[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 12:35:45AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> - Set-top firmware completely fubared, just like you described, and
>   the company and tech people just shrugged it off and gave excuses
>   that didn't make any sense at all.

They wrote it in ActionScript. So it's a feature, not a bug! :-P


> - Video feeds that I could almost swear must have been MPEG *1*.
>   Constant compression artifacts.

Ugh. This reminds me of that nasty online plague known as WebEx.
Inferior proprietary non-interoperable video encoding, in a day and age
when superior open standards exist. Usable only with a badly designed
proprietary player with egregious usability problems. People have
complained loud and clear and the official response is, our engineering
team designed this train-wreck so we're stuck with it, and we're looking
to maybe perhaps someday move to a better format but that's not on our
list of priorities right now.

Yet for whatever reason corporate types just love WebEx. Every meeting
and cow-orker's son's birthday party is on WebEx. Ugh. Nowadays I just
resort to looking over the cow-orker's shoulders when reviewing WebEx
videos instead of defiling my PC with that crap.


[...]
> I miss the 80's: Devices worked and idiots didn't use computers.

LOL... I agree with the sentiment. My dad has a pair of Apple II's from
the 80's, and they still work. He does his accounts on them sometimes.
Compared to a 3-year-old PC of today, which is probably already dying a
horrible death of HD failures, fan failures, CPU overheating, software
breakages that's gotten it into a state that requires reformatting and
reinstalling to fix. Apparently, this is the crowning achievement of 3
decades of software development.

Sigh.


T

-- 
In theory, software is implemented according to the design that has been
carefully worked out beforehand. In practice, design documents are
written after the fact to describe the sorry mess that has gone on
before.