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 …
So, message to Microsoft: stop trying to copy Apple and Google. Maintain focus on backward compatibility, reliability and giving people freedom to use their systems as they see fit (NO forcing App Store for Win8/Metro). Keep providing top notch developer tools for the your platform and, while your at it, don’t force us to use Metro on traditional desktop systems.
Adobe flash works okay, you just periodically have to go into your task manager and kill the task when adobe eats up 1.5 gigabytes of your memory, then you reload the browser again.
The garbage collection routines don’t seem to work or there’s an awful memory leak in adobe, or a simpler explanation is that adobe’s programmers are buffer-crazy and buffer everything for speed but forget that main memory is still not an infinite resource.
“I remember when computers used to actually work.”
Are you serious? You don’t remember how, a mere 10 years ago, if you didn’t remember every week to update your AV and scan, and defrag, your computer would grind to a halt? How 90% of the multimedia files online had to be downloaded to your system, and if you were lucky you already had the codec for them, but more often than not it was in some obscure one the poster favored?
Back then, sure, Flash was king…of Newgrounds for animation and games.
Everything today in computing is far better than it was ten years ago, but now we focus on the pointless little annoyances instead of the hair-pulling system killers. This is the exact same stupid nostalgic attitude of the “good old days” people try to claim in general.
Bell invented the telephone and it replaced the telegraph and now the phones are little wireless telegraphs…I do agree that flash is broken while HTML is not fully baked.
I was activating a MS computer today and it failed for security reasons. That was all it said.
It was up to me to figure out the time, date, and time zone were set wrong by the people that sold this refurb so naturally MS thought it was a pirated copy of the OS.
They wanted me to contact them using a modem on a machine without one that was connected to the net already. For some reason the controls on setting the time and date and getting it to stick are a kind of slovenly design in that you can do it without it taking.
Okay, I knew what to do as soon as it failed to activate but this sort of 12th rate design sucks the fun out of life and wastes time.
“It’s like technology is reflecting the deteriorating state of society. Everything is going to hell.”
As John and Adam would put it…that’s a fractal!
I’ve got two XP laptops and a Win7 desktop, with Adobe all over them. None of them give me any problems (well, Firefox has been a little cranky, nothing that IE won’t handle). Whiners.
I gave up on Adobe a few years ago. I used to use their Dreamweaver product after the bought it from Macromedia. They ran it in to the ground. The code it produced was garbage. The support sucked. Despite the fact that the product would crash and inject random garbage into the code, they would deny it was possible. And yet they want top dollars for their products.
Believe it not. Microsoft’s Visual Studio produces much cleaner code. And not once has it ever corrupted anything I’ve worked on.
Anyhow… I’ve had other run ins with Adobe trying to get support on what I considered basic items over the years, only to run into brick walls and refusal to even acknowledge product flaws. I don’t expect things to be perfect. But I do expect a vendor to at least consider that it might happen and help their customers.
Adios… Mofos…
My take on it is that we actually have everything we needed since the pentium 4. 99% of what average users need can be done on a pentium 4. I.e. web, music, pictures, movies, documents. So people need to complicate things to make people keep buying. Suddenly movies need to be hd. Documents need cloud integration and incompatible formats, music needs itunes and streaming, the web need “web apps”.
Now that everything is so complicated it crashes all the time. You need to upgrade! Upgrade to faster and LIGHTER laptops or tablets! With app stores!
What’s worse is that consumers actually buy this crap so they have to keep selling this crap.
Remember when you could actually navigate a website because they were developed in html and css? Not anymore! Now you need javascript, flash and php in every website you log into.
The P4 sucked. I avoided that entire generation. But you have a point. We do have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to horsepower. Even the cheapest computer is quite capable.
I was amazed at SimCity for my phone the other day. I remember when my *computer* had trouble rendering it.
Micrsoft, Adobe etc. should spend time making their products work better rather than adding new features. Stability doesn’t get the “oohs” and “aahs” at a trade show or press demo but consumers and IT people would be thrilled.
I own a company and work in the software development industry.
I can tell you in fact that most software quality has been decreasing continually for the past two decades.
The tools and development environments have becomes better, but the quality level of programmers has decreased overall.
I am a regular visitor to a large number of developer forums, and I have a view into the back rooms of a number of smaller and larger software corporations. I regularly see programmers with stupid ideas doing stupid things: no code commenting (many believe this ensures their employment); no team code or function sharing; unfamiliarity or abuse of APIs; attempts to circumvent APIs because they don’t personally like consistency between apps; moronic design ideas (installing unnecessary services to gain app functionality, etc.); lack of programming language understanding; etc.
Many years ago when I was an i86 assembler programmer the apps were more solid because a programmer had to know what they were doing. Now any idiot can get into Java, Basic, etc. and think they are a programmer because they can get a “Hello World” app to compile.
The second problem is the suits at the top. They want the product out as soon as possible with the minimal product viability, including bugs, to get the profit rolling in. Then they typically direct the programmers onto new and useless features for the next version(s) without fixing the majority of the pre-existing bugs. I use a variety of major software applications here from major developers, some that top $3500 per version, with bugs that go back a decade with no future plans to ever fix them.
It is extremely frustrating.
I am a developer and I can create amazing thing with any technology including Flash. I’ve herd enough whining about the flaws of technology from people that have trouble turning their monitor on; and yet these people write news articles on the subject. You don’t like computers, pick up a book instead.
Do you mean to say that HP will save the day?!
Is that why Mrs. Meg decided to release WebOS?
…Or are the “powers that be” just trying to push cloud computing on the public so that they can more easily peruse our data?
I don’t know. All I know is that I haven’t really trusted Adobe for a very long time. (Sort of makes you wonder just how well their PDF reader works or even any of their other apps too, don’t it?!)
For me, 99% of the time Firefox crashes Flash, then complains. This started happening when they introduced the feature that runs plugins in a separate process. Try setting dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to false in about:config.
Flash is not a very good example of technology getting worse. It is progressing faster than any other platform I know in terms of security, stability and features.
In addition, there’s an excellent public bugbase for Flash. Any crash bugs you report are very likely to get fixed in the next release.
I agree about Google TV though. The experience is inferior in every single way to normal TV.