permissions.
Basically, developing error-free software is comparatively easy if your software effectively performs no I/O, that is, it behaves like a program in a computer science paper: read in some data on launch, grind through some computation, emit output, terminate. Barring catastrophic hardware failure of CPU or memory, this is a nicely deterministic programming model. You stand a chance writing correct code.
Throw "real" I/O into the mix, and almost anything can fail in weird ways, and your code has to be prepared for it. Network I/O is guaranteed to fail sooner or later while the developer is using the software. So it usually gets taken into account in some way, usually only distinguishing between "there is no connection" and "there is a connection". There are a myriad of other cases in between that are usually not even considered.
Disk I/O can fail for a variety of reasons. Not just hardware failure; file systems aren't perfect, especially when confronted with power failure, kernel panics, etc. Randomly flipped bits happen. (yes, really)
Not only are there are bugs in the GUI framework you're using, other GUI programs are running at the same time and they can inadvertently interact with your program due to the shared GUI framework use.
Other programs can inadvertently interact with yours in other ways: locked files, claimed sockets, contention for any kind of resource, race conditions, thread/task scheduling - you name it.
Timing bugs are ubiquitous. Everything you do in your program takes >0 time. Maybe on your system, with your data set, it looks like 0. Maybe because it takes slightly less than one video frame's worth of time. On your customer's system, it takes longer. If they click something before your operation has completed, and you haven't anticipated this, your program will fail in weird ways. Where I live, I can't get an internet connection with less than about 80ms latency even to the nearest servers, let alone to North America, where most servers sit (more like 200ms). You wouldn't believe how much software handles this terribly.
The problem is complexity - in many cases, unavoidable complexity, not the accidental complexity us developers keep railing against. Most of these error cases are extremely rare. The thing is, with thousands or millions of people using your software, extremely rare bugs suddenly become a very frequent occurrence!
Yet the tools for dealing with this kind of thing are somewhere between terrible and non-existent. There are some tools for simulating difficult network conditions; those are comparatively easy to make. I'm not aware of similar software that simulates OS API call failures. 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. valgrind and its myriad of plugins are great, but as developers we almost certainly under-use it.
Developing such tools is obviously expensive, and even they won't catch all bugs. But I'm pretty sure they could reduce the probability of running into bugs by a few orders of magnitude.
Don't even get me started on how programming languages don't help you handle error conditions or timing problems even if you try.
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]
Realistically, you'd have to automatically detect the calls made, for system calls you have ptrace (most commonly used by strace), though I'm not sure how you reroute them. I guess there must be some kernel-side hook. Still, that's likely to be too low-level for GUIs for example. Preloading dynamic libraries like that also only works well on ELF-based systems, other OSes behave rather differently, and if you're trying to test kernel code, it's a whole other problem.
Once you're simulating errors, you have to specify correct behaviour. For stream input fuzzing for security purposes, you're usually just probing for crashes. In the general case, the test framework will need to know the intended outcome of errors.
For either part, I'm not aware of anything existing like this. I'm slowly custom-building little islands of functionality like it, but it's a far cry from some kind of general solution.
See the many posts about vim, git or command line tools on HN. I have never caught a grep bug, for instance, (cat is pretty reliable too).
The problem might be because the level of expectations raises faster that the technology. Chrome was amazing at the beginning, and now people are unimpressed.
It's a thankless job. The developers I worked with directly loved me -- the best of the lot did, anyway. (My observation in turn of their abilities and professionalism.) But management had no clue (and refused to get one). And many developers outside of my exclusive little clique had to be brow-beaten into some level of compliance.
Speaking generally: You say you want quality. But your actions belie this.
P.S. If you're concerned about "quality", amongst other things you should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". To understand the importance of and drive for quality amongst those who really care.
We can make better software and we can make it easier to use and we can make everything more convenient but it'll never be enough. Making stuff better doesn't mean ridding it of all possible complications and minor annoyances. In fact, some of the things he complains about are actually features, not bugs and those cases the solution is to get a different product.
Everything is broken and nobody's upset? No. Everything is awesome and everyone's jaded.
I have a hunch (that's all, though) that if there were never any up-front purchase cost for software, and instead it was all, say, monthly-subscription-based, that there would be a bigger focus on quality. "Hmm, frustrated users are cancelling their monthly subscriptions because sync doesn't work? Well, maybe we should work on that instead of adding glossy cover flow..."
Much as I like the idea, I don't have high hopes. The revolutionary "right thing" approach has typically lost to the evolutionary "worse is better" in software fields with broad appeal. This is true even with the tools and materials used to build computing systems at a low level. Consider the popularity of programming languages like C++ compared to say... Smalltalk.
With open source software, if the universe of people with a particular bug is big enough, it'll contain developers who are capable of fixing it.
Or if a particular bug is hurting you badly enough, you can find and pay a developer to fix it.
See Linus's Law [1] (scroll down to point #8.)
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
[1] Yes, Gmail is slow for me too; haven't used its web interface for years, and I've moved my correspondence to private domain. Some of his complaints are valid complaints about sloppiness. He also seems rather unhappy with Apple's SW, so I'm wondering why is he still giving shitloads of money to Apple.
[2] For example, a backup on my Win7 machine failed, with a mysterious message in event log urging me to look for other errors in the event log. I scrolled down and saw that AV (MSE) had quarantined a certain file. I deleted the file, and lo and behold, the backup succeeded!
Is this an issue? Yes. Do people care? Not enough apparently. What do you do? You either accept it or you find a solution at a low enough price that people start caring.
Bottom line: look at what people are willing to pay.
Instead now you still have to archive (I have a 500 MB limit), but you do in a .pst file that you anyway have to use from Outlook that, again, does not have a good way of finding stuff (have you tried the search box on even only 6 months of emails?) or, even more important, to comment stuff (how many times I wanted to add comments to an email, nobody thought of that?).
Edit: Yes, I know what you are thinking: it takes more space! But hey, don't we have super sized hard drives anyway?
Surely somebody's doing something! I'm sure if you look around you'll find a lot of people doing a lot of things to fix software quality and improve user experience in software applications.
But, consider what's really broken in the world: food supply, resource depletion, pollution, poverty, crime, violence, war... When I read a title like, "Everything's broken" those are the problems that come into my head. And so, I was disappointed to read your list. It didn't aim high enough for the problems I was considering.
Makes me feel one component what's broken is our priorities and focus. Clearly the priority and focus for the software you're using is not on quality and experience. It seems the software industry has optimized to get-product-out and iterate asap. Ship!
But then, when I consider the larger question of "what's broken?" where I look at the real issues in the world, I come to the same answer: the priority and focus of society is not tilted strongly enough towards fixing those types of big-world problems. Instead, we have so many of our great minds attacking other types of problems.
Generally, when we humans focus and prioritize, we can achieve just about anything we desire.
I don't get upset about today's software because it's much better than what we had before (even iTunes). I remember the 90s where my computer would lock up twice daily with a blue screen. Where my data would get corrupted regularly. Where I had to reinstall my OS bi-annually to deal with slow downs. I haven't had to experience these things in nearly 8 to 10 years. Now it's all more about annoyances than catastrophic failures.
At the cafetaria here I pay with my bankcard, if I put the card in too soon, the payment never works. I know that the payment device software is clearly broken. The solution: The clerk stops the payment and restarts it if you put it in too soon, or yanks out your card and puts it back in himself.
Good luck explaining that it's broken.
For example I've had the same iPhoto library for about 5 years now. The only issue I ever had was importing duplicate photos (my fault) and then running a hacky app that was supposed to magically fix this. Nope. It just trashed my iPhoto Library file. If I had manually deleted the duplicates I wouldn't have had any problems. I've had countless address book/calendar syncing issues for the same reasons. I gave up on trying to hack together a system that works now I'm fine with these different services being islands. I don't need every contact I've made in the last 20 years on every device I own.
Another example from Apple: The 2011 MacBook Air wireless connections issues. Also several huge threads in the forums, and multiple posts around the net and nothing.
And Apple isn't the only company. I don't even want to get started on the state of video games today (look at the launch of D3 from Blizzard and what a nightmare that was or SW:TOR - just a couple of recent examples).
I imagine two reasons for that state we are at now: Money - the rush to release (and "worry about fixing bugs later" -this is VERY true in the gaming world); and in Apple's case, they hate to admit anything can possibly be wrong in perfect-town Apple.
> in Apple's case, they hate to admit anything can possibly be wrong in perfect-town Apple.
Bingo. And that's exactly what the article is talking about. Things that a company or programmer has the ability to fix _now_ just don't get done.
The general issue is that the indirect costs of a product are not supported by the company that created it.
I explain: a company could generally earn more money by releasing new software (or features) than by fixing bugs, even if its users spend more time and money because of these bugs than it would cost to fix them.
We can see it everywhere: - unhealthy foods generating long-term medical care costs - short life products generating cost of buying new ones quickly (built-in obsolescence) - cheap electricity generating thousands of years of waste management - etc
If we find ways to make these indirect costs absorbed, we could improve software quality.
Ideas: - for proprietary software, include a kind of warranty to fix bugs when enough users ask for it (similarly to getsatisfaction.com) - for opensource software, I think of getsatisfaction.com coupled with a donation system to encourage people to fix popular requests
What do you think?
Can anyone elucidate on whether adopting this mode of development where software can be formally reasoned about has led to significantly fewer bugs in real-world software scenarios? Is the legacy of Smalltalk impeding progress?
I ask this as a fairly average OO software developer that has found that despite being fastidious about keeping up with code coverage, bugs still present themselves all the same.
Global warming, destruction of nature, loss of liberty because governments we elect betray us - don't worry, somebody else will fix that, probably some Y Combinator startup. No wait, driverless cars are the answer.
Us humans hallucinate in our own private world more than we interface with the actual world. We can and will rationalize anything. Nobody is upset because we aren't really there, or even here. We are off somewhere else, thinking we are smarter than we are and that everything will be okay.
With the terrifying state the planet is in, we should all be upset.
Eh, really?
What I find so amusing about people like you and me (and OP) whining about how imperfect the world is that the world has gotten so much better, even in our lifetimes. And yeah, if you are a white American-born male, it might not seem that way- in fact, the world might not have gotten better for you. If you aren't skilled, it almost certainly has gotten worse for you; you've got to compete against a huge pool of people that were simply not in the running before. But for the masses of humanity that weren't lucky enough to be born an American white guy? eh, I think things are better than they were. And really, things aren't so bad for us, either. Maybe not quite as cushy as they were; but eh, I'm still a long ways from pretending to be Chinese, or even wanting to learn a language other than American English for business reasons. Things aren't so bad, at least from where I sit.
But yeah. Getting upset, first, takes a lot of personal energy; and quite often is dangerous.
more to the point, quite often, it's counterproductive. The food riots all over the middle east? (I'm sorry. Look at food prices[1] Then tell me, with a straight face, that poor people are okay with the cost of living going up 4x, but have a problem with a high-school talent-show quality video. I mean, I guess it's possible that it really is the video? but it sure seems unlikely, compared to the much more reasonable explanation that people get unhappy and violent when they can't get enough to eat.)
I mean, sure, they are upset, it's difficult to afford food. A perfectly understandable thing to be upset about. But, is this going to help them? probably not. I mean, it's going to be bad for us, too... but for us? bad means paying a little bit more in taxes, maybe, or dealing with fewer public services. Worst case, we experience more inflation than we'd like. For them? I suspect it will be much worse. Yeah, getting upset isn't helping them. (One could argue that it's actively hurting them even if we don't retaliate. We are a major exporter of grain and soy. By destabilizing us, they are destabilizing one source of food, and thus driving global prices up further. Of course, especially in the case of Egypt, well, there's something else going on; Throughout history, Egypt has been a major exporter of grain. I don't know what happened to cause that to change, or if our presence in the area has anything to do with it, but it certainly is... an odd situation that Egypt can't even feed itself. It's possible that if they could get us to leave, they would be better off. I'm certainly not in any position to weigh in either way on that one.)
I mean, I'm not saying you should never work to change anything, but quite often? pretending that there is not a problem does less damage than getting upset and 'taking action' without really understanding the situation or the consequences of those actions.
But yeah; all I'm trying to say is that before you "take action" on a global issue where you don't have all the facts (and that is any global issue; none of us have all the facts. On most issues, even if you combined all human knowledge, we'd still have missing pieces.) you should step back, and make sure you aren't firebombing an American embassy, if you know what I mean.
For example, some suggest that part of why agricultural commodity prices are through the roof is demand for biofuel. Sure, biofuel is a great thing- the people working on that are trying to solve important problems that are real problems. But... as an unintended consequence, they are driving up the price of food.
Go look at graph 1 again. god damn. The thing is, for me? And probably for you, grains are so cheap that they could go up 10x without really altering what I pay for my prepared food. I mean, even now, you can get a bushel of soy for $17. A bushel is a lot. like 35 litres. 150 cups. A metric fuck-tonne of tofu. Man, that sounds so cheap to me. I mean, I could go work at McDonalds for a month and buy enough soy and rice to live for a year, easy. I mean, in theory, I could support myself on one day a year of consulting work, if I had a place to sleep and cook.
but... that same bushel? set you back about five bucks a few years back. I mean, imagine living somewhere that the actual cost of the soy or the wheat or whatever your food was made out of was what you paid for? where four hundred bucks really is your yearly budget? I don't think the biofuel folks gave that too much thought.
(Of course, many people believe that the commodity price inflation has more to do with qe3 than with biofuels. The fact that metals have been inflating right alongside the edible commodities would support this theory. I'm just throwing out biofuels as an example of a rational and well-meaning attempt to solve one problem could cause another problem. I have no proof that it /did/ cause that problem that it could have caused.)
Really, from that point of view? OP's whining about small problems, maybe, is the sort of thing OP ought to be worrying about and focusing on? These are problems that can actually be fixed, and that can bring a small amount of happiness and productivity to the world, and at the very least, probably won't make anything worse.
Personally, I think OP was being a little dramatic. But that's okay. I mean, I actually had the same problem opening a word file today, but I was using LibreOffice, so I figured that was the problem and made the sender send me a text version. I probably would have been a little steamed if I had paid four hundred bucks for office.
[1]http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=soybean-mea...
food prices aren't BIG? I mean, they aren't big for you and I, sure, but for most of the rest of the world, there is nothing bigger.
And really? you are seriously saying that the average person's level of personal liberty and human rights is lower now than it was 30 years ago?
Like I said, that might be true if you are white and male and born in the US... or if you are anything and live in the parts of the middle east we are at war with, but for the vast masses of humanity, the world has gotten rather more free. /they/ now can compete with /us/ for jobs, which is an incredible improvement. (well, it's an incredible improvement for them. For the least skilled of us, well, it kinda stinks. Me? I think it makes things a lot more interesting, and it vastly increases my potential customer base.)
As for liberty and human rights, I concur with my sibling poster - the world has been getting BETTER with regards to those things the last 30 years, Americans are the ones that have been escalating the crazy lately.
When I do software for money I often just want to quickly do what's required from me. My motivation is more "getting it done" and less "making user's happy". I'm thinking "how to implement requirenment A" instead of "how to best solve user's problem A". Another big factor is that I don't have full responsibility. If some parts of the UI can be improved I often don't care - I'm not responsible for that, convincing my manager that the UI sucks just isn't worth it.
- complexity of modern systems - reliance on third party libraries that suffer from all the same problems - underfunding - understaffing - QA next to non-existant or "sourced out" to support staff - unrealistic deadlines - incompetence (that was always a problem, but combined with the lack of QA becomes more apparent to the end user)
Basically the issue is we all want more, for less money, in a short amount of time. And I think we've hit the ceiling for that as far as the human factor is concerned.
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.
Of course I don't really want to disable updates altogether incase there is an 0 day out there and I need to patch. Problem is that a lot of things don't give me the option of saying "fetch security updates only , ask me before installing anything else and allow me to revert if I don't like it".
Or would that so feature-poor/expensive/slow-moving/low-status that no-one would use it?
They will answer Mobile Me, iTunes, Snow Leopard, iCloud, Genius, Ping, iPhones unable to call or any other thing which at some point was delivered in such a shoddy state that it was hard to keep believing Apple was any different than the other tech companies.
Anyway, this is not another Steve Jobs is dead, Apple is going to heck-post. The decay began a long time before that.
But then it struck me: One man's first world problem is another man's billion dollar company.
Pay for more stuff.
13 of the 20 issues are on freeware or free services. Gmail way exceeds my expectations, because I know I'm the product, not the customer.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the author's writing style, it was a good rant
have problems with stock roms on devices since you don't know what they do? Try android custom roms.
Have problems with Operating systems doing insane amounts of work without you ever knowing what that is? Try rolling your own Distro.
Problem with gmail? Try running mutt somewhere and give yourself pub key access to the server.
But more generally don't fucking rely on the cloud.
Oh dear, skype, I have to use it for work purposes, but man, how I wish I didn't. He forgot to add android and linux to the list. Compared to that you can at least just use an older skype version on windows and be done with it.
My notebook runs a heavily customized linux and it boots in under 10 second. Updating my system? Still boots in under 10 seconds. All my linux distro setups lasted for years.
Fast, good, cheap; pick any two.
80% of the people only use 20% of the features anyway. And they never see the bugs that drives the remaining 20% of the people nuts.
Yes, I guess that's why we are alone. Most people don't know it can be better. You probably have to be writing software for a a long time to be furious when something is slow or broken in today's hardware.
I notice he uses only one open source product (Google Chrome). One aspect of choosing open source is being able to fix problems you care about yourself (in theory at least).
To preserve separate "rolls": open finder. Navigate to Photos. Right-click your iPhoto Library and choose "show package contents". Find the Originals folder and drag it out. You're set.
On an entirely unrelated note, guess how much work I got done today...
"Hmm, first one is about iPhone; next one is about Windows; I wonder . . . "
Ctl-F "linux" - first hit is the comments, and I close the tab, contentedly.
Too true.
So we should ask ourselves: are they so rare? Maybe we should stop providing lame excuses and write our codez correctly from the start?
Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing.
The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and instantly, sometimes loses a mail. Or the UI is slow to load your new messages.
A program with which you can do on your laptop what it took huge teams, million dollars of equipment, and professional expertise to do (FCP), has a crashing bug in some particular action.
The program that lets you talk to everybody on the planet, instantly, with video, and paying nothing, has a badly designed UI.
etc...
Yes, I can see how "everything is broken".
Because, when we didn't have any of these, when 30 years before you had a rotating dial to dial numbers on your phone that only called landlines and cost mega bucks to call internationally, when you had MS-DOS as the most prevalent desktop OS, when 20MB was a huge disk in a desktop system, and before something like video chat was only possible in huge organizations with special software, everything was perfect...
Wanting to improve things? Fine.
Not understanding the complexity and magnitude of the technical achievements you use everyday? Bad.
Your incredible display, which somehow manages to use liquid crystals to display beautiful 1080 HD video develops a jitter and bright line down the middle after a month.
The machine gun which lets you launch tiny projectiles at speeds high enough to kill a person sometimes fires rounds without you pulling the trigger and causes a casualty.
...
Yes, the technology is incredibly complex and represents a huge transformation in the way we do things, but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly. Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly.
This is not to say that the people who made the tech are at fault per se, just that the customer is not at fault either for complaining when things dont work.
In some ideal world, where you can have things with MILLIONS of moving parts and TRILLIONS of states, designed by mere mortals and still have them be faultless, yes.
In the real world, the customer will have to settle for things not being 100% perfect.
He can now do things unheard of even in science fiction 20-30 years ago, and takes for granted things only appearing like 6 years ago (e.g YouTube).
>Given the fact that most (all?) of the products mentioned in the post have some kind of price associated to using them, its not unreasonable to expect they work correctly.
I think that, yes, it is unreasonable. That you pay for something doesn't mean anything related to it's error margin. You cannot demand the impossible just because you paid for something. It's like saying: "hey, I paid for this car, why does it is disfigured when it crashes and can kill me?".
Consumer products (non digital) break all the time. You can even pay top dollar and yet have crap food served to you. And all those are far less complex than software.
>but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly
It's not an excuse - it's an explanation. These things are complex, and complex things sometimes fail. The average user can be forgiven for not really appreciating this, but lack of knowledge of the nature of complexity doesn't magically make it disappear.
Of couse companies could take the NASA approach of spending huge amounts of time and money on formal requirements/analysis methods, building massively fault-tolerant solutions etc etc, but I doubt there's a vast amount of users out there willing to buy tech that's 5 years behind cutting edge, and costing many times more, simply because it (almost) never fails.
My response to your comment is the same as the previous one:
>My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
Cars stop moving on a fairly regular basis, often as a result of the comparatively simple mechanical side of things. In the case of Toyota a couple of years ago, they didn't stop moving at all when the driver wanted them to.
The other examples you gave have happened too - this despite the rather more critical nature of the machine gun issue and again its relative simplicity compared to, for example, a modern phone.
I've got no problem with people calling out where they see problems, expecting someone to at least take their complaints seriously, and in a lot of cases expecting the company to do something about trying to resolve it.
But that's not really the message I took from the article - the idea that that these problems are caused by lack of passion or quality on the part of the people making this stuff rather than being an almost inevitable result of the complex nature of these systems.
TBH, I'm not even sure I buy that it's really that much of a problem. Almost everything isn't actually broken - the vast majority of our tech works remarkably well the vast majority of the time, and I prefer having tech that mostly works and is both available and affordable than having the same tech that will work perfectly when it's delivered in 5 years time at a vastly increased cost.
"Is this a speed problem? Are we feeling we have to develop too fast and loose? Is it a quality issue? Have we forgotten the art and science of Software QA? Is it a people problem? Are folks just not passionate about their software enough to fix it? I think it's all of the above. We need to care and we need the collective will to fix it."
I.e, he attributes things to lack of: care, passionate people, the forgotten art and science of QA, etc. Which is BS. There will ALWAYS be many bugs and problems in systems that large in scope and complexity.
And it's not because "the guys that designed, say, GMail or FCP (that he complains about) do not care, or lack passion, or have forgotten the "art and science" of software QA.
Plus, the kind of bugs he describes are not that important compared to what we have actually achieved and DOES work.
FCP crashing when you "scroll too fast" while rendering?
Give me a break, these linear editing systems cost tens of millions of dollars, took half a room, and didn't operate in real time just 15 years ago. Oh, and had just as many bugs, and you needed support staff from Avid or whatever to come over to set them up. Now thousands of people all over the world edit their films and documentaries in their laptops.
Plus, the kind of bugs he describes are not that important compared to
what we have actually achieved and DOES work.
That's a lame excuse. Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago, the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases and that nobody cares enough to fix, because "bah, it's not that important."
The problem is not that the bugs exist, but how fast and how well they are being solved.
Well, this is my other pet peeve, people not understanding the notion of "opportunity cost".
>the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases
The key word here is "seemingly".
Do you really think that the guys as Apple/Google that pull all-nighters and work themselves to death to finish iOS/Android don't have "enough passion to fix problems"?
Or do you believe that if they took their sweet time they would have fixed every "low hanging fruit"? Even a low hanging fruit can add a couple of days to a month to a project, or delay other, more important features and/or fixes.
"Go attack all the low hanging fruits" is a meaningless proposition. Some projects you use are open source. Why don't YOU go attack them? Who is gonna make those "low hanging fruit" interesting for a volunteer to work? Who is gonna make them profitable for a for profit company, so that it doesn't die in the market while fixing them?
Mozilla tried to build a better browser. They addressed all the low and high hanging fruits.
What happened?
It took them 5 years to ship something that worked kinda OK, by which time the company had died, and the market share went to IE. And even those releases 5 years after the new code started had lots of problems. Eventually they betted on the more minimal Firefox instead of ever perfecting the full blown Mozilla browser/suite. And it's still not perfect.
Result? Besides the parent company dying, they haven't got that old high Netscape market share back even now.
>Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago
I, for one, do.
Do you really think that the guys as Apple/Google that pull
all-nighters and work themselves to death to finish
iOS/Android don't have "enough passion to fix problems"?
Who is gonna make those "low hanging fruit" interesting for a volunteer to work?
The bottom line is that I feel it's disrespectful to a user to tell him to put up with the annoying "life-wasting five minutes at a time" bugs, only because 60 years ago he would have been playing cards over candlelight instead of trying to sync his iTunes library.
It's like starting to pierce people with a pin and when they complain say "be grateful this is not the medieval times, because the pin would be a broadsword and you'd be already dead."
It's just using past progress to justify current mediocrity. We should accept that those bugs that affect UX are indeed very important, and not dismiss them.
Have you even thought how much better things would be if people actually gave this a higher priority?
About Mozilla, there are lots of things that went wrong, and not many of them were due to fixing UX annoying bugs.
Who defines it? The business. Opportunity cost is a business notion (even if that business is making a non for profit OS software).
>The pride on creating a mighty fine piece of software should do it. I actually DO try to attack all the user facing (annoying) bugs on my projects, always. I may or may not be successful at that, but I'll never use "we are much better than 15 years ago" as an excuse.
So you "may not be successful at that". So why don't you stop 100% whatever else you're doing until you are successful 100% at that?
Because, obviously, you also need/want to do other things that you consider more important.
What I'm saying is: give the same courtesy to the makers of software you use.
>The bottom line is that I feel it's disrespectful to a user to tell him to put up with the annoying "life-wasting five minutes at a time" bugs, only because 60 years ago he would have been playing cards over candlelight instead of trying to sync his iTunes library.
Actually I find that the user throwing a fit is immature and disrespectful to what he is offered.
And you can see that sense of entitlement all too often in OS projects: "your software doesn't do X, or has the Y bug, it is crap, etc".
There are programmers that want to fix bugs, and programmers that just don't care. But it's not like the "just don't care" is somehow the prevalent attitude, or that bugs that are not fixed don't have a reason behind them not getting fixed (even if it is the simple: "didn't get to it, yet").
Neither are all those bugs "simple UX bugs" as you seem to imply, meaning that they have no backend or deep dependencies, or are trivial to fix. The bugs the article describes for example are syncing bugs, or bugs in working with video streams a non linear video editor. Those can be very complex and subtle, and may not even appear except in some very specific setups.
>It's like starting to pierce people with a pin and when they complain say "be grateful this is not the medieval times, because the pin would be a broadsword and you'd be already dead."
No it's not like that at all. For one, in this example you compare small pain now to bigger pain in the past. But what people get now is much more features (with some bugs), compared to less features in the past (with some bugs). So, if anything, it's exactly the opposite.
I do think that "don't care about UX bugs" is a prevalent attitude among software developers. I may be mistaken, but let's not forget you even used it as an argument: "those bugs are not that important", which is what compelled me to reply.
I believe that death by a thousand cuts is worse than death by a single blow, each time these bugs occur make a little cut.
And of course some of them might be devilishly complex or E_NOREPRODUCE, but I believe they are pervasive mostly due to the industry being focused on having more features before stabilizing old ones, because, you know, those bugs aren't that important.
(Hint: Multiply 5 minutes wasted by an annoying bug by 12000000 users and you have a million hours down the drain, each time)
Then re-read your response and see what a defensive crouch you immediately took. How that immediate defensive reaction led you to miss these points. Crying "complexity!" for things that don't work is not a solution. Time, money, education and understanding are required to implement a solution, and I believe that Scott is explicitly calling for the latter and implicitly calling for the rest.
"Calls to action to do better" are a dime a dozen.
You can get them in $5 self-help books, motivational posters and bs marketing gurus. For all I know, they come free with Cheetos.
The problems he describes are not because of some "lack of craftmanship". They are inevitable in large scale, enormous complexity systems, that also have to SHIP some day. Things that CAN get fixed, ARE getting fixed.
>Time, money, education and understanding are required to implement a solution, and I believe that Scott is explicitly calling for the latter and implicitly calling for the rest.
Saying that "Time, money, education and understanding are required to implement a solution" means absolutely nothing. At best is a platitude that goes without saying.
Do you or Scott thinks that the major software players do not spend time, money, education and understanding on what they are making?
Microsoft, one of the software makers he complains about (and he knows internally), spends tons of money on testing and QA. And it has some of the top minds in software engineering. Ditto for Apple, ditto for Google.
Business logic dictates they will do what they can get away with. If they can sell shoddy product (that looks good in the commercial or in the store), then they will do so.
Savvy users must suffer, or find a new system to use.
I think that you are expecting too much from he human race. We CAN always do better, but there will always be software bugs no matter what.
Humans will always make errors in judgment, planning or execution. Look at the Mars rovers, they updated the firmware on them once they were on mars. Do you think that they did not go over everything carefully? Look at anything which has been acclaimed to have been the greatest design or implementation ever and you can always find many same flaws with it.
I get what you are saying with the we can do better, but most people (including you) would rather be productive rather than going over everything 5 times and re-analyzing every design (analysis paralysis). Who could survive that grind? Humans need to be challenged and need to feel like they are progressing or their morale will be destroyed.
Things will not EVER change dramatically from this pattern. Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.