"Ben Hochstrasser" <bhoc@tiscali123^H^H^H.ch>writes
Quote
Please bear in mind that the following is /not/ meant as D2005 bashing.
In my jobs I came across many different kinds of developers. One thing had
all in common: They worked with above-average well-equipped, fast machines
with dazzling graphics and ultra-fast server attachment. There's nothing
wrong with that.
Unfortunately, many of their products proved to be of rather poor
performance when run on an average office PC with average memory, disk and
graphics. It often proved to be unusable when connecting via the internet.
Today I run across this behaviour far more than the years before.
Well said!
I used to develop on a Pentium 166 until the middle of last year. Now I run
a 2ghz machine but I feel fairly secure in the knowledge that it is unlikely
to be outdated for a few years. I was teased horribly for using a 166mhz cpu
but as you say, if it'll run well on a p166, it'll run well on most things.
I look at the specs on some of the games I see around and they can use
massive quantities of memory, top-end graphics cards etc. The thing
everybody is missing with their headlong rush for the latest technology is
that the vast majority of users don't upgrade their computers until they
jolly well have to. Personally, I feel that we should concentrate on
producing software for the majority rather than the ultra expensive end of
the market.
I see so many software houses rushing to produce software for the upper end
of the market while forgetting the golden rule that the software must
actually work before it is released. Releasing it and using paying users as
beta-testers is, in my opinion, excruciatingly dishonourable. I recently ran
foul of this with my quest to find software that will write a vcd, svcd or
video dvd, turning digital photos into a slideshow that can be seen on TV.
As examples : Roxio's "easy CD and DVD creator" would crash the computer
spectacularly with its drag to disk feature and took 8 hours before it would
announce that it couldn't fit 1.5gb of files onto a 4.7gb DVD. Another
example: Sonic's vCD creator - goes through all the motions then crashes
with some program-generated error message despite the fact that (again) I
was trying to write less data than would fit onto a CD (in this case 300mb).
Photo2DVD will allow me to orient a photo vertically but will then stretch
it to fit the screen width instead of putting a border. As the latter is
shareware, I cannot imagine they get many customers. These are the milder
bits of bad software. A company calling itself Direct-Soft inc managed to
code their AVI to MPEG recoding software so badly (I cannot imagine how they
managed it) that it destroyed XP's capability to do a system restore and
corrupted the system so badly the only answer was to install XP onto another
hard drive and then copy the data accross before reformatting the original
drive.
It's giving programming and software a very poor reputation. Oddly enough, I
never hear of this from mac software so the next computer I buy for my own
personal use (as opposed to for development) will almost certainly be a Mac.
As I see it, the strength of the Mac is that its market share is smaller,
leading to fewer but better software developers and more dedicated users.
