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Snakes In The Ball Pit => Yay, I get to talk about me! => Topic started by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 13, 2014, 04:01:51 pm

Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 13, 2014, 04:01:51 pm
Because I am nothing but a lifeless husk that serves as a host for a scraggly neck-beard.

I'll start by complaining about a Lunix thing, just to maximize how horrible I am.

The K Desktop Environment lets you embed little widgets into your desktop (which they call "plasmoids," because they call the desktop "plasma").  One of these nifty little plasmoids is called Comics; as you might guess, it lets you view webcomics right on your desktop.  I have helpfully screencapped my desktop and circled the Comics plasmoid.

(http://i.imgur.com/R6oA9wDl.png) (http://i.imgur.com/R6oA9wD.png)

The comics plasmoid is pluggable; you can add new comics providers to it.  I've written a handful of these things; they're little JavaScript files.  What you do is provide a few select functions, and the plasmoid itself uses those as callbacks.  This API is not very well designed; it's not entirely clear what's going on or why.  As far as I know, there's no formal documentation for it, either; there's a tutorial, but it isn't very good.  The main way you learn how to make these is by installing a few and pulling them apart.

Basically, in the plasmoid's configuration screen, you can get to a screen that lists a bunch of comic providers, which you can click to install.  Here's were the problems start to kick in; that list comes from kdefiles.org, and it isn't curated.  Any schmuck can create an account on kdefiles.org, write some javascript, package it, upload it, and have it immediately appear in the download list for everyone else.  (As far as I know; the ones that I submitted showed up in my comics list immediately.)  This is in part a problem because not everyone is a very good software engineer - and even if they were, the API itself is undocumented and non-obvious.  Some of the providers that are available are really bad - they're by people who couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with that API and ended up producing something that occasionally blows up.

This problem gets worse because - brace for it - the plasmoid isn't isolated from the rest of the desktop at all.  As far as I can tell without looking at the code, the Javascript interpreter that runs the comic providers is in the same process as the comic plasmoid and the rest of the plasma desktop.  If the little uncurated java snippet that you get from the internet explodes, it can drag your entire desktop down with it.  And the Plasma desktop is apparently central to the way that KDE works such that, if it goes down, your entire login session will ultimately get royally screwed up (as opposed to the session just detecting the hang, killing the Plasma session and re-launching it, which is what real software engineers would have done).

I discovered all this when I installed the Dr McNinja provider.  Long story short, my desktop kept crashing.  I finally noticed that it seemed to happen when I hit the "next comic" button with the Dr. McNinja comic up.  So since they're just javascript, I looked at it, and I found out that the person who wrote that provider didn't know what the hell they were doing and built it such that hitting "next" would cause two callbacks to infinitely call each other.  Apparently, when the Javascript interpreter hit that, it started looping forever; because there's no competent isolation, that froze the entire plasma desktop and eventually crashed it.  Just to confirm that that was what was happening, I put a "while(1)" loop in one of my providers, and sure enough, that kills the entire Plasma desktop.

As a final note, this also means that there's a javascript interpreter that is connected to the internet (and designed to process web requests), that is not properly isolated from the process that manages your desktop and that fetches unverified code from the internet and runs it no-questions-asked.  That is a colossal, gaping security vulnerability - unless you trust them to have designed their security systems much, much better than they did their multithreading, which I really doubt.

I haven't kept track of this, so maybe they've fixed it since the last time I looked at it (which was September).  But I kinda doubt it.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Runic on March 13, 2014, 05:27:29 pm
You were trying to hook it up to Dr. McNinja, so it might have also crashed because it was getting TO RADICAL.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Moriarty on March 13, 2014, 05:40:35 pm
At least the comics plasmoid is visible by default. The same can't be said of the stupid weather plasmoid, which places itself invisibly under the clock as though you never even added it.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 13, 2014, 05:58:01 pm
You were trying to hook it up to Dr. McNinja, so it might have also crashed because it was getting TO RADICAL.
Runic, March 13, 2014, 05:27:29 pm

You're behind, Runic!  King Radical has been vanquished, and now we're hunting vampires in a flashback!
I WIN THIS NERD CONTEST!


At least the comics plasmoid is visible by default. The same can't be said of the stupid weather plasmoid, which places itself invisibly under the clock as though you never even added it.
Moriarty, March 13, 2014, 05:40:35 pm

It's a universal theme of KDE that they care a lot more about feature count than quality or integration.  Most K* apps wind up as huge sacks of disorganized neat tricks, and not so much as usable software.
Title: Another Exciting Installment of the Gleech Bumping his Own Threads
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 24, 2014, 10:16:35 pm
So let me whine for a bit about LaTeX.  LaTeX is document-preparation software used a lot in the sciences - in the mathier sciences particularly.  The basic idea is that you have a source file, you feed it into the LaTeX processor, and it spits up a PDF.  The reason you'd do this is because LaTeX is really good at type-setting math - way better than any other software I know of, anyway.

Essentially, it turns a source file that looks something like this:
\documentclass[11pt]{article}

\begin{document}

Do you seek knowledge of squid giant axons?

\[ C_m \frac{dV \left ( t \right )}{dt} = \sum_i I_i \left ( t, V \right ) \]

\end{document}

into this:
(http://i.imgur.com/8hLJ64w.png).

LaTeX is also the math-language for wikipedia, which some of you have probably guessed (or a sub-set of it is, I'm not sure).

If you have a lot of math to lay out, LaTeX is your baby.  The problem is that there's more to modern documents than laying out equations nicely.  You see, LaTeX is old: the current major version of LaTeX is LaTeX 2e, which had its first release in 1994 and its last release in 2011.  There are a lot of things that modern users expect to be able to do easily when making a document that LaTeX doesn't nicely support - like embedding images, having colored text, setting your page margins or including source-code listings.

One or two people reading this post just yelled "Hey, wait a minute!  LaTeX can do all of those things!"  Sort of; straight-up LaTeX can't, but there are packages that add all of those features.  Sometimes, in fact, more than one package; consider the wikibooks section on including source-code listings (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Source_Code_Listings), or the wikibook chapter on embedding graphics (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Importing_Graphics), or the wikibooks section on typesetting algorithms (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Algorithms).  (Would you call that simple?)  Notice that in the case of both graphics and algorithms, there are multiple packages that do the same job in different ways - and sometimes there are even packages that extend other packages!

The problem, essentially, is that the needs of LaTeX users have changed, but the core system has not evolved at all; it's still more-or-less the same LaTeX 2e we've had since 1994.  To fix this, people have been releasing more and more packages to shore up the capabilities of the basic system; however, even these packages have aged out usefulness, and other packages have sprung up to add in even more features that the previous crop of packages didn't include.

In an ideal world, what it would be nice to do is throw out the mess that is LaTeX 2e and rebuild it for the current, completely different environment; sadly, that's impractical for a number of reasons.  Among them are all those goddamned packages; people are actually using those things right now in their documents.  If the LaTeX authors started over, they'd either have to either maintain compatibility with all those packages (which'd be a nightmare) or provide as much of the functionality of those packages in their new system (which'd be a herculean engineering challenge).  There is in fact a project to build a new version of LaTeX, LaTeX 3 (http://latex-project.org/latex3.html); that's going nowhere, I suspect largely for the reason that they can't possibly satisfy all the needs that the old, decrepid LaTeX 2e plus its 80 bajillion mutually incompatible packages is currently handling (however poorly it's handling them).

So we're stuck with the same old typesetting system, which makes it easy to typeset equations in exchange for making it hard to do God-damned near anything else.

Edit: None of this even touches the less-than-intuitive and inconsistent syntax, or the sometimes-crazy layout rules (like the ones governing figure placement), or that its default behaviors and settings can be insanely hard to change without using packages, or the way it can shit the bath if a figure or table is wider or higher than a page.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 31, 2014, 03:11:50 pm
Someday someone not me will post, and someday someone will post about something that isn't a KDE component.  Those two things will probably be related.

Anyway, I'd like to gripe about the KDE system configuration dialog.  I have a simple scenario, pictured below: I would like to set the image of the robot (highlighted in the window at right) as my desktop icon.  There isn't a context-menu option to do that, because that would advance usability, and the KDE team are constitutionally opposed to creating usable software, so I opened the settings application (the window at left) to hunt around for where to set my desktop background.

(http://i.imgur.com/eW5FGwG.png)

Looking at that settings pane, can you figure out:
a) if you can set the desktop background from this screen and, if you can,
b) where on this screen would you go to do it?

Answer: you can't.  Even though you can set the theme of the widgets on your desktop from here, and the color of your window borders from here, and the background of the task-bar from here, you can't set the desktop wallpaper from here.  You have to click on the little icon in the top-right corner and go to "default desktop settings".

Bonus: look at my task bar, and marvel at how vast and tangled my neck-beard must be.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Tiny Prancer on March 31, 2014, 04:02:06 pm
"Desktop - Dolphin" is the one that fascinates me the most
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: cyclopeantrash on March 31, 2014, 04:03:23 pm
Truly the bristliest neckbeard.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on March 31, 2014, 04:11:07 pm
"Desktop - Dolphin" is the one that fascinates me the most
Tiny Prancer, March 31, 2014, 04:02:06 pm

Sorry to disappoint, but it's just that "Dolphin" is the name of KDE's file-manager (http://dolphin.kde.org/).
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Tiny Prancer on March 31, 2014, 09:22:18 pm
I was so genuinely hopeful that it was one of those virus-ridden FREE OCEAN DESKTOP DOWNLOAD websites
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on April 09, 2014, 05:25:56 pm
I've been using LibreOffice to try to make some presentation slides; LibreOffice is the fork of OpenOffice that happened after Oracle bought Sun.  It's crashed twice in the last 45 minutes.  I'm not doing anything crazy, I'm just using the bullet view and writing text.

That's LibreOffice and OpenOffice in a nutshell right there; it'd be of great value if it worked, but it's a twitchy little fuck that fucks up and crashes all the goddamned time, for no discernible reason.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: nigeline on April 10, 2014, 12:56:12 am
I've been using LibreOffice to try to make some presentation slides; LibreOffice is the fork of OpenOffice that happened after Oracle bought Sun.  It's crashed twice in the last 45 minutes.  I'm not doing anything crazy, I'm just using the bullet view and writing text.

That's LibreOffice and OpenOffice in a nutshell right there; it'd be of great value if it worked, but it's a twitchy little fuck that fucks up and crashes all the goddamned time, for no discernible reason.
Der Trommelnspinne, April 09, 2014, 05:25:56 pm
This. It sucks that Google Drive refuses to include such simple features as footnotes or cell merging, forcing us poor paupers to use OO/LO.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Emperor Jack Chick on April 10, 2014, 01:29:50 pm
Oh Libre Office is fucking TERRIBLE. I had that on my work machine for hella days until I found out that I could just ask the IT team to install real MS office.

Satan I had a bitch of a time trying to get it to do basic function work on a spreadsheet. LOL WHAT'S DIVISION?
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: fluffy on April 18, 2014, 01:13:19 am
Yeah I gave up on OO/LO long ago. For my document editing I either write it in HTML or, if it's more complicated... LaTeX.

Which sucks.

Incidentally I typeset my comic books in LaTeX, because I'm some sort of crazy masochist nerd.  The color correction process is pretty much just "pray that it works, run a hard proof, apply adjustments with ImageMagick until it looks sorta okay." I think I'm going to finally learn InDesign for my next book because holy shit.

I think my "favorite" accretion of weirdness is all the different fucking ways you can lay out a table, each with a different subtle set of broken or missing functions. And each has a slightly different name and slightly different subenvironments and it's just goddamn crazy and if you want to turn a table from one type to another because the one you're using doesn't support pagebreaks quite right or it doesn't do footnotes in the way you'd expect or whatever you have to completely rewrite all the markup just to find out that this other one insists on typesetting everything in Outer Mongolian or something.

As far as software that people actually USE goes, my gripe these days is probably with iTunes, especially ever since they redid the entire UI for no good reason. I mean I'm not averse to change if it's for the better, but the new UI is actually missing a fuckload of functionality, like being able to predict what the "play" button will do, and being able to play just a single podcast episode. What's worse about the podcast playback stuff is that it will only play podcast episodes in reverse chronological order.  The library filtering functions have also been completely brain-damaged beyond repair.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Lemon on April 18, 2014, 09:34:12 am
(http://steamunpowered.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Steam-update-UI.jpg)
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Ambious on April 18, 2014, 10:16:39 am
I fucking hate KDE.
Every time I install it I'm like "NOOOO! WHY?!" and then I try reverting back to Gnome and the entire system is already garbled with crappy mac-ish icons.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: fluffy on April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am
KDE was okay back when it was a CDE clone, because they took the general CDE concepts (which were a well-intentioned but poorly-executed attempt at modernizing Motif) and made them workable. Then they decided to "innovate," where by "innovate" I mean "copy Vista, badly."

My Linux DE of choice is xfce. It's reasonably lightweight, pretty flexible, doesn't get in the way, and mostly does what you fucking tell it. There's maybe a hundred papercuts in it (rather than the thousands in everything else) and none of them actually cause me grief, they're just minor nuisances that I shrug at and move on from.  Also you can set it up to work pretty much exactly like classic NeXTStep, only with a betterless-shitty file manager, and I still feel that NeXTstep was one of the better UIs around (maybe that's why I put up with so much nonsense from OSX).

Although Linux's media player ecosystem is bullshit. They all try to clone the wrong parts of iTunes, for a start.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Ambious on April 18, 2014, 12:42:38 pm
What's worse about KDE is the shit widget-y thing they've got going and the entire "MS Windows friendly" interface.
Ironically, MS Windows itself has a better interface by now (disregarding Windows 8, mostly).
I haven't tried xfce, I might give it a go next time I'm board (read: in a couple of minutes probably).
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: STOG on April 18, 2014, 01:32:46 pm
Why can't I mark projects as completed? Oh, Sharepoint is down.

Did my project get accidentally eaten by another user accidentally because we had the misfortune of sending out completed projects at the same time to the same server? Thanks, Sharepoint!

Why can't I send out releases from one certain time to another certain time? Oh, because Little Lord Sharepoint is attempting to backup all the data and also this is 1994 and we are using AOL 4.0, so we can only do one thing at a time.

I thought our techies were morons, but to be fair, Sharepoint is a piece of goddamn garbage that makes everyone unhappy. It'll shit up your documents and be the rotting elephant carcass in the room. (But our software engineers are pretty dumb, though.)

Sharepoint randomly goes down when our poor sysadmin is trying to get some sleep? Sounds like Sharepoint!

Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on April 22, 2014, 02:21:15 pm
(http://steamunpowered.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Steam-update-UI.jpg)
Lemon, April 18, 2014, 09:34:12 am

Greetings human, I just decided to install a 700MB update to one of your games, and saturated your internet connection to do it!  You weren't using it, were you?

Oh, you were playing a non-Steam game, and I just caused you to lag out and get kicked from the match?  You were watching netflix and I just caused the stream to freeze?  Man, I probably should have asked before I did that.

(A huge pet peeve of mine is software that either grabs lots of my system resources or starts long, uncancelable jobs without asking me first.  And software updates can frequently do both.)


Old KDE
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

I hated KDE 3 a lot more (and I've never used anything older).  The thing that I really hate about KDE4 is the atrociously poor integration, and KDE 3 was at least as bad in that respect.  At the same time, KDE 4 at least has useful features that KDE 3 didn't, like the comics plasmoid and file-view plasmoid, and the ability to configure a screen-corner-tap to trigger a workspace view (basically like Gnome 3 and.or Expose).

xfce
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

XFCE is a really good one, and I pretty much agree with your assessment.  The UI is lean and efficient, sanely organized with options for what you want to configure and no bloat.

Although Linux's media player ecosystem is bullshit. They all try to clone the wrong parts of iTunes, for a start.
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

Jesus.  Amarok is horrible, Rhythmbox is good but it's aging (especially in the UI).  Banshee would be really cool if it didn't crash every half-hour or so (more if you try to listen to a podcast).

Lately tho I've mostly been using Google Music's web player (and feedly's web-app for RSS and podcasts), which makes the music player on my platform largely irrelevant.  I use VLC whenever I want to play something on the local drive.

Sharepoint!
STOG, April 18, 2014, 01:32:46 pm

Microsoft's business applications.  Sure, they're agonizing, but hey, there isn't a competing platform you could switch too, and even if there was it's probably missing a feature that someone in your office is using, so you're pretty much stuck.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: fluffy on April 22, 2014, 07:16:16 pm
Old KDE
fluffy, April 18, 2014, 11:47:07 am

I hated KDE 3 a lot more (and I've never used anything older).  The thing that I really hate about KDE4 is the atrociously poor integration, and KDE 3 was at least as bad in that respect.  At the same time, KDE 4 at least has useful features that KDE 3 didn't, like the comics plasmoid and file-view plasmoid, and the ability to configure a screen-corner-tap to trigger a workspace view (basically like Gnome 3 and.or Expose).
Der Trommelnspinne, April 22, 2014, 02:21:15 pm
3 was starting to get pretty crappy. I remember liking version 2, although at the time I was a die-hard pwm2 zealot. I probably would still be using pwm2 if it would actually build on a modern Linux.  I keep hearing that I need to try out Awesome because Awesome can be configured however you want, including just like pwm2.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: count_actuala on April 29, 2014, 05:13:39 pm
(http://steamunpowered.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Steam-update-UI.jpg)
Lemon, April 18, 2014, 09:34:12 am
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Runic on April 29, 2014, 10:02:47 pm
Jesus Christ, Javascript implements GUIs in some weird and unintuitive ways.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on April 30, 2014, 03:37:10 am
Jesus Christ, Javascript implements GUIs in some weird and unintuitive ways.
Runic, April 29, 2014, 10:02:47 pm

Javascript is a crime against language design.  Javascript is the way it is not because of good engineering decisions, but because Netscape slapped some shit together in a hurry, then their shit became too widely used to ever be replaced, so it's gone through almost two decades of bandaid-fixes and having new features randomly shoved in.

Because it's widely used, idiots decided that it must be good, and now it's being used in areas that it was never supposed to be used in - like as a syntax for config files, or to implement extensions in lunix desktops.  Or as a core language for the Qt platform.

Google might could replace it with dart, except, among other things, they're kicking up a whole lot of NIH by doing the initial development internally.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Runic on April 30, 2014, 03:39:40 pm
Yeah, this is the first language I've ever learned and I can already tell that there are some pretty important features that they just sort of slapped on there.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: fluffy on April 30, 2014, 03:58:24 pm
The nicest way to put it: JS is a decent language with a lousy syntax.

Which is to say, under the hood it's actually quite elegant and efficient and can bring all sorts of interesting optimizations to the table. And because JS is so widespread, the core is being worked on quite a lot and it's getting better all the time.

BUT it has to maintain compatibility with the shitty old shit, and it's shit. And it gives shitty developers a LOT of rope to hang themselves with, because it hides so many details behind abstractions and closures and "garbage collection solves everything" (except that by design its GC mechanism is kind of bad).

This is why there are so many languages out there which essentially use Javascript as the worst, most roundabout bytecode (CoffeeScript, asm.js, etc.) and because of the entrenchment of JS, those are doing quite well, whereas Google's alternatives (NaCl, DART) are going to languish in obscurity forever because it's easy to enhance your existing JS runtime to work well with those other frontends but a pain in the ass to throw it all out just for something that everyone's already given up on.

The entire PS4 UI is written in Javascript. As is the new PSN store UI that was rolled out on PS3 a couple years back.

If you do want to do any JS development at all, I highly recommend using strict mode, which isn't widely supported but it does at least work in a way that's backwards-compatible.

Or, better yet, use an entirely different language.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: fluffy on May 01, 2014, 02:49:08 am
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Moriarty on May 04, 2014, 12:34:59 am
Note that old versions of the file chooser’s documentation suggested using gtk_file_chooser_set_current_folder() in various situations, with the intention of letting the application suggest a reasonable default folder. This is no longer considered to be a good policy, as now the file chooser is able to make good suggestions on its own.Quote from

By "make good suggestions" they apparently mean "will display an arbitrary selection of files the user happens to have opened at some point since the OS was installed". I always wondered why so many programs defaulted to a list of seemingly random crap in the open file dialog, and now I know. They're actively being advised not to set a logical default directory.

The question of why the GTK people thought this was a good idea remains unsolved.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: junior associate faguar on May 07, 2014, 05:29:48 pm
I'm pretty sure GTK was designed in the old Unix tradition (i.e. on lots of psychoactive medications)
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Down10 on May 07, 2014, 08:10:46 pm
I was reading this thread and the Java system update popped up. Swear to God.
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/t5w17rdslt29b75/Screenshot%202014-05-07%2018.03.53.PNG)
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on May 13, 2014, 09:58:56 pm
Note that old versions of the file chooser’s documentation suggested using gtk_file_chooser_set_current_folder() in various situations, with the intention of letting the application suggest a reasonable default folder. This is no longer considered to be a good policy, as now the file chooser is able to make good suggestions on its own.Quote from

By "make good suggestions" they apparently mean "will display an arbitrary selection of files the user happens to have opened at some point since the OS was installed". I always wondered why so many programs defaulted to a list of seemingly random crap in the open file dialog, and now I know. They're actively being advised not to set a logical default directory.

The question of why the GTK people thought this was a good idea remains unsolved.
Moriarty, May 04, 2014, 12:34:59 am

Speaking of moronic default behaviors for file browsers...

(http://i.imgur.com/h3n53bY.png)
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Isfahan on May 13, 2014, 10:10:42 pm
Is that file browser just going "I know how you want your files organized, here you go! :D No no, you're welcome!"
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: A Whirring Bone-White Gleech on May 13, 2014, 10:17:11 pm
Is that file browser just going "I know how you want your files organized, here you go! :D No no, you're welcome!"
Isfahan, May 13, 2014, 10:10:42 pm

If that's what it's trying to do, it guessed wrong by a pretty wide margin.

I hade most of these Smart, Semantic File Organization Schemes, because they never do a better job of organizing my files than I do.  Directory trees full of MP3s are pretty much the only instance where the heuristic tool is a big improvement.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Old_Zircon on July 22, 2014, 08:39:42 am
I can't believe I haven't posted about Pro Tools in here yet.  I just don't have it in me to enumerate the things that suck about it right now but it really is the most crash prone, out of date, overpriced piece of junk DAW I've used, and if I'm not being paid I refuse to touch it.  The only positive thing I can say about it is that the keyboard shortcuts are pretty well thought out.

I haven't tried 11 yet but looking at some of the early pro reviews it sounds like an upgrade from the 90s technology under the hood of 10 to technology that every other good DAW had in place by 2006 or 2007.  Also they eliminated the "Complete Production Toolkit" bundle (i.e. the "unlock features that are standard in most programs" bundle) so now insCtead of having to spend about $2800 to get a piece of software that still compares poorly to Reaper on every level except for control surface support (and Nuendo/Cubase already had that down back when I still used them 5 or 6 years ago), now you have to buy a 5-figure, full blown HD system with it's overpriced, mediocre converters, just to get uncrippled software.   Also it's not backward compatible with the previous 20 years worth of hardware, so EVEN IF YOU ALREADY OWN AN HD SYSTEM you have to get A NEW ONE.

Also pay-per-ticket tech support.

Even in the 90s when it was dominant, it was a second rate solution for people who wanted nonlinear editing but couldn't afford a Sonic Solutions rig that was even more expensive (but actually sounded good by all accounts).
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: EYE OF ZA on July 22, 2014, 04:08:18 pm
I forget that Steam is open, connect my laptop to my phone to do some internet work, and suddenly a whole gigabyte of my cell data (a 2GB limit) for the month is gone.

Okay, fuck.  I turn Steam offline, so that this doesn't happen again.

I do the same thing two days later.  Steam, while offline, downloads a 50+ MB update.

Steam: we're not quite sure what "offline" means
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Lemon on July 22, 2014, 05:28:29 pm
Had to install Visual Studio on a new computer today. Unchecked the stuff I didn't need, then it started downloading.

16 gigabytes.
Title: Let's Whine About Shitty Software
Post by: Yossarian on July 22, 2014, 05:48:15 pm
I forget that Steam is open, connect my laptop to my phone to do some internet work, and suddenly a whole gigabyte of my cell data (a 2GB limit) for the month is gone.

Okay, fuck.  I turn Steam offline, so that this doesn't happen again.

I do the same thing two days later.  Steam, while offline, downloads a 50+ MB update.

Steam: we're not quite sure what "offline" means
EYE OF ZA, July 22, 2014, 04:08:18 pm

From what I've been told steam defines offline as by design critically temporary. Apparently after a set amount of time steam will refuse to function until a connection is made.