Streamer apps critical

@moonwatcher

I have no idea. These days there are a couple of camps of developers, The professionals, trained in structured development using standardized tools. Then the net has nurtured a huge number of "wild Wild West" multilingual coders and developers that patch together stuff in all sorts of the latest fad of tools. Because lots of small businesses needed web and app development these home schooled folks had so much business that they started businesses and hired people and produce spagetti apps and all sorts of tools. It’s a mess. Some of these businesses have gotten huge.

I was an senior IT executive for a global company. I needed a little work done in the Portland area had my local systems manager go out to get bids. Each was more bazaar than the last. We wanted and extendable shell to allow easy extensibility and maintainability. They could not even understand the job. We got back bids from $95K to $290K using a half dozen or moire tools. The shops were a bunch of guys with couches and snow cone machines that had absolutely no idea what structured development was. It was hysterical. I am sure a lot of small businesses are really spending a fortune on IT that is a mess.

We finally had to go to Seattle to find a professional programming house to do the job. It was a real eye opener.

@ghdprentice that is scary to contemplate that so many of the apps we and banks, and other outfits use are patched together so randomly. I remember way, way back in the 1970s, they taught us to add comment lines to all our code with the idea that anyone could come along and examine the code and figure it out. I don’t think anyone adds comments to their code now. I got out of it (I’m an engineer, not a programmer) before C++ began its rise. I was taken aback by how instead of compact code that ran efficiently these new "kids" would call on huge libraries of functions to simply multiply a couple numbers. Guess all that super processing power of 486 chips encouraged such practices and even more so today with all the super number crunching chips and those being used in graphics cards.

I just hope somewhere, somebody is maintaining a map of the architecture of their code, so my Tidal and banking software doesn’t flake out very often. LOL. Thanks for the info and thanks for giving me something else to worry about. I recall 1999 when they had to hire a bunch of old COBOL programmers to come in and "save the world" from code not understanding "2000". Crazy.

@moonwatcher

Banks would not be using this approach or most global companies.

But yes comments are still best practice and now frequently in user exits... depending on the application. 

A story just for you, on commenting. I was implementing a global SAP system. Its base was a couple million lines of code. I had a team of about fifty people working on it, a number of of consultants for over a year. We went live. We had a really bazar and urgent issue. Don’t remember the issue. But, my lead programmer / manager and I were reduced to scrolling through thousands of lines of code and associated user exits at 2 am in the morning. Finally after a couple hours... we found a line changed. There is a comment: "I am going to hell for this, I know I shouldn’t do it, I will regret this" and the programmers name is time date stamped. We just looked at it and broke up in anger / laughing and said, "Yes you are!, you SOB". The programmer was in Belgium and we were working in the US for the go live so he was not immediately available. So a few weeks later were were having dinner with about 15 people in Europe and with the offending programmer. I got up and said I want to toast the person in this group nearly shut the company down, I am sure that he will recognize this comment: "I am going to hell for this....etc" while looking right at him. He turned deep red. He knew that to find that, there had to be a huge problem and that it would have taken hours and hours to find it, It was funny then... not some much when the company couldn’t ship globally.

Just came here to say that I agree with the premise of this thread. I’ve owned the Lumin T2 for the last few years. For my system and needs, I think it sounds fantastic. The UI is whole other story. There are entire threads on the Internet dedicated to how horrible it is.

The sad thing is a UI upgrade doesn’t even seem to be on Lumin’s radar. The most frustrating thing to me, is that you cannot filter or sort your playlist. I have over 1200 songs in mine, and I have to scroll for minutes trying to locate the one I want to play. Seems like an easy fix. Lumin, you out there?

One thing that flabbergasted me is that PSAudio felt ok releasing the AirLens, which seems a great streamer, without a native interface. I'm looking at buying a streamer in the 2-3k range and I'm afraid it WON'T be the AirLens.