I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB tabs open, but I’ve seen it with some other frequently-visited sites. It works fine for a while, but after a day or two, hitting “Reload” to, say, update comment counts, does nothing. It says that it’s loading, and maybe even that it’s transferred some trivial number of bytes, but then it just sits there. No other pages from the same domain will load, either.<\/p>\n
This only happens in Opera. If I cut and paste the URL into Firefox, the pages in question load immediately. If I quit Opera, and re-start it, the pages load just fine… for a while.<\/p>\n
In a similar vein, iTunes keeps asking me to upgrade to the new version, which I haven’t, because I’ve heard that it’s buggy. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is supposed to be, but I’m not downloading an upgrade until the numbers change, just because I know it’ll do something stupid.<\/p>\n
These things are fairly typical of the modern relationship with computers. I’ve gotten so used to it that I didn’t really think about how odd this is until this morning, when I read somebody on LiveJournal talking about a video game crash, saying “I should know better than to purchase a game before the first patch is out…” Then it hit me: Has there ever been a bigger con job pulled on consumers than the modern software industry?<\/p>\n
I mean, look at what they’ve managed to do: computer users now expect new software to be buggy. That is, we fully expect a newly purchased product, straight out of the box, to be broken. Something that for any other product category would be an outrage is just shrugged off as the normal course of the business. If you bought a toaster that didn’t toast, you’d take it back to the store and demand a refund, or at least a working toaster. But somehow, because computers are involved, if a new video game crashes, we just say “Oh, well, that’s what I get for buying it before the patches come out.”<\/p>\n
I have no idea how they pulled this off. I think it probably has to do with their initial market being people who are perfectly happy to have broken products, because it gives them a chance to tinker around and find some hack to avoid the bug. But I bet the same thing happened with cars in the 1920’s, and it didn’t stick there– if you buy a new car, and the radio doesn’t work, you take it back to the dealer and demand that they fix it. Somehow, the “bugs are normal” thing has held on even as software moved from a niche product to a mass consumer market, and even people who are sensible and frugal in other areas just accept that new software will frequently not work right.<\/p>\n
I bet Ford would kill to know how that was done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB tabs open, but… Continue reading Bugs Aren’t Features<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}