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So I'd like to talk about the decline in... well I was going to say "software quality" but I kind of feel like that isn't right. Software since Windows 95 onwards has always been " a bit shit" but somehow things have gotten worse. Not in the sense we can do less. But that we seem to be breaking things quicker. Products that once worked but were "a bit shit" would on occassion receive updates that made them "a bit less shit". Now the opposite seems in effect. What is "a bit shit" over time becomes "completely fucking broken".
My own personal experience of this is with Apple products. I'm no fan boy by any means. My first exposure to Apple products was when in early 2011 when a friend donated a 2010 Macbook Pro to help me start my own software company. I was genuinely impressed. Build quality was good. Performance was plentiful for developing the web apps on which my business was founded. Having a unix like OS under the hood was definitely a step up from the Windows computers I had. It travelled the world with me and the software I wrote on it made me a relatively well off man. All told it did about 5 years of hard work with me all over the place and at the end when it could finally do no more I sold the parts off on Ebay and got a few hundred quid back (off topic, when I put it on ebay the met police phoned me up to ask about the history of the macbook as it "resembled one stolen from an embassy recently" to which I responded "but they all the look the same, are you seriously telling me you're phoning up every person selling a macbook on ebay?" to which he replied "... yep, that about sums it up"). Over its life time the software updates didn't do much to it. There wasn't really much to fix.
I replaced it with a Macbook Pro 2015. The build quality was again good but there just seemed to be a glitchiness to the software. It asked for updates more frequently and it was harder to tell it no. Dialogs wouldn't behave correctly to keyboard input. Programs that had ran fine for years would need assistance to work correctly. I was having to google strange behaviours more often to find workarounds. And, each update, would seem to just make the problems worse. Not so much it broke entirely. But enough that it pissed me off more.
Same thing happened with my phones. I had an iPhone 4S for many years and it was bombproof. Alas though I eventually changed to an iPhone SE and immediately noticed a drop in software quality. Keyboard not hiding or showing correctly at random times, scroll panes not scrolling all the way down, apps randomly closing, UI inconsistencies and just outright hiding or disabling stuff that you need. And again, each update seemed to just add more annoyances. The most recent of which is that now when I listen to podcasts using headphones the volume will randomly cut out for minutes at a time.
Other examples of the phenomena are: PS3 removing linux support partway through my company doing some product demos on it. The trackpad on my friend's recently purchased Lenovo laptop stopped working after a windows update. Another friend has a Samsung phone that now randomly turns on the camera flash after a software update. My business partner had a Macbook Air but that became unusably slow after an OS update. Numerous other friends who's Android phones from various manufacturers became unusably slow after a few years of software updates.
It just seems that the market incentives have shifted. The Internet, perhaps rather than being just a tool for delivering much needed software fixes. Is in actual fact, more of a tool for companies to fuck with your shit so that you'll have to buy a new one. Nearly everyone I have spoken to who has experienced these problems brought on by software updates has just shrugged and said "oh well, it was time a for a new X anyway". Or they'll advise "what you need to do is install this tool, then this patch, then roll this back, then reinstall the OS, then look at this youtube video, then get this DLL of a forum...". To which I reply "that is what I do for a living, for a lot of money an hour, you're literally describing a day of work that I won't get paid for to fix something that I didn't break in the first place, you're crazier than me if you're thinking I'm spending my Sunday doing that".
I'm now at a point where I genuinely wouldn't know where to buy a laptop/phone/tele or anything really that I could trust to work properly out of the box and not get bricked by updates in a year or twos time. My friend calls it "crapitalism". It's all the stress, misery and shafting your fellow man of capitalism. But also none of the products work and you can't buy fun drugs.
The only ray of light in this sorry tale is Nintendo. My friend bought a Switch recently. We have played through Mario Odyssey, In To The Breach, Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker and a few other games. It works. It works well. We are having "fun". It doesn't seem to need any updates. Or at least the ones it does need haven't broken anything that we can see. So yeah, fuck buying other things.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @03:47PM (3 children)
If it's more than a year or two old, the linux support (and sometimes the *BSD as well) is excellent.
(Score: 2) by lizardloop on Saturday April 06 2019, @05:28PM (2 children)
Whilst normally I'm a bit of suspicious of the "put linux on it" mantra I have found that a PC/Laptop matched to the right version of distribution with automatic updates turned off is probably about the most stable thing you can find in this world. I had a work PC with Ubuntu 12 on it for about 6 years and it was bomb proof. Alas I had to upgrade it to Ubuntu 18 in order to support a new project I was working on. It now crashes when I try to run Chrome or Visual Studio Code. Hey ho, it was good while it lasted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @09:11AM
I've fallen in love with containers for larger/more complex software. Running a minimal base system with nearly every GUI program containerized with whatever distro works best for it is really the best. If it fails on Ubuntu, I can try literally any other distro quickly and easily, with just a small price to pay in extra space used.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:41PM
Personally I can always revert to a working config with mxlinux. Remaster it with its GUI tools, after having installed the programs and config you need, and remember to save in places that aren't mounted on ramdisk, like Live-usb-storage folders. Every remaster is a checkpoint, every reboot is a restore to checkpoint, there is no systemd to randomize things.
If you use the frugal install (oppa puppy linux style) you find your actual partition at /live/boot-dev - you might have problems with programs who use your now ram based /home to store temporary files. I bind mounted home and Live-usb-storage on top of it. Remember to change pw of root and demo users before the remaster.
I am also very happy to be able to boot from removable media again, like in the floppy disk era. Also, how about booting to ram (boot option named toram) and removing your usb key? only a bios level malware can get you, all the rest does not survive a power cycle.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @04:44PM
*nix *nix *nix!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 06 2019, @06:42PM (3 children)
The companies have figured out that most people will happily eat shit, so they produce shit, claim record profits, and celebrate.
"Profit above all," contrary to the Gospel of Mammon, does not guarantee the best products. Indeed, human nature being what it is, it is more likely than not to generate rather bad ones, so long as a stable local minimum can be had with those bad products. Add in advertising--which is basically COINTELPEO-level psy-ops at this point--and various regulatory-capture distortions of the market, and well...you get this situation.
F/OSS forever. Use the source, Luke: it's our only hope.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday April 06 2019, @07:52PM (2 children)
Absolutely, which is why I advocate bringing back REAL competition. Why should Apple or Microsoft produce better software? Where else you gonna go...Linux? Not unless you know a geek or are comfortable doing stuff yourself because---SCARY---.
The local store that used to be family run is now a big corp store where no one REALLY gives a shit because they're overworked, underpaid and not owners, but WHERE ELSE YOU GONNA GO? The family run store is gone because monopolies are allowed to shut down and shut out competition.
Without competition, why compete?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:40AM (1 child)
Ironic, isn't it? Capitalism destroys itself unless well-regulated, because the profit motive is both shortsighted and deliberately ignores both human nature and physical constraints; humans are not rational actors, infinite growth is not possibly, and externalities don't disappear from reality as they do from the balance sheet. Unbridled capitalism is its own ileus, and eventually chokes to death from the bottom up on its own feces.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:49PM
Free market capitalism never happened, and if it did with some magical economic reset, then it would devolve in the same cronyism we see in nominally capitalist countries.
Same as communism, it never happened, it would devolve into Orwell's animal farm.
Those two are thought categories needed to bring about social democracy, a good cover for the plutocracy which you call capitalists and somebody else calls statalists by looking at other aspects.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @07:13PM (1 child)
It could last a thousand years.
Too bad about Apple... and Boeing. Both suffer the same managerial problems that brought down the space shuttle and countless other disasters we still suffer in every facet. The disappointing thing is that people know better than to allow this happen. Camelot truly is dead... for now... maybe we'll do one of those *out of the ashes* things and rise to new glory not seen since V-J Day.
They say that a million years is the blink of an eye to god.
A guy is praying to him, and the receptionist sends back a message:
He'll get back to you next week
(don't remember where I heard that)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2019, @11:39PM
It could be as quickly as a thousand years, but I'm not as optimistic as you are. It may be on the order of 10s or 100s of thousands. Otoh, N-day may catalyze the transformation (perhaps the humans will be shocked out of societal autopilot long enough to seriously think about how to solve the structural economic problems), but I think biological evolution is necessary.
Each time the humans will rise from feudalism, establish capitalism, and then regress back to feudalism (the likely result of N-day, and there's no reason to expect that there will only be 1 N-day on an evolutionary timescale). I don't think the destruction from N-day will be enough to regress the humans back to earlier forms of societal organization like hunter/gatherer or sedentary (dawn of agriculture) tribal organization, but I could be giving them too much credit. Each complete cycle from feudalism to capitalism to feudalism takes somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 years between emergence of empires iirc (not counting this cycle operating in multiple parts of the world independently). Of course, this is the first time humanity has achieved fully-realized, global capitalism so ymmv.
Even after N-day, Earth abides. If the humans wipe themselves out completely, though I don't think that's a likely possibility, then some other species will arise and undergo the same test: from wanderers to farmers, from farmers to warlords, from warlords to nobles, from nobles to capitalists, from capitalists to...
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:01AM (4 children)
In the '80s and '90s when computers were still kind of new and mysterious, vendors had to convince people that their product was easy to use and served a purpose. The more people they could convince, the bigger their market got.
Now people have mostly accepted the idea that they need a computer/phone/ISP for something-or-other. All the vendors have to do is keep stocking the shelves. Doesn't matter if they are selling garbage, because very few people are going to give up and go back to using an abacus at this point.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:24PM (1 child)
Oh they still court people, it's just that tech nerds are such a smaller portion of the market than they used to be, so most of the consumers don't know garbage when they see it. They just go for the ooh, isn't it shiny, isn't it thin? Oh, I can talk to it. It's sooo fashionable. I saw it on TV. *pukes*
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday April 07 2019, @07:36PM
The TI/99 was shiny and thin but random people who didn't know what a computer was for didn't line up to buy it. Now they do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:37PM (1 child)
vendors had to convince people that their product was easy to use
Heh, you'd think they're selling 737s...
Our computers are still extremely primitive, a horse and buggy (or an Italian car), and they are not ready for prime time. However, there is no better tinker toy on the planet. But that's all they are right now.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:09PM
> or an Italian car
Sad to recall that some people do not know how good Italian cars have been compared to the competition in the past and also recent past sometimes. But of course you might be trolling.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 08 2019, @06:57PM (2 children)
I would suggest that Software Quality on average hasn't declined significantly over the years. As opposed to the fact that it's subjected to much more punishment than in the past. Also, BASIC programming couldn't die fast enough.
The problem with making something of really good quality, is that you can't make giant piles of money on selling fixes/new hardware. So, at a certain level perhaps, what you say is true.
#1 Fix for getting a good TV. Don't get a "Smart" TV. You'll be happier.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:22PM (1 child)
Good luck buying a TV of decent size that isn't "smart". You end up having to buy a commercial signage monitor at maybe twice the price, and it'll lack OTA tuning and composite in for your legacy sources.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:13PM
Unfortunately, a lot truer than I first imagined.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"