Where the fuck did we go so wrong with modern software? (Tantrum)

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

That sounds interesting, i've avoided GIMP like the plague because i hate the interface, it's nice to have an alternative for when eventually, older copies of Photoshop stop working on Windows.

The interface is very much like Photoshop now and functionally it is like older PS. Change some keybindings for different functions and you can breeze into it applying existing Photoshop knowledge. I'm not shilling it, the old interface used to make me legit mad when trying to use it. There's a bit of the linux/open source poo still left but I've found that it's mostly some quality of life things that are missing, like double clicking the magnifying glass to fit the image to the window isn't a thing.

 

[sasazuka]

There's a bit of the linux/open source poo still left but I've found that it's mostly some quality of life things that are missing, like double clicking the magnifying glass to fit the image to the window isn't a thing.

Are you talking about Gimphoto? My biggest issue is that for the life of me I can't seem to get thumbnails when I go to the window to "Open File", which is a bit of a bother when I have folders with hundreds of IMG_XXXX.jpg and _DSCXXXX.ARW files in them.

I generally have to open Windows Explorer to find the file I want to work on.

 

[The Bovinian Derivative]

Here's a story that to me encapsulates my problems with modern software (development):
We were doing a university project and a friend of mine wanted to download a 10MB library so we could add two vectors together, and nothing else. When I asked him why not just home brew a class with two members and a method to produce a sum he told me "Someone already made a lib for it, so why bother?" The entire project was barely a few megabytes with all assets. The guy was working for SAP and i shudder to think what their code base looks like.

 

[potato fan]

I dare anybody to name a single damned thing that Adobe or Microsoft has implemented in a "new version" of a product which existed in 2001 that legitimately adds value for the end user and couldn't have been included in an update or sold as an upgrade option for the 2001-era iteration instead.

Well, compared to xp, Vista got a GPU driven UI, and new drivers model, indexed searches that seemed to work, and started using limited user accounts with decent rights elevation mechanism, and win7 finally had fixed task scheduler that gave priority to UI, and become stable enough to have a month of uptime becoming a standard, not a record.

I do use office daily, and there were quite a lot of improvements in it since 2001- Excel can now use multiple CPU cores to process formulas, there are new file formats that seem less likely to get corrupted at random and are smaller in size, excel has prettty useful "tables" functionality, and ditched the MDI interface. Theres also a tool to compare excel sheets (which I am sure Microsoft just licensed from some other company). In Word the new search funtion is better, themes and smart arts are pretty usefull (in powerpoint too) if you want to add some nice formatting quickly, theres now a way to remove background from images embedded in the document, autonumbering function seems to be saner now, and they improved the commenting system so it is nearly managable now. Oh and they added OneNote which is pretty cool too, or at least used to be untill MS decided to rewrite it as their newfangled "universal app" or whatever, and it lost half of functionality. And for some interations of office, they used to bundle a cool little app called Groove, which allowed for p2p based collaboration on documents, basically a serverless sharepoint which was neat for smaller organisations and students, but this app too has been killed, unfortunately.

 

[ditto]

Vista got a GPU driven UI, and new drivers model, indexed searches that seemed to work, and started using limited user accounts with decent rights elevation mechanism

Vista got such a shit reputation mainly because it was 2 years ahead of it's time in terms of hardware support. By the time Windows 7 was released drivers and hardware had caught up. Had to use a Vista box a few years back and was suprised at how decent it was, nothing like the "ME 2.0" I thought it would be.

Oh and they added OneNote which is pretty cool too, or at least used to be untill MS decided to rewrite it as their newfangled "universal app" or whatever, and it lost half of functionality.

I'm trying to make peace with universal apps and native mobile apps just because the "future" is looking to be Electron monstrosities with always-needed internet backends.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

I do use office daily, and there were quite a lot of improvements in it since 2001- Excel can now use multiple CPU cores to process formulas, there are new file formats that seem less likely to get corrupted at random and are smaller in size, excel has prettty useful "tables" functionality, and ditched the MDI interface. Theres also a tool to compare excel sheets (which I am sure Microsoft just licensed from some other company). In Word the new search funtion is better, themes and smart arts are pretty usefull (in powerpoint too) if you want to add some nice formatting quickly, theres now a way to remove background from images embedded in the document, autonumbering function seems to be saner now, and they improved the commenting system so it is nearly managable now. Oh and they added OneNote which is pretty cool too, or at least used to be untill MS decided to rewrite it as their newfangled "universal app" or whatever, and it lost half of functionality. And for some interations of office, they used to bundle a cool little app called Groove, which allowed for p2p based collaboration on documents, basically a serverless sharepoint which was neat for smaller organisations and students, but this app too has been killed, unfortunately.

You're right, Office has received a great amount of things worthy of full version change, though they seem to miss the target as much as they hit it every time they try to do something new. They kill off the good things, and try to weekend-at-bernie's the shit, and it sucks.

Well, compared to xp, Vista got a GPU driven UI, and new drivers model, indexed searches that seemed to work, and started using limited user accounts with decent rights elevation mechanism, and win7 finally had fixed task scheduler that gave priority to UI, and become stable enough to have a month of uptime becoming a standard, not a record.

Vista got such a shit reputation mainly because it was 2 years ahead of it's time in terms of hardware support. By the time Windows 7 was released drivers and hardware had caught up. Had to use a Vista box a few years back and was suprised at how decent it was, nothing like the "ME 2.0" I thought it would be.

Vista was, in my opinion, the last major leap forward in terms of Windows releases. To me, 7 was essentially a finished, better-timed Vista with new Aero features. If they hadn't poorly misjudged consumer readiness and spent a bit more time on perfecting Vista, I think it'd have been identical to what we got with 7. Part of me wonders if the poor reception of Vista didn't cause Microsoft to take what they had planned for a Vista SP2 and spin it into its own product to save their own hides.

Strip away UI changes that nobody likes anyways, and you quickly see Windows 10 for what it is; Win7 with an amount of feature updates equal to those we used to see in major service pack releases etc, plus a clingy pseudo-OSAAS model with creepy telemetry for no good reason.

Tinfoil hat time: Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to force users into Win10, and it wouldn't surprise me if we see a subscription model eventually. I find the amount of neutral to positive media coverage of Win7's EOL highlighting the "UpGrAdE To StAy SeCuRe" meme highly suspect.

 

[ditto]

Tinfoil hat time: Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to force users into Win10, and it wouldn't surprise me if we see a subscription model eventually.

Even worse, I suspect they're going to try a "Windows in the cloud" model where the local machine is only capable of running a browser and all the real work is done on Azure servers.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

Even worse, I suspect they're going to try a "Windows in the cloud" model where the local machine is only capable of running a browser and all the real work is done on Azure servers.

The day they go full cloud meme with friggin' Windows is the day I'll go full linux, or pirate a copy of Windows Server again. "I am the cloud now."

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Tinfoil hat time: Microsoft seems to be going out of their way to force users into Win10, and it wouldn't surprise me if we see a subscription model eventually. I find the amount of neutral to positive media coverage of Win7's EOL highlighting the "UpGrAdE To StAy SeCuRe" meme highly suspect.

They are already sandbagging Win10Pro to force those users to move to Enterprise and its subscription model.

 

[Maurice Caine]

They are already sandbagging Win10Pro to force those users to move to Enterprise and its subscription model.

I wouldn't mind a Windows 7 community edition but MS would probably DMCA the team behind it faster than the chinks fucking with the west

 

[MAPK phosphatase]

Here's a story that to me encapsulates my problems with modern software (development):
We were doing a university project and a friend of mine wanted to download a 10MB library so we could add two vectors together, and nothing else. When I asked him why not just home brew a class with two members and a method to produce a sum he told me "Someone already made a lib for it, so why bother?" The entire project was barely a few megabytes with all assets. The guy was working for SAP and i shudder to think what their code base looks like.

I've been through the same "why are you invoking this library" experience, but in my case someone was invoking a library for two lines of code to do something that could be done in two lines of code without the library.

 

[Ambiguous Morality]

One of the main problems is that the big five suppress competition, leading to a corporate monopoly with no new ideas being made. And also the boomers in congress that can't do jackshit.

 

[ditto]

I've been through the same "why are you invoking this library" experience, but in my case someone was invoking a library for two lines of code to do something that could be done in two lines of code without the library.

Reminds me a of a Hacker News comment that programming is cool because it's like playing with Lego all day long.

 

[MAPK phosphatase]

Reminds me a of a Hacker News comment that programming is cool because it's like playing with Lego all day long.

Code built as if you were playing with Lego will stand up about as well as bridge built entirely out of Lego.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

They are already sandbagging Win10Pro to force those users to move to Enterprise and its subscription model.

Every day we stray further from God's light.

I miss the days of actually feeling like you owned a product when you bought it, and the idea of not even being able to buy software outright is downright nauseating to me. Fuck that.

 

[Jack O'Neill]

Here's a story that to me encapsulates my problems with modern software (development):
We were doing a university project and a friend of mine wanted to download a 10MB library so we could add two vectors together, and nothing else. When I asked him why not just home brew a class with two members and a method to produce a sum he told me "Someone already made a lib for it, so why bother?" The entire project was barely a few megabytes with all assets. The guy was working for SAP and i shudder to think what their code base looks like.

Fuck me! What a lazy sack of shit. One thing that really pisses me off is when people use the term in software "why are you reinventing the wheel?". This is just a fucking dumb and retarded statement you could ever make. There is no such thing as "reinventing the wheel" in software development. You make what you need for your application. I develop my own game engines or libraries for what ever I am making. Quite frankly, most libraries and game engines do not work well with what ever I am trying to make. I care about the quality of the product, and I want it to be efficient and small as possible. Also, you have a shit load of control over the thing you are developing. You know how it works and you know how to fix it. Sometimes, I do use libraries, but only from developers I can trust and I know that their solution was put together with care. For example; SDL multimedia library. I have never had a single fucking issue with it.

 

[cecograph]

There is no such thing as "reinventing the wheel" in software development. You make what you need for your application. I develop my own game engines or libraries for what ever I am making.

No, you don't. Unless you're Terry Davis.

 

[General Tug Boat]

I think a lot of the problem in modern software development is that we sacrificed efficiency for cute looking UI. Essentially, we sacrificed anything with any type of memory management with a never ending cascade of plugins that simply never meld together properly. Therefore for a nicer ascetic, you are sacrificing not only compatibility, but also reliability. On top of that, seems to me like a lot of programmers really haven't learned the hardware side of things all that well. I am transferring from EE to more of a software developer based program at my community college, because:

1) COVID cancelled the courses I needed.
2) I would like to examine this same question.
3) Always wanted to expand my horizons beyond C-language

Memory management and timing is everything in hardware, one of the most essential aspects to get anything to fucking work is knowing how it does what it does, and why it does it. It doesn't seem to me that a lot of these development tools are actually designed to optimize the resources that modern machines actually have. It's amazing on how memory management doesn't seem to be much of a concern anymore, despite that how things work in the stack is actually what is responsible for how these protocols are actually initiated. I think because of the advancements in microprocessors is a lot of what sets a lot of people back from being creative in how they allocate the memory transfers between registers.

Most of these major companies endorse slow buggy junk code I feel for the sake of keeping people employed. It is sort of like when you have everything manufactured in a country full of bugmen. Instead of paying the extra few bucks of something of quality and value that will actually last, you can mass produce something that looks fancy, but actually ends up being a complete piece of shit at the end of the day. Matter of economics more or less; In the terms of the manufacturing age, you sacrifice quality, for quantity. Meanwhile conversely in the digital age, you sacrifice efficiency, for beauty.

When you are loading 800 different plugins, which the minimum wage Indian probably has no idea what the other 799 plugins do, and might be familiar with the 1 plugin, tries to compile it to make something comprehensive. It turns out to be a fucking disaster. Then you have more Indians make patch after patch to try to resolve the ever exponentially increasing amount of conflicts. Everything works like shit. because we are still relying on the same boomer source code. Hence like the street shitters shit in the street, we just pile the shit pile higher and higher. To such a point that everything FUCKING BREAKS and then some how it miraculously works. But... That's engineering, so I guess just learn how to live with it.

 

[Cool Dog]

SaaS/freemium its fucking evil

Its not even about piracy, gaben already proved you can defeat that with things like regional prices and if anything piracy makes software more popular to the point it becomes the industry standard, just look at office and photoshop for example

No, SaaS its pure greed, its bleeding you dry for shit you used to pay for only once

And now that shit its spreading to vidya with GaaS, I seen games that charge you monthly so you end up paying like $100 a year for a game that would otherwise cost around $40 tops, its fucking ridiculous and for what? updates? just charge them separately and I'll pay again ONCE and only if I want to

Oh but you gotta make more money, you gotta pump those numbers up so venture capitalists will inject more money on your bullshit scheme and you get to be a unicorn. Meanwhile you're destroying the entire industry until it all crashes and burns down but you made your money so who cares right?

Fuck these cunts