I hate software

This is a serious rant about the alarming drop in quality in software products caused by the exponential boom of the Web, resulting in system, drivers, plugins and applications crashes, freezes, hangs, slowness, and other problems. Indeed.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/i-hate-software.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

As bad as things are now on the quality front, I remember them being much worse ~5 years ago. I haven't seen an unavoidable system freeze in a couple years now, and those used to be very common on Linux desktops.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure things are better than they used to be. And I haven't been involved in computer stuff for very long either.

 

Best backup software in RollbackRX. Run under Windows, its a lifesaver! Windows would no longer boot after I installed software that crippled it, so I went back in time - and boom - everything worked again! If you want to mess around with Windows, this saves you from having to do a reinstall.

 

Do you love your wife then?

 

Software is good as always. It's made by humans.

I was playing with my sister Volfied and my sister was at level 10 and praying not to encounter that bug where the worm goes out from the screen.

 

I kind of feel the same about the quality of the software today: it is much lower than a few years ago. I think that the main reasons are:

1. Increasing complexity of the software projects, that will automatically lead to more bugs/problems. The vendors should learn that keeping things simple is a great way of writing good quality software, but unfortunately the users will sometimes push for more and more features in a single product, instead of using multiple products (see security suites, for instance).
2. In today world (at least in some parts of it) computer programming is regarded as something that everyone can do, even without too much training. And while it is true to some extent, that doesn't mean that all people that learn programming are also very good at it (as it is the case in any other kind of job). Hiring a programmer that says (s)he knows 5 programming languages might seem a good idea at first, but ignoring the proficiency in using them for real work might have unforeseen consequences.
3. Laying off programmers doesn't help either, because the projects increase in size, but the teams responsible with the development will shrink. That, coupled with ever shorter deadlines, also lead to lowering software quality; in order to meet a deadline programmers will be tempted to left some corner cases untested, hoping that nobody will notice; but in most situations, those cases are not so "corner" as someone would think.

 

Okay, this is starting to make me wonder if I've been living on a different planet or something...

 

Yeah this is just another problem of companies pushing out too many updates. It started with the Google Chrome update cycle fever and it spread like a disease. Same goes for Ubuntu. Why do they have to come out with a new release every 6 months? Why not have yearly release cycles?

 

Plus I'd add that most programmers are probably rewarded more on quantity than quality.

 

I feel the same way, and ironically was JUST talking about this with a friend last night!! I was telling him that most 'good' software is gone, and the new stuff is utter trash...

For example I want a good email client, that doesn't destroy my pocketbook. Eudora is gone, that was awesome back in the day. Dream, Becky, and Pegasus are mostly gone, or going. Thunderbird is dead in the water.

Whats that leave us, really? TheBat! is horrendously overpriced at $60 for the pro version for ONE version release upgrade? Outlook is absolutely atrocious, the interface was designed by a fool, and it isn't stable or secure. POSTBOX is about the only viable one, a rewritten Thunderbird Fork that actually works.. But why are our choices narrowed down to basically ONE product?

I remember running a small, super lean program in the tray that would accurately filter 100% of the spam at the port level.. It disappeared, and most of the integrated spam filters are lacking. Why did this little guy I love that sat in the tray disappear?

The good programs seem few and far between.. I tossed the WinRAR guys some cash this week, why? They keep on developing it, it's fast, 5.01 came out, and RAR5 is a feat in engineering. None of the other compression programs even bothered to keep up, much less fix any of their bugs or algorithm failures. So we are down to basically one usable product. Katz would be rolling over in his grave.

Oh, and I agree with the article.. Mozilla stuff is pretty much garbage. What was the last good Firefox version? 3.6.. That's right.. 3.6 was the last good version of Firefox, and we're on what now? 26.0.. 4% of all FF users are still running 3.6, if you can believe that. It's pretty lame I need to install FasterFox just so 26 feels fast. I need to edit config, and change scroll pixels to 100 so it doesn't feel like a 30 year old browser. I need to turn off hardware acceleration just so half the pages load run.. What a mess of a product.

Don't even get me started on AV's.. Bullguard, when I bought it - v12, it was fast, had a great interface, and was effective.. Then 2014 comes out, it's slow, buggy, and has probably the worst interface ever devised.. WHY?
http://i44.tinypic.com/svgqdh.png

Anyway, I agree with that dudes rant, 100%. Here's hoping the products I do use, stop trying to be something they aren't.

 

I would want to understand, why the web browser needs to be such large for a web page. Not video, not audio, just web. Has all them makers just say "all the people have ram, so worry not on what footprint is".

Should the 2.4ghz machine be slow now?

Topic is correct to mine eyes! In many more ways than one. Almost, get rid of internets, 1ghz machine is good enough for traditional use haha.

 

Bloat is insane these days, and developers seem to think it doesn't matter.

I was running Kaspersky on a test machine, and all told, it was chopping down my ram by nearly 500MB.. I mean - really? Give me a break.

Webroot taking 2.2mb right now. My email client 19mb, Admuncher only 2.8mb.. But yeah, lets make an AV take up half a GIG?

Please.

 

There are indeed too many updates happening. If you think about it just a little you will realize that software which undergoes a lot of updates says something.

That "something" is the software is defective. They can't get it right! The hapless user is a beta-tester. The programmers are trying to finish something. The programmers are trying to make something work. Well.. tell you what.. When you can make your product work then you release it.

I pay you (my programmers & engineers) to make it right from the start. And that is what you are going to do. If you need 3 more weeks to finish a feature, tell me now and then do it. But do not tell me the gig is finished, and then ask me to approve an update 4 days later. It isn't going to happen.

 

Eudora is still used by many including me who like its advanced filtering.

It works fine on win7.
Thre are threads on the email group about win 8 so i expect it works on that.

The email group on hades gets email question daily.

Just because it is not developed further doesnt mean its not the best email client for many people.

 

What can I say, you are probably using the bad software. My opinion is actually quite the opposite. I remember daily BSOD, problems with applications, drivers and games. Today? I do not even recall when I have seen the last BSOD as for the software, the only bothersome problem is that I have to or I want to update it time to time.

From the other viewpoint, they release too many updates, because they are adding more features, which users want. It is the same with Linux-Windows. People are happy, that Linux updates often, because they add more features and fix problems and then they are angry at Microsoft doing the same, they say, that it is flawed by design.

 

Yet another circumstance ... the developer gets it right, but microsoft changes something, and now the app won't work.

Example is the AX64 topic here.

 

A few years ago yes you could get a lifetime Lic for a good program and that is why they went under and sold out fo the most part.
Norton was pretty good but never free. Even though Mc afee seemed to always crash computers, they still charged and seemed to make moola too. . that is why they are still in buisness buying out the good companies that don't or didn't charge.

I like the Malewarbyte peoples approch. Free lifetime for those that bought before a certian point, then those buying after have to pay yearly.

For fun I was looking back on posts from 2002 this morning while drinking my morning coffee and what was posted back then compared to now. And who was here. Wish I could find the board posting before 2002.. from the old forum.

 

I disagree. Thunerbird is rock solid and very stable email client. And it is not dead in the water, it constantly recives security updates.

I honestly don't tnink you are giving email clients a fair review here.
Here are the stable and well designed email clients that we can choose from:

• The Bat! Professional $60 initial purchase and $42 upgrade every 2 years.
• The Bat! Home $27 initial purchase and $18 upgrade every 2 years.
• Postbox $10 initial purchase and $5 upgrades (I assume every year).
• Thunderbird free, very stable with security updates.

Now price wise TheBat! Professional is just about the same as for Microsoft Outlook. Maybe even cheaper. You pay $21 per year on average versus Microsoft Outlook $100 every 3 years which is $33 per year.
And there is TheBat! home of course and Postbox.

100% Agree.

I disagree. Just because a software is using lots of RAM doesn't mean it is bloated. As a rule actually, I prefer to use software that utilizes as much RAM as possible. What you need to look at is how much CPU is being used. CPU is the bottleneck these days more so than RAM. And of course how much I/O you got. RAM is cheap, RAM is just sitting on my laptop unused and farting and waiting for something to come up and utilize it. My CPU on the other hand is constantly being taxed.

I agree on this one but it also doesn't go for every program. Lets compare several different ones:

• Microsoft Office 2010 versus Microsoft Office XP
  --> XP uses less RAM (irrevelant), less CPU, less I/O; XP loads on my netbook 5x faster and doesn't slow down my computer to a crawl.
  --> Libre Office super fast
  --> Open Office super fast
• Antivirus early 2000 vs Antivirus post 2010
  --> Newer AVs are so light you can't even feel you have them installed. Bitdefender free, Avast, AVG, ESET, Norton all are supre light. Back in the days Norton would destroy your laptop.
• Firefox 3.6 versus Firefox 26
  --> Newer Firefox sets my Thinkpad T23 to a complete crawl, I can't run this pieace of ***** on a laptop that runs Firefox 3.6 without any probelms.

So yeah I agree with you. There has been a trend among non-security software to be as bloated and as full of ***** as possible. I mean I know storage is cheap but why the heck Microsoft Office has to be 2GB to install on my SSD while Office XP was 300mb? I just want to write a damn essay or do a stupid presentation. That's why I swiched from Microsoft to Libre Office. Same goes fro Windows, too much bloatware and I swiched from Windows 8 to Linux Mint. Microsoft Outlook, bloated and poorly designed and so I swiched to TheBat! and now Thunderbird.
Unfortunetly I cannot switch out of Firefox. For some reason web browser developers think that I don't need to have a File Edit View History Bookmarks and Tools menu at the top of my browser which I think is the most retarded idea ever (ie Chrome, Opera, IE). Sea Monkey on the other hand still thinks it is in the 1990s with the same oversized Netscape UI.

So now im stuck with Linux. Although I enjoyed Windows a lot more I don't have much choice. Im also stuck with Libre Office/Open Office and again not out of choice but because I can't stand the bloat. But that's okay, someone else is getting my money even if it is $14.99 for a CD towards Linux Mint team. They have done an excellent job and I am thankful for providing a stable platform with out of the box expeirance like Windows but with no bloat.

I can see myself in the future buying used Thinkpads and putting Linux on them for my primary computing and buying new Macs just for watch Netflix, using occasional software that's not on Linux or playing some games when Im boared. Hardware wise Thinkpads went down the trash too but that's for another rant. Windows also went down the trash and so did Microsoft Office, the web browsers and a lot of other programs. Thankfully there are alternatives that do most of the basic jobs.

 

Software and coding have been going downhill for a long time. No one writes efficient code any more. Having nearly unlimited disk space and memory have made coders lazy and sloppy. Not that long ago, a complete OS used to need a couple hundred megabytes, not several gigabytes. By themselves, an OS used to require a few dozen megabytes of RAM. Now requirements are in gigabytes. Simple apps that used to need a few kilobytes are several megabytes. Bloated doesn't begin to describe current coding. The argument "there's lots of ram and disk space available, why worry about how much we use" is a lazy excuse. One only has to look around in the physical world to see what that attitude has done. It still takes energy to produce and run these components. Yes, improvements in efficiency have offset a lot of the waste, but one still has to wonder just how much more work could be obtained from this hardware if it ran efficient code, especially if we consider bigger equipment like data centers. Digital storage space and RAM might be virtually infinite but the materials and energy required to produce and run them are not. Right now, computers and coding are at the same level that cars were in the 60s, fast, powerful, and wasteful. With efficient coding, they could do twice as much with far less RAM and disk space.

 

@noone_particular: sorta kinda agree. The current emphasis on 3D desktops and eyecandy is nothing short of stupid, and IMO irreponsible when you factor in the number of people stuck with low-end or legacy systems.

However, I will also point out that "coding defensively" often requires more RAM and CPU time. Things like try/catch blocks can be a source of overhead, and let's not get started on scripting languages. While I agree that a lot of bloat is completely unnecessary, you have to accept some additional resource usage if you want your code to be safe and portable.

 

I think it's very difficult to say whether one thinks that software has improved at all or not, or to say "Oh well updates are bad" or "Oh well more RAM has to indicate poor programming" without actually understanding how a program works at a data structure level. Doesn't really seem fair to try to judge it otherwise.

I would bet money that code quality has drastically improved over the last decade.

 

Maybe not objectively but practically I can.... My Office XP works on my 1.5 year old netbook like a bliss but my Office 2010 is like a snail. So a slow application is pefroming poorer than a faster application. In one aspect at least Office 2010 is inferior...
Better yet, Libre Office or Open Office or even Word Perct work just fine.

 

Is that the fault of code quality? Or is it feature bloat? I would call those two very different things.

 

Very much enjoyed reading all the comments on this thread BTW to you all, but if you think MS Office starts slow try Publisher (make a cup of tea time)!

As advancements in processor power and speed increase It's really annoying that new software programs and including new OS's just seem to gobble them up, memory too!

Windows doesn't seem to me to start or do anything that much quicker than it did in previous versions, including the software.

Note I personally have slowed down tremendously over the years , no upgrades have ever been issued though with regards to hardware or software!

Maybe we're just meant to run/work at a certain speed because anything faster could be dangerous, or what if that's just what they want and the old adage 'keep them hungry'!

LOL, Ian.

 

That may be more indicative of the introduction of the WDDM and the removal of the audio HAL starting with Vista than the quality of the software, at least with games anyway.