When you read that the $150 laptops with the AMD APU with some R5 400 mhz (?!) "GPU" are not really good enough (even with 4GB RAM and a 500GB (slow) hard disk) to play video games, you have to understand that it is really, really, true.

Should anybody need some evidence to indict the computer industry, one need look no further than a sampling of so-called "progress indicators". A continuous parade of idiotic and unethical practice.

I think if anybody needs an indictment of the entire computer industry, one needs to look no further than at a compendium of so-called "progress indicators". A continuous parade of idiotic and unethical practice.

I cannot fathom the sheer ineptitude displayed by seemingly all of humanity when it comes to usability and user experience. Consider the horrible UX of any OEM Windows install, with all the related bloatware. Then consider that I try to use a "decrapifier" type application but even getting that to work means I have to experience the horrible UX of the Windows installer system, and then the horrible broken UX of the application defaulting to needing to download every translation file from some slow remote server?! And then how Windows 8 makes it hard to even find the Program Files folder, and then of course I have to look in there and the blasted Program Files (x86) folder.

Complete and utter insanity and hell.

If your search engine gives me different results when the only thing i change is the word "cannot" to "can't" in the query, then I kinda think your search engine is an epic fail.

I haven't used Microsoft Windows in a long time, not really since Windows 7. I am mucking around with a couple of cheap ass AMD laptops with Windows 8 pre installed, and I have to go through the setup process.

It is like complete and utter crap UX. Constant complete epic failures of usability and user experience. It really is enough to make me newly respect e.g. Ubuntu and (of course) Mac OS X.

(Also: weird that the setup on the two different (but actually very similar under the covers) machines had different screens, options, settings, requirements.)

Please boycott any sites that put modal dialogs in your face while you are trying to do things. Be it advertisements, email newsletter subscription offers, 124C --whatever it is, the fact that they are willing to break the UX like that means they are, imho, idiot jerks who deserve to go out of business.

A web browser that doesn't actually show my recent history in order in the history menu, only 'Recently Closed' and 'Most Visited' (I guess they want me to have to wait for the long click on the back button every time or something, and all the crappy ux domino effects that come with that.) A replacement history extension that does what I want... but uses some stupid hateful utterly idiotic ux where the menu faaaades in and out so i have to BURN yet another 0.25 seconds of MY LIFE any time I want to use it.

Oh and a GTX/Gnome program that never populates anything in the 'Recently Opened...' menu AND doesn't default to opening the thing I had open when I last closed the application.

A blogging platform that somehow breaks Chromium such that when I search for a word on the page, the x/y numbers change as I advance, but there is no highlight anywhere on the page showing the hits, and the page is not scrolling to where they might be should they be off-screen.

A blogging platform that breaks (can't save post, etc.) like the wind of a great grandpa.

THAT's what I get up at 6 am for, yeah BABY!

One of the common things that is said in the open source community is, "if you run into a problem, open an issue on it, don't just complain" with the implication that it is not ok to complain about whatever it is you ran into.

There's so much wrong with that mindset.

Just one concrete example of how it is wrong is that there's so much under-documented confusing bad weird crap involved in even e.g. just getting set up with Flow + Browserify that while I am already getting nowhere fast, I would bet getting nowhere fast ten times slower if I also attempted to open and follow an issue on every freaking thing that I come across along the way.

I am not entirely against using issues. However, I believe that in a good ecosystem it is part of a bigger gestalt of good UX. Using issues is just one tool among many and really should be a last resort. If there are issues being opened, it often indicates more fundamental problems e.g. poor documentation or a poor design or a poor ecosystem in the first place.

I do not understand how anybody can make a text search engine ux that is bad in this day and age. Have the people who create such broken abominations never used, I don't know, you know, Google? There are 3 (yes, three) basic levels of epic fail that I constantly find on the internet:

1. No free text search feature at all.
2. It is just broken under the covers (e.g. bad index no stemming or god only knows what) so good results are hard/impossible to get (e.g. I see the thing right in front of me but search doesn't find it) (e.g. hits appear and disappear seemingly randomly as I update my search).
3. Front end search query language is weird (e.g. doesn't default to 'and') (e.g. uses extra weird syntax).
4. Really poor filtering options (e.g. none, or stupid wrong ones).

e.g. Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Craigslist, Android Gmail, Win Phone Edge, most any e-commerce site I've ever seen ever, etc.

In software engineering, "We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection." (er, well, except sometimes performance.)

In JavaScript, we can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection that is under documented and depends upon 3.14159 other under documented javascript libraries and competes with at least 7 other ways of trying to accomplish the same thing. (Oh and p.s. we'll make damned sure to always give them all really annoying names that either just sound effing childishly stupid (e.g. "...ify" or "belch" or some such) or are a freaking hatefest when it comes to seo (e.g. "flow").)

I find it curious (that's an euphemism, by the way, for a never ending string of cuss words) that the browser history feature ux has become so uselessly obviously blatantly corrupted over time. Chrome does not in fact even show the page I was on immediately preceding the current one. It shows Recently Closed and Most Visited. Uh. yeah.

There are two kinds of programming experiences.

One is where you find yourself having gone off on tangent after tangent, each time seeing and learning something super cool that you want to get around to adding/using in your development. You feel smarter, more powerful, unleashed, ready to build anything.

The other is where you find yourself having gone off on tangent after tangent, each time trying to figure out how to get something to work at all, something that should have worked out of the box, or at least had documentation that didn't suck. Like, x doesn't work so then you read about it and somebody says use y to solve that problem so then you try to get y to work but then etc. ad nauseum. You feel like a whipped dog, you want to quit and become anything but a programmer in life.

You can probably guess which category I'd put JavaScript in.

Of all the horrible things about the JavaScript ecosystem, one of the most glaring wtfs to me is that, apparently, even the ES6 module spec tells me I have to hard code the paths to libraries I want to include.

I don't generally live in the world of JavaScript, but one cannot get away from it so I do try to catch up and dabble now and then. I have to say that to date I have never seen a JavaScript environment that was actually really any good by my predilections/standards. The core language is really crap (who cares if it was crap because it was created under extreme duress, the fact is it is crap) and the lack of a controlling centralizing body with sufficient sway means that anything layered on top of it just leads to a living hell in my opinion e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=browserify+flow+import+export+"may+appear+only" as one random example I am wasting my precious life on this evening. There seems to be a lot of good intention out there in the JS community, but the sum total of it all is a minefield of vaguely in/compatible, under documented, rapidly changing, overly complex, overly flexible, overly fragile stuff. I personally have yet to see any way to manage JavaScript in any way that isn't junk.

There's no particular answer anybody can come up with that I can see, either. It is a horrible situation and the lock-in is just insanity. Gosh, maybe if we actually cared about software development we would all agree that JavaScript must not cannot never ever not ever be used for anything. We would disable it and delete it everywhere. We would demand that all browsers and all web sites use... something else. Oh, uh, but what would that something else be? Yeah, inevitably it wouldn't work out well because nobody could agree, and whatever it was would suck too and not be at all what I prefer in programming languages and ecosystems.

Do you really wonder why the aliens are staying the hell away from making contact with us?

I hereby claim a "citizen's patent" (like a citizen's arrest) on the concept of having not just a simple boring mere touchscreen device, but having a lickscreen (or uh tonguescreen) device. It won't respond to finger or stylus swipes at all, only to tongue lick swipes. (Yes, kicks the Tinder a different experience around.)

Ok, I hereby also put the idea into the public domain.

So there.

I was pleasantly surprised by https://www.vehiclehistory.com.

news flash: shopping online at bricks and mortar companies still sucks absolute feces.

even at tech store web sites.

Reading about airliner incidents and accidents, I have a few humble suggestions for shoring up the problems that are still encountered.

1. hypoxia
1. In-cockpit cameras recording pilot's use of oxygen masks when required by rules/regs/laws. It is human not to don the mask, I get it. But it needs to be done. Review the video after every flight (and I do mean every flight) and if somebody didn't do it right then gently reprimand/teach/demote/remind/urge them to do it. Over time we can hopefully train everybody to really truly don the masks when it is right to do so. (Of course, the masks and tubing and valves and all that can have trouble too, so there should be pre-flight checks for them where the pilots actually use them during taxiing.)
2. The autopilot should be able to bring a plane down to a less depressurized altitude if it detects a bad pressure situation. This feature should possibly be something that ground control can remotely invoke. Yes, I grok the security concerns.
3. The autopilot should be able to land the plane at an airport if need be: if it doesn't get input from pilots that makes sense (the pilots should be quizzed every 25 minutes with a random question that a non-hypoxia-impaired person could easily answer); if the pressure goes wrong; if told to by ground control.
2. data
1. There is apparently an issue where airplanes don't really automatically report in often enough. It is expensive. It can be thwarted by the plane's satellite antenna being blocked (e.g. if things have gotten so bad the plane is inverted). It can be turned off (it should not be able to be turned off ever for pete's sake). So I suggest that a peer-to-peer system be implemented to complement the satellite one. Each plane will more frequently broadcast a minimal squirt of useful telemetry about itself. All other planes that can pick it up will record it. All that data will be automatically uploaded over WiFi as soon as the planes land.