Ed Brayton summarizes the problem with our ugly horrible intrusive ads. We all want them fixed; the catch is that we don’t manage the ads, a much bigger company does it for us, and they haven’t been very effective at policing the stuff. They have just one job…
Anyway, Top Men are working on it, we’re doing what we can to slap down the worst excesses. As Ed says,
In the meantime, please do keep sending those tech help emails. When you do, give us as much information as you can — your OS, browser and version, the company the ad is for, a screenshot of it, anything you can. It’s important that I know this stuff so I can fix it. And even if we don’t reply to each of you that sends one, please know that I’m taking it seriously and working with Patheos to address the problems. And thank you for your patience and understanding.
Also, here’s the link for reporting problems.
Ooo, I love Top Men! …wait, that came out wrong.
Allow me to be the first one to say “Websites have ads?” and then extol the virtues of adblock and the like because someone has to whenever the topic comes up.
It’s the content of the ads that concerns me the most. Boy, there is some vile stuff in the ads. I know that is the nature of web publishing, though. Subscriptions don’t usually work, and the worst ads pay the most. If you keep putting out good content then the readers will suffer through the annoying ads. That’s the bottom line.
Fucking popups. Also, animations and noise. If those can be got rid of, I’ll only complain about the ones with offensive content. Until someone can offer me that guarantee, though, it’s adblock.
Yes, on a desktop browser such as Firefox. What are the options on iDevices with Mobile Safari?
Ooops, my comment was addressing (williamgeorge) #2 in the first instance.
Some time ago you promoted an ad free/lite subscription. I paid for one because I refuse to switch off adblock for any site. Link?
Top left where it says get FTB ad free?
I recommend Firefox with NoScript. It block the ads, and all scripts are blocked at first. You can select which scripts get to run. It doesn’t make up for the fact that Firefox isn’t sandboxed for security (like Chrome is), but it does give you some interesting options.
Sunday Afternoon
My advice would be to ditch the iCrap and get a mobile device that runs Firefox or Chrome, then install adblock.
I wonder if you did some kind of fund drive once a year, to generate the same amount of cash as FTB would get from the ads, and (if successful) turn the ads off for the year. Kind of like NPR does except without the begging?
What are the options on iDevices with Mobile Safari?
Chrome works on idevices.
How come insisting that tech nerds develop some competency and put out workable products is never an option?
We got ourselves into this mess by letting tech nerds snow us that technology is cool and worthwhile in itself, even when it’s fucking useless. It really isn’t. It’s a tool that some of us use to do real shit, and it should fucking work.
Can you imagine if we’d let blacksmiths get away with the kind of bullshit we let IT people get away with? “I’m sorry, but my hammer architecture doesn’t play nice with your horse’s’ foot architecture. See, you got a mustang. You should have bought yourself an appaloosa.”
Betcha blacksmiths were less sexist, too. Relative to their wider cultures, anyway.
Anthony K wrote:
Why do you assume tech nerds are responsible for this particular mess? There aren’t that many companies where the tech nerds are responsible for the business decisions that have lead here.
Oh, I know management, in most industries, is chock full of useless know nothings. That’s how I know they didn’t program the popups.
Besides, the comparison to other industries is apt. I’m sure auto engineers also have to deal with MBAs who couldn’t find their asses with a flashlight and a focus group but still make business decisions, but I’ve never taken my car to a mechanic to have the mechanic say “heh heh, ditch the Honda and buy a Toyota” and then go back to World of Warcraft. I’m sure it happens, but such smarmy bullshit is virtually guaranteed when dealing with tech nerds.
Anthony K @13:
Years ago, while dealing with some Windows crap, it occurred to me that if cars were as unreliable as this, the streets would be filled with pitchfork-bearing mobs.
Anthony K
It’s not the techs’ fault; they build what Marketing tells them or they get fired. Blame Marketing, they’re the ones who come up with all the stupid new ideas for ads.
Poor techs! It’s a good thing thing that marketing doesn’t exist in any other industry. I mean, imagine if auto companies had marketing departments. Why, the poor engineers would have no choice but to make shitty cars that don’t work, or else they’d get fired.
Apparently it’s not the techs’ fault, but the fact that their industry, unlike any other, has people called ‘marketing’ and ‘management’ who somehow cause all the problems.
Anthony K 20
Have you looked at the crap that’s being pushed by auto companies? Marketing has plenty of sway there. The problem isn’t that the popups and animations and so forth don’t work (usually; sometimes the scripts can fuck with browsers); they pop up and animate and all that bullshit on schedule. The problem is that they’re there, which is marketing’s fault. Not just tech companies’ marketing departments, but the marketing departments of all the companies that pay for the stupid fucking popups.
You mean like my car that reliably works?
Yeah, that’s exactly one of the problems. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with browsers. This may shock you, but I’m using one now.
You don’t say! Those fucking marketing programmers!
The problem of them being there, yes, we can put that on marketing. The fact that they fuck shit up; that’s on the fucking techs.
I have an idea! What if we put techs in charge of buck-passing?! And we’ll put marketing in charge of making the pop-ups. Then we won’t have any pop-ups! Problem solved!
Not even fucking kidding, I just got a “There was a problem with this page so it was re-loaded” message, and then I had to log in again. I’m sure it was all marketing’s fault somehow, but my car has never forced me to hit CTRL ALT DEL.
And which unworkable product are you upset about, exactly?
Pop-up ads? Those are working as designed.
Browsers allowing pop-up ads? Those are working as designed too.
Safari not letting you install ad-block or the like? That’s also working as designed.
Is it shitty that I can’t block these obnoxious pop-up ads in Safari? Fucking hell yes! It’s not because of unworkable products, though.
You really have no idea how much effort goes into making sure things work as well as they do, do you? Modern day computers are complex enough that no single person can know or understand everything a single machine is doing. But sure, let’s have billions of the things all communicating with each other, and then complain when it doesn’t work the way you expect it to!
I don’t even know where to start with this, because holy shit that’s a terrible analogy. Here’s a better one: “Sorry, my horse shoes won’t fit your camel, because it’s a fucking camel, not a horse!”
Stupity got us into this mess.
Why can’t it get us out?
tee fucking hee
stupidity
@Anthony K, And how much did you pay for your car. Now how much do you pay for your browser and other software? Think there might be a correlation? hmmm?
Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD
30 October 2014 at 10:23 pm
must be in an ad that adblock blocks.
ghee I think I heard about a big recall of various cars just the other day because the airbag safety device that was designed to protect the occupants of the vehicle in an accident was killing people with shrapnel ?
Cars are safe er and more reliable because of government oversight and regulation and liability laws suits.
There is not very much regulation and oversight in the computer industry I am aware accept maybe NSA back doors and internet cloning and copying but that is a different subject. Instead we have license agreements and are told we do not even own any of our software even if we do not have to “buy ” it
It is marketing and the need to pay for the services that is the problem. No one seems to be really interested in cooperation in so far as the user’s experience goes but only in system compatibility and only that in so far as their desire to get their adds displayed and some are worse than others.
I was having a problem with a particular video add server here that was so bad that after about 2 to 5 minutes it had up to 4 video adds with sound trying to play in the margins at the same time, it would totally lock my system up to such a degree I had difficulty even closing down the browser.
I can not afford to donate anything at this time so I had adblock installed
uncle frogy
It’s still a very young industry. We’re pretty much around the same stage as the “automobile” industry was when steam carriages were blowing up in the streets and killing innocent bystanders.
But yeah, I’m afraid that the answer to the question “what I can do to fix this on a device that, by design, makes it impossible to fix this?” is “use a different device”. We’re programmers, not fucking wizards. You choose to buy a locked-down piece of shit that doesn’t work properly, I’m sorry, but you’re shit out of luck. You bought the steam carriage with the worst record for blowing up. Nobody held a gun to your head.
Wait wait wait… Patheos is providing the ads? The Christian company? The reason I keep seeing that Viagara pop-up that won’t even close unless you click the “leave this page” popup and the “hottest female body” ad is because Patheos did it???
Whoa. I guess money is more important than God.
Actually, let’s be honest here, were closer to the stage that civil engineering was in the early High Middle Ages, when cathedral towers were collapsing all over Europe… We’ve just started trying to build really big, complicated things, completely unlike anything that anybody’s ever tried to build before, and we have no idea how to do it properly yet.
Maitre FTB: And finally Monsieur Creosote, a wafer-thin ad…
I have a book, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability and Productivity by Thomas K. Landauer, published 1995. It makes, over 366 pages, very much the same complaint Anthony K. does.
As I said on Ed’s blog:
Speaking personally I would be leery at best about visiting a website that a friend described as “It’s good, but make sure you have something like adblock before going there”, as would (I suspect) most even slightly net-savvy people.
Guess what I have to say about FtB.
The “Get FTB ad-free” link doesn’t show if I have Adblock enabled. I always have Adblock enabled or I wouldn’t be able to tolerate using the internet, so I didn’t know the link was there until now. I have paid the subscription but I had to go searching for the form which wasn’t easy to find.
It would be a good idea to allow the link to show when Adblock is enabled otherwise people like myself who always use Adblock won’t know about it unless they happen to see a mention of it elsewhere.
Re @23:
No, I think he is referring to those “infotainment” thingies in new cars these days. When everyone fusses about handheld cellphones, the car companies stick in these things where everything is controlled on a single touch screen, and lets you talk “hands-free” on your cell phone. Never mind that “hands-free” is just as distracting as handheld. And that touch screen means you can’t just feel the control, you gotta look at the screen to see where the button is virtual on the screen. And car marketers keep yelling “We’re Safety First, Bluetooth Is The Safest!!!” “Fewer buttons mean less confusion: everything controlled in the very same place, on a single screen!!!”
I don’t mind the ads so much as the one that pops out of the left and totally skews the entire site.
I wonder if NPR’s model would work. Figure out the readership then from that estimate the typical revenue/reader and have a fund drive once a year to raise that amount.
I don’t subscribe (my brain edits ads out) but i’d donate so that none of us had to see ads. ‘Cuz we’re a hive-mind.
Patheos? Well that at least explains why the problems here are pretty much the same as the problems over at Friendly Atheist. But I didn’t know they were an ad provider in their own right and not just a blog network. Is there any other affiliation with them? I’ve been assuming from things said in the past that FTB is hosted on some general purpose web hosting server farm.
Ooh, a whole nineteen years ago!
Seriously, that’s not a long time, in terms of engineering maturity. It took people hundreds of years to figure out how to build cathedrals without them falling down.
Besides, the sort of things people were doing with computers 19 years ago were of a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we’re trying to do today. To stick with my cathedral-building analogy, 19 years ago we were just learning how to build mud huts.
Well, to stick with your analogy, 19 years ago and since then, nobody ever did figure out how to build a mud hut. It’s not as if Windows 3.1 with Netscape Navigator is now a problem that’s been “solved” — that shit still doesn’t work. What people actually did was start building different things which were buggy in some new way, then yet more things after that, and so on.
Anthony K@17:
You actually know a mechanic who isn’t a condescending asshole looking to part you with as much of your money as they possibly can by crook or by book, but mostly the former? Please introduce me to this unicorn. I haven’t met an IT guy yet who wanted to charge me 100 bucks to flush my computer screen cuz the display is lookin’ a little cloudy.
Anthony K@23:
Heh. Somebody here has never owned a Dodge. But seriously, what kind of cars are you driving that you are so confident in their reliability? My computer may crash but when it does, at least it hasn’t stranded me on some fucking interstate in the middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin at 4AM on a freezing January morn and CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn’t cost 2000 dollars to press.
unclefrogy@31:
One can imagine an automotive engineer grilling new recruits: “WHEN WE MAKE MISTAKES PEOPLE DIE SON!!!”
I don’t have a problem with sites generating revenue through advertising.
But the online advertising industry has been morally unscrupulous from day one. First came banner ads, which were fine. But then came animations designed to test peoples’ patience…then came third-party ad-hosts…then came JavaScript pop-ups…then pop-unders…then mock pop-ups…then Flash and sound effects…then came tracking routines, withheld content, and every other sinister technology in the book thrown against the wall. When a headline hits about some big, supposedly-reputable site like Yahoo serving malicious code via its advertisements (while simultaneously evading responsibility for the damage), I just shrug my shoulders and figure that it’s business as usual.
But three-quarters of the problems with ads aren’t caused by them being ads…they’re caused by them using JavaScript. Mandatory JavaScript is a violation: If you’re providing dynamic functionality you should provide it on the server side and run the code on your computer, not mine, and I will not bog down my resources to run your unvetted, executable code on my computer.
Some sites are meaner about this than others: Patheos insists on visitors running executable code from up to eighteen different offsite domains at once, and they withhold commenting functionality from the site unless you run it. I don’t block ads, but I do block offsite-hosted scripts…and if blocking scripts causes 100% of your ads and 50% of your content to disappear, that’s a problem with your ads and your site, not my computer.
As far as I’m concerned, the solution is this: Take responsibility for your own ads. Sell them yourself, vet them yourself, and host them on your own server without relying on JavaScript to present them. And if you can’t support yourself that way, maybe you shouldn’t be running ads in the first place. I remember an era when most of the relevant content on the web was either academic, or hosted by hobbyists on their personal sites out of the goodness of their hearts…and I wouldn’t be sad to see that era return.
I agree with Andrew T.
Also, just to repeat this for emphasis: it’s a dumb move to make your “FTB ad-free” advertisement invisible when an adblocker is being run (or javascript is blocked, for that matter). You should want everyone using the site to be capable of seeing it and using it, and it doesn’t need to be any more intrusive than a text-based link.
<blockquoteAnd that touch screen means you can’t just feel the control, you gotta look at the screen to see where the button is virtual on the screen. And car marketers keep yelling “We’re Safety First, Bluetooth Is The Safest!!!” “Fewer buttons mean less confusion: everything controlled in the very same place, on a single screen!!!”
We just got the “newest” car we’ve ever had (a 2009); I was honestly shocked when we were shopping to find how many of even the lower-end cars are touch-screen based now, or moving in that direction with knobs that are each a multiple control toggle switch or that have to be pressed on just the right colored side to go one direction or the other. If I have to look at it to make it work, it is not safe. I am flummoxed why car controls are now less safe than ones 30 years ago were.
@26 jste
You’re kidding, right? I’ve been using computers since the mid-80s. Pick the system you love most to bag on for its problems; I’ve experienced those.
You’re absolutely right about the complexity of modern computing, but complaining about products when they don’t work the way they’re supposed to is pretty much one of the few powers we have as consumers.
Well, the analogy was more about the attitude that everyone who’s ever dealt with a tech in any capacity has experienced. “You bought the product that’s not my favourite! Ha-ha! Sucks to be you. Ethics in game journalism!”
@29 Paul Hatchman:
I paid ~$14 for this side cutting can opener at a grocery store. Best $14 I ever spent. Seriously, everyone, be on the lookout and grab one of these when you get the chance.
@32, Dunc
I’m pleased that you’ve managed to diagnose my issue as “wrong product” though I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned exactly which product I’m using. (I’m only able to comment today from work because it’s a crap shoot whether or not I can log in to FtB from here and today appears to be my lucky day. In today’s miracle of ‘functioning as intended’, IE was the winner.) For the record, I use Chrome, Safari, IE (at work only because lots of business communication software won’t work with Chrome), and Firefox. And they all fuck up.
And as far as “nobody holding a gun to my head”, you are aware that computers are pretty much a must in nearly every work environment, right? And that at work, very few of us have the ability to choose which products we use? Don’t fucking caveat emptor me.
But that’s standard for dealing with tech people. “You bought the wrong product, hur-hur.” “Problem exists between chair and keyboard.” “ID-10T error.” Anything to deflect the blame.
@44 CR
Exactly. And when Dunc’s cathedrals are all sorted out, they’ll have moved on to building buggy and broken shopping malls.
@45:
I have met such a unicorn, but you’re certainly right that IT people tend not to be gouging assholes, compared to mechanics, and usually do their best to fix the problem as quickly and cheaply as possible, as far as I’ve experienced.
Other than the recalls mentioned, new cars are fairly reliable. How well are ten-year-old PCs holding up compared to ten-year-old Hondas?
I’ll probably x-post this over at Ed’s.
I don’t mind the ads, in general, as I don’t mind that being how the site is funded.
Thank you for managing to nix the pop overs that scrolled with the screen and were impossible to close as it crashed all my mobiles (for the record, that includes idevices and android).
I really don’t think this is true. I remember when BSODs were such a regular occurrence that it was a running joke (remember all those BSOD screen savers?), and when you really did need to regularly reboot a Windows box just to stop it from dying on its ass. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a BSOD. Hell, I don’t even know what it looks like in any version of Windows since XP. On the other side of things, I remember when trying to install Linux on a perfectly normal, not-exactly-recent desktop machine meant hours, if not days, of buggering about with ISAPNP settings and obscure config files, before you finally gave up in disgust because it simply wouldn’t talk to your modem and your graphics card at the same time (let’s not even talk about printers). Nowadays, anybody can install Linux fairly painlessly, you can generally expect whatever OS you’re using to fundamentally work, most of the time, and you can usually expect your web browser of choice to work on top of it. You can even expect most of your peripherals to simply work, straight out of the box, without having to spend a day or two downloading drivers and manually resolving IRQ conflicts. That’s a huge improvement.
We actually have made a hell of a lot of things a hell of a lot better. It’s just that the range of things we’re trying to do has expanded even faster than the range of things we know how to do, which is a pretty clear sign that it’s a fundamentally immature discipline.
Yeah, and got a lot of shit from IT people because “hur-hur, wrong product.” Now I got some Apple products. I should expect those to work without a hitch, right?
Sorry about that comment 52 Dunc, I actually do agree with the bulk of your comment 51.
Tech does tend to work together better than it did a decade ago. But now we’re expected to simply use more tech, so the total amount of problems I experience in my typical work day remains the same.
If people required a ten year old PC to get their damn kids to school, they’d probably hold up pretty fucking well, ya think?
You said “iDevice”, did you not? Which implies something from the Apple ecosystem, and the entire ethos of the Apple ecosystem is that they’re pretty much locked down. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, you’re fucked. Welcome to Apple, please bend over.
Whatever it is you’re using, I’m pretty damn sure I didn’t write it. Is there a heck of a lot of shitty, badly-written, should-never-have-been-released, not-even-fit-for-alpha software out there? Hell yes. Not my fault, guv’nor, I didn’t write it.
And yeah, web code is the fucking worst. Millions of javascript monkeys, bashing random bits of script they found on the internet together until it vaguely looks like it might sort-of work, if you’re lucky, on a good day. “Move fast and break things” as the official ethos of a major player. Welcome to the downsides of rapid adoption. If anybody’s got any solutions, I’m eager to hear them, but I’m afraid “you guys all suck!” isn’t a solution. I feel your pain (oh, believe me, I feel your pain) but until the industry matures to the point where we have a workforce that actually knows what the fuck they’re doing, “architecture” means something other than “drawing meaningless diagrams nobody will ever refer to”, and people actually start budgeting for testing, then I’m afraid we’re stuck with it.
I’m not sure what this comment means, but we do use computers to get to school, or work, or least we use them when they’re there, and they still fuck up. I’ve been at work for just over an hour and I’ve already had Word crash on me. (Using something else is. not. an. option. I have to use the tools I’m given, and they have to work with the tools my colleagues have been given.)
Thank you @46 Andrew T!
Personally, I go even further than your opening statement: Not only do I have no problem with sites that generate revenue through advertising, I actively try to support advertisers who support sites I like… if I know that they’re specifically choosing to do so. It’s well known that individual sites have little or no control over ads served from outside sources controlled by third parties and that the advertisers themselves have no control over where their ads appear, but one of the overlooked downsides to that is that I as a consumer usually have no way of knowing whether and ad is appearing on a given site by chance (or by algorithm) or because the advertiser wants to support that site.
If I know for certain that a business has actively chosen Freethoughtblogs as a place to spend their advertising dollar I’ll go out of my way to give them my money (assuming I need or want what they’re selling). Otherwise I’m not interested in anything they have to offer.
I don’t think I did. Yes, safari crashes on me all the time, but I’m a multi-platform user, and I experience problems with all of them. Less so with my PC, but I pretty much only use it for gaming and interneting.
No, but it feels good after all those BSOD and Micro$oft jokes I had to endure from tech people. Now I guess it’s welcome to Apple, bend over.
(Also, Dunc, rape analogies aren’t cool. I know you know, and you’re using a common phrase, but don’t.)
If the total number of problems you’re experiencing has remained more-or-less constant, you’re one of the lucky ones.
I don’t want anybody to get the wrong impression here. I totally agree that the whole situation is completely fucked. I’m just saying that at this stage in the development of an entirely new suite of technologies, “completely fucked” is exactly what you’d expect. It takes a long time for an industry to mature. Nobody set out to build cathedrals that collapsed and killed thousands. Nobody sets out to write buggy, awful code. But the discipline we laughing call “software engineering” simply doesn’t know how to do any better yet. We’re starting to develop the techniques needed to deal with some of the worst and most obvious sources of disaster, but adoption is tricky, because at the end of the day, vendors don’t suffer any immediate negative impacts from releasing shit that doesn’t work. The next iPhone could prank-call your co-workers and send hardcore pornography to your granny, and people would still queue round the block to buy the damn thing. “It’s OK, we’ll fix it in a patch.”
For my iOS devices, I like the Mercury browser. It has an ad block feature and otherwise good privacy options. I guess they have it for Android, too, but I can’t attest to its performance on that platform.
Point taken. Sorry.
As for the iDevice thing, I must be confusing you with someone else in the thread. Buy yeah, Safari is horrible, in my (limited) experience. Still better than any IE version under 9 though…
Fair enough and well-stated.
I’m not an early adopter, so I’ve never lined up for any product really. (Okay, I will buy the occasional AAA title game come October, but I pretty much buy lastgen components and hardware. But again, not using computers is not an option, so a lot of us buy the tech that we know will be buggy because companies treat users as unpaid beta testers (once consoles were all internet enabled, it was pretty much the death of games that worked perfectly right out of the box) because we have no choice.
@61, no worries. Just a gentle reminder.
I think it was because the first comment I responded to in this thread referenced “iCrap”, so it’s understandable. My wife thinks I’m silly for using Safari when she installed Chrome on our iPad, so I guess that one’s on me anyway.
To continue the architectural analogies, one of the biggest problems we have in the industry is that most of our customers (and even many of our own project managers) haven’t got enough experience to understand the difference between “we’d like the lobby painted a different colour” and “we’d like the building to face in a different direction”.
On a lighter note, if you want to understand just why software is so completely fucked, here are some hilarious essays from James “The Funniest Man in Microsoft Research” Mickens:
The Night Watch:
Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery
Enjoy!
I do chronic disease surveillance. “Statistics” to much of management and some clients, and that’s the limit of their understanding. Some of the data we use are collected for the purpose of surveillance, and some of it is collected for other purposes, and we have to use what we have. It’s hard to make people understand why we can’t just open up a dataset and have the right numbers come tumbling out. So I do sympathize (even after the hard time I’ve been given y’all over this.)
Again, lemme bring up Project Wonderful>. They seem like just the thing you’re looking for. I have adblock, and the only ads that I let through are the project wonderful ones.
Damnit I cannot seem to get links to work right around here. >_<
The adds were horrible, but I wanted to support the site, so I subscribed. Presto, no adds and the site gets the cash it needs to survive.
To be honest, when it comes to the web, the surprising thing isn’t that it’s bug-ridden and horrible, it’s (a) that anything works at all, and (b) that you don’t immediately get infected with at least a dozen different types of malware the instant you connect. Browsing the internet is the IT security equivalent of going for a swim in an piranha-infested open sewer, which has been deliberately infected with thousands of carefully-tailored bioweapons, whilst hundreds of people shoot at you. The people who write your browsers are doing an incredible job just keeping you alive.
Actually, it does, and has for years. (Canonical example is the Space Shuttle’s software.)
Part of the problem, as you go on to say, is “vendors don’t suffer any immediate negative impacts from releasing shit that doesn’t work.” There is a lot of trvth there, but it isn’t strictly true.
For example, Big Dumbie Co, who I work for, has just had to revise a chip because, it appears, a trivial test was never done — and the problem was a “killer” (not of people, but of the usability of the chip). Without a fix, there would be no sales, and hence several million dollars of R&D expenses without an obvious payback.
The trick right now is to implement one of the known steps to avoiding these mistakes, to avoiding shite: A postmortem, or debriefing, on what happened and how to prevent it from ever happening again. And so the next mistake appears: Only a handful of the engineers want a postmortem. To-date, none of the managers or executives has expressed an interest, or even given an indication they have any sort of understanding of process feedback and continuous improvement. Most of them seem to be of the so-called “waterfall” process school, which was shown to not work back in the fecking 1960’s (The Mythical Man-Month).
That’s really a very different class of problem: a single, precisely-defined environment, with pre-defined requirements, a very tightly controlled software stack, and nobody actively working to attack it. Even then, the engineering effort required to validate the solutions was enormous. Nobody’s got billions to spend on developing web browsers, which have to work on a dizzying enormous array of environments and configurations, to perform functions nobody’s even thought of yet, running a whole load of modules written by third parties, many of which are horribly badly written, and are often actively malicious. The challenges are really rather different.
Congratulations, you can be a “software manager” or executive. You’ve just dismissed an entire field of expertise because the example cited is not “identical” to what you imagine the problem to be.
“X is not a Y, therefore, whatever process X uses cannot possibly apply to Y.”
I really don’t think that’s fair. Pointing out that the problems are different is not the same as completely dismissing the available solutions. It’s just recognising the limitations of the comparison. Your paraphrase is a strawman. Certainly, there are many things that the software industry could learn from projects such as the Shuttle, if they cared to.
Dunc @69
You make that sound like a bad thing.
@Dunc (#55):
I think I said “iDevice” in #5.
Thanks to LicoriceAllsort (#60) for the suggestion of Mercury with built-in add blocking.
I knew that Chrome exists for iOS, but I wasn’t able to find setting or ways to load add-ins like in the desktop version.
The path of least resistance is probably subscribing to get rid of the ads.
I went that route because the ads were causing problems with IE browser at work, and our IT department has to approve all programs/addons. Logging in from any browser or the iPad will remove the ads, although it might be tough to get to the login page with certain ads.
I subscribe because I run AdBlock, but I recognise that the site has to be paid for somehow.