I’m a pretty advanced (if I may say so – proof will follow if necessary!) software engineer and web developer, and basically do HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/C programming all day.

It’s breathtaking to see how much virtually ALL software sucks, and at the same time, everyone seems to silently accept this and buys yet more computers, instead of smashing the damn crap into the trash and doing everything with paper and pen again.

Just wanted to reinstall the software for the Microsoft Lifecam webcam. Downloaded LIFECAM.EXE from microsoft.com. 25 MB. I thought “Gosh, that’s QUITE A LOT FOR A WEBCAM DRIVER!!!” (I know as a programmer that such a driver can be put into 50k).

Started the EXE. “NOW DOWNLOADING THE NECESSARY FILES FROM THE INTERNET”.

OK, it was the DOWNLOADER that is 25 MB. The INSTALLER is yet to be downloaded!

People need to go back to the C64. 10 times the speed at 1/10.000 the resource wastage.

I’m with Robin’s comment:

“either get a mac, or hum while you run, or both ”

I’d offer a twist:

“hum while you run out to get a mac & fusion ”

Come on, like any advice I could offer you on this would be of any help to you?!!

That said, Parallels is pretty sweet for a WinXP user but for Vista you’re let down in that you can’t use the BootCamp version of Vista in Parallels. Fusion from VMWare does let you do that (but I’ve had some hiccups with networking with that one)

Whatever you get though – as you probably know – there’s a balance between making money for th company and producing a good reliable product that’s going to have a good lifetime…

They don’t want to pay for smart, talented testers. Good white-box and automation testers cost what developers do. Most companies want to pay help-desk money for testers.

They don’t want to start the QA process at the beginning of each dev cycle. Testers are left out of requirements meetings, design meetings, code reviews. And in spite of the rise of test-driven-development (TDD) in agile cultures, unit testing is still very weak in most companies.

They prioritize new features over quality almost chance they get. Whatever discipline they have around QA and test goes out the window when the pressure to deliver rises.

I’m not suggesting a heavyweight, process-intensive approach is the answer. Not everyone is writing the inertial guidance system for a satellite. But there are ways to use a context-driven approach and achieve much higher software quality and reliability. Better quality (within software products and between them) is possible.

Brad, I share your pain.

Imagine when people laugh at the prospect of syncing from one device to the other, or when terms like DVD and “storage medium” are replaced by terms like “how much grid space do you have?”

Probably a pipe-dream… but it’d be pretty sweet.