I hope some theaters do take up Lucasfilm on doing a show at 12:01 AM on the 19th. Actually, I have planned to do just that, and take my kids, if a midnight show is available.
I have great memories of going to see 'Empire Strikes Back' at 'first show' midnight showing that same way back in '80.
So, This is What We Worry About Now...
on
Killer Asteroid
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· Score: 2
So, now that the Soviets went to that great James Bond villian scene in the sky (Stalin is having cocktails with Ernst Blofeld right about now) we now get to sit around and fret about the 'cosmic hammer' doing us in like it did the dinosaurs.
Actually, I think this fits human tendencies really well. Besides hitting on the human fear of sudden death, I think down deep most folks like the idea of 'we were such kings of the globe, it took a COSMIC DISASTER to do us in!!!'. I think some must also like the idea of our fossilized bones being dug up one day, mounted in museums, and captioned with tidbits like 'they once ruled the earth...'.
Oh well... if we really wind up having to depend on a yutz like Bruce Willis to save us, maybe being a set of fossilized remains isn't so bad after all...
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
I had NO idea I was addressing a bodhisattva of coding wisdom... perhaps I should ditch my job, give away my belongs and follow you barefoot for the next decade...
On the other hand, your attitude indicates that while you may (again, MAY) be 'enlightened', maybe you're such a pain in the a$$ to work with that you have little opportunity to share your knowledge with others.
Before knocking the 'world' others live in, why not check out your own? Yours seems to be full of road signs that indicate that only *you* know the right way... or better still, join the real world that the rest of us poor stiffs have to live in... you might find it refreshing.
You mean you know of a skyscraper that was completely evolved from scratch? One where wild animals were let loose on a set of raw materials at close to their lowest form, and through almost completely random action, along with natural selection and survival of the fittest, produced a completed building?
If you have, I suggest you alert the media. Otherwise, I think what you mean is that the designers and builders tweaked things as it went along. that's completely different from what people mean by 'evolutionary' programming.
*Programmer to Customer* 'Yep, Mr. Smith, using our nifty new evolutionary software engineering process, we can produce a program that works FABULOUSLY... and we can deliver it in a mere 1.5 million years...'
If you're going ot be dealing with normal, human timeframes, evolutionary programming is unlikely to deliver the goods. This is the reason why bridges and buildings are designed and built by people, rather than letting a few packs of chimps loose in a forest full of hardwoods and saying 'we'll be back for our structure in a few eons...'.
...that you can't just make a comment on my opinion rather than trolling through the gutter of personal attacks. Why not tell me about what makes 'Code Complete' so special?
And 'it doesn't matter that it's published by M$'?? Using that logic, I shouldn't look askance at a book called 'Love and Compassion for Your Fellow Man' if I noticed it was written by Adolf Hitler.
BTW, I believe that 'Code Complete' is not just published by M$, but that its author is a M$ employee. Therefore, since I haven't knowingly used any of his code, the only measuring stick I have is the M$ code I've seen (uniformly bad to mediocre) or the middling M$ apps I've used. Which is NOT a good basis for a 'coding best practices' rep...
...on Herb Schildt. I don't find your comments on him inflammatory at all. His books make great doorstops and table levelers, but nothing more.
There are also entire publishing lines not worth ther weight in scrap cellulose... if Sams went out of business tomorrow, I think I'd dance in the street. I've had to deal with too many newbie coders who I've had to help, only to discover they had a Sams book that represented the center of their programming universe.
Just ask yourself that question... would you go to work everyday on the 80th floor of an 'evolved skyscraper'?
Any given sizable base of code is as complex if not moreso. I'll believe that 'evolving' code is a good idea when I see an evolved system perform as well or better than a system written by good designers and programmers.
I haven't read 'Code Complete' before, so take this with a grain of salt. If I were going to buy a 'coding best practices' book it would be most likely this one, simply because Kernighan and Pike are the authors. These are two guys who have been writing solid (and in many cases, revolutionary) code for DECADES now.
On the other hand, I never heard of the guy who wrote 'Code Complete' before the book came out. And (warning: anti-Mickeysludge diatribe follows) from the several unpleasant times I've actually seen M$ code before there may not be a SINGLE PRODUCT from M$ written with any of the techniques 'Code Complete' advocates.
Hotmail, on the other hand, provides a good example of what happens with Mickeysludge gets its hands on an already WORKING Unix site. Ever since its mail headers starting reading 'Mickeysludge Exchange' it's been damn near worthless. They must be trying to get the main servers over onto IIS again too... it's been dog slow and virtually unusable for 2 days now.
Hotmail should be used as a case study on how your high volume site will tank if you use Mickeysludge products instead of more open systems.
And yes, I do realize Hotmail does not run on Linux... in did, however, used to run on Solaris boxes and a Unix mail system before Billy got his meathooks on it.
Besides the concerns that others have raised here about the validity of this firm's 'statistical methods' (I'll bet any professional statistician would be embarassed to death to be connected with their methods), the entire tone of their pronouncement reminds me of what rubs me the wrong way about Corporate America these days.
The entire idea seems to be that act of employment means that the employee's entire life to be lived at the employer's pleasure... that any time spent away from work represents 'lost productivity'. What a crock of shinola!!! Sorry, I was under the misguided impression that if you have personal days or vacation days, what you do with them is up to YOU.
I wonder if this excrement for brains outfit has ever done a study on EXTRA productivity gained when technology workers put in nutty hours trying to complete almost impossible projects on insane deadlines and stupid budgets, orignally proposed by moronic bosses... nahh, thought not...
I was always impressed when I saw the source or machine level code for CP/M. It was a tight O/S with some coherent structure to it. Heck, I even some some pretty good multi user machines serving up multiple CP/M sessions that were solid. The O/S they used was done as proprietary extensions on top of base CP/M code (NOT running MP/M).
DOS (especially in its early days) looked like a not so hot copy of CP/M for the 8086, done by someone who was barely competent.
GoldStar sold PC 386 clones with DR-DOS; I had one.'
I said major US vendor. GoldStar is offshore (either Korean or Taiwanese), and was not a major vendor at the time.
'I'm not sure I trust a man who shouts so much when he types. DR-DOS was a far superior product compared to Microsoft's operating systems, that's clear. And you could even buy clear, concise documentation for it.'
On the 'trust' issue, I can't help you there... you'll have to deal with that on your own. Although, I might point out that 3 words in an entire paragraph doesn't seem excessive to me (assuming you realize that things like DR DOS are properly capitalized and hence NOT shouting (and yes, 'not' was shouted)). I agree with the rest of your points in that statement...
'And DR-DOS, as of version 5, included both extended memory management utilities and a cooperative, protected-mode task switcher (ala DesqView) for applications. One could run Windows 3.1, protected mode, as a task, and then switch back out to DOS and run other things (as many as you could fit in RAM--it would even page these out if you needed it). Novell DOS 7, the result of Novell's extensions of the DR-DOS code base after company acquisition, added pre-emptive multi-tasking if I remember correctly.'
DR DOS 5's memory mangement stuff was simply on a par with what you could get with MS DOS 5. The DesqView thing you got originally with DR DOS was pretty scaled down. When you mention Windows 3.1 with DR DOS, you need to think back to the time period. By the Win 3.1 introduction, DOS level task switchers were very dead. Swapping out Win 3.x as you describe required running Windoze in real mode... not real practical too deep into the Win 3.1 adoption cycle as that eventually disabled many protected mode drivers and DLL's. Heck, a couple of revs in, MS made real mode go away. By the time Novell DOS 7 hit the market, NT and Win95 were on the horizon (if not nearly shipping).
Since I was working for a peer to peer LAN vendor at the time this whole thing was referring to (and since my company at time was buddying up to Mickeysludge), I've got a pretty decent handle on what was going on at the time. Both 'Der Fuhrer' Gates and some posters here have said some things that need a little correcting...
- 'DR DOS was competition eating into their business'?? MY A$$!! DR DOS' high water mark in market share was somewhere in the high SINGLE digits. They NEVER put a real hurtin' on Billy && Co. Hells bells, the original wrangle about per processor licensing was over DOS. When you bought a machine, you paid for MS DOS, PERIOD. I can't recall a single major US vendor who bundled DR DOS with their boxes.
- The only hay DR DOS ever made was in the market for embedded DOS (quite tiny back then). DR DOS was ROMable, MS DOS NEVER was and NEVER became so; a CLEAR SIGN that DR DOS was better written and engineered. I've seen parts of the source for MS DOS and DR DOS, and a LOT of the machine code for both. TRUST ME... MS DOS is a total kludge, whereas DR DOS was written by assembly aces who knew what they were doing.
- Any 'incompatibilities' with apps running on MS and not DR came in only 2 flavors that I saw: dumb a$$ practices on the part of the app programmers, or manufactured by MS (see the infamous AARD 'bug'). Yeah, if you wanted performance and the ability to do certain things, you had to go to the bare metal on DOS. HOWEVER, if you were smart, you tried NOT to look for flags, data structures, etc., in specific memory offsets in the DOS kernel, etc. Heck, we had no real trouble in running our LAN O/S kernel on DR DOS. The only real 'bug' I ever saw was the Win 3.0 AARD check, which was used to deliberately scare DR DOS users back into the MS fold.
- Some of MS's other business practices at this time were fascinating... besides DR DOS, MS decided to deliberately try to compete with FREE memory management add on's to DOS 5.0 with products like 386^MAX and QEMM. It was a market space MS never competed in and essentially just killed these utilities. The real explaination is that Bill wanted NO OTHER VENDOR alive out there that knew how to write O/S level software. Trust me guys, I've seen Billy screw over companies and people LONG before he was in a position for world domination.
Anyway, that's my.02 from an old timer willing to admit he once worked on that stuff...
Something that always amazes me about these self congratulatory love fests is how little Linus, Eric Raymoyd, etc, etc, give any credit at all to the people who blazed the trails for them. I haven't read the book yet, but it seems devoid of any interviews of people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho and many others.
Sorry, boys and girls, but without those guys there would likely be NO 'Open Source Movement'. They were the first to do readily available, accesible research on practical, NON PROPRIETARY, non big iron requiring O/S's, languages and scripting tools, and for the sheer pleasure of it at that. Linux is a direct descendent of their work, and with a healthy supply of Unix-alike tools and utilities (without which Linux would just be a curiosity).
Cmon, Open Source 'leaders'... does it really hurt that bad to give a little credit to the guys that got you here?
...is none other than Microsoft and self appointed 'cummm-poo-torrr boy gene-ee-uss' Nathan Myhrvold. Surely you remember Nate... Microsoft spends ungodly sums to promote him as the second coming of Einstein. You probably recognize him more on sight; he looks like the mutant offspring of bigfoot and Mickey Rooney.
I read an unintentionally hysterical article about 2 yrs ago wherein the computer illiterate interviewer asked what hot 'innovations' the 'giant brain' Nate had contributed to while at Mickeysludge, at least those in its main products. He pointed proudly to paper clip man!!! Yes indeedy, that annoying animated dork from hell is the product of Nate's 'intense, in depth study of user interfaces and artificial intelligence'!
Hopefully, none of Nate's 'innovations' will ever be used on anything that can destroy the planet, like nuclear weapons or handling plutonium. I sure wouldn't want to see what his idea of 'AI' would do with that...
(c) Associated Press, Redwood Shores, CA - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was startled today by two masked gunman as he attempted to respond in a demonstration to Microsoft's assertion that SQL Server would indeed meet his database perfomance challenge issued last year. Amid startled gasps in the crowd, one of the attackers held a gun clearly labeled 'SQL Server 7.0' to Mr. Ellison's head while the other took a bag containing the challenge prize of $1 million.
The two men were apprehended shortly thereafter, and were identified as William H. Gates, III and Steven Ballmer. Ballmer was heard at the police station as saying, 'seeya, Billy, I TOLD YOU SQL Server 7.0 could get that million dollars', while a dejected Gates could be heard muttering disgustedly 'just shut up, you bald dork'. A clearly aggravated Melinda Gates would only comment that 'this is absolutely the last time I'll ever bail out those two assholes... jeez, the DOJ mess was bad enough'.
Microsoft immediately announced that rumors of a new WB series, 'When Geeks Go Bad - Billy and Steve, the Thelma and Louise of High Tech', were completely unfounded.
Hmmm... let's see... 'geeks will never learn what business people want'...
A clue for you, Buckwheat; the app that made micros acceptable to business people everywhere was VisiCalc... which was developed by a math and computer geek named Dan Bricklin (and he's still a genuine geek today).
So... this is what we're left with after YEARS of incessant WHINING about the 'innate superiority' of the Mac? 'We're no worse than those other guys we've been making fun of'? PLEASE...
Crackintosh fans, SPARE ME the smug crap in the future, OK? And take a good, hard look at some of the comments you've been posting. How the HECK do you EVER expect Apple to make it any better when your responses cover their collective backside instead of calling them to task?
This is to announce that I've just patented the algorithm that describes the double helix layout of DNA. If all you people out there pay me the standard royalty fee of $100,000 a head, I won't have to take action. Otherwise, my associates will be over shortly to remove every strand of DNA from your body that infringes on MY patent.
I seem to recall Oracle having some BIG problems in this regard somewhere in the late 80's or very early 90's. They tried cooking the books in regard to their sales numbers (the way they credited sales to quarterly results, or some such). They got into BIG trouble for it and, as I recall, were forced to restate their sales (and profit) numbers for several previous quarters.
Needless to say, it turned out they were NOT the 500 lb gorilla business wise that they appeared to be prior to that. Their stock took a major dive, and they had to recover from the debacle to beat out the DB competition that they had.
You can take 2 lessons from that; yes, if proven, the company will take a hit. And there's no guarantee that it will be a long term or fatal hit for a company the size of Mickeysludge.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope some theaters do take up Lucasfilm on doing a show at 12:01 AM on the 19th. Actually, I have planned to do just that, and take my kids, if a midnight show is available.
I have great memories of going to see 'Empire Strikes Back' at 'first show' midnight showing that same way back in '80.
So, now that the Soviets went to that great James Bond villian scene in the sky (Stalin is having cocktails with Ernst Blofeld right about now) we now get to sit around and fret about the 'cosmic hammer' doing us in like it did the dinosaurs.
Actually, I think this fits human tendencies really well. Besides hitting on the human fear of sudden death, I think down deep most folks like the idea of 'we were such kings of the globe, it took a COSMIC DISASTER to do us in!!!'. I think some must also like the idea of our fossilized bones being dug up one day, mounted in museums, and captioned with tidbits like 'they once ruled the earth...'.
Oh well... if we really wind up having to depend on a yutz like Bruce Willis to save us, maybe being a set of fossilized remains isn't so bad after all...
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
.02
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
Just my
College is a nice place to start from ground zero if you have no experience in coding (or some other computer tech pursuit), but no amount of schooling can give you talent you don't have in the first place.
.02
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
Just my
I had NO idea I was addressing a bodhisattva of coding wisdom... perhaps I should ditch my job, give away my belongs and follow you barefoot for the next decade...
On the other hand, your attitude indicates that while you may (again, MAY) be 'enlightened', maybe you're such a pain in the a$$ to work with that you have little opportunity to share your knowledge with others.
Before knocking the 'world' others live in, why not check out your own? Yours seems to be full of road signs that indicate that only *you* know the right way... or better still, join the real world that the rest of us poor stiffs have to live in... you might find it refreshing.
You mean you know of a skyscraper that was completely evolved from scratch? One where wild animals were let loose on a set of raw materials at close to their lowest form, and through almost completely random action, along with natural selection and survival of the fittest, produced a completed building?
If you have, I suggest you alert the media. Otherwise, I think what you mean is that the designers and builders tweaked things as it went along. that's completely different from what people mean by 'evolutionary' programming.
*Programmer to Customer* 'Yep, Mr. Smith, using our nifty new evolutionary software engineering process, we can produce a program that works FABULOUSLY... and we can deliver it in a mere 1.5 million years...'
If you're going ot be dealing with normal, human timeframes, evolutionary programming is unlikely to deliver the goods. This is the reason why bridges and buildings are designed and built by people, rather than letting a few packs of chimps loose in a forest full of hardwoods and saying 'we'll be back for our structure in a few eons...'.
...that you can't just make a comment on my opinion rather than trolling through the gutter of personal attacks. Why not tell me about what makes 'Code Complete' so special?
And 'it doesn't matter that it's published by M$'?? Using that logic, I shouldn't look askance at a book called 'Love and Compassion for Your Fellow Man' if I noticed it was written by Adolf Hitler.
BTW, I believe that 'Code Complete' is not just published by M$, but that its author is a M$ employee. Therefore, since I haven't knowingly used any of his code, the only measuring stick I have is the M$ code I've seen (uniformly bad to mediocre) or the middling M$ apps I've used. Which is NOT a good basis for a 'coding best practices' rep...
...on Herb Schildt. I don't find your comments on him inflammatory at all. His books make great doorstops and table levelers, but nothing more.
There are also entire publishing lines not worth ther weight in scrap cellulose... if Sams went out of business tomorrow, I think I'd dance in the street. I've had to deal with too many newbie coders who I've had to help, only to discover they had a Sams book that represented the center of their programming universe.
Just ask yourself that question... would you go to work everyday on the 80th floor of an 'evolved skyscraper'?
Any given sizable base of code is as complex if not moreso. I'll believe that 'evolving' code is a good idea when I see an evolved system perform as well or better than a system written by good designers and programmers.
I haven't read 'Code Complete' before, so take this with a grain of salt. If I were going to buy a 'coding best practices' book it would be most likely this one, simply because Kernighan and Pike are the authors. These are two guys who have been writing solid (and in many cases, revolutionary) code for DECADES now.
On the other hand, I never heard of the guy who wrote 'Code Complete' before the book came out. And (warning: anti-Mickeysludge diatribe follows) from the several unpleasant times I've actually seen M$ code before there may not be a SINGLE PRODUCT from M$ written with any of the techniques 'Code Complete' advocates.
Hotmail, on the other hand, provides a good example of what happens with Mickeysludge gets its hands on an already WORKING Unix site. Ever since its mail headers starting reading 'Mickeysludge Exchange' it's been damn near worthless. They must be trying to get the main servers over onto IIS again too... it's been dog slow and virtually unusable for 2 days now.
Hotmail should be used as a case study on how your high volume site will tank if you use Mickeysludge products instead of more open systems.
And yes, I do realize Hotmail does not run on Linux... in did, however, used to run on Solaris boxes and a Unix mail system before Billy got his meathooks on it.
Besides the concerns that others have raised here about the validity of this firm's 'statistical methods' (I'll bet any professional statistician would be embarassed to death to be connected with their methods), the entire tone of their pronouncement reminds me of what rubs me the wrong way about Corporate America these days.
The entire idea seems to be that act of employment means that the employee's entire life to be lived at the employer's pleasure... that any time spent away from work represents 'lost productivity'. What a crock of shinola!!! Sorry, I was under the misguided impression that if you have personal days or vacation days, what you do with them is up to YOU.
I wonder if this excrement for brains outfit has ever done a study on EXTRA productivity gained when technology workers put in nutty hours trying to complete almost impossible projects on insane deadlines and stupid budgets, orignally proposed by moronic bosses... nahh, thought not...
I was always impressed when I saw the source or machine level code for CP/M. It was a tight O/S with some coherent structure to it. Heck, I even some some pretty good multi user machines serving up multiple CP/M sessions that were solid. The O/S they used was done as proprietary extensions on top of base CP/M code (NOT running MP/M).
DOS (especially in its early days) looked like a not so hot copy of CP/M for the 8086, done by someone who was barely competent.
GoldStar sold PC 386 clones with DR-DOS; I had one.'
I said major US vendor. GoldStar is offshore (either Korean or Taiwanese), and was not a major vendor at the time.
'I'm not sure I trust a man who shouts so much when he types. DR-DOS was a far superior product compared to Microsoft's operating systems, that's clear. And you could even buy clear, concise documentation for it.'
On the 'trust' issue, I can't help you there... you'll have to deal with that on your own. Although, I might point out that 3 words in an entire paragraph doesn't seem excessive to me (assuming you realize that things like DR DOS are properly capitalized and hence NOT shouting (and yes, 'not' was shouted)). I agree with the rest of your points in that statement...
'And DR-DOS, as of version 5, included both extended memory management utilities and a cooperative, protected-mode task switcher (ala DesqView) for applications. One could run Windows 3.1, protected mode, as a task, and then switch back out to DOS and run other things (as many as you could fit in RAM--it would even page these out if you needed it). Novell DOS 7, the result of Novell's extensions of the DR-DOS code base after company acquisition, added pre-emptive multi-tasking if I remember correctly.'
DR DOS 5's memory mangement stuff was simply on a par with what you could get with MS DOS 5. The DesqView thing you got originally with DR DOS was pretty scaled down. When you mention Windows 3.1 with DR DOS, you need to think back to the time period. By the Win 3.1 introduction, DOS level task switchers were very dead. Swapping out Win 3.x as you describe required running Windoze in real mode... not real practical too deep into the Win 3.1 adoption cycle as that eventually disabled many protected mode drivers and DLL's. Heck, a couple of revs in, MS made real mode go away. By the time Novell DOS 7 hit the market, NT and Win95 were on the horizon (if not nearly shipping).
Thanks for the stroll down memory lane... :-)
Since I was working for a peer to peer LAN vendor at the time this whole thing was referring to (and since my company at time was buddying up to Mickeysludge), I've got a pretty decent handle on what was going on at the time. Both 'Der Fuhrer' Gates and some posters here have said some things that need a little correcting...
- 'DR DOS was competition eating into their business'?? MY A$$!! DR DOS' high water mark in market share was somewhere in the high SINGLE digits. They NEVER put a real hurtin' on Billy && Co. Hells bells, the original wrangle about per processor licensing was over DOS. When you bought a machine, you paid for MS DOS, PERIOD. I can't recall a single major US vendor who bundled DR DOS with their boxes.
- The only hay DR DOS ever made was in the market for embedded DOS (quite tiny back then). DR DOS was ROMable, MS DOS NEVER was and NEVER became so; a CLEAR SIGN that DR DOS was better written and engineered. I've seen parts of the source for MS DOS and DR DOS, and a LOT of the machine code for both. TRUST ME... MS DOS is a total kludge, whereas DR DOS was written by assembly aces who knew what they were doing.
- Any 'incompatibilities' with apps running on MS and not DR came in only 2 flavors that I saw: dumb a$$ practices on the part of the app programmers, or manufactured by MS (see the infamous AARD 'bug'). Yeah, if you wanted performance and the ability to do certain things, you had to go to the bare metal on DOS. HOWEVER, if you were smart, you tried NOT to look for flags, data structures, etc., in specific memory offsets in the DOS kernel, etc. Heck, we had no real trouble in running our LAN O/S kernel on DR DOS. The only real 'bug' I ever saw was the Win 3.0 AARD check, which was used to deliberately scare DR DOS users back into the MS fold.
- Some of MS's other business practices at this time were fascinating... besides DR DOS, MS decided to deliberately try to compete with FREE memory management add on's to DOS 5.0 with products like 386^MAX and QEMM. It was a market space MS never competed in and essentially just killed these utilities. The real explaination is that Bill wanted NO OTHER VENDOR alive out there that knew how to write O/S level software. Trust me guys, I've seen Billy screw over companies and people LONG before he was in a position for world domination.
Anyway, that's my .02 from an old timer willing to admit he once worked on that stuff...
Something that always amazes me about these self congratulatory love fests is how little Linus, Eric Raymoyd, etc, etc, give any credit at all to the people who blazed the trails for them. I haven't read the book yet, but it seems devoid of any interviews of people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho and many others.
Sorry, boys and girls, but without those guys there would likely be NO 'Open Source Movement'. They were the first to do readily available, accesible research on practical, NON PROPRIETARY, non big iron requiring O/S's, languages and scripting tools, and for the sheer pleasure of it at that. Linux is a direct descendent of their work, and with a healthy supply of Unix-alike tools and utilities (without which Linux would just be a curiosity).
Cmon, Open Source 'leaders'... does it really hurt that bad to give a little credit to the guys that got you here?
...is none other than Microsoft and self appointed 'cummm-poo-torrr boy gene-ee-uss' Nathan Myhrvold. Surely you remember Nate... Microsoft spends ungodly sums to promote him as the second coming of Einstein. You probably recognize him more on sight; he looks like the mutant offspring of bigfoot and Mickey Rooney.
I read an unintentionally hysterical article about 2 yrs ago wherein the computer illiterate interviewer asked what hot 'innovations' the 'giant brain' Nate had contributed to while at Mickeysludge, at least those in its main products. He pointed proudly to paper clip man!!! Yes indeedy, that annoying animated dork from hell is the product of Nate's 'intense, in depth study of user interfaces and artificial intelligence'!
Hopefully, none of Nate's 'innovations' will ever be used on anything that can destroy the planet, like nuclear weapons or handling plutonium. I sure wouldn't want to see what his idea of 'AI' would do with that...
(c) Associated Press, Redwood Shores, CA - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was startled today by two masked gunman as he attempted to respond in a demonstration to Microsoft's assertion that SQL Server would indeed meet his database perfomance challenge issued last year. Amid startled gasps in the crowd, one of the attackers held a gun clearly labeled 'SQL Server 7.0' to Mr. Ellison's head while the other took a bag containing the challenge prize of $1 million.
The two men were apprehended shortly thereafter, and were identified as William H. Gates, III and Steven Ballmer. Ballmer was heard at the police station as saying, 'seeya, Billy, I TOLD YOU SQL Server 7.0 could get that million dollars', while a dejected Gates could be heard muttering disgustedly 'just shut up, you bald dork'. A clearly aggravated Melinda Gates would only comment that 'this is absolutely the last time I'll ever bail out those two assholes... jeez, the DOJ mess was bad enough'.
Microsoft immediately announced that rumors of a new WB series, 'When Geeks Go Bad - Billy and Steve, the Thelma and Louise of High Tech', were completely unfounded.
Hmmm... let's see... 'geeks will never learn what business people want'...
A clue for you, Buckwheat; the app that made micros acceptable to business people everywhere was VisiCalc... which was developed by a math and computer geek named Dan Bricklin (and he's still a genuine geek today).
I guess that makes the score:
Geeks 1 - Know Nothing Dork 0
So... this is what we're left with after YEARS of incessant WHINING about the 'innate superiority' of the Mac? 'We're no worse than those other guys we've been making fun of'? PLEASE...
Crackintosh fans, SPARE ME the smug crap in the future, OK? And take a good, hard look at some of the comments you've been posting. How the HECK do you EVER expect Apple to make it any better when your responses cover their collective backside instead of calling them to task?
This is to announce that I've just patented the algorithm that describes the double helix layout of DNA. If all you people out there pay me the standard royalty fee of $100,000 a head, I won't have to take action. Otherwise, my associates will be over shortly to remove every strand of DNA from your body that infringes on MY patent.
Have a nice day...
I seem to recall Oracle having some BIG problems in this regard somewhere in the late 80's or very early 90's. They tried cooking the books in regard to their sales numbers (the way they credited sales to quarterly results, or some such). They got into BIG trouble for it and, as I recall, were forced to restate their sales (and profit) numbers for several previous quarters.
Needless to say, it turned out they were NOT the 500 lb gorilla business wise that they appeared to be prior to that. Their stock took a major dive, and they had to recover from the debacle to beat out the DB competition that they had.
You can take 2 lessons from that; yes, if proven, the company will take a hit. And there's no guarantee that it will be a long term or fatal hit for a company the size of Mickeysludge.