Let’s hear it for technology!

 

Scott Adams brings the snark in his “Dilbert” comic strip last Sunday.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the strip’s Web page.

I can only sympathize.  I don’t use many apps on my smartphone, but it’s still infuriating to find how many of them require this, or that, or the other setting to be changed for them to work correctly.  Back in my commercial computer programming days, if we’d coded like that, we’d have been fired!  As an old saying had it, “If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”

Peter

5 comments

  1. What I find worse is the number of phone features many apps "require" to work. App programmers must spend as much time trying to justify access to the rest of the phone as they do in programming the actual target operation of the app. I spend as much time killing accesses as I do installing in the first place.

  2. What drives me crazy is how updates reset my personalized settings back to default. I can't decide if it is laziness to not nigrate settings or 'enemy action' to try and force certain default (unfriendly/data stealing) setting on us…

  3. Just sexperienced that a few minutes ago. The hotel I'm staying in has a laundry room where you can pay for the machines either by app or by quarters. So I decided to use the app. Wasted far longer than I should have trying to get the app to register the location so I could pay. Gave up and got some quarters from the front desk….

  4. Android itself has been increasingly exhibiting strange and unpredictable behavior the past couple of years. Phone going into lock mode when it shouldn't… but then at other times spontaneously unlocking itself and accepting random input from my sweaty pocket. Official bundled browser unable to make up its mind whether "open in new tab" means "open the link in a new tab in the current window", "open the link in a new tab in some random different window", or "open the link is a whole new window" – and then its also unpredictable which tab/window the browser will start out in when next it's invoked.
    Also, many user settings have disappeared – I don't know if they're no longer supported or just moved to some extremely nonobvious menu. It's almost like there's nobody in change, and the code monkeys are just changing stuff at random.

    @Francis Turner: Was that posted from a phone with really interesting autocorrect?

  5. Computing is one field where the KISS principle has been totally forgotten over the years because developers develop for their egos, not for usability.

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