Well agree with the general "Motif" stinks mood of this discusion. I have always thought this.
One of the main reasons why Windows 3.1 swept UNIX aside on the desktop market was Motif. I mean how could you persuade your boss to spend 3 times the money on UNIX hardware when the desktop looked so bad (worse than W3.1 is bad!!!).
So now we have a group of guys with a legacy product who are trying to breath some life into it or look for another job. So they decide to try some high fashion open source trendiness, but, they screwed that up too!
I suppose you could say RMS was overeacting as nobody in thier right mind would choose to use Motif. But I think he is right to whine moan and grizzle about the whole thing.
Basicaly, its like "esso" sticking an "environmentally friendly" sticker on the Exxon Valdiz. If you let anyone use the "free" "open" etc. words when they don't mean it the whole thing becomes meaningless.
Yes. The PHBs do take the word of gartner for gospel.
Yes. They are most often completely wrong or there are postdictions? masquerading as predictions.
The annoying thing is it is quite hard to get hold of older (i.e. proven to be complately wrong ) Gartner reports as they disappear from view when they come into contact with reality. I wish I had taken hard copies of some of thier older stuff to counter some of the though free "Gartner Says" descision making that goes on.
DEC will coninue to be the major mid range player!
No software vendor can be considered viable if they do not offer full DCE integration!
CICS 6000 will be the major transaction monitor on UNIX in 2 years.
IBM are among the top two or three vendors in every market they compete in -- except for PCs.
They put a lot of effort/money into claing back some market share (they did after all invent the PC and were rather peeved about the Wintel alliance high jacking the whole thing).
However recently they seem to have realised two things.
1. There is not much money in commodity products.
2. Thier core business is high value, high end servers, is completely at odds with providing cheap commodity hardware.
They are very happy to leave this to people like AMD (to whom they readily license technoligy) and to the Apple/Motorola alliance.
When IBM talks about competing with Intel. They are talking about what IBM calls the "mid range server" market and Intel calls the "high end" server market.
If Intel had actually produced the IA64 on time then they would have made a serious dent in that market. Instead Itel have had to squeeze yet more performance out of the ageing x86 architecture, where (until recently!) there was no viable server Operating System to effectively utilise all that CPU power.
The intersting competion in this field is from Sun, who for the first time in several years do not have the fastest chip/biggest server to offer thier customers, as both IBM and HP have leapfrogged them.
It will be very intersting to see if they can regain there lead with thier next generation Sparc - do out sometime soon.
Re:Things you learn in Business School...
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
Still doesn't change the fact that the biggest, best established, and oldest pure e-ecommerce firm has never actually turned a profit.
If this was a mall-commerce(TM) bookstore that had failed to turn a profit five years and billions of investors money it would probably be called "The Chapter 11 bookstore" by now.
As the e-hype dies down and investors remove thier rose tinted glasses they will see that the E-mperor is rather skimpily dressed.
While I am sure the book is an excellent guide to Objectionable Perl, I would question the whole concept of souping up the calling conventions of a procedural language and calling it OO.
This being my major objection to C++ also.
Why screw up a really nice procedural language to produce an unsightly hybryd?
Noe Python on the other hand is a scriting language which is OO from the ground up. You can just about write procedural code if you really try but its much easier to do pure objects, and unlike some OO languages (C++!) you can actually read and understand the resulting code.
Obviously you have never tried or seen anyone try to get support for an M$ product.
You have too choices. You can try using the support that was included in your intial purchase. This will get you a total non specalist on the end of the phone who will be using the same problem databse/FAQ that you can access on the M$ website for free. You get the same level of support from most LINUX distros at their web sites. (IMHO you get a better quality of database and FAQs from the LINUX mob), you, also have access to various usenets mailling lists where some very talented people will try to solve your problems just cos they are nice guys.
Optionally you can sign a support contract with someone like UNISYS, Compaq (ex DEC) or even M$ itself. These contracts cost you large sums of money -- but you do get access to technical expertise.
Such support is also available for LINUX.
I think the real problem here is instutional laziness. It is very difficult to force a change through in any large orgnisation, and much more difficult in any Civil Service/Goverment buearocracy. Its easier to follow existing procedures and do what the last guy did than to push for a switch to LINUX, even if it means throwing away close to a million dollars which could have been spent on actual education.
The legal framework for copyright was origonally designed to protect the writers of books.
As such what is copyrighted is the written text. You can copyright just about any peice of text if you can reasonably claim that no-one else has ever written that particular combination of words before.
There are two issues that may help the original poster.
1. If the copy was entered from DreamWeaver then you could probably claim that the standard HTML framework generated by the software is the same for every piece of HTML generated by the package. Thereofre only the text actualy typed in by the scuzzbags is copyrightable.
2. What is copyrightable is the exact form of words and/or appearance. Something which looks similar and does the same thing is not in breach of copyright. This is why all these writers of detective stories where the butler did it cannot sue each other.
So even if the scuzzbags did actually own the copyright of the mess which thex left you to sort out, then if you could maintain that the non machine generated HTML code was substantially different (and that what similartities there were resulted from following the clients instructions and/or using data supplied by the client) they would be required to prove otherwise, which in turn, would require them to produce a copy of the website in the state they left it.
Who are these "scuzzbags" anyway. After the legal stuff is done with could you please "Name and Shame".
The single most important piece of internationalistaion is being able to display the characters on the screen. just taking the EU countries in europe there are at least 7 accents you can put on the letter A -- ä à â ã is all I can mamnge on my current keyboard.
The other important piece is having a decent speel checker for your chosen language.
So much software is USA-centic even english speaking Biits and Aussis feel left out. Imagine if your name is müller and your software won't even let you spell your name correctly.
Go to the DVD copier at work (Every IT shop has at least one).
Insert the original DVD in the "reader" drawer.
Insert a blank disk in the "writer" drawer.
Double click on "copy".
Repeat until bored.
And be sure to use your own blank disks and not your employers as that would be stealing.
Disks copied in this way will play on any DVD just as well as the origonal.
On a more philisophical note. How can someone defend the "secrecy" of an encryption algorithim that was so easy to crack! I like man mean if like man I encrypted like man a sentence which used like man an alogrithm consisting like man of like man inserting like man the like man words like like man man randomly in the like man text could I have you like man arrested for like man cracking the like man code.
The automobile as we know it (4 wheels, steering wheel, gasoline internal combustion engine, headlights, gearbix and clutch) was up and running well before 1900.
Ait Conditiong/Refrigeration. Didn't that revolutionize the Argentinian economy in the 1880's.
Shouldn't "Poorly researched articles" be up on that list. (I think the Babalonians get there first though).
Didn't Leeeshure Soot Larry have a drinking problem, engage in paid for sex with unhygenic girls, died of food poisening (several times over ), conducted some seriously tedious shopping expiditions, and , did the first on screen dump ( the polyester suit turned brown if you forgot the "lower pants" before "dump").
I suppose the moral is someones always been there and done that before you.
The only problem I have with it is it is so UN*X centric that it ignores the vast number of Very Very high level development environments that are available on more "traditional" platforms.
A few worth mentioning from the 70s are:-
MarkIV - a very propriettery report generator.
FOCUS -- One of the very first proctival 4GLs, and still very widely used.
The current state of the art in VHLLs is probably represented by Forte which was recently bought by Sun, and, still IEF (used to be from Texas Instraments -- bough by someone else recently).
What all these languages have in common is that they try to model an entire problem space, Report Writing in the case of MArkIV, to, Business Systems in the case of Forte.
For low level problems there is nothing better than a low level language. Extremely sophisticated high level languages like C++ plus STL will always disappoint becuase they are centered around coding tecniques rather than problem solving.
Incidently if you are interested in a programing language where you could insert a diagram try XEROXes "MESA". It alowed you to use the normal VP wordprocessor as your editor. Text in "courier new" was considered compileable code, everything else was comments -- a very neat trick which I have never seen emulated in any other language!
Well you may have a point, especially from a lawers point of view, that you would be happier buying proprietery software from a trusted vendor with whom you have a contract and the possability to sue for damages.
Except you then pick a vendor whose software is constantly rated the highest security risk by most of the serious security spcialists and consultancies.
And, to make matters worse, if you ever tried to translate those 3,000 words of legalize that come with every MS product into English (Could someone upgrade BabelFish to do this? Must be worth a PHD ) it reads --- "Thanks for the money, if it doesn't work tough".
Good point for the wrong reasons. You can get StarOffice for free and while it is different from both MS Office and WordPerfect you can do all the same stuff. I have never tried it but according to the blurb you can import access db files into StartOffices different (read wierd!) database. So the problem is solved. On a different note. Id you want a PC to run MS Office then no one does it better than NS. The move to linux is happening in a major way on the server side, and, is begining to take off on the desktop side because people are realising that that bloatware, feature creep endless pointless upgrades are not where its at. When the next generation of LINUX apps based on GNOME components comes available. Lots of simple, elegent widgets that interact with each other in intelligent ways -- then all these "suites" and monolithic products are going to look seriously tired. We may even improve on the origonal Xerox desktop. (Anyone who ever used ViewPoint software on a Xerox workstation will remember just how good it was compared with the current generation of GUIs).
The latest releases of TCL (8.0 and up ) were re-written from the ground up to improve performance. As a scripting language it will never be as fast as compiled code, or even pre-interpeted byte code like java.
But its faster than Python, almost as fast as perl. And if you want a proactical cross platform GUI in either of these languages, then you end up using the "Tk" toolkit, which, was written specifically for TCL and, surprise surprise ! is much eaisier to use with TCL than with any other language.
While TCL takes some getting used to (trust me - everything is not what it seems with this language!!) I have written applications with a couple of 1000 lines of TCL/Tk which compete effectivly with MFC/X Windows applications costing $1,000s.
PLUS and this is a really big PLUS and it actually surprised me. It is pheonominaly portable. With not a single change in the TCL/Tk source and with five or six IFDEFs in the C code I have ported an application from AIX to Solaris, HP, Windows NT (3.5 and 4.0), Windows 95 and OS/2. With a few more changes (including fiddling with the TCL source!) I have ported the application to VMS.
My company normally bills me out at aprox $200 an hour. At the time I was sorely tempted to bill AOL for $12,000 for the 6 hours it took me to get my system working again.
P.S. Does anyone know how to get rid of the AOL dialup dialog and get the standard Windows one back?
Why do people maintain that OO is inherently superiour when all the practical evidence points to boring old structured/procedural methodologies and languages being more succesful in real life.
What's everybodies favourite Web server -- its apache written is C.
Whats the best Web server OS -- its BSD written in C.
Whats the best selling database software in the world. Take your pick Oracle, written in C, Sybase written in C, DB2 written in Assembler/C.
What's the worlds favouate scripting language -- its Perl written in C.
Whats your favourite operating system -- probably Linux -- written in C.
There is however on operating system written almost entirely in an OO language (C++), which uses "reuse" in a big way, which uses "metamorphsis" in a big way -- yes its the one you love to hate Windoze -- written in C++ with the unitelagable MFC classes, it reuses all that DOS assembler code, almost every MFC class is a superclass of other superclasses.
Now I am not saying a good programer cannot write good OO code. A good programer can write good code in almost any language. But OO and C++ in particular enables a bad programaer to write spectaulary bad code -- some of the worst designs I have ever seen in 25 years systems experience have been pure OO.
It was written in a diferent culture with a different target and a different purpose ( make B.G. richer?). Two of the base assumtions you can make are that NT is not modular you cannot plug in a new file system because the rest of the OS expects an "NTFS" file system to be there, "NTFS" specific calls are embedded in MFC classes, and, therefore most programs. The second assumption is that the underlying file system and the widley distributed MFS classes will be subject to change at the whim of engineers in Redmond.
Thought number 2.
This should probably be implemneted as an NT service, not as device drivers. Anyone who can read and understand a manual and who can program (surpisingly few computer "profesionals" in my experience;-) ) could write a viable NT service program.
Thought number 3.
Have you got an NT market?
The defualt NT file system is pretty good and can easily be distributed to other platforms via the various "NFS" on NT products. Plus NT installations have a culture of using databases when the underlying file system is not enough. I mean could you provide a File System with more functionality than Oracle V8.0?
This whole porno/censorship thing seems to be a hangup in the whole English speaking world!
The USA's puritan obsession is well known.
The UK has the strictest censorship laws (as pertaining to dirty pictures) outside the muslim fundamentalist world.
Australia leads the way in internet censorship.
Here in continental Europe no one really cares what pictures some sad act beats his meat to, as long as no one gets hurt.
This seems a sane an sensible attitude which leaves people with a lot more time for more contructive pursuits like DRINKING! (Oops I forgot thats illeagle in some state too!). God bless the land of the free. (Free as in free mineral water!)
Slashdot Mirror
Well agree with the general "Motif" stinks mood of this discusion. I have always thought this.
One of the main reasons why Windows 3.1 swept UNIX aside on the desktop market was Motif. I mean how could you persuade your boss to spend 3 times the money on UNIX hardware when the desktop looked so bad (worse than W3.1 is bad!!!).
So now we have a group of guys with a legacy product who are trying to breath some life into it or look for another job. So they decide to try some high fashion open source trendiness, but, they screwed that up too!
I suppose you could say RMS was overeacting as nobody in thier right mind would choose to use Motif. But I think he is right to whine moan and grizzle about the whole thing.
Basicaly, its like "esso" sticking an "environmentally friendly" sticker on the Exxon Valdiz. If you let anyone use the "free" "open" etc. words when they don't mean it the whole thing becomes meaningless.
Y2K is open! -- Well its full of holes anyway!
You are both right.
Yes. The PHBs do take the word of gartner for gospel.
Yes. They are most often completely wrong or there are postdictions? masquerading as predictions.
The annoying thing is it is quite hard to get hold of older (i.e. proven to be complately wrong ) Gartner reports as they disappear from view when they come into contact with reality. I wish I had taken hard copies of some of thier older stuff to counter some of the though free "Gartner Says" descision making that goes on.
DEC will coninue to be the major mid range player!
No software vendor can be considered viable if they do not offer full DCE integration!
CICS 6000 will be the major transaction monitor on UNIX in 2 years.
Hmm these guys probably own an 8-track.
IBM are among the top two or three vendors in every market they compete in -- except for PCs.
They put a lot of effort/money into claing back some market share (they did after all invent the PC and were rather peeved about the Wintel alliance high jacking the whole thing).
However recently they seem to have realised two things.
1. There is not much money in commodity products.
2. Thier core business is high value, high end servers, is completely at odds with providing cheap commodity hardware.
They are very happy to leave this to people like AMD (to whom they readily license technoligy) and to the Apple/Motorola alliance.
When IBM talks about competing with Intel. They are talking about what IBM calls the "mid range server" market and Intel calls the "high end" server market.
If Intel had actually produced the IA64 on time then they would have made a serious dent in that market. Instead Itel have had to squeeze yet more performance out of the ageing x86 architecture, where (until recently!) there was no viable server Operating System to effectively utilise all that CPU power.
The intersting competion in this field is from Sun, who for the first time in several years do not have the fastest chip/biggest server to offer thier customers, as both IBM and HP have leapfrogged them.
It will be very intersting to see if they can regain there lead with thier next generation Sparc - do out sometime soon.
Isn't competition wonderful!
If you relly want to know what dynamic thrusting company IBM is check out this patent application:--
http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?patent_number =5501650
Many thanks to "The Reister" for this link.
Still doesn't change the fact that the biggest, best established, and oldest pure e-ecommerce firm has never actually turned a profit.
If this was a mall-commerce(TM) bookstore that had failed to turn a profit five years and billions of investors money it would probably be called "The Chapter 11 bookstore" by now.
As the e-hype dies down and investors remove thier rose tinted glasses they will see that the E-mperor is rather skimpily dressed.
While I am sure the book is an excellent guide to Objectionable Perl, I would question the whole concept of souping up the calling conventions of a procedural language and calling it OO.
This being my major objection to C++ also.
Why screw up a really nice procedural language to produce an unsightly hybryd?
Noe Python on the other hand is a scriting language which is OO from the ground up. You can just about write procedural code if you really try but its much easier to do pure objects, and unlike some OO languages (C++!) you can actually read and understand the resulting code.
Obviously you have never tried or seen anyone try to get support for an M$ product.
You have too choices. You can try using the support that was included in your intial purchase. This will get you a total non specalist on the end of the phone who will be using the same problem databse /FAQ that you can access on the M$ website for free. You get the same level of support from most LINUX distros at their web sites. (IMHO you get a better quality of database and FAQs from the LINUX mob), you, also have access to various usenets mailling lists where some very talented people will try to solve your problems just cos they are nice guys.
Optionally you can sign a support contract with someone like UNISYS, Compaq (ex DEC) or even M$ itself. These contracts cost you large sums of money -- but you do get access to technical expertise.
Such support is also available for LINUX.
I think the real problem here is instutional laziness. It is very difficult to force a change through in any large orgnisation, and much more difficult in any Civil Service/Goverment buearocracy. Its easier to follow existing procedures and do what the last guy did than to push for a switch to LINUX, even if it means throwing away close to a million dollars which could have been spent on actual education.
The legal framework for copyright was origonally designed to protect the writers of books.
As such what is copyrighted is the written text. You can copyright just about any peice of text if you can reasonably claim that no-one else has ever written that particular combination of words before.
There are two issues that may help the original poster.
1. If the copy was entered from DreamWeaver then you could probably claim that the standard HTML framework generated by the software is the same for every piece of HTML generated by the package. Thereofre only the text actualy typed in by the scuzzbags is copyrightable.
2. What is copyrightable is the exact form of words and/or appearance. Something which looks similar and does the same thing is not in breach of copyright. This is why all these writers of detective stories where the butler did it cannot sue each other.
So even if the scuzzbags did actually own the copyright of the mess which thex left you to sort out, then if you could maintain that the non machine generated HTML code was substantially different (and that what similartities there were resulted from following the clients instructions and/or using data supplied by the client) they would be required to prove otherwise, which in turn, would require them to produce a copy of the website in the state they left it.
Who are these "scuzzbags" anyway. After the legal stuff is done with could you please "Name and Shame".
I think you "yanks"* are missing the point.
The single most important piece of internationalistaion is being able to display the characters on the screen. just taking the EU countries in europe there are at least 7 accents you can put on the letter A -- ä à â ã is all I can mamnge on my current keyboard.
The other important piece is having a decent speel checker for your chosen language.
* yanks --> derogative for citizen of USA.
BG ;-) et alles.
So much software is USA-centic even english speaking Biits and Aussis feel left out. Imagine if your name is müller and your software won't even let you spell your name correctly.
How to pirate a DVD:--
Get your DVD disk.
Go to the DVD copier at work (Every IT shop has at least one).
Insert the original DVD in the "reader" drawer.
Insert a blank disk in the "writer" drawer.
Double click on "copy".
Repeat until bored.
And be sure to use your own blank disks and not your employers as that would be stealing.
Disks copied in this way will play on any DVD just as well as the origonal.
On a more philisophical note. How can someone defend the "secrecy" of an encryption algorithim that was so easy to crack! I like man mean if like man I encrypted like man a sentence which used like man an alogrithm consisting like man of like man inserting like man the like man words like like man man randomly in the like man text could I have you like man arrested for like man cracking the like man code.
You have the right to remain silent!
The automobile as we know it (4 wheels, steering wheel, gasoline internal combustion engine, headlights, gearbix and clutch) was up and running well before 1900.
Ait Conditiong/Refrigeration. Didn't that revolutionize the Argentinian economy in the 1880's.
Shouldn't "Poorly researched articles" be up on that list. (I think the Babalonians get there first though).
All this sounds very familiar.
Didn't Leeeshure Soot Larry have a drinking problem, engage in paid for sex with unhygenic girls, died of food poisening (several times over ), conducted some seriously tedious shopping expiditions, and , did the first on screen dump ( the polyester suit turned brown if you forgot the "lower pants" before "dump").
I suppose the moral is someones always been there and done that before you.
Intersting paper.
The only problem I have with it is it is so UN*X centric that it ignores the vast number of Very Very high level development environments that are available on more "traditional" platforms.
A few worth mentioning from the 70s are:-
MarkIV - a very propriettery report generator.
FOCUS -- One of the very first proctival 4GLs, and still very widely used.
The current state of the art in VHLLs is probably represented by Forte which was recently bought by Sun, and, still IEF (used to be from Texas Instraments -- bough by someone else recently).
What all these languages have in common is that they try to model an entire problem space, Report Writing in the case of MArkIV, to, Business Systems in the case of Forte.
For low level problems there is nothing better than a low level language. Extremely sophisticated high level languages like C++ plus STL will always disappoint becuase they are centered around coding tecniques rather than problem solving.
Incidently if you are interested in a programing language where you could insert a diagram try XEROXes "MESA". It alowed you to use the normal VP wordprocessor as your editor. Text in "courier new" was considered compileable code, everything else was comments -- a very neat trick which I have never seen emulated in any other language!
Except you then pick a vendor whose software is constantly rated the highest security risk by most of the serious security spcialists and consultancies.
And, to make matters worse, if you ever tried to translate those 3,000 words of legalize that come with every MS product into English (Could someone upgrade BabelFish to do this? Must be worth a PHD ) it reads --- "Thanks for the money, if it doesn't work tough".
Could someone please enlighten me!
I was forced to use OS/2 as my main desktop at work for over a year between 98/99.
I did not like it -- at all.
The file manager is like that windows 95 "My Computer" thing that everyone hates.
Switching tasks is a 5 mouseclick operation if the window is not visable.
The standard fonts were designed for a 10 by 10 pixel screen. I mean the fonts used by the "notepad" eqivalent are BILBOARD sized.
It is totally unintuative.
It crashed just as often as any other PC I have ever used.
The only thing I liked was that it ran REXX, always the prettiest scripting language.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Good point for the wrong reasons. You can get StarOffice for free and while it is different from both MS Office and WordPerfect you can do all the same stuff. I have never tried it but according to the blurb you can import access db files into StartOffices different (read wierd!) database. So the problem is solved. On a different note. Id you want a PC to run MS Office then no one does it better than NS. The move to linux is happening in a major way on the server side, and, is begining to take off on the desktop side because people are realising that that bloatware, feature creep endless pointless upgrades are not where its at. When the next generation of LINUX apps based on GNOME components comes available. Lots of simple, elegent widgets that interact with each other in intelligent ways -- then all these "suites" and monolithic products are going to look seriously tired. We may even improve on the origonal Xerox desktop. (Anyone who ever used ViewPoint software on a Xerox workstation will remember just how good it was compared with the current generation of GUIs).
You've got to be suspicous of someone whose main claim to fame is inventing PIN numbers.
Lets see:-
Maybe our customers need a password for the ATM so people who steal thier cards can't clean out thier accounts.
We can only afford to put numeric keypads on the ATMs so we can't have a proper password like we have on our other computers.
GEE why don't we have a passnumber instead!
Great idea but "passnumber" sounds dorky. Lets put is through our TLA generator.
BINGO we have a PIN!
___@ö
But its faster than Python, almost as fast as perl. And if you want a proactical cross platform GUI in either of these languages, then you end up using the "Tk" toolkit, which, was written specifically for TCL and, surprise surprise ! is much eaisier to use with TCL than with any other language.
While TCL takes some getting used to (trust me - everything is not what it seems with this language!!) I have written applications with a couple of 1000 lines of TCL/Tk which compete effectivly with MFC/X Windows applications costing $1,000s.
PLUS and this is a really big PLUS and it actually surprised me. It is pheonominaly portable. With not a single change in the TCL/Tk source and with five or six IFDEFs in the C code I have ported an application from AIX to Solaris, HP, Windows NT (3.5 and 4.0), Windows 95 and OS/2. With a few more changes (including fiddling with the TCL source!) I have ported the application to VMS.
Portable or what!
Been there, done that!
My company normally bills me out at aprox $200 an hour. At the time I was sorely tempted to bill AOL for $12,000 for the 6 hours it took me to get my system working again.
P.S. Does anyone know how to get rid of the AOL dialup dialog and get the standard Windows one back?
Why do people maintain that OO is inherently superiour when all the practical evidence points to boring old structured/procedural methodologies and languages being more succesful in real life.
What's everybodies favourite Web server -- its apache written is C.
Whats the best Web server OS -- its BSD written in C.
Whats the best selling database software in the world. Take your pick Oracle, written in C, Sybase written in C, DB2 written in Assembler/C.
What's the worlds favouate scripting language -- its Perl written in C.
Whats your favourite operating system -- probably Linux -- written in C.
There is however on operating system written almost entirely in an OO language (C++), which uses "reuse" in a big way, which uses "metamorphsis" in a big way -- yes its the one you love to hate Windoze -- written in C++ with the unitelagable MFC classes, it reuses all that DOS assembler code, almost every MFC class is a superclass of other superclasses.
Now I am not saying a good programer cannot write good OO code. A good programer can write good code in almost any language. But OO and C++ in particular enables a bad programaer to write spectaulary bad code -- some of the worst designs I have ever seen in 25 years systems experience have been pure OO.
Thought no. 1.
NT is not UNIX.
It was written in a diferent culture with a different target and a different purpose ( make B.G. richer?). Two of the base assumtions you can make are that NT is not modular you cannot plug in a new file system because the rest of the OS expects an "NTFS" file system to be there, "NTFS" specific calls are embedded in MFC classes, and, therefore most programs. The second assumption is that the underlying file system and the widley distributed MFS classes will be subject to change at the whim of engineers in Redmond.
Thought number 2.
This should probably be implemneted as an NT service, not as device drivers. Anyone who can read and understand a manual and who can program (surpisingly few computer "profesionals" in my experience ;-) ) could write a viable NT service program.
Thought number 3.
Have you got an NT market?
The defualt NT file system is pretty good and can easily be distributed to other platforms via the various "NFS" on NT products. Plus NT installations have a culture of using databases when the underlying file system is not enough. I mean could you provide a File System with more functionality than Oracle V8.0?
This whole porno/censorship thing seems to be a hangup in the whole English speaking world!
The USA's puritan obsession is well known.
The UK has the strictest censorship laws (as pertaining to dirty pictures) outside the muslim fundamentalist world.
Australia leads the way in internet censorship.
Here in continental Europe no one really cares what pictures some sad act beats his meat to, as long as no one gets hurt.
This seems a sane an sensible attitude which leaves people with a lot more time for more contructive pursuits like DRINKING! (Oops I forgot thats illeagle in some state too!). God bless the land of the free. (Free as in free mineral water!)
Try telling the customer AIX 4.1.1 is not Y2K compliant (true!) and it's out of support.