Good tight clean code is back, and the euros are doing it

Lounge
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One begins to suspect… are American corporate practices mirroring the dysfunctions of governing practices ? Are we collectively so out of it we can’t even measure how out of it we are ?

Vide.. my recent experiences with Euro region based or originating programs versus their American counterparts…

My Norton 360 all-in-one antivirus, firewall, and other stuff program was as bad as having a nasty computer virus, at least on my machine.. . and it was a beast to uninstall..I never saw such absurd bloatware passing itself off as a premium design…

Stripped it off and replaced the ugly monster with NOD32 by ESET. .. supposedly written by a team of slovakian hardcores… holy moley!..
it was like trading a barely roadworthy 20 year old pickup truck with a Porsche… so fast and transparent you never have to think about it, installation is a breeze,

Then…had the same experience with my disk defrag… used to use Diskeeper until it became another impenetrable, opaque, arrogant corporation with an impossible to install product… looked around and discovered O&O… german company that writes beautiful tight code… so I’m cogitating, why deal with these companies which seem to have followed the example of the Executive Office and gone into imperial disconnect mode with product functionality to match?

Now… Linux is beginning to stir again as some old (and paralysing) litigation issues are being resolved… which might change the OS
playing field in compelling ways…

The question is: is tech dominance and creativity dominance we had assumed was our american birthright being captured by the euro techies ?

How is it that this big, out of touch (corporations, governmental structures… and the media has gotten just as clueless, just to spead the love around) smug, lack of introspection, narrowly defined mission leadership class is producing such weirdness and dysfunction?

Is our software now a metaphor for who we are ?

Our Friend tacitus - RIP 12/2010 - A compilation of brilliant and exhilarating posts
2

You have to remember in order to maximize profits and minimize costs, that America’s large software corperations are “off shoring” their development processes to countries where programmers earn $3.00 a day. Or in the case of Microsoft to Canada where they can import off shore programmers at minimum costs. Meanwhile American high tech workers are being retrained into new jobs, and remember it takes lots of training so that they can remember to say “you want fries with that?”!:frowning:

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I don’t know what got into the collective corporate assbrain in the last 24 months… I’m seeing this idiot “let them eat cake” disengaged weirdenss in so many softwares… as if the top layer of leaders all went to aruba to snort coke and left the business in the hands of chimpanzees intent on tapping a keg… WTF ? I get new machines from Dell, loaded with the “old” XP (don’t even get on the subject of Vista…) and they are behaving like strangely manic depressive carnival barkers… pointless “helpful” total shit windows pop up at the most inappropriate times, today some f.u. thing opened 50 (!) Explorer windows to update my programs ? Had to hard de-boot the sytem, could not interrupt this insane process… does the management even use their own crap products ? Evidently not…

Everybody I’m talking to tells me how much of a total royal P.I.T.A. Norton-Symantic is to deal with as a company and as a set of programs… damn hard to even find a customer service number.. and Dell wants to upsell a Norton preload… do they not understand that the public is highly fed up with the lousy programming ? Evidently not…

Here’s what gets me… the people running things at the highest levels seem to have broadly dropped the hint that that they have got it made in the shade and they don’t give a flying shit how you feel about that… I doubt they have a clue what’s happening in Iraq nor do they care…

Everything is a symptom of everything else…:cool:

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What were willing to put up with as software is amazing. Windows has problems, but Linux isnt exactly a shining example of great user-friendliness, you grep pipe less? Its because we pay for it. Billions of dollars a year for it. And nobody is willing to say “This is crap and you arent getting another cent.” Worse, nobody is willing to seek out good software. Everybody buys what the pack buys. Its no better in other countries. It sucks just as much but in a foreign language.

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I resent that :angry:. I am asked often about computer problems from friends/teachers/parents and I can usually easily fix their problem or suggest a great product, most likely OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. I also pride myself as being a non-conformist.

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I HIGHLY recommend watching the documentary entitled ‘The Corporation.’ It really shook my world, and I already had a tight grasp on the influential tactics that these bloodsuckers use to enslave us with their mass marketing. I never knew that a Corporation is considered a LEGAL PERSON in the United States until I viewed the film.

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The user friendliness of many Linux distributions has vastly improved during the last few years. I’m using openSuSe and it’s not less user-friendly than Windows - it’s just different, so it takes some time to get used to the differences between both systems. Of course there are great differences between the different distributions of Linux regarding user-friendliness. Gentoo for example is a system for the Linux professional and the “average” user would go insane (me included). But distris such as OpenSuse and PCLinuxOS are IMO easily understandable for everyone who would understand Windows, too. For me WinXP has been degraded to a kind of gaming console… :smiley:

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NOD is the good stuff.

And I think we can thank the King of Bloat (Microsoft) for spurring on the creation of intrusive, and mostly useless features, that get copycatted by everyone else.

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It appears that the softwares are a reflection of the size of creating corporation. The larger the software corporation the larger their footprint even after un-installation. They don’t want to let go and like to continue keeping tab on user’s usage profile and choice of replacement software so that they can then imitate those desired features to further monopolize the market.

An interesting read on a related topic, how the growing size of the organisation changes the philosophy and hence their products.

PC World - Is Apple the New Microsoft?

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Let’s not blame offshoring for all the job problems in America. Businesses will go where qualifications can be obtained at cheaper costs. Companies are here to make money and this basic philosophy is why America is the land of opportunities and has achieved the high average quality of life that it has, compared to the rest of the world.

Having worked both at offshore and onsite locations, I think the problem is the disconnect happening by only moving the very low level development jobs to offshore and not the jobs responsible for high level design and decision making. You have to move the entire department or nothing at all.

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That’s what stunned me.. we’ve been sold a bill of goods that evolving software has to be more cumbersome, more complex, more stuff-it-down-your-throat our way or the highway mentality… when I finally got the last (please, please…) of that WRETCHED Norton off my machine I was blown away by the functional simplicity of NOD32… as well as the code O&O is writing… I can’t get the american programs off my machine fast enough… I get the feeling that many in the software community are waiting for Judge Kimball’s final ruling on Linux ownership… because I also get the feeling that IBM has been holding off dumping a massive library of open source code into the marketplace until Linux got the green light… :slight_smile:

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if linux get’s the greenlight it would certainly make things interesting.

My personal preference for resolving bloat issues, is just building my own rig, whether hardware of software. But then again, images are part of how i make my living.

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I built my first comp when I was 13 :smiley:. And I prefer Kaspersky over NOD.

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Programming in Assembly eliminates a lot of bloat!!:roll_eyes: But then again, these days there aren’t a lot of programmers who know Assembly.

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Machine language only ! We should have special nurseries where infants are socialized into machine language from birth… a special class of machine language savants… human compilers ! Did you see that thing where an entire airport was put out of operation because of one network card in one peripheral machine ? I think probably senior mamagement is no longer drawn from the programming ranks but legal, tax strategy, marketing and wouldn’t know their ass from their elbow anyway… Dell did an internal audit of their employee satisfaction… so happened that 50% of their employees would immediately leave the company if they could find equivalent pay elsewhere… and the top guys had no idea anyone was unhappy until the report landed on their desks… talk about clueless…

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human compilers! lol

hey check this guy out - he’s a bitch to troubleshoot, but i totally dig the cyborginess…

My Latest Rig

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well i’m not that slick that i can write up an AV/fW program as i need too. But I don’t have to attempt to remove soem other craptastically invasive suite, because soemone else decided i needed it.

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Why is anyone here complaining? Really, this is everyones fault. I really don’t like M$ for any of their products. Rarely have they come up with anything NEW in terms of their labs created it. But I can’t blame them entirely for the faults of bloatware. When I think of M$ I think of a quote;

“I don’t know what the key to success is, but I know that the key to failure is trying to please everyone” -Bill Cosby.

Its that one reason alone the Open Source will always win out. They are only motivated by creating a solution to a problem they are having. Then they distribute it and everyone loves it because they were having the same problem. Demand -> Supply = Happy users.

Microsoft and similar companies are creating solutions for which their are no problems, thus bloatware.

Sloppy code is also a huge factor but again, these are people who are not personally interested in the program. They were not frustrated by the problem, they are just creating a solution. Its not personal. If anyone has had to fix anything, they know that the personal solution works much better than OTS (off the shelf) products.

So diss the OS all day long, thats cool. But remember that we all made it this way. If anyone is interested in my background, I was a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems for 9 years and designed special solutions for Ford, Ebay, and the DoD. I moved on to the AF Space Command where we built satellites. Currently I am in Baghdad doing multi-role engineering (as well as being a Combat Medic)

Be Happy,
Davinci <– I really miss the days of Bell Labs, they created some COOL SHIT!