EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => Altium Designer => Topic started by: T3sl4co1l on August 09, 2017, 04:24:52 pm
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Happened upon this today:
https://bugcrunch.live.altium.com/#Bug/8171
Hello,
I uncovered an issue with the Bug Crunch area on your website. It appears to allow users to submit and vote on bugs, but the issues with the most votes are not resolved by your team.
I have attached a screenshot of your Bug Crunch page sorted by votes (descending), accessed on 2017-07-14. Notice that the issues with the most votes have been there since mid-2011! That's over six years ago!
If you do not address the Bug Crunch issues with the most votes, then it feels like we are shouting into the wind.
Surprised it's been up a month now. Maybe they really don't read BC? :-DD :popcorn:
Tim
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LOL.
Maybe (MAYBE!) sure we'll see improved bugcrunching once the (supposedly) completely rewritten codebase is released in AD18.
And Maybe the new codebase WON'T introduce a whole slew of new bugs that will languish for years and years. :popcorn:
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They chose not to fix anything but just shut it down permanently. Is there any way to report bugs now?
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They chose not to fix anything but just shut it down permanently. Is there any way to report bugs now?
???
Bugcrunch isn't shut down, it works just fine for me: https://bugcrunch.live.altium.com/#/bugs/new
Well, "works" in so far as you can still create bug reports that will mostly get ignored, anyway....
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That sounds weird. I have a message at the bottom of the page and then a redirect to the main page. I tried connecting via VPN in Frankfurt with the same result.
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That whole bugcrunch thing... I think they should just validate what a user reports on the forum and make note of it. They already do that for a lot of the posts I make. Sometimes they tell me to post a bug crunch, but usually they now say "... we'll take care of it" Used to tell you a ticket was created. Not sure what happened there.
Recently I reported a bug via my "Pro" support concerning them not being able to import Kicad 7 files. They told me after an hour long "chat" that ... "uh, well, too bad. Use EasyEDA to do the conversion. "
Really? Gotta be kidding me.
Well, last year for my Cadence Pro subscription, I noticed that the padstack preview wasn't working. I mentioned it to EMA EDA (the exclusive reseller in the US) and their tech guy forwarded it to Cadence support.
In return we got:
"The new status is set to Inactive, which means that no action is planned. Each CCR is carefully considered, evaluated, and prioritized along with other fixes, planned feature additions, and enhancement requests, for possible inclusion in upcoming product updates and releases."
then after we all complained:
"Thanks for the update. Have a nice week and happy Christmas.
With this, I shall be closing this case.
You might receive a customer survey form for this Case. If you do, please share your feedback. Your feedback will help us improve our support effectiveness and product quality."
Then even later: " R&D will review this and accept these issues and also they will discuss with marketing team consider an priority basis."
So yea - all these software companies suck. Any old timers like me wonder how this industry - that had such promise when we started back in the late 70's/early 80's - turned into a POS.
Well, it's obvious. First once us lowly geeks back then got the stuff to work, the guys with the shiny shoes saw it and it was like the turn of the 20th century was with steel and railroads. So now they hose it up but it get really big.
So then geeks, which used to be a denigrating term back then, are now the new "rock stars" so every mother in the world wants their kid to go into STEM. So we end up with a bunch of "man bun, java jockey, pitiful python pirates gloming crap code on to stuff that used to work, and continue doing so.
It's like what happened to the digital audio workstation pioneer - Protools. Used to be a leader. Now it's a bloated mess of crap that crashes constantly.
So then there's Reaper. Well, the installer - about 15 MEGAbytes. Not GIGA, not a stub installer - that's the whole installer. And it does everything Protools does and even more - it will even edit video.
So how can some guy come along, write lean, well written code that kick the competitor's product out of the water?
Well, here's the guy that wrote it - he also wrote Winamp and sold if to AOL for big $$$'s Check out what he says here about how - and more importantly, WHY - he wrote reaper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfaQrOeb_F0&t=202s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfaQrOeb_F0&t=202s)
at 3:50
"when I left AOL [after they bought Winamp], I came away from it wanting to avoid that in the future; wanting to just make things for the sake of making them .. and not have to constantly justify everything with business decisions/motivations. The ability to just make software for the purpose of making it... for the end goal of making something that's really powerful and enjoyable to use"
Hmmm... someone doing things for the right reasons. Cool...
And here's another person's opinion of Reaper vs Protools:
13 Reasons Why PRO TOOLS is BETTER than REAPER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FwB8oRWvVw&t=982s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FwB8oRWvVw&t=982s)
See what he says at 16:25 where he goes on to talk about a " slow janky mess..." due to a revolving door of inexperienced coders having no clue as to what the code really did.
That says it all...
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Relevant: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/ (https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/)
There's a recent DEFCON talk too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q118B_QdP2k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q118B_QdP2k)
Simply capitalism at work. If you don't like big shitty software that's expensive, or hidden fees in purchases, or exponentially rising costs on monopoly or otherwise noncompetitive services whether regionally or globally, or big public projects that inevitably cost exponentially more than their estimates like high-speed rail, or your very tax dollars being siphoned away for frivolous bank bailouts and corporate welfare... then you must be nothing but a filthy commie!
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The most direct alternative, in this case -- unfortunate or not as it may be -- is direct anarchism: software has the unique ability to exist independent of money, at least above the basic minimum to operate on the internet at all (which it seems we aren't escaping any time soon, but given that we need it for many basic services, capitalist or otherwise, this use comes for free on top of all that). In other words, free software. So, if you have programming talent, and the patience (or tolerance..) to join a large software project, go contribute to KiCAD, for zero cost and benefit (personally and financially; or maybe not, if you have a Patreon or etc.!), and make the world a slightly less shitty place!
The misfortune of course being, such civic responsibility is woefully rare these days; you certainly won't see it on a mass scale, democracy is tenuous enough these days, let alone the massive change in attitude that would be required to support anything like the libertarian to anarchist "small government" ideal some fantasize about (without that simply devolving to the authoritarian hellscape that it inevitably becomes at-scale). But in small projects (on the grand scheme of things; thousands of contributors, perhaps), enough people can be gotten together, if maybe not to make unilateral progress towards some particular goal, then at least to evolve it outward and onward.
Hence you might have oddball features that are not quite what you're expecting given the project's general scope, and with quirky UI or whatever that's somewhat characteristic of whatever subset of developers created it, or are responsible for it. Inhomogeneity is one of the prices we pay, as users of FOSS. Not to say corporate projects aren't susceptible to similar dynamics, mind, but more that they can direct more strongly, and cut offending features entirely if they so desire, without anyone else having to weigh in on the decision. Most stark of all, they can simply stop selling, or developing, and the project grinds to a halt; the same is patently impossible for FOSS, as long as the codebase is available, and being actively developed somewhere.
Or, the existence of projects that are nigh-unusable at all; a lot of small projects are one-offs that the developer(s) found helpful, maybe just once upon a time even, let alone on a regular basis, and that's it. In a sense, buggy and incomplete is the natural state of FOSS projects, preferred even. In a roundabout meaning. That is, consider FOSS itself as a whole, not so much the preferences of interested parties (developers and users). "Preferred", here, more in the sense of, how the system evolves, the minimum-energy state; as physicists would use the word. Thus, large, polished, functional projects are the exception rather than the rule.
Tim