Off Topic - A thread to Digress

[Fizzlebop Smith]

@Lisias

Quote

MHO, that's the problem.

You see, good engineering was always about finding the "good enough" sweat spot - money is a finite resource, trying to do everything perfect will bankrupt you before the end of the project.

There're exceptions to that rule, but they are few.

As an example, see Boeing Starliner - a unholy mashup of good engineering and bad engineering tied together and launched into space. That damned thing didn't killed anyone because there're very, very good engineers working on that thing. But it's failing to fulfill its role properly because there're some bad ones working unchecked on that thing too.

You didn't realize the problem because the previous generation (the ones that came before you and me) did a really, really, really good job. It took decades until the bad ones managed to start to screw up things enough to the industry start to crumble.

You know you know what follows, but some people around here doesn't, so I will go "condescending mode" from this point so they can be part of this discussion.

We write software in layers. The best is the lower layers, most resilient they are to stupidities made on the higher ones.

For some time, idiots on the higher management managed (pun not intended) to walk from their stupidity because there were good engineers enough in the field working on the lower layers of the Software, and these heroes carried on the burden on their shoulders and prevented the disaster.

But as the good ones started to retire, their positions started to be filed by the stupid engineers that Idiots were hiring in the past - and them we have bad engineering happening on the lower layers of the Software Stack - and when this happens, there's no point on hiring excellent engineers to work on the higher layers, because they will be forever sabotaged by the stupidities on the lower ones.

So, in essence, the problem is not being "good enough", but IDIOTS DECIDING WHAT'S GOOD ENOUGH.

Absolutely. Trying to put out a "perfect" product will bankrupt a company because time is the most valuable commodity by far. 
Where I live "It good enough" is colloquially considered to be anything but and is universally used in my field when something does not technically meet the governing acceptance criteria, but will function within the capacity afforded.

Every day, I have to determine whether the products we make are acceptable products that will meet / exceed the need of our customers. I tend to lean on the latter by enforcing best practices. This is made relatively easy through the existence of various certificate and endorsements that lay out that Base Line expectation pretty clearly. I have begun to see a rising trend where the project managers use their engineering backgrounds to override acceptance established by the governing body & pencil whipping to pad their bonus margins. 

I essentially agree with you totally, but also think some points made to PD come into play here. I don't think these people are necessarily idiots but have been conditioned by the shift in paradigm. The emphasis has shifted to place all importance on profit. I know there has always been an emphasis on profit, but things are different in ways I'm not fully equipped to articulate.

Capital of the Early 19th century was investments regarding industry. These business-peeps risked their own reputation and fortunes on whatever they invested in. Now we invest other peoples money and underwrite the excrements out of any venture to limit personal liability. This ensures that there is very little risk to those people at the top making bad decisions.

Its not like their massive bonuses are going to be taken away should the company be fined millions for shady practices. The idiocy is in the greed and continuous emphasis to place more and more importance on profit. Western Business classes teach an ethical responsibility to maximize shareholder profit.

Where is the commitment to integrity of the product? When the Profit gained from these shady yet normalized practices exceed the potential fines associated with the act, it is considered as a tax or fee. The "price of doing business".

The mobile monetization video you linked disgusted me on so many levels and emphasized certain aspects ive seen creep into my own industry over the last 20 years.


 

Edited July 4 by Fizzlebop Smith

[Lisias]

19 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

I essentially agree with you totally, but also think some points made to PD come into play here. I don't think these people are necessarily idiots but have been conditioned by the shift in paradigm. The emphasis has shifted to place all importance on profit. I know there has always been an emphasis on profit, but things are different in ways I'm not fully equipped to articulate

Idiocy is "contagious" disease.

There's a old adage from my time in which I thought it would be a good idea to try a PMP certification (yeah, yeah... I was younger and inexperienced at that time ): Good Managers don't work for Bad Managers.

You see a Bad Manager, you can be absolutely sure all the managing hierarchy under him is equally bad, or in the way to be - because the good ones that haven't left yet, are working on their way out.

This is not a new phenomena - it was always this way even before Management became a concept.

 

24 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Capital of the Early 19th century was investments regarding industry. These business-peeps risked their own reputation and fortunes on whatever they invested in. Now we invest other peoples money and underwrite the excrements out of any venture to limit personal liability. This ensures that there is very little risk to those people at the top making bad decisions.

Completely removing the remedies it used to exist to prevent incompetents from reaching the top brass.

You see, idiocy and incompetence are the inherent state of the Human Being - we all born idiots and incompetents - we have to learn our way out of it.

If we remove the very mechanism that allow people to learn from their mistakes, they will not have any incentive to do it - they will not even realize these are mistakes at first place.

Ignorance is the root of all evils.

 

28 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

Its not like their massive bonuses are going to be taken away should the company be fined millions for shady practices. The idiocy is in the greed and continuous emphasis to place more and more importance on profit. Western Business classes teach an ethical responsibility to maximize shareholder profit.

Where is the commitment to integrity of the product? When the Profit gained from these shady yet normalized practices exceed the potential fines associated with the act, it is considered as a tax or fee. The "price of doing business".

I couldn't agree more.

 

29 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

The mobile monetization video you linked disgusted me on so many levels and emphasized certain aspects ive seen creep into my own industry over the last 20 years.

I started to see these things in the I.T. Industry from the late 70's. With the enormous successes they got, other Industries started to copy cat it, and this is the net result.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the new Jack Welch - the worst possible practices from manufacturing reached the IT engineering and computer science in the late 70s, and from there started to spread to everywhere.

Now we have, essentially, two generations disconnected from best practices (that works) and professional ethics (and I'm not even touching the legal factor - some of these people should be in jail).

 

[SunlitZelkova]

Part of the reason I'm interested in Soviet history is because I see a lot of parallels between then and present day society.

The way you guys talk about it, "profit" sounds like the present day's equivalent to "quota" in the Soviet economic system.

Whether maximizing profit or meeting/exceeding the production quota, both are achieved with the sacrifice of quality and ethics.

[boriz]

55 minutes ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

"shift in paradigm"

Agree completely. Here's a YT vid of someone describing why modern music is bland crap, and I think with minor tweaking, it applies to lot's of other industries too.

[Lisias]

22 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Part of the reason I'm interested in Soviet history is because I see a lot of parallels between then and present day society.

The way you guys talk about it, "profit" sounds like the present day's equivalent to "quota" in the Soviet economic system.

Whether maximizing profit or meeting/exceeding the production quota, both are achieved with the sacrifice of quality and ethics.

You know... I'm a retro-computer enthusiast. And I got some retro computer from the Soviet era and... Dude, they are "bad" (note the quotes), but also... Pretty good! Oukey, they were starting and, so, copycatting whatever they found in West and adapted to their needs, but still... I have here two home computers based on the PDP-11 architecture - damn, the best the West had at that time were Z-80 ZX Spectrums or 6502 Commodore C64 - the 68000 were being used on 50K USD (in 80s USD!!) HP 300 Mini Computers and high performance UNIX Workstations!!

Looking on that Soviet tech, the conclusion I reached is that Soviet really excelled in Engineering (perhaps even more than the West), but failed terribly on Manufacturing.

Going back to my retro-computers, the design and the ideas look pretty good for the era - but quality of the plastics and the reliability of the components are the problem on them.

And what you said apparently corroborates my hypothesis...

Edited July 4 by Lisias
Better phrasing.

[boriz]

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms: https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/

(This is a large and interesting art site. Well worth a random surf).

[boriz]

8 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I'm a retro-computer enthusiast

Me too! I still have my original, ordered pretty much the day it came out, ZX-81 with original PSU, manual, leads and 16K RAM pack*.  Also 4 CBM PET's, two big screen, two small screen, with two CBM dual floppy drives, a BBC micro, a BBC master system, a couple of Amigas, a C64 with original 'datacorder', and old portable 14" CRT for authenticity. All working when last tested, but to be fair, that was a long time ago.

*My solution to the RAM pack wobble crash syndrome was to replace the spongy feet on the bottom of the ZX-81 with something harder. A friend of mine actually soldered the RAM pack connectors directly to the ZX-81 PCB.

[Nuke]

i cant help but think the move to low quality is deliberate. i find the first or second generation of a product is the best. but after that its all about cost cutting. you are buying the same thing for the same price, but they found a way to make it cheaper so they get the bigger cut. i got maybe a first or second gen consumer 3d printer and the thing still works great while others complain that their monoprice is breaking down.

things like finite element analysis i think are abused to reduce materials costs, but also take away the kind of overbuilding you used to see eg with antiques or amish furnature. they just didnt know and materials are cheap so they overbuild. office chairs for example are a good example. ive had 20 year old chairs that work fine, yet all the modern ones are trash after 2 years. the fundamental difference is a grade of steel that is slightly cheaper, or a lower thickness though not far enough in price to warrant a $700 difference in the final product. the rest of the components are more or less identical. even some of the premium options bulk up the parts that never fail and ignore the gimbal that always fails. essentially selling more expensive trash.

if you are into electronics and like to mod the deficiencies out of consumer products. you find a lot of boards that have slots for parts that aren't populated (in some rare cases 10% or less is populated). sometimes this can be for a more premium version of the same product. but it leaves one scratching their head when its not. i know its because when the designs are sent for production, they will actually build a small run of initial models, and do a thing where they see how many parts they can remove before the product fails to function, and then ship the result. so even when a qualified engineer designed the thing, their work is effectively thrown out by a middleman.

i dont understand how consumers can tolerate this kind of waste.

3 hours ago, boriz said:

Agree completely. Here's a YT vid of someone describing why modern music is bland crap, and I think with minor tweaking, it applies to lot's of other industries too.

i just watched that one yesterday.

2 hours ago, boriz said:

Me too! I still have my original, ordered pretty much the day it came out, ZX-81 with original PSU, manual, leads and 16K RAM pack*.  Also 4 CBM PET's, two big screen, two small screen, with two CBM dual floppy drives, a BBC micro, a BBC master system, a couple of Amigas, a C64 with original 'datacorder', and old portable 14" CRT for authenticity. All working when last tested, but to be fair, that was a long time ago.

*My solution to the RAM pack wobble crash syndrome was to replace the spongy feet on the bottom of the ZX-81 with something harder. A friend of mine actually soldered the RAM pack connectors directly to the ZX-81 PCB.

i miss my ti99.

[Lisias]

15 hours ago, Nuke said:

i miss my ti99.

I have one. Have a MiniPEB (great device), some software, lots of cartridges. And TI 99 Calc.

I fired up the thing, and loaded a SpreadSheet I had created for fun some years ago. Everything is still working as expected.

Then I fired up Office 365. Tried to open an old Office 95 spreadsheet I found on an old backup. Bleh.

The I tried to install my old copy of Office 95 so I could open that spreadsheet. Bleh.

Then I fired up LibreOffice to read that damned file - now it works, but the last stable doesn't export Office formats in a way that Office 365 fully understands (graphs, advanced scripting, etc - even some more advanced text formatting), you need to have the latest LibreOffice Beta - but it doesn't support my version of MacOS anymore, and I don't want to upgrade because I will lose 32 bits support and I have lots of 32 bits applications I still rely on and I don't see why in hell I would buy everything again.

excrementsification. Even on Open Source.

I have this one to tell you guys: on Day Job, we are commissioning new ProxMox VM hosts to replace our VMWare, we are done with VMWare. For good.

By historical reasons, our Firewall and Router are pfSense (used to be OpenSense, but when we migrated, we had to use pfSense or we would lose support from the datacenter). Well, we can live with it.

The old VMware servers used pfSense 2.5.1, we installed 2.7.2 on the new (obviously).

And I got screwed.

On pfSensse 2.7.2 they ditched ICS and started to use KEA as DHCP server. But... KEA is still in Techonologial Preview, and it's missing a awful amount of features that ICS were providing up to 2.7.1. Yes, they broke a lot of features on DHCP from 2.7.1 to 2.7.2 - and had I mentined they shoved a Preview application on the STABLE BRANCH?

Features that I was relying when I made my migration plan. Features that I need in order to have two similar environments running at the same time under the same infrastructure, and redirect clients between the environments by simple DNS magic (exactly what's KEA doesn't support).

And this damned pfSense version is, allegedly, homologated by IBM to be used on the DataCenter.

Now what? I'm screwed, as always. And we had paid for being screwed. The rationale is that by using anything else, we will no get support from NetGear. But I don't need support for a product that I can't use and end up relying on something else, so...

Yeah. excrementsification.

=== == = POST EDIT : 2024-0705 = == ===

I forgot to mention:

The 2.7.2 release notes doesn't mention the withdrawan of any features, neither that KEA is in Preview.

Today I had time (and patience) to look into KEA's documentation (completely defeating the need of pfSense, that are supposed to shield me from this) and realize that KEA's missing features are, in reality, optional plugins that weren't activated when they integrated KEA into 2.7.2 (and, again, on a minor version bump).

Interesting enough, KEA is a complete rewrite using C++ (using Boost, by Kraken's Sake!) and PostGRESSql or MariaDB as data back end (JESUS CHRIST!!).

ISC published a migration tool, KEAMA, that supports migrating DDNS entries (one of the missing features), so I conclude that the new KEA have support for it (I'm losing my temper already, I'm still really liquided off with this stunt).

In a way of another, everything pinpoints to the fact that the missing features are there on the daemon (besides hidden on some bloat - Boost and SQL, Jesus) and they just didn't activated them (neither created the GUI for them).

Yeah. excrementsification.

Edited July 5 by Lisias
Bad Gateways are screwing with me!