updates - is it just me?
Posted by: sjw on 15 May 2015
if its not a bloody iTunes or spotify update its jriver…………no wonder people are going back to vinyl
driving me nuts!
Updates, yep! If it ain't broke, don't fix it. At least not until several months after everyone else has tried it.
Trouble is, nothing released by any software company is "ready for primetime". The marketplace is the testing environment. So updates aren't really optional.
Trouble is, nothing released by any software company is "ready for primetime". The marketplace is the testing environment. So updates aren't really optional.
My approach to 'updates' is to ignore them unless I am having a problem. So often they b*gg*r up something that is working (fairly) well. As I said in another thread (which I started), since updating my iPhone6+ software, I have problems with playing audiobooks while listening on headphones (but not, curiously enough, on the phone's own speaker). They frequently now stop with spurious 'voice operation' thingies. Very strange, because I have voice control disabled!
AND STAY OFF MY LAWN
+1
Theoretically: any software change introduces bugs.
Empirically: no one can afford to find 100% of the bugs.
Historically: fewer and fewer can afford to fix all of the ones found.
Itunes have over the years degraded to a can do everything bad or very bad solution. Fortunately there are ways around that using alternative software.
+1 to only upgrade if you want/need to, and also for ANYTHING BUT ITUNES. There are so many better options out there.
The problem is not just the finances of fixing every bug, but also the impossibility of doing it. Quite apart from the scale involved, software is built in layers - if everything was coded from scratch then it would take forever. Developers build using tools, pre-written chunks of code and protocols that are often work in progress. So a bug in a lower layer of the software may affect your programme. And if you've done a workaround, the fix to that bug may affect you too. Even the notion of a 'bug' as a specific thing is sometimes debatable - my 'bug' might be your 'feature', especially as it relates to underlying code.
For non-IT types out there, don't think of software as something built by developers from scratch, and bugs as failures in that process. Think of software as a symphony performance, reliant not only on the skills of the performers but the acoustics of the room and quality of the instruments they're using. There will always be a bum note every now and then. Even the best lead violinist sometimes breaks a string.