Software
Introduction
What to Buy – That is the Question
Buying decisions are the essence of life in the commerce-driven 21st century. From everyday decisions like selecting lunch from a restaurant menu, to getting a new car, to major company acquisitions, much of our time is spent “buying”.
And these choices are anything but simple. Each marketer professes to be the sole champion of our consumer rights and pummels us with enticing advertising messages, about how their wares are “the best”. Seductive as these messages are, no product or service is quite the same. The difference may be glaring – that of “better vs. worse”, or a subtle tradeoff between price, quality, feature set, customer service, or durability.
It is therefore important to keep our wits about & develop a systematic approach to the buying decision. Our view should be broad & farsighted, rather than buying based only on what immediately meets the eye. Hasty decisions leave us with flashy features never used, or hefty repair bills of products that came cheap.
A good example of a systematic approach is when you buy a car. A myriad of factors are considered & weighed, which impact the owner for the next decade. This includes brand, performance vs. style, price, safety, terms of finance, mileage, maintenance, resale value & so many other factors.
I have been reading this abstracts paper from the Dagstuhl Seminar End-User Software Engineering and it has lots of interesting points to make.
In the Dagstuhl Seminar report (Burnett et al) it is stated that “The number of end users creating software is far larger than the number of professional programmers. These end users are using various languages and programming systems to create software in forms such as spreadsheets, dynamic web applications, and scientific simulations. This software needs to be sufficiently dependable, but substantial evidence suggests that it is not.” This point relates to that of (Ko) (Carnegie Mellon University) who explains that the goals of end-users may be unrelated to production of code, but instead they are interested in their domain problem, this means they perceive programming barriers as distractions. Ko explains that end-user programmers must be allowed to focus on their goals, and an important part of the solution is to visualise the whole program execution not just the output. A further problem outlined by Ko is that of programs which were intended to be temporary and owned by a particular person becoming central to a company, this often happens with spreadsheets.
Employing software testing methods can have its disadvantages. For one, it can cause undesirable delays in releasing a newly developed software. Despite this, however, software testing is still employed by most software developing companies. Aside from the fact that software testing is part of the standard protocols in software development strategy that should be observed, there are a number of benefits that can outweigh the delays that can be caused by software testing. The following are reasons why software testing is crucial when developing a new software:
Software testing will help ensure that the new software that will be released will work. Through software testing, developers will be able to find out whether there are technical problems in a particular software before it is released. This will help ensure that the software end- users will be purchasing is working properly. Software testing also ensures that the software that is being released by its manufacturer has passed standard quality tests.
Computer Backup- Forget About It!
Backup Software is for the birds! Computer Backup is too hard, too much trouble and a pain in the butt. Let’s just forget about it.
Backup Software is touted as the savior of your computer’s critical business and personal files. They claim that all computer hard drives (where our files are stored) eventually will have a 100% failure rate. They try to tell us that the failure of our hard drives is just a matter of WHEN, not IF.
Do your backups they shout!
Poppycock!
BACKUP SOFTWARE- LET’S GET REAL
You and I know the real story. The real story is that new computers are so well made that they almost never fail, right?
Therefore, we don’t need to worry about buying backup software and setting up a computer backup system, do we? It would just be a waste time– for sure!
After all we know that all the press about hard drive failures, natural disasters and terrorist attacks is just a conspiracy by the backup software companies to get us to buy their products.
Personally I never had a hard drive failure (that I recall). If my computer stops working for whatever reason, that’s life.
Specialists in the IT sphere as well as other people are always potential clients of any software manufacturer. Engineers, accountants, architects, designers, programmers, people who start home-business and other specialists in any sphere today use a computer. But the hardware is not enough in order to work on a PC or Mac. People need software but only a minority can afford buying full versions together with necessary plugins and add-ons. Great if you work in a corporation on in a firm where “everything [software tools] is already installed”. But where is an exit from the situation when you have to buy, say, Windows XP or Mac OS, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and other? Away with questions – let’s look through possible variants of solving this issue:
1) Buy any software you need directly from a manufacturer;
2) use trial versions of a brand-name company software limited in functionality;
3) try to find a similar software tool at a less famous manufacturer;
4) download pirated software from “underground” hacker-sites (illegal);
5) download cheap OEM software from manufacturers’ affiliates or third-party suppliers.