> That's one of my biggest complaints about the software industry. Charging > for bugfixes. If a car manufacturer sells me a defective product it's up to > them to fix it. If the local cannery sells me bad tuna fish and I get sick > from eating it then they are responsible for it. If M$ or Adobe or just > about anyone else sells me software with bad code then they charge me to get > the code fix?!?!
This is a really, really interesting subject, ie quality control in software. :) A lot of talk and thought has gone into this... These things are going to start coming to the forefront very, very soon as computers become more of a commodity. There was a large article about it (I believe in wired?) which if you are interested in these types of things, is a fantastic read. I could try to find the link if anyone is interested. It basically compared the software industry of the US right now to the US auto industry in the 1980's... Horrible quality control. The idea was to get stuff out and to get stuff out as cheap as possible. There was a man who proposed a set of rules that would take care of quality control, but he was laughed out of the industry because of the added cost, etc. The japanese heard what he was saying, brought him over, and implimented all of his ideas from the beginning of their process... Producing cars at a lower price and higher quality, seriously hurting our auto industry and destroying certain aspects of it in some ways forever. Software COULD come out that didn't crash, but the figure that was given was that it would add another third to development costs... And the american software isn't in that mode. Get it out as soon as its "good enough". Microsoft is a prime follower of that tenament. Apple is a little better than most companies, but it is starting to pull back from that in order to compete. What is interesting is many foreign software companies are starting to take and apply the same quality control principles from the same guy and apply them to software (mostly in india, where they actually have specific schools to teach that style of software writing). Apparently when the process are applied at the fundamental levels, it raises dev costs and time by about 15%, but the payoffs are soooo worth it. They showed off a piece of software with something like 3.5 million lines of code which didn't have ONE bug that could be found. Amazing. Anyways, the article goes on to follow the line of reasoning that just as the american auto industry had a horrible wake-up call from the foreign companies who took quality control to heart, so too will the software companies which could be one of the fundamental shifts away from US dominance in software/innovation. > With the DMCA I can't even decompile the code and fix it > myself so I have no choice but to pay more for what I should have gotten in > the first place. The DMCA is a travesty, I seriously hope it gets struck down in the higher courts. It's just insane... I could make a product with 2-bit encryption, market it as a very secure e-commerce platform because anyone who reverse-engineers it (decrypts) is a criminal. But, obviously it is not a very secure platform... Ugh. >Current example, Hardware DVD decoding under OSX. If Apple > fixes it they will probably roll the fix into an upgrade that must be paid > for. Why should I buy the upgrade to get back functionality that Apple broke > or at least didn't fix (possiblly on purpose) when they released 10.1? Well, that isn't a cool thing and its definetly disappointing that hardware dvd decoders don't work. I can see why apple doesn't want to support it (they'd basically be writing code they would never use again) but its just something they should eat. There are supposed to be 2 more minor fixes coming out really soon (like a 10.0.1 update) so I'm hoping they'll include support for the hardware dvd decoders in one of those, if not 10.1 (which I'm sure will be free, and a download)... The people affected are in one of their most lucrative markets (powerbook users, not the smaller amount of older g3's) and alienating them wouldn't be smart at all. It's one of those cases where sending them an email asking for it actually could do some good, apple is a LOT better about listening to user-feedback now. -- Michael Bryan Bell http://homepage.mac.com/michael_bell/ -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Macintosh? Get free email and more at Applelinks! <http://www.applelinks.com>
