So do I Colin, and I guarantee that the software in your tightly regulated industry is riddled with bugs. In fact the regulations themselves create the bugs, as they are complex requirements with a deadline attached which in themselves do not create new revenue for the regulated entity. In fact the layering of regulation upon regulation creates a software nightmare, and it not because the software suppliers are deficient, it is because of the fundamental nature of software development to which there is no current alternative.
I think you misunderstand me, Gary. Just look at the recent Luminar 3 launch. That is criminal to me and must be stopped. The problem is the software houses are not working to a standard.
Anyway, have a good Christmas.
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In principle i support your quest/opinion.
Lets assume you buy a physical (complex)appliance and the manufacturer is sending people to there customers to update and fix every time a piece of that appliance. (like a software update from the distance). Would you find that normal? Every thing you bring on the market needs to be tested by a safety buro and get a stamp and certificate in they pass.
So i buy a car, full of electronics these dayâs, which is road legal. And yes this is i think the key, a car cost you a fortune and if you buy it in parts even more. There investment/profit system is total different then the software system. And if the Software is steady build but has a long lifetime before a new version comes along the hackers will profit from that. (you canât steel by cloning a car)
And in the early dayâs the software was a background thing in the appliance not more then a fixed program which reacted on physical buttons. Now a dayâs even a simple office coffee vendor has a touch screen virtual sliders for your sucker/milk and strongness. And can view advertisements on the the screen as screensaver which is automatic stopped when you approach the applianceâŚJust for coffee , thee and choco!!!
It is even deeper: We people are invested in little software guided tools, appliances and other stuff which is going to be even more (household robots?) That we are used to effortless use of things, never thinking of how much work lies behind creating this product.
So thatâs why i am in the middle, : Yes i buy something i expect it work according to its advertisements and not break down in pieces. And i demand it has a certain lifetime to use without further payments.
At the same time they have to go with a never stopping train of changes inside there program or on the OS by safety demand (hacking) or flaws detected by users or changing electronics of the holder of this software. (32b or 64b databus things, cpu coreâs) So they need to adapt the core module or write a complete new one.
So Yes, donât push the program half finished . badly tested out in the open and let the payed customers do the testing and annoying task of hitting against flaws and breakdowns.
And there a we are, customers, to help by joining Early Acces groups to be there mirror and test panel to find flaws and deliver constructive comments.
Thatâs why i like to be a part of the AEgroup. Itâs fun to do and it get you a better programrelease at the end!
Have a Merry Christmass and a Happy Newyear!
Criminal and must be stopped? Iâm sorry, but that is way over the top. Iâve been writing software since 1979 , starting with IBM mainframes, and began buying, using, and yes writing PC software starting in 1984 with a IBM PC XT running DOS. While I have seen poorly conceived and written software that eventually falls by the wayside throughout the years, I have yet to see ANY consumer software with poor or buggy functionality that I would ever accuse of being âcriminalâ!
Hardware, software, and development standards and practices, have evolved extraordinarily significantly since the early days, and continues to do so as technology evolves. One thing that has not changed is the requirement for incredibly hardworking, and creative analysts and developers who are experts in various fields and well versed in a variety of subjects beyond the highly technical ability to write logically integrated code to perform complex tasks.
Writing applications that work properly and present a logical and consistent interface to the end user is as much art as science. Software today is expected to work acceptably on multiple operating system platforms running various older and newer versions, and to run on older and newer computers with various differences in processors, type and amount of ram, various performance levels of older and newer video cards, and on older and newer hard drives with varying speed differences. Additionally applications are expected to work in conjunction with older and newer hardware peripherals, some of which are ancient by current technology standards and problematic. They are also expected to work along side other software applications, some of which may also be ancient and problematic. and all of which interact with each other as they compete for a operating systemâs limited resources.
And then there is the X factor. That is the end user, who, no matter how much time and energy has been spent testing the software on multiple platforms and with different hardware, will still find unexpected errors. This is despite the due diligence and best intentions of developers and testers. They canât ever ensure that everything will always work as planned given the seemingly almost infinite number of environments in which their software will run, and the almost unlimited number of possible pathways code can take depending on an end userâs processing choices. Do you really believe that software companies intentionally release software that will result in driving away unhappy customers, and in the process make them criminally liable?
We live in a word where many once high quality consumer goods are being cheapened to meet a price point. Consumer software on the other hand is getting better and better and yet the prices remain reasonable. Since you brought it up, considering what a program like Luminar does, its asking price is absurdly low. While they have struggled with a DAM and other issues, it is certainly not criminal, assuming your definition of criminal is the same as mine.
As a paying customer you are entitled to your expectations and opinions regardless of whether or not they seem reasonable to me, and there will always be customers of any product who will be very unhappy with it even though most other customers are satisfied. However, you might want to consider how amazing it is that we have so much software that does such wonderful things at wonderful prices, rather than focus so much frustration and anger on the inevitable problems that arise as part of this extraordinarily labor intensive and complex process.
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Sorry you have not convinced me and you never will. Selling something that just does not work isâŚwell I have already said it. So I have now unsubscribed from this thread as it really does not matter to me what those who are in the industry think any more than it matters to them what I think. Time will telI and I reckon that it will not be too long before something is done to reign in companies selling stuff that cannot actually perform as advertised.
Iâm not trying to convince you of anything. That is an impossible task and itâs not my job to educate you, although I hope you now have a greater appreciation of the complexities involved. I did, however, find your comment insulting after a lifetime of involvement in software development, and felt the need to respond. It appears unlikely you will every be fully content with what will always be a less than perfect software development process. You may just be what would be considered a difficult customer who will never be happy with less than your expectation of perfection, although I hope thatâs not the case.
Mark
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In the case of the release of âLuminar3â aka Luminar2019, I agree with ColinG.
The company has been hyping that âLuminar3â would have a DAM, bug fixes and MAC parity. The promise to the purchaser was to purchase âLuminar 2018â now (November) and get the updated version on December 18 with improvements, fixes and their DAM for free and all updates through 2019 for free. By December 19, after the initial release, it was apparent that the software failed to install, the DAM crashed computers, the DAM catalog system failed after one use, etc etc. People on the Windows and MAC community boards are furious and demanding refund instructions on the community boards. On December 21, the support team acknowledges there are some minor troubles and ask users to post their issues in the community board. Effectively making paid users beta testers. The promise now is that an update will be issued before 12/31 for some of the âminorâ troubles (v 3.01) but another update will come out end of January or early February to address other issues, possibly passed the refund time frame. I would classify all that as possible criminal or at least deceptive advertising. The software is not in working order for many.
Take a look for yourself at only the Windows community and keep in mind that the MAC community is not happy either.
https://community.skylum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360000143112-Luminar-for-Windows
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None of that makes it criminal, which has to do with committing an unlawful act. That is what I was responding to. And apparently not everyone is affected despite the number of complaints. I know this because on a different forum a number of people were pleased with the new version. Additionally, here is a short review by TechRadar in Britain, which gives the latest version 4 stars.
I am not a fan of Luminar and frankly never liked what it did and how it did it. My software of preference is PhotoLab Elite. If I understood him correctly, I believe Colin in earlier posts has been implying that there should be legally enforced industry standards for software development to avoid bugs and serious functional issues. The assumption that it is possible to do that indicates a lack of understanding regarding the software development process.
What could be in place are regulations to ensure refunds or other damages for software that fails to work properly or as advertised. However, the suggestion that buggy consumer software is a crime is just silly, and the creation of legally mandated development standards is not a practical reality and will likely never be until software developers are replaced by AI. Even that will not guaranty bug free software.
Mark
I see Nikon Z7 now supported but I see only the 24-70S/f4 lens supported as well! Neither the 35S/f1.8 nor the 50S/f1.8 are recognized!
When do you believe will those be added?
You might find related information in here: https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/sections/360002221511-Module-FAQs
The area seems to be under construction. I get a loot of OOPS and COMING SOON when I click the respective links
Mark, I had decided not to bother replying to the thread because sometimes ignorance will not give way and it is clear that ColinG is not prepared to appreciate the realities of the world he lives in. However, for anybody else that is interested then Mark is completely correct. I am a developer by training but for many years I have earned my money by being regarded as a an expert in the global software market. In my experience people do not appreciate that the âhumbleâ PC is unprecedented in that a so called âcommodityâ product is so extensively configurable to be able to achieve many diverse capabilities. What other commodity can? It is subject to extremely short life-cycles requiring continual renewal, and the cost of testing software exceeds the cost of development. For a retail package such as PL which operates in a relatively small market, to genuinely achieve the levels of new functionality and robustness demanded within this forum it would require the purchase price to be a minimum of TEN times, and more like THIRTY times, what is is now. I wish the user community understood that we have all made a decision to buy into an excellent fringe product that will only grow market share if we get behind it, and we have not chosen to buy the assurance of established market âgorillaâ such as Adobe. Some of the language on here is outrageously over-the-top. Some of the analogies are amazingly ignorant (comparing software to a car - seriously? I donât expect a car I buy to receive quarterly upgrades on the latest engine, fuel management, driver interfaces, sat-nav etc.). So I feel frustrated by the unreasonable level of noise about some user expectations, whilst I am also hugely impressed by some of the technical knowledge shown by others. I think Iâll just focus on the latter in future. Rant over.
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Wait for it and
is become your present day.
This is a strange thing: The inbuild sat-nav is a bit overdue. atleast overhere.
itâs a option for some hundered euroâs and the maps needs to be accurate in the never ending changing roads as new or in max speed or direction. And my mobilephone or a 150 euro navkit has traffic and âlivetimeâ map update.
I have lease car with inbuild satnav (got it as a package of a bunch) and i can update the system myself downloading from the manufacturers website and do some things(legal). But if you canât do it yourself the garage can do it for you. (for a cost ofcaorse)
Most satnavâs in cars you can update til the second year. then you have to pay extra. so no one is using that anymore and uses his mobile GâŚmaps.
The only way this incar system is surviving is when the maps are updated by âhome-wifiâ/ 4g or every service moment. or as some cars already do just second screen the mobile phone so using GâŚmaps. long live harvesting data! If you donât want this buy a paper roadmap and old car of before 1990.
And i think this is the split we are in. We want that âfreedomâ and longer livetime of the old systems and on the other hand the convenience of a self updating learning system to help us around.
(we even forget that because of the modern software the car is calculating its next maintenance check depending on your drivingstyle and km/day. and in 1990 you needed every 10.000 km a maintenance now its 30.000/40.000 km) My car has giroâs and G-chips which knows i brake hard wile turning a corner and it âprepairs it self for impactâ wile braking as hard as it can for you and keep the movability of direction alive even on four different surfaces. modern cars are helping you more then you think and i know they upgrade firmware when its command by manufacturer.
See the Tesla; itâs sees a emergency brake in front of you before you do, but that old truck behind him not. so your front will be fine but the back? 
So if you want it or not that car is becoming a self driving hollow (place you sit) computer on wheels!
sorry couldenât resist⌠
Wait for what exactly? If you read my post I was saying the comparison to software and a car is wrong - not software IN a car. When I wrote sat-nav I was referring to the hardware. Everywhere else I was referring to the mechanics or physical parts of the car. My point is that I do not expect quarterly updates of the physical parts of a car. Maybe I could have been clearer, but given one side of my example was software, then the other side canât be. In order to get the benefit of the new technologies in a car, you normally have to pay, and normally itâs a complete replacement. So the purchasers experience with a car (a commodity) is accepted as different to software (which is not really a commodity). Anyway, thanks for your good humoured reply. 
Actually perhaps comparing it to a car is somewhat valid as both are highly technical products which contains significant numbers of unresolved bugs. The main difference is that unresolved bugs in a car can kill you. But, we are in complete agreement other than that. The issue though is that the consumer doesnât need to know the complexities of software design, merely that it is complex and far from error free, and that in order to make any software package more bug free than it may currently be would be prohibitively expensive.
Mark
LOL.
This latest upgrade was sold entirely on the basis of upcoming functionality. But if you enjoy plugging your ears and listening only to the guy waving around his big expertâŚopinions, have fun.
I donât think any of us were happy about that. I started this thread and complained about the lack of functionality from the beginning. The current conversation though is unrelated to that and was in regards to earlier comments by Colin about bug mitigation in not only current and future versions of a vendors software, but in past versions as well and included a number of comments, arguments, and suggestions by him regarding how software should be supported and a call for legal standards for software development. As a retired programmer and software development manager I attempted to explain the complexities of software development and more significantly the effort required to test and implement upgrades which generally make fixing software bugs in older versions of a vendors software untenable. He then used the word criminal in a reference to buggy software, and we were off to the races.
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Yes and they use the carrosery more then few years only modify it a bit so its looks new compared to the on you bring back. and you go for thousants after few years wile paying every year for maintenance.
(so software is miles cheaper!)
My point was that âweâ see the pc as a appliance and itâs software the same as the more fixed software in your TV, oven with touchscreen and helpmenu, CV for that matter, but we forget for the sake of ease that those donât do âcomplexâ things by turning in a other appliance every time we start up a new application. (sometime more then one at the time.)
I am not a programmer but i "programmed the old Z80, pre ibm 8086, in HEX. and did some other things at school in that line so i know how much work you need to do before a simple action is done by the âpcâ. (didnât liked it, have no patient for programmingâŚLOL) So i started to repair the hardware around the software.
But i agree with you, we not helping bashing against things, we help by being constructive like a EAmember, bringing ideeâs thoughtâs new pointâs of view. And a program a isnât finished product, it floats, evolves.
I think this was triggering this side vork, the upgrade without any visual new things got most people with wrong feet out of bed. I am convinced that âtheyâ didnât liked it either but needed it to do for that hars time that they announced. And they come true, yes i know a DAM, but evolving is there and they work hard for us.
Your welcome 
hmm, this post started about DPL feature impromement and increase. We have come a long way.
We are at an early major release 2 stage, which usually means that changes tend to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
My main concern about DPL is that, in search of technical perfection, the labs fall behind in offering a sensible set of choices to us users. Choices that enable speed before accuracy, to give you one example.
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Mark, I have two Mac Pros (home and office) and a MBP 2011 17" (I choose an older i7 quad for the 17" screen as itâs the last model with anti-glare 17" screen). As I mentioned, the Mac Pro which is really slow is the 6 x 3.46 GHz sporting an Nvidia GTX 980 graphic card and running El Capitan with DxO PhotoLab 2.0.0 build 9. Iâve had better luck with my 12 x 3.33 GHz with a Radeon RX 590.
There are not a huge number of background processes running, the disks are all SSD, the computer has no other issues. It seems directly related to the Nvidia card. It would be nice if DxO would come out and give some more detailed performance guidance on both Windows and Mac.
Perhaps the issue is with the 5DS R files. I have a bunch of Sony A6300 files to process from the holidays which will give me some insight into file size. If DxO PhotoLab has performance issues with large files (5DS R, Nikon D850, Z7, Sony A7R I II III) and/or Nvidia graphic ards, it seems much more important to solve those performance issues than start to add huge new modules (DAM). Thatâs my point - DxO has built a very nice core to a RAW developer. Spending all their resources on new modules is disrespectful of their existing customer base and, to be quite honest, running after foolâs gold.
Will a half-baked DAM sell more DxO PhotoLab licenses? I donât think so. Can the DAM be more than half-baked for the next couple of years? Given the development time over in some case decades which iMatch, FastRawViewer, PhotoMechanic and Adobe Lightroom have consumed, I doubt it.
Will slow and laggy DxO PhotoLab sliders on large files drive away existing customers, anger new users and garner bad reviews? You betcha. More and more as high resolution cameras become more common. Or no hardware acceleration for Nvidia video cards for instance.
In an ideal world, DxO would be able to run after all of these issues at the same time. We are all aware that right now DxO is not in an ideal space. DxO is rebuilding the company and the software development team and managing revenue very carefully. Neglecting the core application for some distant green field would be misguided.
I remember canoeing across huge lakes in Canada and the distant green fields would look like soft meadows where one could just lay out oneâs sleeping bag and lie blissfully staring at the sky. Weâd paddle hard to get to the other side. When we came closer, it became apparent that those meadows were the same rocky, lump filled mountain sides weâd left behind on the other side of the lake. Hopes for an integrated DAM which will somehow improve workflow are as naive as our dreams of soft meadows on mountain sides as teenage canoe trippers.
Great idea.
A fast mode for previewing adjustments in real time would be most welcome. I can see thereâs some work been done on fast preview but it could go much deeper and be completely real time.