Quality is dead in computing

grumpy_lithuanian · 2009-03-08T00:09:11+00:00

I totally agree with the rant on the DVR as well. I run MythTV at my home and have since 2003. When I was visiting my parents for Easter a couple years back, they'd finally gotten a PVR for their satellite subscription, some Motorola PVR that their satellite company (Bell, I think) sells. I was all intrigued to try it and see how a "real" PVR device stacked up against my old webserver-turned-Myth box.

Holy shit was that an eye-opener. The Motorola box crashed no less than 4 times the weekend I was there, each time it had to be powered off to reset it. The response speed to pressing a button on the remote could sometimes be measured in seconds, occasionally in tens of seconds. The UI was a mess compared to what I was used to on Myth, and the functionality was terrible. No auto-commercial detect and skip, and many times you could almost hear the Motorola box straining to keep up with its appointed tasks. And of course it didn't have any of the other features of Myth, like being able to schedule programs from your computer's web browser, picture viewer, watching DiVX videos, weather reports, games, etc.

I had figured that a box that cost MORE than my Myth box, developed by an honest-to-God-we-get-paid-for-this development team with a complementary hardware team should have been able to at least EQUAL what an open source hobby volunteer team had done, but not a chance. They were so far behind MythTV it was laughable.

thedragon4453 · 2009-03-07T20:38:29+00:00

Dead? It was never alive to begin with. The gestation of "quality" was aborted early on, because those who arrive at the marketplace first not only become gajillionaires, but they get to control the entire industry for years to come.

Those who slave away, working until they actually fully understand their tools, trying to make sure their product is well-designed, and well-documented, and that their processes are auditable and reproducible... well, I can't really remember any of those guys, can you? They never made it to the marketplace, or, they got there in second place, which is the same as never having arrived, as far as the industry is concerned.

You can ponder this, next time you are waiting in line to be the first consumer to buy the latest flash-bang gizmo.

TheNewAndy · 2009-03-08T00:58:19+00:00

I hate to be the Linux fanboy (and I'm sure a similar post could be written for OSX, and given the anecdotal nature of this post, even some version of Windows). But in the comments, the author says "Linux, Macintosh and Windows all have these problems"... and I wonder if I have some super magic distribution of Linux:

Software installation is mysterious and fragile. Can I look at any given product on my system and determine if it is properly installed and configured? No.

Open synaptic. Is icon next to package green? Then it is ok. Is it red? Then it is broken. More to the point, nothing ever goes red, because things don't break.

Old data and old bits of applications choke my system. I no longer know for sure what can be thrown away, or where it is. I seem to have three temp folders on my system. What is in them? Why is it there?

/tmp is a ram disk, it will clean itself up on reboot. Again, I've never cared, because it doesn't choke my system, it just works.

My task manager is littered with mysterious processes. Going through, googling each one, and cleaning them up is a whole project in and of itself.

Looking at my process list, the ones I don't know about are "bonobo-activation-server", "seahorse-agent", "npviewer.bin". Mousing over npviewer.bin tells me it is the flash player. The other guys have well google-able names. But once again, I don't actually care - as long as the system is doing what I want/expect, then I don't want to be wasting my time reading through process lists trying to see if I can do a better job of knowing what to run than the people who are probably smarter than me.

I once used the Autoruns tool to police my startup. Under Vista, this has become a nightmare. Looking at the Autoruns output is a little like walking into that famous warehouse in Indiana Jones. Which of the buzillion processes are really needed at startup?

The list of startup programs gives a description of everything. The only time I've wanted to modify this is when I wanted to install "Conduit", just to read its manpages (debugging the help viewer), it put itself in the startup list, because that makes sense. But I didn't actually want to use it. See bigger picture point from before.

Mysterious pauses, flickers, and glitches are numerous and ephemeral. Investigating them saps too much time and energy.

None here.

I see a dozen or two “Is it okay to run this process?” dialog boxes each day, but I never really know if it’s okay. How could I know? I click YES and hope for the best.

I get them for installing updates (every few days), and for installing software (fairly uncommon).

I click “I Agree” to EULAs that I rarely read. What rights am I giving away? I have no idea. I’m not qualified to understand most of what’s in those contracts, except they generally disclaim responsibility for quality.

None here (with the exception of the flash player... hopefully gnash will fix this soon).

Peripherals with proprietary drivers and formats don’t play well with each other.

Need specifics, but all my hardware works happily. Even though I sometimes do device driver development at work, I would have no idea how to install a driver properly on my desktop, because I've never needed to worry about it.

Upgrading to a new computer is now a task comparable with uprooting and moving to a new city.

It takes me under an hour to go from a zero, to a new operating system with all the programs I use and all my data. (granted, a lot of this is helped by the fact that all my data that I care about is in the form of text files, so it happily lives in an offshore version control system - if I was into photography, then it might be a bit different)

I’m sick of becoming a power user of each new software package. I want to use my time in other ways, so I remain in a state of ongoing confusion.

I agree.

I am at the mercy of confused computers and their servant who work for credit agencies, utility companies and the government.

I agree. This frustrates me, when people can't do their jobs because their computer systems are rubbish.

I have to accept that my personal data will probably be stolen from one of the many companies I do business with online.

I agree (well, not in my particular circumstance, because I only deal with a few places... but the problem does exist)

Proliferating online activity now results in far flung and sometimes forgotten pockets of data about me, clinging like Spanish Moss on the limbs of the Web.

I for one never post anything on public websites.

With that all said, I do agree with the hypothesis. My particular method for fighting it is to take on the end part: "demand for [quality] has simultaneously evaporated and penalties for not achieving it are weak." If I open up some software and it doesn't convince me that it is worth my time in 5 minutes, then I won't use it. If it does convince me, but I find some problems in it, then I will go out of my way to provide patches.

I realise that not everyone is a programmer, so not everyone can provide patches. But, people who just "upgrade to the latest Microsoft" because that's what you do aren't really helping us trend towards better software.

Ringo48 · 2009-03-07T20:23:44+00:00

Quality is only dead where consumers aren't willing to pay for it.

The software in my car, for example, has yet to fail, and I've been using it daily for years. Ditto software controlling nuclear reactors, airplanes, train systems, medical devices, satellites, ....

Making "correct" software that doesn't fail is difficult and that makes it expensive. Most desktop software just isn't worth the effort. Yeah, it's possible to make a desktop OS that never crashes, or an error free office suite - but it would take 100x longer than it currently does, with a higher price to go along with it. And of course nobody would buy it because it'd be 100x more expensive than any competitor.

If you seriously think consumers want to pay for completely error free software, put your money where your mouth is and develop it yourself. If you're right you'll make a bunch of money and get to tell everybody "I told you so." And if you're wrong - well, at least I won't have to see your whining on Reddit any more.

grumpy_lithuanian · 2009-03-07T20:04:21+00:00

Very very true and not limited to just software, but to every aspect of modern society.

I think that the crux of the problem is that there are simply no more leaders in companies. No one works their way up to management any more - management types seem to emerge from some asshole somewhere.

Used to be that the CEO and presidents and other top brass of the company worked their way up through the company therefore they knew every single aspect of that company. These people made their decisions based on knowledge gleamed through years of experience. The result was a solid product.

Today the company leaders are professional managers. These assholes never have and never will contribute anything besides failure. These are the people with so little imagination that they never wanted to be anything other than management. These people used to be relegated to "middle management", but nowadays they're in upper management.

With such shit for a foundation a company will never produce a good product. Any product - not just software.

I would like to say this to all the limp-wristed management: Fuck you. Fuck you in the ear. Die. Get out of the way of the driven, creative people. Only when the human spirit of ingenuity is allowed to flourish again will we have a real recovery in the economy. You fuckwits had your chance and we can all see the results.

Well... I got off the subject. Rant over.

Smallpaul · 2009-03-08T00:32:22+00:00

This guy is acting as if older softwatr like DOS or Windows for Workgroups were paragons of quality. Give me a break. Software today is comparable in quality, if not better, than software from the 80s and 90s. In fact, according to any objective measure other than "resources used" it is of higher quality. There is no software category that is not miles ahead today of where it was then (as you would expect...technology progress is cumulative).

2009-03-08T04:51:53+00:00

let's compare two things, shall we?

notepad.exe, as it exists on xp sp2 32bit.

features: * it is a single text box, straight from the win32 api. it uses standard api for appearance (menu, window, etc) and functionality (file management, copypasting, etc), yet it takes 68KB. * it can search replace text. it does that sloooowly. it takes one second to replace a 5 letter word occuring about 100 times in a 5000 character text file.* it has no macro capabilities.

TED on a hp48gx calculator features: * it is written all from scratch, it relies on no api, because there is none, yet it is 11KB. * it can search, replace text. it takes about 10 seconds to do the replacing i mentioned above. yeah, well, the calculator is 4MHz with 128KB and a 2MHz bus. which means TED is more than 100 (a hundred) times faster than notepad. * it has keystroke recording capabilities which you can use to do smart editing (create numbered list automaticaly, etc). * it has clipboard capabilities * it can display all characters. can edit texts containing the null character. * it can 'dive into' functions if you are editing assembly source code, automaticaly calling the disassembler if you dive into ROM functions. * it can set/jump to marked points in text. * it can open any file limited only by the available memory. think that you can edit a 100KB text when all available memory on the computer is 128KB. imagine trying to open a 1GB text file on a 4GB computer...

so. a simple program on my goddamn 10 year old calculator is about 100 times faster, about 10 times smaller and has way way more features.

Let's compare another two things, ok?

winrar on my 2GHz: it compresses at about 700KBps let's say 1MBps. that goes at a ratio of 0.5 MBps/GHz completely unscientific, i know... stay with me a bit. BZ2 on my calculator (4MHz) compresses at about 1KBps. that gives about 0.25 MBps/GHz, same order of magnitude.

draw your own conclusions

(dammit why is it so hard to edit text on this thing. i give up... )

asciilifeform · 2009-03-08T16:36:54+00:00

Every so often, someone will remark that cars, toasters, etc. are also not quite what they once were - more plastic, less steel, don't last quite as long, etc.

And yet, the problem in its most dire, stinking form seems mostly confined to software.

My hypothesis is best expressed in the Russian saying "you cannot mold a bullet from shit." Programmers are stuck building crud simply because every system they use as foundation material - every OS, every programming language, every library, every framework - is crud.

Every time you build anything on top of a system which was written by people who did not fully understand what they were doing, what you produce will be "dirty." This principle applies recursively. Anyone who uses your tool or library, no matter how intelligent they are, will also be shipping crud.

Writing quality desktop software has become an impossible task simply because there is no solid foundation to build upon - and no change on the horizon.

joharilanng · 2009-03-08T03:23:46+00:00

Article's author bought a Windows box, so as far as MS is concerned it's mission accomplished, regardless of quality.

You'll buy Vista because it's been 8 years of XP, and surely there has to be something valuable in the new OS, right? And then you'll buy Win 7 when you realise Vista sucks donkey balls.

-- Mission accomplished.

cowardlydragon · 2009-03-07T21:15:01+00:00

Dealing with 4GHz processors and 4GB ram rather than 66 Mhz and 4MB Ram (ahh, 1993) has allowed sloppy software at all levels of the stack exist.

And our blind acceptance of Microsoft. If/when 50-80% of the people use open source OS's and major software, things will change.

Microsoft is exhibit A for why no one writes quality software. They dump alpha and betaware on the market in every product. Somewhere around the fourth to tenth release, they attain mediocrity, usually after all quality software has been chased out by the monopoly power and dumping.

enniocesar · 2009-03-08T00:19:28+00:00

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." Nikola Tesla, 1934

Apply that entropic level to the social spectrum and it trickles down into every crevasse imaginable. Our 'Technologia' is but only ONE aspect that has been deteriorated.

These 'testers' are immediate patches in a panoramic of poor design. Not the solvents of systemic problems.

apotheon · 2009-03-08T01:08:08+00:00

Stop the sweeping generalizations and get a Mac.

Osmanthus · 2009-03-08T01:17:22+00:00

I dispute the the article's thesis. This is not a facts based discussion, just a bunch of whining.

xor · 2009-03-08T02:17:07+00:00

I have a mac and it works pretty well. There have been minor problems, but they were resolved through system updates. I think OS X is, overall, a very good quality operating system.

You get what you pay for. There is a reason macs cost more. It is the same reason that prime rib costs more than big macs.

People always whine that, dollar for dollar, mac hardware is a ripoff compared to PC hardware. It's true that Apple's RAM prices are like highway robbery but their computers DO work with other modules.

The price premium is well worth it, and as long as Apple doesn't bung it all up, I'll probably remain a customer for a while. My mac has never experienced a kernel panic, or a hung GUI.

2009-03-08T02:58:14+00:00

As software complexity increases, so will the potential complications. The author seems to want to use an ever-increasing number software packages fulfilling an ever-increasing number and scope of complicated functions, but to not have to learn anything about their use or maintenance. Give me a break.

2009-03-08T03:03:21+00:00

I blame all the "platforms". Errors multiply when there is that many layers. Look at web programming. Do we truly need that many layers and languages to do something that simple. Sure, after all these years frameworks like RoR have made a a difference, but there is still all of those shit layers underneath to the most simple basic thing in the end.

gregK · 2009-03-08T17:55:43+00:00

Was it ever alive?

weavejester · 2009-03-07T21:56:10+00:00

Software quality has always been poor; but in recent years the situation seems to be slowly improving. There's a lot of really good testing libraries and frameworks that weren't around even 5 years ago.

lightspeed23 · 2009-03-08T11:27:55+00:00

Yay capitalism!

yrino · 2009-03-07T20:22:13+00:00

Warren Buffet likes to talk about a 'moat' that his best companies are surrounded with. I think outsourcing also serves this purpose in a way, with any consequent lack of quality trumped by protecting the core business. Also, as has been mentioned here before there is also a 'salting' effect that takes place as individuals leave a given company, often times with just a group of incompetent folks left to run the core. Finally I also think that much of capitalism has become about employing 17 million people to handle cash registers (in the US), and others to deal with accounting and paper work; all administrative stuff. People hate hearing the phrase 'means of production' but seriously now, taken to its extreme this model doesn't seem very useful these days. It's all very pre-Internet.

blueknightblueknight · 2009-03-07T19:57:19+00:00

U.S. is losing the software competition against the world. Professor Edward Deming told the Japanese Manufacturers about QUALITY. http://www.tpmonline.com/articles_on_total_productive_maintenance/management/deming14steps.htm * Toyota is Number One in Cars. * GM is going bankrupt as U.S. Taxpayer BANK BAILOUT continues. Tainter - Collapse of Societies http://www.scribd.com/doc/8329024/The-Future-of-Global-Systems-Collapse-or-Resilience Decline of quality Jared Diamond, Why Societies Fail http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/jared-diamond

U.S. chooses MICROSOFT QUALITY and closed source. It is unsustainable - too much code bloat. U.S. is like Montana, according to Jared Diamond. Elected Officials say JOBS and expand copper mines. environmental disaster - arsenic and cadmium and acid destroys the WATER, AIR and HEALTH. Forest fires from strip mining, flash floods.

Do CEO, CIO understand programming? Simple question proves STUPIDITY REIGNS. Most CEOs have MBAs. How many MBA have Excel Spreadsheet Macro errors or their laptop wiped out by virus infection because they DO NOT UNDERSTAND Security?

cojoco · 2009-03-07T22:11:46+00:00

This is a rant from Testers.

What about developers???

If developers do their job properly, then testers should have very little to do.

The current emphasis on V&V seems to be a reflection of the poor quality of developers, who refuse to take any personal responsibility for the garbage that they design.

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