Blink. Blink. Blink.

The cursed blinking 12:00. Here's a fun article about how the race for newer, better, faster has lead to technological tyranny. "There's a fundamental conflict between the seller and the buyer of software. The buyer wants to make it work. The seller wants to make it half-work and improve it next year." via Slashdot

Luddite!

I don't buy it. Here in Japan there's no such thing as the VCR setting it's own clock AND there's no such thing as a clock blinking 12:00. Why? Because the Japanese are not so fucking lazy as Americans and will actually READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!!!!

Take my cellphone for example. It comes with 2 BOOKS!!!. Each 200 PAGES LONG!!! Ask any high school girl in Shibuya how to do anything with her cell phone and she'll be able to tell you BECAUSE SHE READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!

It's easy to believe that computers are buggy because you only ever hear people complaining when they crash, not when they don't. So for example if 1 out of 50 computers crashes every week and you know 100 people using computers then twice a week you will hear an anicdote about how sucky computers are when in reality 98 computers worked fine the entire week. I'll bet one of those 100 people also had to have there car serviced. That's easy to believe, if you only had to get your car serviced once a year then if you knew 52 people, one person a week would have to get their car fixed.

I'm not saying there's no room for improvement. Sometimes though what can you do? There's a zillion people making comercial software, shareware and freeware crap all of which COULD fuck up your computer. They could replace a file with an older version. They could overwrite some file another program needs. I gave me sister a computer with an 8 gig HD. I was amazed when less than 9 months later SHE HAD FILLED THE HARD DRIVE with downloaded crap.

Imaging doing the same with your car. If you attached as many devices to your car and my sister downloaded into her computer do you really think your car would still run?

I also don't buy the nothing's been improved line. Nearly everytime I've upgraded a piece of software something has been improved. An example. Photoshop 6.0 (vs. 5.0 the version I had before) added Slices which I've been really loving for doing webwork. Now instead of having to work in several files I can put all my art in the same file, save and it will automatically cut out each icon/part and put it in a separate file.

Making software simple enough for your mom is also a stupid idea. First, it's been tried and it never sells. Can you still buy Microsoft Works? Second, making it simple enough for mom basically means making it only do what mom needs (which is why it doesn't sell). Mom doesn't need to do very much and so most people that actually NEED to do something need more than MOM. Hence it's more complicated than MOM needs.

Car analogy doesn't work for me

Or maybe it does. If you were to limit the car analogy to one person, then I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed off A LOT if my car's engine just shut off or didn't start for every time Windows crashed. Because Windows crashing happens A LOT more than I have to take my car in for repairs. And I've had it crash after a clean install before I even had a chance to load any software...

It's hard to argue that there isn't, at times, a fundamental disconnect between engineering and UI. Why else is so much written about the importance of UI? Why else are UI articles like the ones by Joel On Software so relevant? Because sometimes the engineer is the one that is lazy (or maybe just misguided).

If it's necessary to read 400 pages to use a cellphone, well, then obviously the cellphone better do a lot more than make phone calls, it better cook me breakfast, file my taxes (crap, that's coming up), and wipe my ass. ;-) And if someone wants to take the time to read and learn all 400 pages, then more power to 'em, but the practical features (in an ideal world) would be intuitive (or maybe require a little poking around).

Something I've been dealing with: a subtle case of technology vs. stability is FreeBSD vs. Linux. Here comes a religious war... Linux wants every new whiz-bang feature. It gets it. FreeBSD doesn't get every new whiz-bang feature. It takes several months (to never) to get these features into the OS. But FreeBSD is stable. So lots of people use it for their servers and are happy. Look at Netcraft and all the longest running servers are FreeBSD. Yahoo runs FreeBSD. Inktomi runs FreeBSD. What's FreeBSD? Most people have never heard of it. Because Linux is King. It's "cutting edge". Which is not bad, just not what it's hyped up to be (the solution to all your problems).

I don't think the article was saying nothing's improved (unless it did so in a tongue in cheek fashion like the rest of the article), but rather that there's been nothing revolutionary recently. Keeping up with the Joneses has supplanted off the beaten path thinking. Let's just add an MP3 player to my watch. Wait, I think I need an MP3 player in my camera. Feature creep. (Hehe, I'm guilty of techolust, I have a Casio WristCamera...) I don't think the article was meant to be taken completely seriously, just something to provoke some debate.

Yea but

I know it was a intented to provoke debate. So was some of what I said. I would be happy to crash FreeBSD for you ;-) Just use it like windows. Download every single program you can find for it and install, then fillup your hard drive and e-mail yourself more e-mail then your hard drive can handle. I can almost guarentee it will crash AND it will be VERY hard to get back into it to fix it (Because it makes the assumption that it can write to the drive even when booting which it can't if the drive is full.)

Okay, so you had Windows crash on a clean boot. Have you ever tried to start a car from spare parts like you made your computer? Trying building a car in the same way and you'll get the same results. Buy it from the dealer and it works. (once it a while you get a lemon). But one from Dell, same story. In the car, install your own stereo or change the engine chip for better tuning and you've just voided your warrenty. Do the same on the computer (install some random software) and for some reason Dell/Microsoft etc are expected to support you but the car dealer is not. Compare Apples to Apples. A computer is a zillion times more complicated than a car.

The only reason FreeBSD and Linux are more stable than Windows is because nobody runs anything other than about 5 programs on them. If you used Windows exactly for the same things you'd use Linux or FreeBSD for and nothing else you'd find it behaves *about* the same. Most people install 75 game demos, 27 free screen savers, 3 chat clients, 3 mp3 players with 48 different skins each and 25 different visual effect plugins etc... That's not how FreeBSD / Linux are used.

As for the UI thing I'm not saying that some UIs don't suck ass but he was going way to far the otherway. I don't want software my mother can use. (By the way my 86 year old grandma is using Outlook Express daily) I want software that can do what I need it to do. I'm not sure the two are compatible ideas.

I'm also not sure it can ever be fixed. The reason WebTV is simple is because 3 people made it. The reason Windows is complicated is because 100,000+ programmers are each trying to add something. They are bound to step on each other's toes. For example I couldn't e-mail some online merchant because he's using some crappy old e-mail client that couldn't handle whatever outlook sent him. Is that his software's fault, my software's fault or just the natural order of things (ie, 100,000+ programmers can't be perfectly coordinated.)

Car analogy still doesn't work...

My original point was that cars and computers aren't really comparable and you can make any analogy fit your argument. I mean, what is the OS on a car? A computer may be more "complicated" but the actual micro-workings (thermodynamics and flow) of the engine are probably less predictable.

I wasn't arguing that FreeBSD and Linux are more stable than Windows. That would be another war... I was just pointing out that there are two inherently different philosophies behind FreeBSD and Linux. Stability vs. Cutting Edge. Both are valuable, but which one gets the press?