[Banter] What is the worst software you have used for its price?

[Nominal Animal]

There's so much badness to choose from but here's a few ...

Linux (any version)
GCC (has to be the worst compiler ever)
Xilinx ISE
Anything by Adobe

Really?  I admit I haven't used Adobe Photoshop since Adobe moved to subscription-based licensing a decade ago, but before that, it really was the bees knees for image manipulation.

[bd139]

Indeed. Photoshop and Lightroom are absolutely excellent. Nothing comes near them.

They are the two bits of software that doesn’t hurt to pay for. It’s also really cheap!

[fourfathom]

...
One of the founders is still in dispute about a piece of beach he illegally owns (or doesnt)

He owns the access to the beach; this kind of behaviour is worse then just fighting over the beach in question, IMNHO.

As far as I can tell, he owns the beach down to the Mean High Tide line (below MHT all beaches in California are public property).  The previous owner allowed access to the public portion of the beach, sometimes charging a fee and otherwise not, but this access was voluntarily given and not a deeded easement.  The current owner (Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) decided to no longer allow access over his property, and I believe that this is his legal right.  A group of people who had been using this access complained and Khosla was sued.  Sometimes "Adverse Possession" is claimed when access over private property is desired, but I don't think this really applies in this case.  But that's the battle.

Disclosure:  I know Vinod, he was our principal venture capital partner at my last company (a very successful start-up).

[Gregg]

*Anything Norton*

I used to install Norton anti-virus on my wife’s computer because she isn’t too careful with the things she clicks on. I used to buy the retail version good for a year when it was on sale for about 75% off of the overly optimistic retail price.
A couple of years ago, I purchased a new copy on a CD on sale at Fry’s.  (I have fond memories of Fry’s) On the box was some ambiguous wording about subscription.  The deal was that I couldn’t install the software that I purchased unless I logged on to Norton and signed up for automatic renewal with a credit card.  Like I would trust a company that claims to be a major player in the internet protection racket that was operating in a manner that I was (presumably) paying them to avoid.

[nctnico]

*Anything Norton*

Except for Norton Commander... 30+ years later I'm still using the Linux clone 

[HighVoltage]

*Anything Norton*

Anything Norton was top notch unlit they got bought by Symantec.
Everything Symantec sucks!

[themadhippy]

Norton Commander.

would rather have a 50 year old norton commando

[HighVoltage]

I used the Norton Commander every day as my file handling tool in those days.
How amazing this tool was and nothing came close !

[bd139]

The only reason Norton commander was so popular was DOS was so shit. mv and cp are better than nc

[Gregg]

Norton Commander.

would rather have a 50 year old norton commando

That would be Norton Hardware:
Many memories of Lucas electrics magic smoke, Amal carburetors and leaking oil.

[T3sl4co1l]

Indeed. Photoshop and Lightroom are absolutely excellent. Nothing comes near them.

They are the two bits of software that doesn’t hurt to pay for. It’s also really cheap!

As I understand it, since their move to subscription based licensing -- and also generally fuck Adobe for all the usual greedy buggy reasons -- the correct price is $0 "wink wink nudge nudge", which is indeed really cheap.

But I don't use it personally so YMMV.

Tim

[srb1954]

I used the Norton Commander every day as my file handling tool in those days.
How amazing this tool was and nothing came close !

Lotus Magellan was also very good. Got a lot of use out of for many years. Only stopped using when when Windows came out and Lotus basically abandoned the product.

[joeqsmith]

One of the first programs I had to run on the IBM PC was VisiSchedule.    That set the bar for the next several decades....

Looks like you can even download a copy:
https://winworldpc.com/product/visischedule/12

[joeqsmith]

I used the Norton Commander every day as my file handling tool in those days.
How amazing this tool was and nothing came close !

I was using something called XTree and continued to use it long after Windows came out (when windows ran under DOS  ). 

[bd139]

Indeed. Photoshop and Lightroom are absolutely excellent. Nothing comes near them.

They are the two bits of software that doesn’t hurt to pay for. It’s also really cheap!

As I understand it, since their move to subscription based licensing -- and also generally fuck Adobe for all the usual greedy buggy reasons -- the correct price is $0 "wink wink nudge nudge", which is indeed really cheap.

But I don't use it personally so YMMV.

Tim

I don’t actually mind paying for it. It’s £10 a month for photoshop and lightroom and they get updated regularly with actual useful features. Haven’t found any bugs yet.

[rsjsouza]

I used the Norton Commander every day as my file handling tool in those days.
How amazing this tool was and nothing came close !

I was using something called XTree and continued to use it long after Windows came out (when windows ran under DOS  ).

Xtree (and later XTree Gold) and its competitor PCTools were excellent file browsers - light years ahead of the crap File Explorer of Windows 2.x/3.x/95/98

I was never a big fan of Norton Commander on the DOS days, but nowadays I use a File Explorer utility that is similar in shape, named FreeCommander. Quite excellent for the price.

Oops, sorry for derailing the thread: we are here to bash software, not praise it. 

[joeqsmith]

"... not praise it."
I think I still have the manual still on my bookshelf for Xtree Gold.   Didn't they change something in the Gold version that screwed up the secrete sauce? 

Thinking about their UI, back in those early days, I was writing my .COM programs in assembler and later in C.  It seems like I had some software from MagnaCarta that allowed me to use the color monitor and get some of those fancy exploding dialog boxes and such.   I had a math library from a company called MIX that I used.    Both were very low cost for us hobbyists. 

Really, thinking back, outside of some of the very early software I don't remember too many problems.   I used (still do) FPGAs and when Altera came out with Quartus I was beta testing it.  Their applications engineers came for a visit so I could demonstrate that it could not build a simple NAND gate! 

We used to use Sun and Apollos and were on the hunt for a better simulator.  We went to one of the major software companies to have a look at their tools.  I had prepared a schematic just in case they asked us for a circuit, which to my surprise, they did.   So they enter my trojan horse and I provide them with some details on how to run it.   Core dump!  Took down the whole system.      They were upset and of course asked me details about it and I explained how I had simulated that same circuit that day with PSPICE at $3000 a copy.   If you played at all with those work stations, you know it wasn't going to be cheap.  That may have been Mentor. 

[Doctorandus_P]

EdWin was probably my second worst (after windoze).

It was a PCB program I bought back in the '90-ies and after a while I discovered that it did not (always) remove a connection from the netlist if you deleted a wire between schematic symbols. That was an immediate one way ticket to the garbage bin.

[RedLion]

Wow, I came here to say Altium.  I haven't dabbled in the others, but my impression has been that they all tend to have a worse user experience or are missing a lot of the graphical control options that Altium has (even if most of what Altium has is half-baked and half-broken), which is part of what has me still putting up with it.

Altium is WAY overpriced on it subscription costs  . The cost has increased a lot over the years. It is now $A 2,400 for a one year's subscription. I reluctantly renewed, but this will be the last time. They should give a $100 discount to a user for every verified new bug he reports.

Mate, you haven't seen the price politics of Mentor CAD. Yes, Altium is the Ferrari of EDAs. It's expensive to buy and maintain, but it gets the job done really well (even if you don't like the UI that much).

Mentor Xpedition is more like your pre-war Rolls Royce. The cost is insane (we're talking 100 kilobucks PER LICENSE, plus tens of thousands for the annual "support package", which is a laptop in a closet somewhere), it is slow to start, slow to run and it breaks down a lot (I just had 4 crashes in 45 minutes because I dared try to rename a net).

Plus the UI is from 1995 and not customizable at all, eg. the hotkeys to rotate a component are Ctrl+Shift+R. Note that Ctrl+R, Shift+R, or just R, are not assigned to anything. Doesn't matter, get f'kin used to it because that's the hotkeys, end of. Of yourse, the designators and properties all rotate along, so you have to rotate each of them back afterwards if you like reading the right way up.

[Halcyon]

I used the Norton Commander every day as my file handling tool in those days.
How amazing this tool was and nothing came close !

I was an X-Tree Gold kind of guy.

[rsjsouza]

"... not praise it."
I think I still have the manual still on my bookshelf for Xtree Gold.   Didn't they change something in the Gold version that screwed up the secrete sauce? 

Since you mentioned it, I vaguely recall something on the "Gold" version that my dad disliked and I loved, as it was the default behaviour in my beloved PCTools (that stupid Norton killed it) - pergaps it was something related to the way the disks were scanned? My memory fails me...

Thinking about their UI, back in those early days, I was writing my .COM programs in assembler and later in C.

My dad was an x86 assembly wiz and taught me enough for me to venture into this as well. Amazing what one could do with up to 32kB of binary executable (the limit of a .COM executable). Good times.

My dad's source code listings were more than 1MB (with comments, of course) - all that was crunched into a mere ~20kB. He loved kedit as his coding platform.

[snarkysparky]

Siemens step7  PLC software.   It is simply unfinished software.  The engineers got it to where *they* could use it and called it done.
You literally have to open some screens and write down obscure numbers and take that back to another screen and type it into a box.

Also hate labview VI programming.   It's all good if you got finished blocks to tie together but if you need to create your own logic is sucks.

These are programs I like

LTSpice
Handbrake
SumatraPDF
Octave
Freemat
speedcrunch
avidemux
tinycad
Librecad
notepad++
sharpdevelop
audacity
irfanview
diptrace

[tom66]

Linux (any version)
GCC (has to be the worst compiler ever)
Xilinx ISE
Anything by Adobe

GCC is bad?  Man, you must not have used XC8.  I reported at least four different bugs in that compiler that literally produced garbage code.

GCC is actually a very good compiler;  but it suffers from trying to do everything (every architecture, hundreds of optimisations, multiple languages.)  This makes it very bloated, but I think it's preferable to having something useless.  The linker toolchains are byzantine and tricky to understand for cross-compilation, but I got there eventually.  It's one of those things that's poorly documented and a bit of the blind leading the blind.

[Zero999]

Linux (any version)
GCC (has to be the worst compiler ever)
Xilinx ISE
Anything by Adobe

GCC is bad?  Man, you must not have used XC8.  I reported at least four different bugs in that compiler that literally produced garbage code.

PICs, especially the baseline devices are a complete turd to program. It's truly amazing any compiler works.

[madires]

Please choose the one you dislike:
( ) Emacs
( ) vi