Amir Rant: Software is Hard but Networking Impossible?

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
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0
Seattle, WA
Back in the 1980s my job was to manage operating system teams. We would take the Unix operating system (what MacOS runs underneath and mother of Linux) and "port it," i.e. make it run on new hardware/CPU. It was a huge challenge initially as unless everything was up, you would not get a prompt from the system saying it had booted. Usually the process would last 2-3 nervous months.

The reality however was that as hard as that job was, getting the prompt was the easy part. Fixing the last 10% of the bugs in the system would take 90% of the time. As a result, the whole project would last 12 months or longer.

One of the things that makes software hard, is testing it. Finding the bugs properly. Letting them happen randomly means very slow forward progress.

Nowhere is that more manifested than when you include networking. It is hard enough to create test cases locally on one computer. It then becomes an entirely different matter when two computers are trying to hold hands to do something.

It is now three decades later though. You would expect that major companies have a better handle on this sort of problem. And most have. Except Google it seems. For a giant that does the most superb job of building a search engine, they sure do the sloppiest programming and testing of any major company I know. Take this simple example.

I changed my google password. Was happy to see the two-way authentication be more seamless on my Android phone. You tell Google you want to change your password and it sends a Text message to your phone as it always has done. But now, as soon as you pull up the notification, it knows it is you and you no longer have to type in the number it sends you. Nice! What is not nice is what happened to me today when I went into Chrome to change something in the settings:



The pink box as you may be able to read says, "Account sign-in details are out of date." Why on earth does it not say which account this is? I have two google accounts. Which one is it logged into? OK, so maybe it is a security thing and it is trying to not give the hacker a clue as to what my account is, should that person be sitting on my physical computer trying to login.

Remembering that I had changed my password, I go ahead and click on "sign-in again." What happened next was remarkable: I get a pop up, I type in my user name and password and I get an hourglass and the pop up hangs forever! I did this three times and it keeps doing exactly the same thing. Here it is:



Clicking anywhere causes the pop up to vanish with no error message. No indication of any problem.

Come on google. Simple login hangs? Why no time out and error message?

And oh, the incompetence does not stop there.

Last night I was trying to use youtube on my Samsung Android tablet. I forget the exact message but it would keep giving me this no matter what I tried to view in there existing running youtube session:



Of course hitting Retry button did absolutely nothing. I open up the browser and it has no problem accessing the Internet. I turn WiFi on and off and still the same problem. Then I remember that I had changed my gmail password. Sign-in using that and it all comes to life! Are you kidding me? No one tested what happens when you have Youtube open and you change your password from another computer?

Am I the only one on the planet to have done this? I don't think so. Apps on tablets and phones run in the background even when you switch out of them. So it is natural for them to be "running" for days and weeks until you reboot your tablet which I do maybe once every few months with a system update.

Youtube seems to be one of the worst offenders here. Start a video and pause it and put the tablet to sleep. Wake up the tablet and hit play on the paused video. Nothing happens! It waits a bit and comes back to the same screen with the play button. No error message. No nothing. It just goes away for a second and comes back and refused to play the rest of the video.

Don't tell me: no one thought that in long videos you may not watch the whole thing at once. All the testing must have been done on 3 minute cat videos!

The work around I have found is to add said video to my "watch later" list. Then pull up that option and then it plays from where I left off! So clearly there is no networking problem.

Yes, networking is hard. But when you are in charge of both the front-end (app) and back-end (your own service), such simple, simple bugs better not exist.

I mean this is beyond incompetence. For such common scenarios there better be no bugs. How did we hand our future of portable and networked computing to this outfit? I guess this is what happens when a company's core business is search and everything else an afterthought. These are problems that can be solved with a handful of testers.

I have to believe they have thousands of testers at Google but no one outside of their search group must have been given a voice to stop garbage from being released. Or else, search is the main division with revenues and all the good testers are there.

Shame on you Google. Shame....
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
And while speaking of competence in consumer interfaces, look at the bottom of the first setup page:



The heck do they mean by "People?" What on earth is "Person 1 (current)?" Didn't anyone for a second review this interface and ask, "can anyone understand what we are saying to them?"

The feature is supposed to allow others to see your bookmarks and such. So why not call it that? Why "People" as the only heading? Why am I called "Person 1?"

Two minutes of usability testing would have shown much better choice of words. And if this were a useful featured, pulled out of the obscure setup menu which only expert users go into.
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
That's a pretty scathing admonition coming from you
I am an equal opportunity abuser :D.

Seriously, I think someone is completely sleep at Google when it comes to software development. I constantly and routinely find usability problems many of which are quite serious yet ridiculously easy to fix. I can't fathom why it is not hurting them more in Android business and why there is so little spotlight on it.
 

DonH50

Member Sponsor & WBF Technical Expert
Jun 22, 2010
3,947
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Monument, CO
We were forced to switch from Outlook to Gmail at work last year. What a mess. Gmail needs a lot more work to make it less user-hostile, and since we try to be paperless the ability to readily archive email locally is very important and impossible under Gmail. We also need to use long labels and nested sublabels (folders, directories) to help organize things. I finally found an app to resize the left-hand label window but it crashes frequently. Many coworkers stuck to Outlook and synch their accounts, but that was not an option for me and numerous others who went through a PC upgrade...

As for Chrome, it is great when it works, but sucks up a gob of memory, and seems much less reliable than IE. I frequently have to try two or three times to open a link.
 

Johnny Vinyl

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 16, 2010
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Costco switched from Outlook to Gmail a few years back. People still haven't stopped bitching!
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
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I love Google's search engine, but a couple of recent events brought me deeper into the Google system -- I replaced an iPhone 4S with an Android, and I added a second personal email account, on Gmail. I've found all kinds of clunky, just plain dumb, and occasionally utterly dysfunctional issues. I don't know enough to know which are networking problems and what is just bad software design, but I do know some of it is pretty frustrating.

My favorite thing about Google is not the excellent search engine, but the fact that they included "Don't be evil" in their corporate mission statement. Evidently they stop short of "be evil," but somewhere well beyond "be a pain in the ass."

Tim
 

rblnr

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 3, 2010
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Yeah, what's up Tim? That's a real about-face.
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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Gmail has a bizarre icon for reply that suggests " Go Back" and it is not even labelled "reply" the likeliest action one is likely to perform on an e-mail aside from "delete".

Interface is the next frontier in Software IMO... On this front (and perhaps many others) Apple is way above the competition...
 
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CherylJosie

Member
Apr 18, 2015
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0
6
Couple of years ago I installed Chrome browser under Linux.

It ate so much processor it ground my Core2 Duo machine to a halt. I had to close Firefox to use Chrome at all and then it would crash with only a dozen or so tabs open.

So I tried rebooting into XP. Same problem.

I shrugged and uninstalled Chrome.

Now that Google has bought their way into streaming, every time I play a video Youtube cues up and automatically plays related videos for me without asking but most of them I already watched.

It does a great job of finding them but even when I have subscribed to a channel and it marks them watched for me in the channel their Youtube auto-playing search engine seems to ignore that flag. I keep getting news segments I have already seen instead of the logical thing, the next segment that I have not yet watched.

It really seems to be a case of 'lights are on but nobody home' syndrome. I completely understand your frustration.

These are the people we have entrusted with the Internet?

Their once fabulous search engine now sniffs through your computer and identifies a 'fingerprint' so it always knows it is you and then it filters all your new searches based on what you searched for over the course of your entire usage history without even bothering to ask if that is what you really want it to do.

Everyone gets different results now so how are you supposed to say 'just Google it' to your friends when you are pointing them toward a new leather jacket and all that pops up in their searches is BDSM?

Plus if the NSA leans on them to disclose their database every search you ever did will end up in the hands of some sadistic perv who will do... whatever the spooks do with our computing info.

I decided to just ignore Google search and switched to Duck Duck Go instead because they do not track anything and everyone sees the same results based on number of linked pages or whatever logical criteria they used rather than some bubble of my own bias insulating me from reality and reinforcing my prejudice.

I wonder if Google has figured out trusted platform yet, or if it is going to sit there mumbling, "Uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word" as the T-rex and Velociraptors run wild eating everyone.
 

BlueFox

Member Sponsor
Nov 8, 2013
1,709
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A big problem with Google is they have a lot of recent college grads for engineers. Aside from a lack of real world experience, they also suffer the arrogance of youth where they think they know everything. So you end up with software such as this Chrome browser on the iPad Mini that crashed on me as I was typing this post.
 

Bruce B

WBF Founding Member, Pro Audio Production Member
Apr 25, 2010
7,006
512
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Snohomish, WA
www.pugetsoundstudios.com
I switched over to a network system in the studio a couple of years ago. Merging calls it "Ravenna". I call it something else!
I made sure to set all my protocols correctly and even bought the only Dell 10-port switcher they recommended. If all the stars are not in alignment and I need to hold my mouth just right with a tilt in my head, then it's not going to work! That's why I'm scared to turn anything off, or even reboot the computer. It uses the Google Chrome interface and sometimes you can't find the network for the life of you!
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
Now that Google has bought their way into streaming, every time I play a video Youtube cues up and automatically plays related videos for me without asking but most of them I already watched.
Don't get me started on youtube :). It must be 16 year old hackers still running it. Every month or two it updates itself on my tablet and works differently yet again. This latest change is quite annoying. Why not have a checkbox you can click to have it to do that rather than all of a sudden by default playing the next random clip it thinks is related to the one you asked.

I suspect lots and lots of people now have Youtube running in the background without realizing it, bumping up their bandwidth costs. I know it keeps happening to me.

Related to this is why there is no easy way to know which tab is playing some sound. Chrome preserves open tabs on system reboot, only to have a bunch of them playing stuff with on way of finding them.

BTW, good to see you posting here Cheryl.
 

Fred

Well-Known Member
May 31, 2010
296
5
365
Covington, LA
I am an equal opportunity abuser :D.

Seriously, I think someone is completely sleep at Google when it comes to software development. I constantly and routinely find usability problems many of which are quite serious yet ridiculously easy to fix. I can't fathom why it is not hurting them more in Android business and why there is so little spotlight on it.

I see a second career in the offing perhaps...:p
 

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