[mythtv-users] Where to find Myth Setup Information?

[mark Deneen]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 8:38 PM, mark Deneen <mdeneen9000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Exactly. And if the fellas who ginned this up were honest, they'd say
> > exactly that in big bold letters on the MythTV home page. This program is
> > the typical Linux exercise in utter futility. But hey, it's free, so that
> > makes it ok, huh?
>
> While MythTV has many deficiencies that a number of us give dozens of
> hours per week to address, in our spare time, it can be properly
> configured with some research, correct choices of hardware, and some
> persistence and willingness to learn.  Open source means we make it
> available for free, and if you don't like it, you can not use it, or
> help us to improve the things you don't like.  If every interaction
> with you is seething with poison and rudeness, you are not the type of
> user we want in our community.  Any one of the people above would have
> been happy to patiently talk you through any of your issues or
> questions, but you chose instead to insult the program, the
> developers, and the users from the very start.  You have written off
> MythTV, and we have written you off.  Can we be done now?  Don't let
> the door hit you on the way out.
>
> Robert
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>

Well then, you are the right person for me to address. You pitch the product
as an application, which it most assuredly is not. It's a programming toy,
and it ought to be advertised as such. Just because you work on it in your
spare time doesn't make it virtuous OR good. Here's 5 simple reasons why my
complaint has merit:
1. The web site is dishonest, and leads people to believe this is a working
application of the type most people would expect today.e.g.  Install, Setup,
Run. That isn't what this is and you know it.

2. At a minimum, some effort ought to be put into making grammatical sense
out of errors and menus. What's in this program ought to be embarrassing to
any educated person claiming to an engineer. It's loaded with unexplained
jibberish. The horrendous misuse of language in the program and the docs is
simply appalling.

3. The "docs" you are all so proud of are meaningless recitations of the
menus, which are unexplained faux techno-jargon. It is not a How-To, or a
User Manual. Find a professional technical writer to volunteer. Programmers
know nothing about technical writing, and create nothing but hacked rubbish
when it comes to user manuals.

4. A real engineer ALWAYS wants to know how customers experience their
products. And for SW, I don't simply meaning collecting bugs. This Rube
Goldberg contraption is a mess from any customer perspective. You ought to
be thankful I would waste the time to tell you what is wrong with it.
Instead you are defensive, as though the mere act of applying hours of your
free time is type of a substitute for competence. It is not. The program is
a hacked mess, and it doesn't matter if you have 100 hours into it, or a
million. Surely you understand that, right?

5. You've spec'd a project that is 10X larger than you could ever
competently complete with part time coders, and it shows. All I can see that
looks anywhere near finished is the menu appearance.

Get as haughty and insulted and defensive as you like. It makes me laugh,
actually. I may be the dumbest user you've ever heard of, but I have 5
computers and dozens of large applications I've purchased and installed, and
please trust me on this - - none of them have this level of McGuyver
bailing-wire nonsense associated with their installation or use. Have I ever
had to recompile parts of a program to get it to work? Uh, no.

I was happy to sign off a couple hours ago by saying, sincere thanks, and
sorry for wasting your time (and mine). But now, this hyper-defensiveness of
the "developers" has me amused. I am assuming you developed this thing for
yourselves? Because if you ever had intentions of having customers (paying
or not) you'd want to hear what they had to say. It's free!
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