Software sucks because there is no demand for quality software - hence software vendors do not need to implement internal engineering processes which could ensure that the software is good (to a degree).
The problem happens when you get into the Enterprise "space", where companies are accustomed to spending huge amounts of money for products that are engineered to be bulletproof. Then they settle for products which were coded the same way consumer companies coded their freeware.
Here's how to solve this problem: Company X claims they sell "unbreakable" software. Their software breaks. They get their asses sued off, or handed to them by their competitors. **IF** their competitors use an engineering process to write their software, and IF they can show that process, and prove it to their customers that they use it, and show, with numbers, how it helps. In other words, act like a REAL software company, instead of just another dotcom trying to make a quick buck before another dotcom is tricked into buying them.
What do I mean by "engineering process?" http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html (o r comparable methods)
Yes, it costs a LOT more to do these things. But they work, and should be a great selling point for people buying software. Unfortunately, the main reason we had a "computer revolution" in the 80's and 90's is because software was so cheap to produce - because it was being written, compiled and shipped. Not engineered. If there was a demand for quality software, then it would be worth it for a software vendor to use these processes to ensure quality. And it would be profitable, because they could charge a lot more. Some vendors DO this, and get their asses handed to them by other vendors who do not. Which brings me back to the original problem. STUPID CUSTOMERS.
So, stop whining about sucky software. Stop spending money on software in the "Enterprise" price range, without knowing that it is, in fact, Enterprise quality. Stop listening to Gartner Group and other ANALists. Stop reading lame trade rags. Their corruption is what allowed this market to degenerate and devolve to the state it's in today. Their job was to educate responsibly, and they failed miserably. But they did make a lot of money from SUCKERS along the way.
Re:This will be another solid update
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
WTF - OS X is *NOT* even supported on an 8600. I have TWO 9600's at my home, and I'm not stupid enough to attempt to run OS X on them. I run Classic on those machines.
What you're talking about is the equivalent of running Windows 2000 (or perhaps NT 4) on a 486 90MHz. Hell, even Win98 forbade installation on a 486 33 (but not a 486 66).
=- On the other hand, I've been running the latest OS X on my upgraded Beige G3. And it performs respectably for simple tasks like email, web browsing, file copies, etc. I only upgraded it when I wanted to mix it up for some video editing, so I plugged in a 500 MHz G4 cpu, and 512 Megs of RAM. That's the equivalent of putting a 500 MHz P4 into a 233 MHz Pentium. I reckon you couldn't even put that much RAM into a box that old.
And if you want to see a Mac that runs faster than it's Wintel counterpart - well, that's the whole point behind this G5 hubub. Apple has had a platform with a technology potential to leave Wintel machines in the dust since 1994, and never really quite lived up to that potential. Until today.
I'm especially pleased that they left the prices in the ballpark of "reasonable". ($3000 for the top-end system's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so sure $2000 for the bottom-end machine really is).
The other rumor sites are buzzing about resellers reporting the arrival of a bunch of very large boxes, with threatening notes about not looking at the contents until Monday - and a few people claiming they looked inside anyway, and saw G5 Power Macs.
hint: same company (different team) shipped a bit of software that was bundled with Win95. I know, doesn't narrow it down much.
I'm mainly just trying to criticize the 90% of the commercial software industry which operates under CMM level 0, and the idiotic customers who demand nothing better than that.
On the other hand, having to organize, coordinate, and participate in Peer Reviews slows the pace of development to roughly 10% of "normal" development.
I work in an environment where we do Peer Reviews, and I've worked, in the past, in an environment where "if it compiles, ship it" - and I'll say that even if the Peers occasionally miss problems in the Review - the coder who has to present it to the Peers has a TOTALLY different attitude.
I see code that's very carefully analyzed first, thoroughly commented, thoughtfully indented, module, class, and variable names, though generally longer, they make sense. People go out of their way to be elegant.
I think that Peer Review is probably MORE important to overall quality of the end product, than developer experience. That's just my opinion, but after living the chaos that was a non-peer reviewed environment for 10 years, the attitudes, etc. there's really a huge difference.
It's even better if the Review team reserves the right, by convention, to give the presenter a wedgie if they don't like their code.
If one has strong personal convictions, and one's employer tells them to violate those personal convictions, then one is a FUCKING HYPOCRITE if they do not tell their employer to go to hell. Especially when the end result is undoing the genius that was the original constitution and bill of rights as drafted by our founding fathers, while pocketing enormous sums of money, and saying how great it is that our freedom allows us to prosper so.
In my opinion, it's subversive, evil, and treasonous, and such individuals would serve society best dancing on the end of a rope.
I'm a Mac O Phile, and I'm *not* willing to pay a premium for the "newest" thing from the big A.
I'm still running a beige G3 (upgraded) and I'll be dang-diddly-doodled if I'm going to pay more than $1000 for a CPU with last-century's memory bus technology.
Now, for the G5, if it's everything Ars has been hyping it up to be, I guess I'd pay upwards of about $2000 for a basic CPU, maybe $2500. (don't need a monitor, or big HD, or DVD-RW, of course - I gots all those already).
I'm sorry. I refuse to believe this was a simple accident.
Someone leaked it on purpose. Whether they knew they'd end up taking the heat or not. This is probably the biggest news in Apple History. (ie. After 19 years, Apple FINALLY lives up to it's potential).
Google's corporate ethic is diametrically opposed to Microsofts.
Therefore, Microsoft's corporate ethic will ALWAYS prevent a Microsoft Search Engine from producing reliable (ie. uncommercially biased) results.
Google's refusal to bias it's rankings based on ad revenue is it's strenght, and the very reason it become so popular, it decimated all competition. No matter how good your technology may be - if you poison your results with commercial bias, there will be roughly ZERO demand for that search service. Even if Microsoft leverages their monopoly to try to cram it down people's throats, it will still fail. Nobody wants another spam factory disguised as a search engine.
The Goal: Develop a system that's "just good enough" to make sure no other software company bothers to develop a solution that's better than NTFS, robbing our file-system out from under us, and eating our OS lunch. (see also: Sun, Solaris, Veritas File System)
The Precident: MAD (Microsoft Active Directory) (see also: the late, great NDS: Novell Directory Services)
I believe WinFS will meet this goal quite satisfactorily. Do you know of ANY other vendor working on alternative file systems for Windows? Would that not be suicide?
The question, much asked, is; Why does software SUCK?
The answer is Commercial Constraints on the development process. Yes - business pays the bills. But rarely looks to the future, in favor of making a quick buck.
Can purely academic software suck? Yes. Ivory-towerism leads to a steadfast refusal to meet user requirements.
Is there a middle-ground approach that might work? Certainly. But when it becomes a contest of egos between an Academic Founder of a company, and the MBA Suits to prove who's "better" or who has the "power" - guess who wins out more often than not? The middle ground suffers. After all, we're only human, aren't we?
that's not true at all. While in general, newer software versions lead to improvements, there are many examples out there of points in the evolution of an application where it just took a bad turn somewhere, and never found it's way back.
Sure, there are new features, which, when compared to the competition, are MUST HAVES, but when compared to the old software, which just plain does what you needed it to do and did it well.
Software gets bloated with undesirable crap, often at the behest of Marketers, Lawyers, and Accountants, rather than Engineers. So when you have LAWS written by Industry Lobbyists and the politicians who answer to them, (instead of politicians who answer to their voting constinuency), of COURSE you'll get unwanted feature-creep.
... not just that - lately, I've been TERRIFIED to actually allow Software Update to run on my mac. Each update, including the security updates, has been worse than the last - they break shit. Lots of shit.
Apple REALLY needs to include an update rollback mechanism.
I used to work for a vendor that had a Windows-only Enterprise product. (don't want to say too much). We decided to port to Solaris, at the request of a few customers who wanted to scale our product a tad higher than the WIndows platform would allow.
After two years, we shipped the Solaris product. After one year of shipping, we discovered a memory leak. After another year of devoting nontrivial developer resources to the problem, buying Purify, etc, tracing the problem back to Sun's compiler, upgrading the compiler, testing, seeing the problem not go away, switching to a third-party memory manager, which had a WORSE memory leak, we cut our losses and abandoned Solaris.
True - the developer team had a lot of Windows talent, not a lot of Solaris/Unix talent - and even had a couple of nasty anti-Unix bigots. But we actually went out and hired a few Unix guys who were, in my opinion, very sharp. But it wasn't enough, apparently. I will say that this was an extremely complicated product.
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That's bullshit.
It's not complexity that makes software suck.
It's the inability of a given development team to handle the complexity they created.
Complexity can be managed - if done properly. But nobody cares about doing it properly when there's a quick buck to be made.
It's that same question ALL OVER AGAIN.
o r comparable methods)
Software sucks because there is no demand for quality software - hence software vendors do not need to implement internal engineering processes which could ensure that the software is good (to a degree).
The problem happens when you get into the Enterprise "space", where companies are accustomed to spending huge amounts of money for products that are engineered to be bulletproof.
Then they settle for products which were coded the same way consumer companies coded their freeware.
Here's how to solve this problem:
Company X claims they sell "unbreakable" software.
Their software breaks.
They get their asses sued off, or handed to them by their competitors. **IF** their competitors use an engineering process to write their software, and IF they can show that process, and prove it to their customers that they use it, and show, with numbers, how it helps.
In other words, act like a REAL software company, instead of just another dotcom trying to make a quick buck before another dotcom is tricked into buying them.
What do I mean by "engineering process?"
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
(
Yes, it costs a LOT more to do these things. But they work, and should be a great selling point for people buying software. Unfortunately, the main reason we had a "computer revolution" in the 80's and 90's is because software was so cheap to produce - because it was being written, compiled and shipped. Not engineered.
If there was a demand for quality software, then it would be worth it for a software vendor to use these processes to ensure quality. And it would be profitable, because they could charge a lot more. Some vendors DO this, and get their asses handed to them by other vendors who do not. Which brings me back to the original problem. STUPID CUSTOMERS.
So, stop whining about sucky software.
Stop spending money on software in the "Enterprise" price range, without knowing that it is, in fact, Enterprise quality.
Stop listening to Gartner Group and other ANALists. Stop reading lame trade rags. Their corruption is what allowed this market to degenerate and devolve to the state it's in today. Their job was to educate responsibly, and they failed miserably. But they did make a lot of money from SUCKERS along the way.
WTF -
OS X is *NOT* even supported on an 8600.
I have TWO 9600's at my home, and I'm not stupid enough to attempt to run OS X on them. I run Classic on those machines.
What you're talking about is the equivalent of running Windows 2000 (or perhaps NT 4) on a 486 90MHz. Hell, even Win98 forbade installation on a 486 33 (but not a 486 66).
=-
On the other hand, I've been running the latest OS X on my upgraded Beige G3. And it performs respectably for simple tasks like email, web browsing, file copies, etc. I only upgraded it when I wanted to mix it up for some video editing, so I plugged in a 500 MHz G4 cpu, and 512 Megs of RAM. That's the equivalent of putting a 500 MHz P4 into a 233 MHz Pentium. I reckon you couldn't even put that much RAM into a box that old.
And if you want to see a Mac that runs faster than it's Wintel counterpart - well, that's the whole point behind this G5 hubub. Apple has had a platform with a technology potential to leave Wintel machines in the dust since 1994, and never really quite lived up to that potential. Until today.
I'm especially pleased that they left the prices in the ballpark of "reasonable". ($3000 for the top-end system's pretty reasonable, but I'm not so sure $2000 for the bottom-end machine really is).
Basically, I think most of the people voting these days have forgotten reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" back in Jr. High School.
The other rumor sites are buzzing about resellers reporting the arrival of a bunch of very large boxes, with threatening notes about not looking at the contents until Monday - and a few people claiming they looked inside anyway, and saw G5 Power Macs.
That damn cat just won't get back into the bag.
tee-hee.
hint: same company (different team) shipped a bit of software that was bundled with Win95.
I know, doesn't narrow it down much.
I'm mainly just trying to criticize the 90% of the commercial software industry which operates under CMM level 0, and the idiotic customers who demand nothing better than that.
On the other hand, having to organize, coordinate, and participate in Peer Reviews slows the pace of development to roughly 10% of "normal" development.
I work in an environment where we do Peer Reviews, and I've worked, in the past, in an environment where "if it compiles, ship it" - and I'll say that even if the Peers occasionally miss problems in the Review - the coder who has to present it to the Peers has a TOTALLY different attitude.
I see code that's very carefully analyzed first, thoroughly commented, thoughtfully indented, module, class, and variable names, though generally longer, they make sense. People go out of their way to be elegant.
I think that Peer Review is probably MORE important to overall quality of the end product, than developer experience. That's just my opinion, but after living the chaos that was a non-peer reviewed environment for 10 years, the attitudes, etc. there's really a huge difference.
It's even better if the Review team reserves the right, by convention, to give the presenter a wedgie if they don't like their code.
If one has strong personal convictions, and one's employer tells them to violate those personal convictions, then one is a FUCKING HYPOCRITE if they do not tell their employer to go to hell. Especially when the end result is undoing the genius that was the original constitution and bill of rights as drafted by our founding fathers, while pocketing enormous sums of money, and saying how great it is that our freedom allows us to prosper so.
In my opinion, it's subversive, evil, and treasonous, and such individuals would serve society best dancing on the end of a rope.
"Senator Hatch's web site is not commercial in any meaningful sense;"
Obviously, you haven't been paying attention to American politics for the past, oh, say, 200 years.
I'm a Mac O Phile, and I'm *not* willing to pay a premium for the "newest" thing from the big A.
I'm still running a beige G3 (upgraded) and I'll be dang-diddly-doodled if I'm going to pay more than $1000 for a CPU with last-century's memory bus technology.
Now, for the G5, if it's everything Ars has been hyping it up to be, I guess I'd pay upwards of about $2000 for a basic CPU, maybe $2500. (don't need a monitor, or big HD, or DVD-RW, of course - I gots all those already).
I'm sorry. I refuse to believe this was a simple accident.
Someone leaked it on purpose. Whether they knew they'd end up taking the heat or not. This is probably the biggest news in Apple History.
(ie. After 19 years, Apple FINALLY lives up to it's potential).
Google's corporate ethic is diametrically opposed to Microsofts.
Therefore, Microsoft's corporate ethic will ALWAYS prevent a Microsoft Search Engine from producing reliable (ie. uncommercially biased) results.
Google's refusal to bias it's rankings based on ad revenue is it's strenght, and the very reason it become so popular, it decimated all competition. No matter how good your technology may be - if you poison your results with commercial bias, there will be roughly ZERO demand for that search service. Even if Microsoft leverages their monopoly to try to cram it down people's throats, it will still fail. Nobody wants another spam factory disguised as a search engine.
The difference is that USB 2.0 High Speed goes to 11.
How do you distinguish ANY of these traits from simple poor motivation?
Um - I think I can confidently diagnose you of having an acute case of hypochondria.
The Goal:
Develop a system that's "just good enough" to make sure no other software company bothers to develop a solution that's better than NTFS, robbing our file-system out from under us, and eating our OS lunch.
(see also: Sun, Solaris, Veritas File System)
The Precident:
MAD (Microsoft Active Directory)
(see also: the late, great NDS: Novell Directory Services)
I believe WinFS will meet this goal quite satisfactorily. Do you know of ANY other vendor working on alternative file systems for Windows? Would that not be suicide?
The question, much asked, is;
Why does software SUCK?
The answer is Commercial Constraints on the development process.
Yes - business pays the bills. But rarely looks to the future, in favor of making a quick buck.
Can purely academic software suck? Yes. Ivory-towerism leads to a steadfast refusal to meet user requirements.
Is there a middle-ground approach that might work?
Certainly.
But when it becomes a contest of egos between an Academic Founder of a company, and the MBA Suits to prove who's "better" or who has the "power" - guess who wins out more often than not? The middle ground suffers. After all, we're only human, aren't we?
that's not true at all.
While in general, newer software versions lead to improvements, there are many examples out there of points in the evolution of an application where it just took a bad turn somewhere, and never found it's way back.
Sure, there are new features, which, when compared to the competition, are MUST HAVES, but when compared to the old software, which just plain does what you needed it to do and did it well.
Software gets bloated with undesirable crap, often at the behest of Marketers, Lawyers, and Accountants, rather than Engineers.
So when you have LAWS written by Industry Lobbyists and the politicians who answer to them, (instead of politicians who answer to their voting constinuency), of COURSE you'll get unwanted feature-creep.
... not just that - lately, I've been TERRIFIED to actually allow Software Update to run on my mac. Each update, including the security updates, has been worse than the last - they break shit. Lots of shit.
Apple REALLY needs to include an update rollback mechanism.
Honestly, eliminating all traces of AIX from the world is about the most noble goal I can imagine.
(Currently working a project running on AIX - transitioning to Linux)
This would put Fox News out of business.
But a 12v car battery is just about perfect now for human electrotorture! Why did they have to go and change a perfectly good formula?
There's gonna be an awful lot of pissed off drug lords, thugs, and CIA hacks out there . . .
Yup.
There's our "tough on crime" Republican president.
I do hope you stupid m*f*ckers out there are planning on voting in 2004. This is getting ridiculous.
I used to work for a vendor that had a Windows-only Enterprise product. (don't want to say too much). We decided to port to Solaris, at the request of a few customers who wanted to scale our product a tad higher than the WIndows platform would allow.
After two years, we shipped the Solaris product. After one year of shipping, we discovered a memory leak.
After another year of devoting nontrivial developer resources to the problem, buying Purify, etc, tracing the problem back to Sun's compiler, upgrading the compiler, testing, seeing the problem not go away, switching to a third-party memory manager, which had a WORSE memory leak, we cut our losses and abandoned Solaris.
True - the developer team had a lot of Windows talent, not a lot of Solaris/Unix talent - and even had a couple of nasty anti-Unix bigots. But we actually went out and hired a few Unix guys who were, in my opinion, very sharp. But it wasn't enough, apparently.
I will say that this was an extremely complicated product.
www.orbital.com
See: Pegasus Launch System