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Honestly, there'S just too many things to fix. It's easy to believe with just a little better management or a little more attention to detail or more XP or what

Honestly, there'S just too many things to fix. It's easy to believe with just a little better management or a little more attention to detail or more XP or whatever all these problems would go way but the truth is it's just too damn complicated. 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

HyprMusic 14y ago
But his point is that we're spending too much time creating new features, and adding to the pile of broken layers, rather than focusing on getting each layer as close to perfect as possible.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  This is a trade off I guess. The issue is that "the market" is wowed by new features more than they are by rock solid software. This is because you don't tend to notice these niggles until you have been using it for a while. 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?
justincormack 14y ago
Start again with simpler stuff? 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.

HyprMusic 14y ago

But his point is that we're spending too much time creating new features, and adding to the pile of broken layers, rather than focusing on getting each layer as close to perfect as possible.

jiggy2011 14y ago
This is a trade off I guess. The issue is that "the market" is wowed by new features more than they are by rock solid software. This is because you don't tend to notice these niggles until you have been using it for a while. 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?

justincormack 14y ago

Start again with simpler stuff? 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.