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> Darren New wrote:
>> I'll disagree with this one too. In some areas, software is like that.
>> Not in all fields, however. When's the last time your DVD player crashed?
>
> DVD player? Actually never.
>
> [It does, however, fail to correctly play a number of DVDs that play
> perfectly OK in other players. And it was NOT a cheap player, by any
> stretch of the imagination. Panasonic too.]
In my and my uncle's experience, cheap players cope with crappy (and
pirated) DVDs better than expensive and good-brand ones!
> My MP3 player? Roughly once every 4 days. (And it HURTS when it crashes!)
>
> Then I took the firmware supplied by the people who designed and built
> the device and replaced it by something written by a bunch of Internet
> heads in their spare time who didn't even have access to the design
> specs. And you know what? It has about 4x the functionallity, and it
> never, ever, under any circumstances, crashes.
>
> Does that not seem wrong to you? That a bunch of guys in their spare
> time could do a better job than the people you paid money to?
>
What player is it? Is the firmware Rockbox? :)
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And lo on Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:44:31 -0000, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> did
spake, saying:
> scott wrote:
>>> If M$ made a quality product and charged a lot of money for it, I
>>> wouldn't have a problem with that.
>> The MS shareholders would though, because they wouldn't make as much
>> profit. It's the same as if Ford suddenly decided all cars were going
>> to be made to Rolls-Royce standards - not exactly a smart business move.
>
> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once
> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut
> down.
No it's subject to the same cost/benefit analysis. If I save $50m from not
installing some widget and worst case scenario is the company paying total
damages of $25m if 'found out' then you don't install the widget. If
people die because of that, then people die.
> However, for software it seems it's OK to sell a malfunctioning product.
It's not legal to sell any malfuntioning product, however you first have
to define malfunction.
>>> What I have a problem with is the fact that they charge a fortune for
>>> very low-quality products, and get away with it.
>> Last time I checked, a company was free to sell their products for
>> whatever price they wanted to. If they try to sell them too high,
>> nobody will buy them.
Unless they're a utility company their prices have to be checked with the
regulators.
> Well, sure, if there were an alternative, people would run out and buy
> that in their droves. I'm sure M$ would radically rethink their strategy
> if that happened. But it won't.
At which point we recognise the free market system in action when it comes
to monopolies, the company in question doesn't have to create a better
product then their competitors simply a product not bad enough to
encourage people to turn away from it.
>>> And they get away with it precisely because of the underhanded
>>> techniques they use to eliminate all competition.
>> Never seen any real competition for Windows.
>
> Perhaps not. (Does NetWare count? I don't really know much about it.)
and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.
> But what about, say, Word? There's quite a few other word processors out
> there - and in past times there were even more. And most of them were a
> lot more reliable than Word...
See above re monopolies. You buy the Microsoft word processor to go on the
Microsoft operating system because it's obviously going to work better.
Home users will use it as that's what they're used to and then you throw
copies at the educators so that the next generation is brought up using it.
>> Linux is certainly getting a lot better, if they could get people to
>> release games for it (like they do for xbox/ps3/pc) then they'd be a
>> strong competitor I think. Not used Apples much, but again lack of
>> games prevents me from looking seriously at it.
>
> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software
> decision.
Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)
> Linux is nice, but... well, it's fundamentally designed for UNIX nerds.
> So if you're not, good luck... Besides, I'm not convinced that the whole
> UNIX design is particularly coherant. (E.g., autoconf exists.)
However as has been pointed out here GNU/Linux has been set up for
non-nerds, the difficulty lies in good old inertia -
So you've got your computer and it's come with Windows pre-installed
here's another operating system, you've never used it before and it may
really screw your hard drive up do you want to use it, do you?
So you're buying your computer and you can choose between Windows which
you've heard of and every program/game you see is designed for, or you can
choose something you've kind of vaguely heard of before. Hey why not go
for the dual-boot option and just waste a ton of space on your hard drive?
At least we've LiveCDs now that helps so much.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> I don't know much SQL, but at least I know I don't know :)
So Greats once said "the greatest knowledge is in knowing that you know
nothing". That dude lived several centuries before SQL existed, and he
was right all that time ago!
> Although I'm
> definitely not as stupid as to do a SELECT * without WHERE clause and
> filtering what I want in the code! Geez...
At the very least you'd think they would be manually building a SELECT *
WHERE RecordID = 1376 for every query or something...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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And lo on Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:58:59 -0000, scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> did
spake, saying:
>> Any idea how many people are switching away from IE? Enough to provoke
>> M$ to start development work on it again.
>
> And yet funnily enough since Vista/IE7, I've seen people who previously
> were using FF now going back to IE - "well it has tabbed browsing
> already doesn't it?"
Exactly the problem, why install Firefox when IE has the same
functionality and is just there ready for you to use? Feel free to try and
talk about standards compatibility to the MySpace generation.
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> DVD player? Actually never.
>>
>> [It does, however, fail to correctly play a number of DVDs that play
>> perfectly OK in other players. And it was NOT a cheap player, by any
>> stretch of the imagination. Panasonic too.]
>
> In my and my uncle's experience, cheap players cope with crappy (and
> pirated) DVDs better than expensive and good-brand ones!
The player also takes an absurd amount of time to open the drive door.
Like, turn it on and press eject. Stand there with the DVD in your hands
for about 45 seconds before the door opens. Put the DVD in. Close the
door. Wait another 45 seconds for the player to decide whether there's a
disk in the drive and whether it's playable.
Sheesh. When I turn on my CD player and hit eject, you know how long it
takes? 0.2 seconds. Even if it's *playing* a disk it takes 0.2 seconds...
>> Does that not seem wrong to you? That a bunch of guys in their spare
>> time could do a better job than the people you paid money to?
>>
>
> What player is it?
iAudio M5L.
> Is the firmware Rockbox? :)
Yes. :-D
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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> I don't know what
> alternatives there are for DirectX for game controller input, sound,
> networking etc, but I'm sure there are some in use.
SDL = Simple Directmedia Layer. Cross platform, can use GDI or DirectX
on Windows, and a dozen different things on Linux (including aalib for
ascii-art on your console). Even runs on Amiga, Dreamcast, Atari... now
*that* is cross platform.
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>> Did you try using "Open and Repair" from the open dialog box of Word?
>
> And how do you do that?
In the open file dialog, there's a little arrow right next to the "Open"
icon - click that and you get some further options, one of which is "Open
and Repair".
> [FWIW, I did spend quite a lot of time researching the options. There's a
> Word experts website that tells you all the little tricks for fixing
> corrupted documents. Sadly, none of them work for a document so broken it
> won't even open at all...]
IME "Open and Repair" opens documents that would normally be unopenable. It
then gives you a list of document sections that are corrupt, and makes the
rest back into a working file.
> Yes. Because the only difference between IE and FF is tabbed browsing.
> It's not like FF is 98% more efficient or secure or standards-compliant or
> anything like that...
Most people don't care about that though, the only difference they see (IME)
is tabbed browsing, and of course the fact that some websites don't work
with FF.
>> Get a life away from computers :-)
>
> And that is an entire *other* story...
Hehe, seriously, did you ever wonder what it would be like to have a job
that didn't involve computers? I wonder sometimes ...
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> (And even Linux isn't that hard to work these days.
> Damn hard to set up, but not that hard to operate once you eventually
> get it working.)
hmm, what have you been running? Linux from Scratch?
Seriously, I've installed Ubuntu 7.10 these days and it starts from a Live-CD,
where you can browse the web while it installs to disk. The only interventions
it asked were to choose the language from a dropdown, the timezone from a
graphical world map and either choose to eat up all disk in a single partition
or do an assisted partitioning. 3 simple choices, all the rest automated. All
hardware (pretty standard stuff) correctly detected and set up with reasonable
defaults.
Play some file in a media player and if it doesn't recognize the format, Ubuntu
will offer to download a suitable codec. If you run a nVidia card, it'll offer
to download and install the official nvidia proprietary driver so that you can
run the composite window manager in all flash bang.
Only thing I needed to know was how to make the ADSL connection: Help browser
says you have to run pppoeconf from the command-line and provide it with user
login and password for your provider.
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Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:
> > If "programmers" like this were to ever get hold of Haskell... my God,
> > it's too horrifying to think about! >_<
> >
>
> (setq t nil)
(set! bTrue #t)
(set! bFalse #f)
that's the enterprise software developer way... :P
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Phil Cook wrote:
>> No - but selling cars which you know are going to crash at least once
>> every 52 days... well, if a company tried to do that, they'd be shut
>> down.
>
> No it's subject to the same cost/benefit analysis. If I save $50m from
> not installing some widget and worst case scenario is the company paying
> total damages of $25m if 'found out' then you don't install the widget.
> If people die because of that, then people die.
M$ is the largest and richest corporation ever to have existed in
recorded human history. If they wanted to, they could turn out a quality
product. It's not like it would cost too much to do it - it wouldn't.
They have more than enough money to do it. They just have no motivation.
They have succeeded in convincing the general public that it's "normal"
for software to not work properly, and there's no real competition to
illustrate the falsehood of this idea. So why bother making a better
product when you can just continue ripping people off?
>> Well, sure, if there were an alternative, people would run out and buy
>> that in their droves. I'm sure M$ would radically rethink their
>> strategy if that happened. But it won't.
>
> At which point we recognise the free market system in action when it
> comes to monopolies, the company in question doesn't have to create a
> better product then their competitors simply a product not bad enough to
> encourage people to turn away from it.
Indeed. This is what M$ does best - they create software that is utterly
awful, but not *quite* bad enough for mass migration to take place.
[Part of this equation is obviously preventing the emergence of anything
worth migrating to...]
>>>> And they get away with it precisely because of the underhanded
>>>> techniques they use to eliminate all competition.
>>> Never seen any real competition for Windows.
>>
>> Perhaps not. (Does NetWare count? I don't really know much about it.)
>
> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing OSs.
Really? That's news.
[Remember, until roughly Windows 98, I didn't even own an IBM PC.]
>> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software
>> decision.
>
> Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)
They make good stuff? ;-)
If M$ suddenly started making really awsome products, people would like
it. What everybody hates is being forced to buy extortionately
over-priced crapware because somebody has illegally exterminated all
competition.
> At least we've LiveCDs now that helps so much.
BTW, have you ever used a Windows Live CD?
If you thought it was slow running from your HD then... you ain't seen
nothing yet! B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!!
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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