Relentless Updates

Here's something that came to mind as I sat down to another security alert from Java as it wants to make another update. Updates.

When a program is released, it is usually put out there "as good as it gets" for the moment until something surprising comes along to derail it, and the developer is forced to put out an update to fix whatever problem arose. These updates, or patches, are only possible because our computers are almost permanently online with a fairly speedy connection, where once upon a time, if a developer put out a program that required a patch, the consumer was screwed.

I recall one such game, called Riven (a sequel to Myst), that froze at a certain point of the game, and after some digging, I learned that the game was glitched and required a patch to fix it. I located said patch (I don't remember how) and popped that on a 3.5" disk to load into the game directory. It fixed the problem. Nowadays, your xBox or whatever would simply download the patch as soon as it was available and you'd never know there was a problem.

This ease of update has led to quite a bit of laziness on the part of some developers since they know once problems come up, they can instantly fix it and move on. This means that you, as a user, basically become unpaid beta testers of some companies' products since your instant feedback (read: ire over a crappy game) will enable the developers to correct issues they might never have found without months of more testing. One particularly heinous example was the release of the game Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. If you have the original Xbox or PS3 version of this game that came out on release day, you have a game that is can never be played without the update. The game was so badly glitched (all Lego games are inherently glitched, but this one was the worst) that the company was forced to replace all the game discs for the Wii owners since the Wii was not able to take game updates. If you're like me, however, and waited till the game went down to 19.99, then your disc is fine.

I use this update thing as a sort of gauge as to the worthiness of a particular product. For instance, Java (although supposedly in every product ever) seems to be one of the buggiest things out there. My computer gets updates almost daily for it meaning the developer finds something wrong with it almost daily.Oh sure, you might say, "well, they are improving it," and that is undoubtedly true some of the time, but developers would not update a product with newer and better stuff on a daily basis. A good portion of these are likely patches to fix bugs.

Another is Adobe Air. The Amazon Cloud Player uses this, and guess what has to update every single time I use it. Yeah. It tells me to close what I'm doing so it can make its update, so I let it finish what it is doing and then tell it to update. I figure it worked last time, and it'll work this time without their precious update. Obviously, the Air does something that the Cloud Player uses, but whatever that is has nothing to do with the updates it makes.

I know these are free, of course, but it still stinks that those developers can't just put out something that works the first (or even second) time without persistent updates that slow everything down while you wait for them to basically say, "Whoops, hang on a minute while I fix this."