While it may be true that most Word users use only 10% of the program's features, they don't all use the same 10%. If you were to create a simple word processor that only had 10% of Word's features, which 10% would you pick? The 10% you use?
It's the obscure features that make a product popular and hard to displace. A small fraction of Word's users use Word to create documents with complex mathematical formulas, but those users have to have something like the EQ field or the Equation Editor. Most users have no idea what either of those features are, but most users have some backwoods feature they do depend on to make better looking documents quickly. They will never willingly switch to a product that doesn't have their pet feature.
The same is true of other products. Have you ever looked at a new email client that did some useful things your current client doesn't but lacked some minor feature you're sure you can't live without? Did you willingly switch anyway? Most users won't.
Simply requiring that this simplified word processor does a good job of importing documents requires that it be complex. When you open a document in a product that doesn't support the original application's full feature set, and your document doesn't come through looking just like it did originally, do you say, "Gosh, I guess I shouldn't have used a feature outside of the universal 10%" or do you say "this product and its crappy import filter are useless, give me the real thing even if it is bloated and cumbersome."
Complex cumbersome apps are a big problem, but it's hopelessly naive to think the solution is to just write a new product with fewer features. It doesn't work. Even Microsoft tried that strategy once - Microsoft Write for Macintosh. It was a trimmed down version of Word 3.0 that sold for about half of Word's price. Sounds great, right? But Microsoft couldn't give it away.
If you want to design a new product to replace a high-powered popular product, you need to build something that supports a superset of the feature set and does it in a more elegant, intuitive manner, where "intuitive" means "easily figured out by current users of the big ugly product". Anyone who thinks that's easy to do has never tried. Of course there's a $billion a year waiting for anyone who can do it.
Hemos says: "... just because I can download something doesn't mean I don't want the CD as well."
That may be true for most people today, but what happens when it becomes just as easy to play MP3s as it is to play CDs? There are already portable players which do a better job at providing music while exercising that a Walkman ever did. How long will it be before there are stereo components that play straight from the Internet? Or car players that play from hundreds of hours of music stored on cheap user-writeable media? And they tell you what's playing instead of just a track number?
It worries me that there are now signs that movies are going to get MP3'd. If we don't figure out a way to bring the entertainment industry (or a more modern replacement) into the digital age without cutting off their revenue stream, then before too long the only new content being produced will be Coke and Pepsi commercials.
Cover art won't save CDs the same way that cover art didn't save LPs. The popularization of CDs put an end to creative packaging. For a great example, compare Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" on LP and CD.
Even CDs that try to provide as much as LPs did end up giving you postage stamp art and lyrics in unreadably small type. But that wasn't enough to save LPs. CDs offer generally better fidelity, better media life and far more convenience.
Beside, why do you need great packaging when you can go to the artist's web site and get much more information than can be packed even onto an elaborate LP package?
Maybe VSS is an OK system for projects where there are very few developers, or only one person per source file, but it's terrible for working on a team project where everyone is competent enough to make changes to the entire source tree.
Support for multiple people editing the same file was added as an after thought, and it shows. For example, you can't check out a file without updating it first. Of course, if you have to update one file, then you probably have to update them all. This is really annoying if you're not current and need to change another file and not ready to update. Maybe the build is currently broken and you'd like to keep working while things are getting fixed. Or maybe you want to get your stuff working before dealing with the big merge you know you'll have to do when you update.
VSS also doesn't delete files that have been renamed or removed, so it's a big manual hassle to go through and clean out dead files.
It's also really frustrating that VSS hides everything in cryptically named files. Suppose you want to know who added or edited a specific line of code? You can't just look at the diff log, you have to manually run diffs between versions until you find the edit.
Finally, if you're going to complain about command line tools, I don't see how you can like VSS. Its command-line origins are clearly visible. There are many operations that can't be performed via the GUI, you have to drop back to the command line.
I don't know much about CVS, but I do know that if you think VSS is a good solution, you've never used a good source control system.
Movie and book spoilers abound. You've been warned...
I find it very boring to hear people whine about what a terrible job a 2-hour movie does of conveying a good 1000-page book. Well, duh. If a 1000-page book could be made into a 2-hour movie, then there wasn't much to the book to begin with.
And frankly, BE wasn't a very good book. I just recently read it for the first time. After I finished the first third (which is what's covered in the movie), I quickly began wondering why I continued reading it. The last two thirds of the book was tediously over-simplified and nearly as boring as the L. Ron intro explaining how his brilliant writing saved science fiction from obscurity.
Many of the things that people complain about in the movie were straight from the book: stupid aliens who dominate the universe, 1000-year-old paper still readable, gold-crazy aliens who miss obvious piles of the stuff and the implausible breathe-gas radiation interaction.
How about all of the stupid things from the book the movie didn't take: secret pea-sized thought control implants, pervasive technology kept secret for thousand of years from numerous advanced races unraveled by a self-educated savage in a month, a entire species of bankers descended from sharks, aliens with instantaneous transport technology bothering to mine a hostile planet with an unbreathable atmosphere using manual labor, a human confederation that overpowers a vastly superior alien force and yet fails to prevent, or even really notice, that their government has been taken over by one greedy idiot.
That said, here are the good things about the movie:
1. It picked the right third of the book to cover.
2. It captured the major plot points of the portion of the book that it covered.
3. It made reasonable simplifications of the plot and took appropriate liberties to shorten the story into 2 hours, especially when compared with the equally ridiculous simplifications that were made in the book.
4. I wasted a lot less time on the movie than I did on the book.
Mr. Thompson derides the software industry for the frequency of errors in newly written software. But yet he neglects to capitalize Internet. He mentions "IMB" as being a software giant comparable to Microsoft. He mentions "lawsuits by unreasonably customers." These are just the errors that distracted me while trying to read his article. How is it that he "shipped" this product with such obvious errors? Could it be that he had to bypass testing in order to make his deadline? Are we to take it on faith that his research and insight are better than his typing? It's ironic that an article that attempts to expose the evils caused by pressure to meet deadlines, lack of discipline and disregard for quality so clearly shows that those problems are in fact not limited to the software industry.
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There's no "d" in "refrigerators", whether or not they run on Windows.
/. for over 3 minutes.
- Mocking arrogant sigs on
While it may be true that most Word users use only 10% of the program's features, they don't all use the same 10%. If you were to create a simple word processor that only had 10% of Word's features, which 10% would you pick? The 10% you use?
It's the obscure features that make a product popular and hard to displace. A small fraction of Word's users use Word to create documents with complex mathematical formulas, but those users have to have something like the EQ field or the Equation Editor. Most users have no idea what either of those features are, but most users have some backwoods feature they do depend on to make better looking documents quickly. They will never willingly switch to a product that doesn't have their pet feature.
The same is true of other products. Have you ever looked at a new email client that did some useful things your current client doesn't but lacked some minor feature you're sure you can't live without? Did you willingly switch anyway? Most users won't.
Simply requiring that this simplified word processor does a good job of importing documents requires that it be complex. When you open a document in a product that doesn't support the original application's full feature set, and your document doesn't come through looking just like it did originally, do you say, "Gosh, I guess I shouldn't have used a feature outside of the universal 10%" or do you say "this product and its crappy import filter are useless, give me the real thing even if it is bloated and cumbersome."
Complex cumbersome apps are a big problem, but it's hopelessly naive to think the solution is to just write a new product with fewer features. It doesn't work. Even Microsoft tried that strategy once - Microsoft Write for Macintosh. It was a trimmed down version of Word 3.0 that sold for about half of Word's price. Sounds great, right? But Microsoft couldn't give it away.
If you want to design a new product to replace a high-powered popular product, you need to build something that supports a superset of the feature set and does it in a more elegant, intuitive manner, where "intuitive" means "easily figured out by current users of the big ugly product". Anyone who thinks that's easy to do has never tried. Of course there's a $billion a year waiting for anyone who can do it.
I buy one of just about everything Apple makes and I've pretty much given up on supporting local Apple dealers. One-click rules.
Hemos says: "... just because I can download something doesn't mean I don't want the CD as well."
That may be true for most people today, but what happens when it becomes just as easy to play MP3s as it is to play CDs? There are already portable players which do a better job at providing music while exercising that a Walkman ever did. How long will it be before there are stereo components that play straight from the Internet? Or car players that play from hundreds of hours of music stored on cheap user-writeable media? And they tell you what's playing instead of just a track number?
It worries me that there are now signs that movies are going to get MP3'd. If we don't figure out a way to bring the entertainment industry (or a more modern replacement) into the digital age without cutting off their revenue stream, then before too long the only new content being produced will be Coke and Pepsi commercials.
Cover art won't save CDs the same way that cover art didn't save LPs. The popularization of CDs put an end to creative packaging. For a great example, compare Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" on LP and CD.
Even CDs that try to provide as much as LPs did end up giving you postage stamp art and lyrics in unreadably small type. But that wasn't enough to save LPs. CDs offer generally better fidelity, better media life and far more convenience.
Beside, why do you need great packaging when you can go to the artist's web site and get much more information than can be packed even onto an elaborate LP package?
Maybe VSS is an OK system for projects where there are very few developers, or only one person per source file, but it's terrible for working on a team project where everyone is competent enough to make changes to the entire source tree.
Support for multiple people editing the same file was added as an after thought, and it shows. For example, you can't check out a file without updating it first. Of course, if you have to update one file, then you probably have to update them all. This is really annoying if you're not current and need to change another file and not ready to update. Maybe the build is currently broken and you'd like to keep working while things are getting fixed. Or maybe you want to get your stuff working before dealing with the big merge you know you'll have to do when you update.
VSS also doesn't delete files that have been renamed or removed, so it's a big manual hassle to go through and clean out dead files.
It's also really frustrating that VSS hides everything in cryptically named files. Suppose you want to know who added or edited a specific line of code? You can't just look at the diff log, you have to manually run diffs between versions until you find the edit.
Finally, if you're going to complain about command line tools, I don't see how you can like VSS. Its command-line origins are clearly visible. There are many operations that can't be performed via the GUI, you have to drop back to the command line.
I don't know much about CVS, but I do know that if you think VSS is a good solution, you've never used a good source control system.
I find it very boring to hear people whine about what a terrible job a 2-hour movie does of conveying a good 1000-page book. Well, duh. If a 1000-page book could be made into a 2-hour movie, then there wasn't much to the book to begin with.
And frankly, BE wasn't a very good book. I just recently read it for the first time. After I finished the first third (which is what's covered in the movie), I quickly began wondering why I continued reading it. The last two thirds of the book was tediously over-simplified and nearly as boring as the L. Ron intro explaining how his brilliant writing saved science fiction from obscurity.
Many of the things that people complain about in the movie were straight from the book: stupid aliens who dominate the universe, 1000-year-old paper still readable, gold-crazy aliens who miss obvious piles of the stuff and the implausible breathe-gas radiation interaction.
How about all of the stupid things from the book the movie didn't take: secret pea-sized thought control implants, pervasive technology kept secret for thousand of years from numerous advanced races unraveled by a self-educated savage in a month, a entire species of bankers descended from sharks, aliens with instantaneous transport technology bothering to mine a hostile planet with an unbreathable atmosphere using manual labor, a human confederation that overpowers a vastly superior alien force and yet fails to prevent, or even really notice, that their government has been taken over by one greedy idiot.
That said, here are the good things about the movie:
1. It picked the right third of the book to cover.
2. It captured the major plot points of the portion of the book that it covered.
3. It made reasonable simplifications of the plot and took appropriate liberties to shorten the story into 2 hours, especially when compared with the equally ridiculous simplifications that were made in the book.
4. I wasted a lot less time on the movie than I did on the book.
Mr. Thompson derides the software industry for the frequency of errors in newly written software. But yet he neglects to capitalize Internet. He mentions "IMB" as being a software giant comparable to Microsoft. He mentions "lawsuits by unreasonably customers." These are just the errors that distracted me while trying to read his article. How is it that he "shipped" this product with such obvious errors? Could it be that he had to bypass testing in order to make his deadline? Are we to take it on faith that his research and insight are better than his typing? It's ironic that an article that attempts to expose the evils caused by pressure to meet deadlines, lack of discipline and disregard for quality so clearly shows that those problems are in fact not limited to the software industry.