I remember when computers used to actually work. Now, like everything else it seems things are getting worse. Adobe flash used to just work. Now it crashes several times a day. When it first started I thought it was a temporary thing and Adobe will fix it. But months later it’s not getting any better.
It seems like dysfunctional is the new functional and standards are dropping. I remember back when Yahoo Messenger used to work. It was a little app that just did chat and no problems. Now it’s bloatware and barely works.
It’s not just limited to the Windows world. the Linux KDE interface has yet to catch up to where it was 10 years ago. In some ways when it comes to text mode editors Linux has yet to catch up with where DOS was 25 years ago and Linux file permission are way behind where Netware was 20 years ago.
We all love Google but I just bought one of their “Google TV” operating systems built into my new Sony TV and to say it sucks is implying that it works at all and comes up to the level of sucks. When they said it was Android 3.1 I had an expectation is was as good or better than my Android 2.3 cell phone. It’s like it’s not even the same operating system. It’s totally incompatible with every other Android app I run. It’s like it’s a completely different operating system. Nothing I’m used to works. Shame on you Google!
I don’t know what others think but I’m getting really tired of things going down hill and that becoming the new standard. It’s like technology is reflecting the deteriorating state of society. Everything is going to hell.
My 2 cents …
I never have any of these problems on my Apple products. Maybe you should stop buying crap.
Cut the crap. I’m glad you enjoy your Mac, but its no magic bullet.
Its a computer, not an altar.
Yeah?! Software that used to work in Snow Leopard does no more in Lion. Mission Control is a total failure. WTF was wrong with scrolling direction, scroll bars and arrows in them? My MacBookPro used to boot very quickly with Snow Leopard, no more with Lion. It now randomly freezes and crashes. iTunes keeps asking me for my password every time. Battery life on my iPod Touch went to hell after the iOS5 upgrade.
great bait article, perhaps you need to chill a lil more, as the holiday stress is getting to ya and you need some stress relief. or more time to come up with a better article. 😛
Amen…
I have actually refreshed this page 2 times before i realized it is just a picture and not another crash ……
Flash has never “just worked.” Not even back when it was Macromedia Flash.
It was an incredible tool whos quirks we tolerated because it brought sound and video to the web in a way no one else had. We loved it because it wasn’t Realplayer.
Flash’s ubiquity is its problem. Using it to watch the occasional kitten video was never a problem. Needing it for half of every website is irritating and more failure prone.
PREACH IT!
John,
Your long and storied career in the Computer biz offers you a unique opportunity to facilitate the correction of failures like this one. Your reputation is substantial enough to get you a meeting with senior management at Adobe. Why not go there and call them on the carpet? Apply equal measures of carrot (they can be credited with relieving the suffering of literally millions of userss) and stick (you will pound them relentlessly in the media if they don’t). Few, if any, of your readers could accomplish this.
Who knows, they might even fix the problems (assuming they’re actually fixable).
Tenaya
What would be the point? Flash is dead, even Adobe knows it. HTML 5 will supplant it…eventually.
Stick to the trailing edge, where most of the bugs are known……
Best cure for flash and crashing is Noscript and adblock. If half the ads are flash and not aimed at me ( hey, there is a world outside of the USA, and it is not all “here be dragons”) why should I even give them runtime. Google got it right with the well placed and relevant text ads, and I even might use them.
Buggy flash and such, i have noticed the later versions of the player are less stable too, comes from doing less testing of the chicken scratchings that is the code it is compiled from. Fix one bug and break something, and introduce 5 new ones.
I’m likely going Mac on my next upgrade (I have everything else of Apple other than the PC) – although leary that Apple might drop the Mac line altogether and focus on portables, tablets.
Windows PC’s suck but it’s not only because of the spaghetti code buried in Windows or the Windows driver model. Plug in vendors push shit out before testing it knowing the internet is always there to patch shoddy work.
Anecdotal feedback on “In some ways when it comes to text mode editors Linux has yet to catch up with where DOS was 25 years ago”… Our secretary at work learned Emacs (on Linux). For several years now her complete and complex work flow is now done in it. Everything what she does hole day long for a large Department at the large University (many, many things). I’d say there is or was no other text editor with such abilities. Two side notes – she disappeared from demands on computer-help-pool (rock solid) and she has NO specific computer science education, just your average administrative assistant (easy to learn).
Yes, bait article – so I needed to bite.
Really? You’re saying a bloated piece of barely compliant GPL code is fantastic? Do me a favor, google around for editors that allow for real time collaboration over the internet. Emacs is on there. Why? Why should a text editor that is supposed to be unobtrusive (but requires exorbitantly long key combinations for keyboard short cuts) baking that in? Does your secretary need it? I would think not. Do most people who use emacs need it? No. And you’re only proving the point that emacs is a good operating system that just lacks a decent text editor.
tcc3 says:”We loved it because it wasn’t Realplayer.”
Ditto with your entire post but especially that last line!
Dallas says:”vendors push shit out before testing it knowing the internet is always there to patch shoddy work.”
WOW! I can’t believe I agree with Dallas! Seems hardly a day goes by I don’t get a notice to update a program or app. Used to be that was the way things worked for beta code. Now, every version. It’s so annoying I sometimes don’t update and, who knows, that might be a bad thing.
Didn’t Adobe announce the impending death of Flash? Maybe they’re starting to cut back on the developers that would be need to fix your version.
..I can’t believe I agree with Dallas!…
Well, you have a ways to go to redeem yourself but this is very encouraging. 😮
I agree that patches are really bad. In addition, I’m convinced these patches also add bloat to the extent of slowing down the system considerably., including boot time.
As far as Windows is concerned, it is unforgivable how shitty it is. The only thing that can save Windows is virtualization (start new and run all the legacy crap in a virtualmode)
To be fair, software seemed less buggy and patches needed less becasue the security footprint was smaller. Most weren’t networked at all, and even if they were internet access was limited or non existent. You dont need to patch things as often when you have to be physically present to pwn a box.
The complexity of software is tremendously greater as well. Its hard to test for the nearly infinite scenarios that might compromise your software.
Don’t read me wrong – we are sloppy and should to better. But recognizing the enormity of the tasks mean acknowledging that there’s no “finished” software.
This sounds like a Geezer Rant.
I’m with the author. There’s has been way too many Flash crashes on Windows.
Here’s the chant:
“Apple: Buy Adobe. Fix it!”
I totally agree!!!! Thanks for pointing this out. Thought I was going insane. Flash and Yahoo IM have become completely unstable junk. Also Firefox crashes all the time too (maybe related to adobe flash). AND I can’t seem to make a flippin Outlook-friendly appointment in my BB calender anymore. grrrrr
Mine has not crashed in a long time.
But it does beat having to copy and paste a load of text, run it through a binhex editor and then watch it as an avi for only 35 seconds.
Cursor_
I used to use Adobe Flash, then it took an arrow in the knee.
Digital is NOT ALWAYS BETTER !!! Most products ship with unfinished software – in fact the software is NEVER FINISHED !!! Just look at WinBloze !!! And they NEVER FINISH before the CHANGE MODELS and forget about supporting their older products – a BIG SCREW YOU to the customer ( and EARLY ADOPTER – A VERY BAD “STRATEGERY” AS “W” woud have called it !!!) So it looks like our BRAVE NEW DIGITAL WORLD will always be DISFUNCTIONAL AND WAITING FOR THE NEXT SOFTWARE “UPGRADE” (AND ALL THIS DOESN’T INCLUDE SOFTWARE CHANGES THAT COMPLETELY CHANGE EVERYTHING SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE AND RESET YOUR ABILITY BACK TO ***ABSOLUTE ZERO*** WITH THE PRODUCT – ANOTHER ABOMINATION OF THE DIGITERATI !!!)
More than most I spend my waking hours surfing the web and watching videos. Stability seems to come and go. I recall being frustrated a year or so ago and thought of going back to XP but I hung in there with my Win7 and Firefox and when I got a notice to upgrade a viewer, I grit my teeth, set a Restore Point, and did it. I don’t recall a single crash in the past six months. I think my last notice to upgrade was from a dodgy site about 3 months ago so I didn’t do it. I’m “in the groove” and happy.
You have to “put up with” that which you can’t control. Key to happiness.
Tick……tock.
Nice rant. No news though. This is expected because of how consumers are at currently. Quality is not what it use to be; not in games, not in software, not in any products. People’s expectations seems, imo, to be much lower from this generation than the early 80’s and 90’s, rather they are always shifting their focus (cause of internet surfing) that they don’t care much.
Take them at it is, you nor I can do anything about it unfortunately.
Why hasn’t anybody developed a good hard drive for Altair? Hmmm?
http://oldcomputers.net/altair.html
Overly tricked out apps have taken over.
Same thing happened to the Swiss Army knife:
http://www.techfresh.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/wenger-giant-swiss-army.jpg
I am using the Chrome browser, and I thought Chrome was crashing Flash.
Sometimes it crashes 7 times an hour.
When I refresh the page, Flash starts working again.
I learn something new every day.
Here’s my experience with Flash and the three browsers (using Windows XP). When Flash Crashes:
1. in Chrome, I hit the refresh button and if I’m lucky, it will work. If not, I just abandon the site.
2. in Firefox, the entire browser crashes
3. in IE, the entire computer goes down with it.
It’s all about the race to be 1st with the next new thing and then copy write that new thing so nobody else can make it.
Forget quality and reliability, as long as it’s 1st and out before any other new thing.
I will second that emotion.
Don’t get me started about Firefox hourly updates. Break all my plug-ins and then maybe they will be happy?
Well now that Adobe has killed mobile development it will just be a matter of time before they are completely moribund. Really, who are they kidding? If you can’t develop for mobile in this day and age, give it up!
Don’t get me started about Unity in Oneriec Ocelot!
Unity is great! I put the Ocelot on my wife’s netbook. Now she doesn’t have fourteen freecell games running with 5 or 6 Firefox windows with 7 tabs each while complaining how slow the machine is running.
Otherwise it’s kind of a pain.
Adobe makes fine bricks
Hm, not wanting to be a douchebag, but my Apple-Stuff still works ok :-P.
My windows 7 PCs work great. So does my android phone.
Whats your point?
What do you expect when every techie has to take a break every 5 or 10 minutes to check Facebook, Twitter, GMail, FourSquare, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Google Plus, Farmville, text messages, voicemail, financial apps, etc., etc., etc.?
As phones get “smarter” and data speeds get faster, it seems to take more and more time to keep up instead of less. And where is that time coming from? Not from Game Time, I’m sure.
Notice the people in the “That was so 12 seconds ago” mobile phone ads are never actually _doing_ anything, they just look at their phones all day.
“shut up slave”
I don’t think so. We are only slaves if we keep buying from these companies that push crap on us.
I got the 1st Droid and it sucked. battery life sucked, keyboard sucked… it just wasn’t a pleasant experience. I was on Verizon and was stuck in my wife’s plan. When the iPhone came out for Verizon I went to the VZ store and the first thing they said when I asked for an iPhone was “you should get a Droid instead”.
So I held up the one I had and said I tried that already. He said oh yea, they fixed all the stuff wrong with those. So I said they sell me a POS and then expect me back as a customer so I can pay again for the phone the 1st one should have been? I don’t think so.
I love my iPhone.
Me too. And so does my wife, daughter, son, son-in-law and EVERYONE at work that has one.
It used to be that a CORE, OS was just an interface to the WHOLE of the computer.
The core gave you access to the rest of the hardware..
Programs had to work around the core, to make things work.. SOME programs bypassed the core, and worked directly with the hardware.
NOW, the core controls everything. and you cant bypass it(at least they DONT bypass it). And the CORE tells the programs what it can and cant do.
Those old enough to remember DOS systems(not just windows) remember how OPTIMIZED things were, to MAKE THEM WORK. You even had to Adjust the core, abit, to get SOMETHINGS to work. THEN there were the games that BYPASSED all of this, and installed their OWN OS, and just WORKED…
most current programming is SLOPPY.
Im tired of useing an unfinished game…BETA WARE…Betaware is a program this is almost finished. Everything after is an addon. I think there is even ALPHA ware releases, which is the START of creating a program, NOT to be released.
Which is why i am still using XP and a palm treo 750 both do everything i need to do and with minimal aggravation.