Why Software Sucks 257
Trent Lucier writes "Why Software Sucks professes to be a book for computer users, not programmers. Author David Platt wants to be the informant, pulling back the curtain on software development so mere mortals can get a glimpse inside the sausage factory. Platt flaunts his geek cred, all the while implying that he's not one of those geeks. But ultimately, trite observations and a condescending tone left me wishing that the book would end long before it did." Read the rest of Trent's review.
| Why Software Sucks...And What You Can Do About It | |
| author | David S. Platt |
| pages | 272 |
| publisher | Addison-Wesley Professional |
| rating | 5/10 |
| reviewer | Trent Lucier |
| ISBN | 0321466756 |
| summary | Explains to non-tech people why software quality is so bad. |
The spectrum of what constitutes bad software is mostly limited to usability, security, and stability. No mention is made of supremely sucky software features like digital rights management, spyware from "reputable" companies, and bundled bloatware. There is plenty of information about these topics that the general public could benefit from, but none is to be found here. To his credit, Platt does mention annoyances like "free registration required" news sites and privacy issues.
The chapters focusing on software shortcomings all have a similar structure. The problem is put into historical context, a reason is posed about why the problem still exists, and readers are given advice on how to fix it. The insights into the world of software development are limited and stereotypical. In Platt's world, programmers are ego-driven, awkward geeks who only care about creating whiz-bang features at the expense of usability and usefulness. They're elitist and lazy, passing off responsibility to the user via confirmation dialogs and convoluted options menus. They go to tech conferences and pay more attention to the amazingly realistic software rendering of a bikini babe as opposed to talking to the real woman standing right next to them.
Of course, stereotypes are often true for a subset of any population. But Platt's characterizations are shrill and condescending, often reading like they were co-written by Comic Book Guy and Ann Coulter. Little mention is made of anyone else in the development process besides programmers. (Because, you know, in the history of the world, a marketing manager has never had a bad influence on a product. Nope, never happened).
Usability labs are cited as a great way to improve product quality. Great, but who is in charge of funding usability labs? Not programmers. Most programmers I know would love to have their product improved upon with usability testing. And by the way, if you think the previous sentence lacked supporting evidence, get used to it, because that's the level of research that is found (or not found) throughout Why Software Sucks.
The examples are typically shopworn (Yes, the Google homepage is simple and easy to use. We get it. Lord Jesus, we get it.) or trivial. UPS.com is constantly scorned throughout the book because it asks the user for their home country instead of detecting it via the user's IP address. Starbucks.com commits the deadly sin of defaulting to a 5-mile radius for it's store locater instead of just listing closest stores. Yes, these are annoying faults, but are they really the best cases out there?
Readers are given advice on how to improve software quality, and it all boils down to boycotting bad products, sending letters to companies, and spreading the word among friends. If you need more firepower, you're out of luck. How can I get my employer to use better software products? Or my local government? Can I leverage accessibility and usability laws in the fight against bad websites? Are those crickets I hear?
In the second half of the book, Platt takes a turn towards sociology and tries to explain the environments that geeks gravitate to. His prime example is the Microsoft Tech Ed conference, which, given the way he describes it, doesn't sound very different from any other kind of conference. Marketing bozos, gratuitous tschotchkes, after-hours drinking by the speakers...it could just as easily be the annual gathering of the Coffin Retailers of America.
Platt has mastered the art of the non sequitur. Theorizing that maybe the problem with software is that the field is too male dominated, we are told that, "Many people think that the recent child molestation and cover-up scandals in the Catholic church stem at least in part from the hierarchy's all-male culture." Gotta love those "many people" and what they think might "in part" be a cause of a problem. "Like Israel, Microsoft is finding out that being on top isn't quite as much fun as it looked like it would be when it was on the bottom." Does that make Apple the PLO? My favorite example is when Platt draws inspiration from How To Win Friends and Influence People. "Dale Carnegie lists rules #7 for making your home life happier as 'Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage'." I had to re-read the enclosing paragraph several times before I realized that Platt's advice was basically, "Read new books."
The biggest problem with the book is that it just feels lazy. Platt constantly references other authors that write better and have more insight into the topics he covers. Bruce Schneier. Vincent Flanders. Eric Sink. It's like watching a bad documentary about sci-fi movies, and constantly getting tortured with short clips from Star Wars, The Matrix, and Blade Runner. At a certain point, you just want to throw the damn thing down and go straight to the source material.
Sometimes, Platt saves you the time and quotes the source material wholesale, as in his section on Po Bronson's spoof "The Seven Habits of Highly Engineered People." Each entry is listed, and Platt explains it all to the reader. As I read this chapter, the introduction to Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" began to play in my mind. I slowly looked toward the sky as I realized that, yes, if this is what it takes, then maybe I, too, could write a book.
Platt invites readers to join his software quality movement and devise some type of "software seal of quality". The accompanying website, suckbusters.com, is clearly unfinished, so I cannot be too critical of it. However, it's hard for me to resist mentioning that a site about sucky software appears to be written in FrontPage and uses frames.
Is there anything in the book worth recommending? For a seasoned software developer, no. If you want a mature analysis of why software is hard to develop, read Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month or Demarco & Lister's Peopleware. If writing human-usable programs is hard for you, check out the writings of Steve Krug or Jakob Nielsen.
But what about non-technical users? Will they learn why software sucks? I keep trying to imagine someone having an intelligent discussion about bad software after reading this book. I can't. They will probably have the courage to say "software sucks". But these days, who needs to read a 272-page book to realize that?"
You can purchase Why Software Sucks...And What You Can Do About It from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I don't believe it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't believe it... (Score:5, Funny)
Show me on the doll where the bad user interface failed to make available options navigable."
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Thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense...
A church guy buys a PC with Windows.
The PC runs fine for 2 days, then starts having troubles, pr0n popup boxes, unending ads, etc.
No divine intervention will have it behave properly like it did, despite the efforts of our church guy
Violent behaviour follows
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Can you show us on the doll where the programmer touched you?
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I can just imagine the thought process "god after 200 pages they might not hate software designers.. I KNOW! let's compare them to child molesters, people hate child molesters right?"
At least he avoided comparing us to terrorists.... in this book.
It's happening more and more... (Score:2)
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Europeans are more sophisticated.
The US is evil.
Men are Evil.
Christians are Evil.
It is just the flip side of the extreme right dogma.
The US is always right.
Atheists are evil.
Ecologists are communists wanting to trade jobs for trees.
I am so sick of the Google home page being held as an example of usability.
It has one function. It has almost the same user interface as locate!
Yes I like Google for searches but good grief people I
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Wha... are you ... are ... are you Jewish?
You know something? All that... all that (hic!) horrible code? It's the Jews' fault man. Without the Jews, we'd have great code and...
excuse me a moment sugar-tits, I think I need to throw up a bit.
Oh My Yahweh! (Score:3, Funny)
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Next I'm going to compare software design review meetings to being in Abu Ghraib.
If software sucks so much... (Score:2)
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-matthew
Soon to be released... (Score:5, Funny)
To summarize, they generally lack action and a good love interest.
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They go too much into detail. That really kills a story.
There's seldom a real climax. For the best books about software, after reading it you know all about that software, but that's about it. A story needs a climax to be interesting.
Books about software seldom have main characters (unless you count the software itself as such, but then, unless it's some sort of AI, a software usually doesn't really make a good main character
Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Spend a little time and you will find countless projects dividing talent among slightly different versions of the same thing and developers who really don't understand their users and don't want to understand them. "If they want something to be different, have them code it themselves!" is a tired refrain, but it points to a mentality of software for the developer, not the wider audience. While I'll admit that it can be good to mess around and create something primarily for yourself, when your goal is widespread adoption of your product, it certainly helps to consider what the end user wants to achieve, and what their standards for usability are.
Software development too often gets mired down in pissing contests, personal rivalries, egoism and Not Invented Here Syndrome and makes the developers appear amateurish and unreliable. This reflects poorly on their software, and we are left to hear them piss and moan about how their great app just can't make any headway against an entrenched rival.
Sometimes the competitor uses unethical tactics, sometimes users are just afraid/can't afford change. Other times however, the developer just wrote the software for themselves and never took the end market into account.
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Sadly, usually the users aren't really sure what they want. Or if they are, they have great difficulty in describing it. And their standards of usability are usually "It should be easy to get it to do what I want."
You see the problem?
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Yeah, the problem is that we need to work harder on drawing out the user on specifics as to what they want. I'm not claiming that's easy - it is, as you say very hard - but it is at the root of many problems in software development. Usually the issue comes down to either poor c
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The reason plenty of software fails is because of the tremendous number of people required to get it right... psychologists, interaction design experts, anthropologists, users (not customers), graphic designers, a pencil sharpener... it's just too much to expect small projects to have all this, much less expert Dilbertian-type managers to sign off the investment required for all these. The main reason I see for software sucking is simply that there aren't enough skills to get it right, and release-date-dr
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That wasn't a spectrum analyzer.
I wonder... (Score:2)
* BTW, Ann Coulter? Huh?
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Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]
Ann Coulter - neo-conehead (Score:2)
His website sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:His website sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
- Because it is released before it is ready for example. And because we tend to stick to the old stuff, even when we know it is failing (like frontpage 5).
- Because we believe all the marketing lies (Someone spend a pretty penny on frontpage and just look how wonderfull the result is...)
- Because we fail to actually learn about, or even slightly investigate into the things we are planning to do (like learning to build websites, not firing up the first application that comes to mind and start clicking).
- Because we believe everyting that made with on a computer is easy to do (Sure, I can build that website).
- And of course, because the wrong people are making the important decisions (whoever decided frontpage was a good idea was clearly not capable to take this decision, same goes for the person who did the release planning for the book/website).
So there is something to learn from this book after allSo sad (Score:2)
Always sad to see a geek in denial. Embrace your geekdom, my brother! Revel in its glory!
Ob FamilyGuy Paraphrase (Score:2)
We need a bill of rights for the user. (Score:2)
We need something like an installation controller. It would back up everything and monitor the installar and log every change to registry, disk, startup processes, changes to drivers, default handler assignments and everything. Then present to the user a simple standard user interface and a
We already have an easily-enforced bill of rights (Score:2)
Or just have a middleman who maintains a library of software packages that have been reviewed (in some cases, audited rather thoroughly) as being generally safe and what they appear to be, makes sure the packages work together, occasionally checks to see if updates and bugfixes are available, etc. The people must have expertise with the subject matter, have the users' interest at heart (!!), and have a reputation that can be lost if they screw up and be r
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This is basically package management. Every usable modern operating system has it. The lack of package management, amoung other things, makes Window$ hopelessly broken.
Debian/Ubuntu: dpkg/apt and synaptic
Red Hat/SuSe/LSB: rpm and YaST or yum
Gentoo: portage and emerge
IRIX: inst and swmgr
BSD: ports/pkg
HP-UX: Software Distri
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This is exactly why I have walways said the registry is a good concept that can not be implimented without causing grief.
Go back to the one directory for a product that contains everything it needs.
I am still waiting for my prize for telling MS about dll hell before the implemented it. Seemed like an obvious outcome to me.
Waste of money... (Score:2)
A whole book about this?! (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Features
2) Cost
3) Time to market
4) Quality
Choose any THREE of the above.
Most software vendors do not compete on quality, they compete on one or more of the other three aspects. In SOME markets (telecom, avionics, etc.) - quality is more important. Releases tend to come less often and tend to be more expensive. Want quality software? Be willing to wait longer and / or pay more for it.
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No it was not. (Score:2)
In practice however quality is not really negotiable and it should not be (that makes your point 3 invalid). And changing the required time is not easy. A project that takes two month with two people will maybe take only one month with fou
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End Date
Budget
Requirements
and you are suppose to rate them from most important to least important.
Which all boils down to good fast cheap, pick two.
Dumb title (Score:2)
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Definitely. At my workplace we can now sit behind our PCs and send these funny email-jokes to each other, while continuing to be even less productive than before. This is called improvement. Hopefully we can soon start working from home, so we can sit at home and send funny joke-emails to each other from there instead. I'm su
Simple explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
Really though, it is just that simple. We know how to make software that is reliable and secure. What do people buy? There is your answer.
And now to make sure I piss off everyone lets go beyond just slagging Microsoft since that is like kicking cripples. Macs suck too. Same for Linux, and BSD. All have bugs exposed on an almost daily basis. Why? Because nobody cared enough.
Ok, so what is my solution? Not giving a rats rectum about Windows or Mac limit my rant to Linux (and a bit of BSD). Start with OpenBSD as they are the closest to getting it right. Sure there isn't much in BSD, but what IS there is as reliable as an organization their size can make it. Features be damned, make it work!
So why couldn't organizations which have more resources take that idea to it's logical conclusion? Look people, adding new features before the old ones work is pointless and leads to software that sucks. Step one should be to take the Linux Standard Base and freeze it. Audit the crap out of it for security flaws and close every single bug report. Eliminate every compiler warning. Then look at every package that isn't at 1.0 status and decide what is needed to call it done and then DO it. Then begin moving that line outward. For now the graphical desktop environments probably can't be frozen, but everything underneath can be.
This won't happen though, because NOBODY CARES.
Re:Simple explanation (Score:4, Insightful)
Software doesn't suck because people don't care. Workers doing their job may or may not care, but certainly the company has some stake in the success of the product (which is somewhat correlated to its quality), and will thus "care" to some degree. But certainly many open-source projects only exist because the people care. So it is not that, in my humble opinion.
It is all a matter of priorities and engineering. I'm sure every geek has thought of what you suggest at some point: "If only there were infinite time and we could really refine this code, we could make it *perfect*!" But the truth is that perfection is impossible, because it must meet conflicting demands. To be perfect it must be rock-stable yet somehow incorporate the latest features and be compatible with the latest and greatest protocols/software/etc. The only way to be compatible is to introduce new code, which inevitably has new bugs, and the cycle continues.
Your proposed "feature freeze" has probably been attempted on some projects, and probably with disastrous results. The problem is that a completely stable, bug-free piece of software that cannot interpoerate in a modern environment is worse than a somewhat bug-ridden piece of software that *does what I currently need it to do*!
Personally I think developers care enough. Part of the problem (as the book appears to point out) is that people accept/buy sub-standard products when viable (better!) alternatives exist. Boycotting is indeed useful in such cases.
But overall software design is hard, and it will always be an engineering challenge, where the final solution is never intended to be "perfect" but rather to satisfy some user requirement, while using a set amount of time and development effort. This is true of both commercial and open-source software.
Just my opinion, of course. I'm not an expert in software engineering.
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Thanks for making my point. It IS a matter priorities and reliability and security aren't very high on the list in the software business. It IS a priority in every other engineering discpline, i.e. the ones where you have to be a real engineer. When people design a building there are a lot of conflicting priorities, exactly like in designing software. But reliability IS NOT NEGOTIABLE. Buildings do NOT fall down on a regular basis and when they do p
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Rocket science happens to include quite some software engineering and Boeing happens to employ quite a few developers. This goes to prove your point even more, when it is important enough, when we care (pay!) enough to get it right it is perfectly p
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Indeed! I mostly agree with what you're saying. However it's worth keeping in mind what the objective of a given engineering project is. The goal of a building is to continue standing and house people. The goal of a bridge is to withstand the load of the traffic across it. Failure to do so costs lives.
However in software the priority is to get work done. When software crashes, people don't die. Money is lost, but that's about it. Even security flaws don't lead to deaths.
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There is a disturbing trend that I have been witnessing in software development -- especially web applications. A lot of effort is being directed into making the developer's job easier or faster at the expense of a better user experience. Toolsets are being developed that make it easy to produce a functional UI in a very short period of time, however the end result is bloated and inefficient -- not just in code execution but in user experience. The interface is not tailored to the user's needs (making fr
It's Easy... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you take a programmer with no practical knowledge of the context in which the software is supposed to work, don't give them time to learn anything past the very basics, keep them at a distance from the people who will actually use the software, and have all the decisions on the functionality of the software, the timeline for delivery, and prioritization of the various parts of the software made by a committee of middle managers, marketing wonks, and executives you will get exactly the kind of sotware we all know and hate.
The best examples of software that I've seen were either written by a programmer with experience in a certain field working closely with an expert, or someone brilliant in a particular field who had a great idea and then picked up programming in order to implement their idea.
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Someone already suggested that the ego of the programmers is the largest cause of bad software. In my experience, the need of the middle managers and marketing wonks to demonstrate their superiority is a major part of the problem. Most will come up with off-the-cuff ideas at "bull session" creative meetings and then use all the political wherewithal they have to make sure that their ideas are implemented. God help you if more than one of these people is on your project and they have
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But seriously it does not require perfect requirements or a perfect master. The key is to have requirements, including test cases and success criteria. Things certainly change but it shouldn't be the usual "change the code before even determining if there really is a problem since you have no requirement to compare to , hope it does what it's supposed to do, write a test based on the code tha
It sucks because... well... (Score:2)
It applies to software and books...
A SUPERB book on this topic... (Score:3, Informative)
It is a classic, and well worth reading. And it does not condescend, and is full of good advice that naive users don't necessarily know. For example, don't type unreasonable values into fields... never enter data when the program appears to be busy doing something even if the program lets you do it... things like that.
Egoism is hard to see (Score:5, Informative)
Software sucks because people get stuck in a mindset. Until last week, I thought that Thunderbird was easy to configure for email. Here is what I do:
- Enter incoming mail server name
- Enter login name and (optionally) the password
- Click ok
- Try to get your mail
- Now go back and try it with the SSL option
- Now go back and try it with the TLS option
- Now go back and try it with "Use Secure Authentication"
- Repeat combinations of the above until you find the most secure one that works
Recently, my wife got a Mac. Here's how to do it in "Mail" for the Mac:
- Enter incoming mail server name
- Enter login name and password
- Click ok
"Mail" connects, tries each possibility, and sets it to the most secure option that works.
Now until I saw this, I never even considered the possibility. Now, it seems quite obvious. Unfortunately, I have to ding them on this - if the password is wrong, it hides the error message from you (you get something generic like "connection failed"). So I spent two hours trying with the wrong password while damning Apple because I thought the problem was that their nifty "do it automatically" approach.
So let's review:
- Don't get stuck copying the way other things do it. Do it right.
- Make it easy by only asking the user for the things the user is responsible for.
- Don't hide information (such as settings or errors) from the user (yes, in "Mail" you can go back in and see what settings it picked)
If we could get the above three right, life would be much easier.
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The Mac way sounds awful. Does it automatically select POP for you and clear out your mailbox the first time you connect? I would be PISSED if it did that.
No, it asks what type of account you are creating, POP, IMAP, or .mac. It actually works very well in that people who don't know what they're doing can easily create a working e-mail account and it will be as secure as possible. It is a little less nice if you know exactly what you're doing, but if that is the case, you'll figure it out pretty quickly.
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For the record,
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Really? For me, it's always made me enter my credentials, then attempted to send them across the Internet in plaintext, complained that it didn't work[1], and then on the next tab, given me an SSL checkbox. I've always thought of Mail.app's configuration as incredibly stupid and insecure.
The proper way to do it would be to first try SSL and if that doesn't work, prompt the user with suitably scary text ("Secure con
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Well, yeah, but that's because it's Good Security Practice (TM). If J. Random H4x0r knew that the username was correct but the password was wrong, then he knows he's already halfway there. You're not supposed to give away that some of the information is right, but some is wrong. You're just supposed to say, "No. Try Again."
See, for example, IETF
Why is software unreliable? (Score:2)
Of course then there ar
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It is worth noting that the latter leads to the problem of the former. The better the requirements and specification, the easier it is to do more complete testing via automated randomised testing, and extended static checking (which can
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then your software development method is broken.
"Also, software developer often get requirements and specifications that aren't complete, but are expected to continue on with development anyway."
The software developers supervisor needs to be pushing back on this situation. Thi includes documenting costs incrued do to poor requests.
"This introduces a lot of usability issues and
Slashdot... (Score:2)
Because.... (Score:2)
...because it's hard to write? (Score:2)
Comic Book Guy Indeed... (Score:4, Insightful)
How can I get my employer to use better software products? Or my local government? Can I leverage accessibility and usability laws in the fight against bad websites? Are those crickets I hear?
To answer the first question, unless you're in the management or IT department of your company you CAN'T get them to use better software products. To answer your second question, you have NO BUSINESS telling your local government what software works for them. (And I'm an advocate of OpenOffice over MS Office for home use as well as using it at my job, but I work in IT) And to answer your third question, you can try, but you have no guarantee of succeeding, nor should you. You didn't pay to have the websites developed, therefore you have no say. In an ideal world people would just do the right thing. But this is far from an ideal world.
It seems to me that your rant (not really much of a review at all) is misplaced against this book. You're railing on about his attack on programmers but not paying attention to the fact that end-users and not coders are the target of this book. They could give a rat's ass about DRM because other than some minor inconveniences and some extra costs, DRM is transparent to them. We have a right to be angry about DRM because it hobbles programmers from being able to actually take advantage of whiz bang new possibilities afforded by upcoming technology since DRM imposes artificial restrictions on us. Joe Average will NEVER "get" that.
I agree with you in that he focused on the wrong stuff to a degree. He got it right as far as the average user goes. But if he was really going to show them the inside of the sausage factory (which I find disturbingly phallic mind you), he would point out that most people writing software today have no business writing it. All the slick IDEs that have been unleashed on would be coders and web developers has resulted in everyone and his brother being a "programmer". There are people developing applications and web sites out there who don't even know what structured programming or OOP are. They have no concept of the basics when it comes to writing code. Most of it is pieced together crap without reusable code even factoring in. It's beyond crufty. And THAT is why software sucks today.
If it's not OOP, it sucks. (Score:2)
I kinda figured that was true, 'cause when my computer blue screens and stuff I see a lot of hex numbers and weird crap like that and so that's probably machine language or something so that's why it probably sucked and died and stuff.
Why software sucks in one sentance (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, that's basically it. It's perfectly possible to write software that doesn't suck- people do it all the time. (See pretty much anything written by JPL, for example)
But it costs. It costs for the good management&development team to decide exactly what the spec will be. It costs for good, experienced programmers to write solid, mantainable code. It costs for QA and UI people to go over everything with a fine tooth comb. It costs time to get it all right, and you're not going to get every wiz-bang feature because that would cost even more.
99.9% of users simply aren't willing to pay for that. The few that are live in niches where an accident is simply not acceptable. (See JPL, above, and even then they aren't perfect: see Spirit for an example) The rest of us settle for the likes of Windows and Office- lots of features, mostly works, ok UI simply because the perfect option would have a 1/10 the features and cost 10x as much.
Settle for Windows? (Score:2)
This isn't anything to do with software development. It's no diffe
Am I the only one... (Score:2)
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Two blocks is the max walking distance.
So five miles is exatly correct for starbucks.
IP can not be relied on 100% to determin location. UPS needs 100%
Ther are a lot of bad examples, those two were poorly choosen.
Suckbusters.com sucks bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Why software sucks, really (Score:4, Interesting)
Software sucks because the costs of it sucking fall on the user, not the manufacturer. That's hasn't been true of automobiles for several decades now, and cars have gotten much better. When was the last time your car died on the road?
Many years ago, I was at Ford Aerospace when the Ford EEC-IV electronic engine control unit was being developed. In that unit, the program was permanent; it was in a mask-programmed device, and could not be changed without replacing the entire unit. Very substantial resources were devoted to insuring that there were no bugs that could cause cars to fail on the road. There was huge fear of a recall; if something had gone wrong, most of the Ford cars on the road would have to come back to a dealership for CPU replacement. There were old engineers at Ford who didn't want a computer to have direct control of the engine. Tweak the spark timing a bit or adjust the emissions valves, like the earlier models of engine control, perhaps. But actually fire the spark plug directly from software? That was radical. So everyone involved was paranoid about bugs.
It worked. Twenty years later, no bugs have been found. There was never an EEC-IV recall. The EEC-IV is still popular with enthusiasts. [fordfuelinjection.com] You can even download the code [kvitek.com] and run it in an emulator. I still have a 1985 Ford Bronco with its original EEC-IV, and it runs fine.
If Microsoft had to face the possibility of bringing every PC with Windows on it into an approved Microsoft repair center for a software update at Microsoft's expense, Windows would not crash. It might not do as much, but critical components of it wouldn't fail disasterously.
And that's why software sucks.
Re:Why software sucks, really (Score:4, Insightful)
An OS is far more complicated. Linux/Windows/OSX/ etc. needs to support numerous configuration, with various hardware and software. I don't see many cars out there that allow you to go in and add programs or logic to the engine control system (legitimately). There's also big disclaimers saying that the manufacturer cannot be held responsible if you alter your car and it stops working.
If you want your software to be guarenteed to never crash, you build a box of hardware that cannot be changed. You make an OS that cannot be modified. Then you write all your programs on that machine and beat the hell out of them. You basically lock the system from user modifcation.
Of course, that makes for a real shitty product. So we have these customizable boxes with customizeable hardware and customizeable software. Unless you expect MS to test every possible piece of hardware and software, then there will eventually be problems.
And I won't even get into the complexity of the code for the OS itself. How much code is in that EEC module again?
I also notice that you're quick to fire off at MS. I would just like to point out this is a problem with ALL operating systems. I've had windows and linux both crash and take my system with it. It happens.
But given the choice between something fairly stable, flexible, and inexpensive vs. an uber-expensive steel-clad mono-box I'll take the former.
~X~
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(The book Freakonomics had an interesting illustration of this phenomenon, whereby bank fraud w
Why everything sucks. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your car stereo doesn't have a two-cent audio-in jack? That sucks.
Your cellphone's 'send to voicemail' button is right under your thumb when you flip the phone open? That sucks.
Your kids' school sends students home early when they don't have a class in the last period, but there's no school bus? That sucks.
Your TV reception is better than your cable reception, because there's an amplifier on your line that's flooded every time it rains? That sucks.
Your town built a bridge and created a stagnant pool right where the ouflow from the slaughterhouse hits the river? That sucks.
What makes anything think that bad design, screwed up decisions, and lousy implementation are unique to software?
Occam's Razor leads me to Sturgeon's Revelation (Score:2)
There are various theories here (in the book, review, comments) about why software sucks, but none of them seem to make more sense than Sturgeon's Revelation [wikipedia.org].
Being a developer myself, I'd like to argue that most developers aren't ego-driven and amateurish, but they are governed by Sturgeon's Revelation just same as most every other profession. This is certainly borne out by my experience anyway.
Best line from the review. (Score:2)
Do it! If your books end up even half as interesting as your book reviews, then you'll really have something. Good luck!
Its easy. (Score:2)
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Because it's a referral link. If you buy the book by following that link, Slashdot gets money.
(That's not a "Slashdot is evil" thing, if you buy the book after reading about it here, they did refer you to it, and they do deserve a referral fee. And besides, it's not like it costs you money. That having been said, I wish Slashdot would set up an Amazon.com referral account instead...)
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And...? (Score:2)
What does that have to do with anything? That's not unusual. If you're a company looking for government to help you out, you would too. Republicans are all about corporatism.
Besides, I really doubt that the decision was made on a political basis, probably on who gives better referral commissions.
And say, since you brought it up, how do you know that, and what exactly is Barnes & Nobles's giving ratio?
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*shrug* Well, there you go. I've gotta admit, it sounded made up to me, I guess it's not. Sorry! And thanks for the info. They say you learn something new every day. I just met my quota, so I'm going home now.
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That is, of course, no reason not to try and make it more reliable - we'll never be perfect, but that doesn't mean we can't try to be better.
Sure,
Re:Bleat, bleat, bleat.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If reviews were written only on books the reviewers liked, that would be one world of biased opinions don't you think?
Moreover, you seem to think that the reviewer is bashing the author/book where it appears to me like a good review and shows a lot of misses in the book itself. As an example, the author categorizes software developers in a very small box a bit too easily IMO.
Yes, I've read part of it, it is extremely short-sighted and won't help the supposed 'target audience' you talk about, in knowing more. Confuse them more? Definitely.
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Also, books don't fall out of the sky in final form. They are products developed at companies that wish to make a net profit from them in a fiercely competitive book market. The author of a book inte
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Where did I negate the need to review it? Don't make up phantom claims.
And the reviewer did try and think of how the target audience would benefit, or not from the book.
He did not focus on the target audience, he mentioned it briefly as a secondary issue. He focused on a tangentially related audience.
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Uhhhh? What do you think the purpose of book reviews is? Or are you perhaps a publisher?
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I found the review to be informative. I have to believe that the intended audience is programmers, no matter what the author says. Do you really think that non-programmers will buy such a book? Surely they are more interested in the latest novel, than in yet another vanity piece. The points that the book made needed to be addressed, and I thought that the reviewer did so.
It's a poorly written and misleading bo
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It is highly unlikely that there will be a particular methodology that magically makes things better, but certainly there are things you can do to make things better. Two major hurdles in software quality are "building the right product" and "building the product right". That is, is what you are planning to build what the users want, and is what you're actually building the s
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But the actuality of all of it, despite parent's obvious annoyanc
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I have released software late that wasn't buggy, and no one complained.
So in my experience, the user doesn't mind if it's late as long as it works.
Of course, calander dates set software completion, not comlete and tested feature requests.
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But in general, programmers don't dictate the release date or the feature set of the products they implement.
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