...where our Supreme Court recently upheld (by declining to review a lower court decision) our right to display Nazi paraphernalia online where French people might access it, despite France's law against this.
Maybe when the Australian government realizes how stupid this makes them look, they'll reconsider. Meanwhile, this will just increase traffic along the sub-ocean cables between Australia and free nations.
I'm in a similar situation and what I am doing is building a very general-purpose set of handlers which I can use as building blocks for quick & dirty apps. It's more work up front to build modules which are either general-purpose in principle or quickly hackable without a lot of booby traps, but if you keep an eye on your other projects while you're coding the immediate threat you can drastically reduce overall effort while improving both the quality and future extensibility.
Most of what I do doesn't involve databases but networks of terminals (serial, RF, and PC UI) are becoming more and more important to us. I have just defined a general-use flat data structure that allows virtually anything to be related to anything else within the sphere of what we do, without a DB engine and very fast, and with the ability to add virtually any kind of record to an existing set on the fly. It's harder to code this than a fixed-record field for a particular customer's app, but I only have to code it once, and then I can use it for everybody. In the long run, it will clean up a lot of old spaghetti while greasing the path for new jobs.
According to ScumWare it appears that they are plugins. This makes sense, since every version of IE has a different (and progressively better hidden) method of setting the proxy, but the plugin interface is standardized between versions.
How so? Because it defaulted to 'off' and could be enabled/disabled with the click of a check box?
No, because you have no assurance that the default and the checkbox will remain in future versions. Remember, what started out as a nose becomes an entire camel in your tent if you don't take care of the situation early.
The browser has no business modifying webpages. The browser has no business calling itself part of the operating system. The browser, proxy, and OS are three separate programs and should remain that way so you can choose the one you want from three separate vendors if you wish.
They can't change the way I want to present my homepage, now the line is crossed a looooong time ago!
Unfortunately, they can. It's the way the Internet works.
Right now I am voluntarily running Proxomitron, a web proxy which strips out ad banners, popups, and assorted misc.trash from the pages I view. And there's not a damn thing webpage designers can do about it except convince me to disable the proxy.
Things like surf+ are like anti-Proxomitrons that introduce spam instead of filtering it out; the only "cure" is to educate consumers and provide information on removing this software if they've installed it. As long as they can be uninstalled, you can't hope for much more. Of course, the kind of integration Microsoft was developing for XP is another kettle of fish altogether.
I've been waiting for someone else to say there is never going to be a "gray goo" problem. What a refreshing change from the "nanotech is coming, we need to regulate it before it eats everything" nonsense.
Any satellite moving slower than 18,000 miles per hour isn't going to be up there for long. Any satellite moving faster than 25,000 miles per hour isn't going to be in the vicinity of Earth for long. Within that range of orbital speeds, it really does not matter how small and maneuverable your satellite is. Evasive action is not possible. By the time you notice a collision might be imminent, it has happened.
Ultimately this big ole network has to have some way to figure out how to get those little packets of information into your computer, rather than MIT's mainframe or Aunt Mildred's or mine. That's what the IP is for. It's like trying to "anonymously" send a letter by putting it in the mailbox in front of your house. You may misrepresent the return address (IP spoof) but unless you go to a public mailbox (internet cafe) the Post Office (net) can trace the letter back to you if it wants to badly enough.
A great game is not about having to memorize a bizarre collection of tools and terrain features and such to play on a landscape the size of Siberia. Some of the best games ever designed can be learned in minutes, but require years to master.
The early games couldn't rely on the crutch of snazzy graphics to grab your attention so they were meticulously tuned for playability. The distance and speed torpedoes travelled, the EFX reward for explosions and captures, the size and brightness of images and responsiveness of controls, were all play-tested for months before a game was released to market. At a place like Atari, dozens or even hundreds of people might play a game for hours before it went out the door. All that feedback went back into making the game more playable.
Today, games are built in closed shops which do not have these resources, and much of the resources they have are spent creating necessary artwork. Simple games of dexterity or strategy are simply not to be found. Doom is not a hopped-up Battlezone; it is another thing entirely. Wolfenstein 3D comes somewhere in between. But the closest you will get to Battlezone today is the Microsoft port, which doesn't play like the original. Sure, it looks like the original, but it doesn't play the same, especially when the missiles come out -- I should know, since in its heyday I could walk up to an arcade Battlezone machine and write my name vertically on the high score list.
Game makers just don't pay attention to that fine-level play any more. Early games made awesome play out of limited graphics and CPU time. DigDug took a liability of early hardware -- difficulty of re-rendering the landscape after an object had passed and erased it -- and turned it into a play feature. (Lode Runner took this to the next level on the 8-bit home computer.)
I trace the beginning of the death of game play to the Intellivision. Every console since has continued the trend -- immersiveness substitutes ever more for cleanness and simple play. A great game takes minutes to learn and a lifetime to master, but most of today's games are the other way around; by the time you can even get through them without cheat codes, they're lame and stale and you're ready for the next new even more immersive experience that will bore you just as fast.
WHERE THE HELL IS PONG? Where are the Atari 2600 games?
How can you name fifty games no less without mentioning some of the originals that invented the form? This list reads like a list of the "50 greatest songs of all time" all of which were recorded since 1960.
Despite a couple of nods toward the C64 and Apple ][, this list is hopelessly 90's-oriented. "All-time" indeed! Where are...
SPACEWAR, the first video game EVER
PONG, PONG, PONG, and PONG variants like BREAKOUT, the first home video games EVER
TANK WAR for the 2600, still holds its own with any modern game for quick 2-person play
BATTLEZONE, first first-person 3d game EVER
SPACE INVADERS, ASTEROIDS, each owned the world for a couple of years
Meanwhile I've never even heard of some of the games they nominated. Then again, I'm not a "gamer" any more -- guess I got it out of my system when we were still carving video games out of wooden blocks.
Not a PDA, but has many of the features of one. Drop-resistant to 5 feet on concrete (I've tried it), thick ABS case, all components are shock-mounted, and the thing is sealed against jets of water (a higher rating than immersion). Its official purpose in life is a handheld barcode scanner/data recorder for industry. Oh yeah, it runs a clipped version of DOS and costs $3,000. That's before $1,500 for the development kit so you can write software for it.
... without permission on a machine he did not own.
The more relevant postscript is that he is being criminally prosecuted and faces more jail time than a typical rapist or murderer, for something that merited sacking at most.
He violated what is often perceived as a nuisance-level TOS provision in network administration, did exceed his authority in doing so, and got fired. (Even that may have been excessive, considering the tameness of the offense, but in these days of viruses and worms and such I can understand the knee-jerk overreaction.)
Now the State is going to crush him like a bug. Even if he prevails in trial he will be wiped out financially, his name dragged through the newspapers, and suffer years of uncertainty about his future. There is nothing whatsoever fair or just about this.
The sad thing is that there is little we can do about District Attorneys who violate all standards of reasonableness and humanity in this way. Near here a few years ago our DA launched an aggressive prosecution against a woman whose baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even her pediatrician testified for her, but she was poor and ill-spoken and the white middle-class jurists of the more affluent community next door convicted her of negligent homicide.
It's either a wonderful sign of how stable the US is, or a tragic sign of what sheep we've become, that none of these evil pieces of shit ever get assassinated.
I'm particularly amused by this claim that Win95 was less stable than Win3.1.
It was. With certain restrictions, such as no multitasking and lots of RAM, Win 3.1 could run for months or even years without rebooting. We were never able, after much experimenting, to figure out how to make '95 stable. Apparently, unlike 3.1 where the instabilities were triggered by stress, '95 had instabilities which didn't have to be triggered by anything. From our point of view (and you have to realize a lot of what we do is embedded and mission-critical) '95 was a sad joke.
You're thinking like those old programmers again. Most systems today do not need this level of performance. In today's marketplace, and with the complex applications we now develop, factors such as development time and robustness usually figure at least as prominently. Yes, using virtual function calls can reduce your program speed by 5%.
You don't know what is possible. I am in the
middle of a project where I am basically hacking
an embedded controller whose firmware was
written (very elegantly, in a certain sense)
in C++. But it isn't fast enough. I talked
the engineer into giving me a backdoor so I
could run some assembly language. That.asm
code is now up to 12,000 lines and is performing
over 1,000 times faster than the normal development
environment coded in C++. Even the guys who
built the box can't believe what I made it do.
As I learned in the casino, if you keep eating
away at your position a few percent at a time
you eventually face a real loss.
The general consensus is that Windows 95 was the most stable release of DOS/Windows there ever was
And whose fucking consensus might that be?
I have three CD's in the drawer to my left. They are labelled Win 95b, Win95 upgrade, and Win95SE. (Yes, they're all pirated. Tell 'em to sue me.) I've used all of them and the only one I'd ever consider telling someone to use would be the Win98SE. Why?
Because they clearly hadn't finished the fucking thing in 1995.
I also know coworkers who have legitimate copies of upgrade-after-upgrade, who use such pirated copies of 98 SE to format their machines, simply because the train-of-upgrades doesn't work. Oh, it might (if you're lucky) get the computer to boot but it won't be as stable or have all the features or [insert complaint].
For a few years, Win 3.1 was the preferred "stable release" even though 95 was out. But it got tiresome to tell people to try to find a legal copy of this OS that actually worked (at least if you were gentle with it). You could restrict multitasking and bump up the RAM and 3.1 would run for months. But '95 would crash for no apparent reason when running nothing but the screen saver. (Can you say "we haven't figured out this pre-emptive multitasking shit yet?")
I am running 98 SE right now on the machine I am typing into. At work we are running actual legal copies of NT 4.0 and one of 2000 (which is, I must admit, amazingly stable, if you have >300Mb of RAM). I have constant problems with NT4 and '98 isn't stable enough for what I do at work, but for casual use it serves, and it supports my wide array of useless crap.
To say that '95 was the most stable release of
anything is simply a lie. '95 was garbage and
'95b was garbage with some of the more obvious
shit wiped off. '95 really should have been '98
but if uSoft had waited, OS/2 might have grabbed
some of their market share, and hey, it doesn't
matter how many people they rip off or
inconvenience, they have to prevent that at
all costs.
Your story is inacurrate. DOS 2.0 did introduce a hierarchical file system and a new API that was a lot simpler to use, but was fully backwards compatible with DOS 1.0
Next time RTFA. All I said about 2.0 was "almost equal to CP/M", which was true. Sure it was slower and buggier but it was much cleaner, unlike 1.0 which was of course a stolen bad ripoff.
DOS 3.0 did not break any applications.
Maybe not any that you used. "TSR's were not well understood?" Maybe not by the idiots in Redmond but there were several that I was using that broke after the re-grade. Of course if MS
had acted normally or honorably they just would
have published the information necessary to
support TSR's and kept the API's consistent, but
NOOOOOO. MS has never done that. People
like me had to reverse-engineer the damn thing,
and do it again after every release.
Your statement on DOS 4.0 is also inacurrate. It introduced a new shell, which few people used, but it was pretty much 3.3 with a few more device drivers.
d00d, 4.0 introduced FAT16. It broke a bunch of stuff. It broke so much stuff I was still dealing with the fallout when 5.0 was released. (Finally, an editor that works! Except it's just QB with a lobotomy. Won't load without 340KB of RAM. Typical uSoft crap.)
Windows 95 might have been released earlier. Did anyone care?
I'd say the millions of folks who have had their data lost and had to reformat hard drives might have wished for a little less eagerness and a little more QC before they received their gift from Redmond. Especially since they had, by that time, almost gotten Win 3.1 into a state that could be described as "working," and instead of finishing it they abandoned it, never finished it, and did everything corporately possible to force their entire customer base to re-grade to '95, even thought it was more at a Win 2.0 level at that time.
Out of curiosity, exactly how much does Microsoft pay you to come up with this bullshit?
Now why you think this immediately means Microsoft wants to hold all of your personal data on their servers, I have no clue.
Because they said so in a press release. This wasn't about.NET, it was about one of their other efforts -- Hailstorm IIRC.
But like any service, it is something you subscribe to and decide to participate with. Microsoft's hope is that you'll find it conveninient and want to use it. If not, then well what are you worried about?
Well, it's like this. I have credit cards. Now there is no reason on Earth I need credit cards; I'm debt-free and have plenty of money in checking. I have credit cards because of the absurdly large number of things you can't do without them. Like rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or get stuff delivered next-day when you order it online. Microsoft is positioning itself to be the next "credit card," only moreso because they will invade every area of life that involves a computer. Do I get to "opt out" of the police, hospitals, fire stations, ambulance services, ADT (who write paychecks for my employer), or my employer placing itself in Microsoft's grand scheme of things? Of course not. So as in the movie, if BillG really were to put a backdoor into the architecture, he could create a great deal of mischief for me despite my aversion to his wares.
They certainly have a history of producing high quality software. I don't know what software you've been using that you consider low quality.
Well, it's like this.
1970's
several buggy and slow BASIC interpreters which were so bad I had to constantly resort to machine language to do simple tasks.
1980's
DOS 1.0, basically stolen
DOS 2.0, nearly equal to CP/M
DOS 3.0, broke half the apps that ran on 2.0
DOS 4.0, broke 3/4 of the apps that ran on 3.0 AND was a memory hog AND full of bugs (but then, "DOS isn't done until LOTUS won't run")
Their first series of compilers, which were unaware of the 8088 failure to complete string copy operations after an interrupt, and so crashed randomly
1990's
Windows 95, released long before it was ready for prime time simply to counter OS/2
NT 4.0, slower and buggier than 3.0
32-bit APIs partially documented and then a lot of that documentation is wrong
It's true that they have done a few things right, especially w/r/t Microsoft Office. But I could have told you in 1978 that their corporate style wasn't capable of developing a stable operating system. Early versions of Word tended to blow up a lot too, but then they didn't tend to take the whole universe with them when they did.
You then claim that this software is rammed down users throats. Are you just gullible? I've never had software rammed down my throat.
You've never received a document as a.DOC after you had multiply and explicitly demanded.RTF because of the totally unnecessary virus threat caused by their irresponsible security defaults, you've never had to install a Windoze partition on a machine just to run some app that is unavailable in non-Windoze version which turns out to be indespensible either to you or a coworker, you've never...
Wait a minute. Of course you haven't been forced to because you're so ignorant you actually like this shit. Never mind.
You remember the movie. Yeah, you mostly remember Sandra Bullock's bust but surely you noticed the computer network in the movie The Net, the one in which every computer in the world magically interoperated so that virtually all data of any type could be accessed through a single back door.
Remember how funny that was? Remember how funny it was that the Net portrayed in that movie was so fast you could practically do full-motion video? That was a real scream when you got home to log onto this net with your 56K. And now that you've got a cable modem, well, things are looking a bit faster. And now that you have a 1.2 GHz processor and 512 Mb of RAM the scene where Sandra opens about 50 windows whilst seeking out BillG, er, the bad guy's identity doesn't look quite as foolish any more.
And the idea of using one application to hack all those different real-world apps -- police, jails, drivers' licenses, hospital records, all stored in a completely compatible and accessible form. Baloney, you remember thinking, thinking of all those old WordPerfect 5.1 docs the boss wants you to convert to Word for Windows 6.0.
Well, it's not so funny any more because that's exactly what.NET is. MS want not only to perfectly integrate all your apps, they want to hold the data on their servers. It's almost as if BillG saw that movie and thought, "gee, what a swell idea."
I've lost count of the number of apps I've run across written with Access, or SQL, when flat files would have been more efficient and made more sense. But flat files tend to be proprietary in form, distribution, and content. If you've ever gone into an 80's-era accounting system you know what I'm talking about -- hundreds of files with enlightening names like X878190.DAT.
But put it all on a SQL server, especially one owned by BillG, and things become much clearer. Every record is tagged as to type and you can much more quickly work out what data go where. It wouldn't be perfect, but tricks like switching the photos on a couple of driver's licenses would become much simpler (assuming, of course, that you go for the last piece of the puzzle and install your back door).
Microsoft has the ultimate history of irresponsibility. Since their first days in business they've specialized in producing slow, buggy, unfinished code which they've rammed down our throats through brilliant (and often illegal) marketing tactics. Now they want to centralize all the data in the world under their own aegis. Excuse me while I go puke.
You might want to at least learn to spell politician before you become one.
He probably are a injunear. You know, 135 hours credit with 12 humanities (and you can take "Boolean Logic" for the philosophy requirement). Injunears don't have to know how to spell anything except FORTRAN keywords.
what's to stop you from, say, extorting more wage? Better work hours? Anything?
Exactly. Like I said, it's about power.
And the answer to your question is "enlightened self-interest." I have demanded, and gotten, certain concessions as a result of my influence, but I'm smart enough to know what the company can afford and will put up with. They've worked with me long enough to know that I am a reasonable person. In short, they treat me like a human being and I return the favor.
I suppose they just assume everyone is out to grab as much as they can, which is just natural, considering they are the 'mind' of the corporations which are agents of greed.
Exactly. It's about power. It's not about satisfying the customers, it's not about building something we can be proud of, it's not about being the leaders in our sector, it's not about being efficient or beating the competition, it's about being in control. It's about responding to a human situation with the knee-jerk response of a machine that isn't capable of understanding pride, craftsmanship, or loyalty.
Fortunately, the feeling is mutual. I wouldn't want to work for someone who would act that way anyway. For that matter, I suspect a lot of people who share my skills feel that way. Maybe that's why some of the managers who have posted here have such trouble finding people who know what they are doing.
Obviously the author isn't talking about "math" in the sense of FOR loops and basic arithmetic. He's talking about calclulus, differential equations, matrices, imaginary numbers, tensors, and other stuff most programmers never see.
I've studied engineering and I've been a programmer for 15 years. Today I couldn't solve a second-order differential equation to save my life. And I'd need a couple of hours with my old textbooks before I even tried to do an integral.
OTOH programming does use some math skills which aren't generally taught to either engineers OR programmers. If I hadn't been given a copy of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming I'd still be in the dark as to some of the mysteries of floating point math. Finite math is very different from the variety usually used by engineers and physicists, and few people understand why it sometimes betrays them.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe when the Australian government realizes how stupid this makes them look, they'll reconsider. Meanwhile, this will just increase traffic along the sub-ocean cables between Australia and free nations.
Most of what I do doesn't involve databases but networks of terminals (serial, RF, and PC UI) are becoming more and more important to us. I have just defined a general-use flat data structure that allows virtually anything to be related to anything else within the sphere of what we do, without a DB engine and very fast, and with the ability to add virtually any kind of record to an existing set on the fly. It's harder to code this than a fixed-record field for a particular customer's app, but I only have to code it once, and then I can use it for everybody. In the long run, it will clean up a lot of old spaghetti while greasing the path for new jobs.
Two half-height file cabinets and a door. Had a desk like this when I was a kid and it rocked.
According to ScumWare it appears that they are plugins. This makes sense, since every version of IE has a different (and progressively better hidden) method of setting the proxy, but the plugin interface is standardized between versions.
No, because you have no assurance that the default and the checkbox will remain in future versions. Remember, what started out as a nose becomes an entire camel in your tent if you don't take care of the situation early.
The browser has no business modifying webpages. The browser has no business calling itself part of the operating system. The browser, proxy, and OS are three separate programs and should remain that way so you can choose the one you want from three separate vendors if you wish.
Unfortunately, they can. It's the way the Internet works.
Right now I am voluntarily running Proxomitron, a web proxy which strips out ad banners, popups, and assorted misc.trash from the pages I view. And there's not a damn thing webpage designers can do about it except convince me to disable the proxy.
Things like surf+ are like anti-Proxomitrons that introduce spam instead of filtering it out; the only "cure" is to educate consumers and provide information on removing this software if they've installed it. As long as they can be uninstalled, you can't hope for much more. Of course, the kind of integration Microsoft was developing for XP is another kettle of fish altogether.
I've been waiting for someone else to say there is never going to be a "gray goo" problem. What a refreshing change from the "nanotech is coming, we need to regulate it before it eats everything" nonsense.
Any satellite moving slower than 18,000 miles per hour isn't going to be up there for long. Any satellite moving faster than 25,000 miles per hour isn't going to be in the vicinity of Earth for long. Within that range of orbital speeds, it really does not matter how small and maneuverable your satellite is. Evasive action is not possible. By the time you notice a collision might be imminent, it has happened.
It's heavens-above.com with a dash. I accidentally hit "submit" instead of "preview".
Oh, and the Iridium satellites are the brightest objects in the sky, if you happen to catch a flare.
Ultimately this big ole network has to have some way to figure out how to get those little packets of information into your computer, rather than MIT's mainframe or Aunt Mildred's or mine. That's what the IP is for. It's like trying to "anonymously" send a letter by putting it in the mailbox in front of your house. You may misrepresent the return address (IP spoof) but unless you go to a public mailbox (internet cafe) the Post Office (net) can trace the letter back to you if it wants to badly enough.
The early games couldn't rely on the crutch of snazzy graphics to grab your attention so they were meticulously tuned for playability. The distance and speed torpedoes travelled, the EFX reward for explosions and captures, the size and brightness of images and responsiveness of controls, were all play-tested for months before a game was released to market. At a place like Atari, dozens or even hundreds of people might play a game for hours before it went out the door. All that feedback went back into making the game more playable.
Today, games are built in closed shops which do not have these resources, and much of the resources they have are spent creating necessary artwork. Simple games of dexterity or strategy are simply not to be found. Doom is not a hopped-up Battlezone; it is another thing entirely. Wolfenstein 3D comes somewhere in between. But the closest you will get to Battlezone today is the Microsoft port, which doesn't play like the original. Sure, it looks like the original, but it doesn't play the same, especially when the missiles come out -- I should know, since in its heyday I could walk up to an arcade Battlezone machine and write my name vertically on the high score list.
Game makers just don't pay attention to that fine-level play any more. Early games made awesome play out of limited graphics and CPU time. DigDug took a liability of early hardware -- difficulty of re-rendering the landscape after an object had passed and erased it -- and turned it into a play feature. (Lode Runner took this to the next level on the 8-bit home computer.)
I trace the beginning of the death of game play to the Intellivision. Every console since has continued the trend -- immersiveness substitutes ever more for cleanness and simple play. A great game takes minutes to learn and a lifetime to master, but most of today's games are the other way around; by the time you can even get through them without cheat codes, they're lame and stale and you're ready for the next new even more immersive experience that will bore you just as fast.
How can you name fifty games no less without mentioning some of the originals that invented the form? This list reads like a list of the "50 greatest songs of all time" all of which were recorded since 1960.
Despite a couple of nods toward the C64 and Apple ][, this list is hopelessly 90's-oriented. "All-time" indeed! Where are...
- SPACEWAR, the first video game EVER
- PONG, PONG, PONG, and PONG variants like BREAKOUT, the first home video games EVER
- TANK WAR for the 2600, still holds its own with any modern game for quick 2-person play
- BATTLEZONE, first first-person 3d game EVER
- SPACE INVADERS, ASTEROIDS, each owned the world for a couple of years
Meanwhile I've never even heard of some of the games they nominated. Then again, I'm not a "gamer" any more -- guess I got it out of my system when we were still carving video games out of wooden blocks.Not a PDA, but has many of the features of one. Drop-resistant to 5 feet on concrete (I've tried it), thick ABS case, all components are shock-mounted, and the thing is sealed against jets of water (a higher rating than immersion). Its official purpose in life is a handheld barcode scanner/data recorder for industry. Oh yeah, it runs a clipped version of DOS and costs $3,000. That's before $1,500 for the development kit so you can write software for it.
The more relevant postscript is that he is being criminally prosecuted and faces more jail time than a typical rapist or murderer, for something that merited sacking at most.
He violated what is often perceived as a nuisance-level TOS provision in network administration, did exceed his authority in doing so, and got fired. (Even that may have been excessive, considering the tameness of the offense, but in these days of viruses and worms and such I can understand the knee-jerk overreaction.)
Now the State is going to crush him like a bug. Even if he prevails in trial he will be wiped out financially, his name dragged through the newspapers, and suffer years of uncertainty about his future. There is nothing whatsoever fair or just about this.
The sad thing is that there is little we can do about District Attorneys who violate all standards of reasonableness and humanity in this way. Near here a few years ago our DA launched an aggressive prosecution against a woman whose baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Even her pediatrician testified for her, but she was poor and ill-spoken and the white middle-class jurists of the more affluent community next door convicted her of negligent homicide.
It's either a wonderful sign of how stable the US is, or a tragic sign of what sheep we've become, that none of these evil pieces of shit ever get assassinated.
You're right, I just hate it when I get a fact wrong in a comment.
It was. With certain restrictions, such as no multitasking and lots of RAM, Win 3.1 could run for months or even years without rebooting. We were never able, after much experimenting, to figure out how to make '95 stable. Apparently, unlike 3.1 where the instabilities were triggered by stress, '95 had instabilities which didn't have to be triggered by anything. From our point of view (and you have to realize a lot of what we do is embedded and mission-critical) '95 was a sad joke.
You don't know what is possible. I am in the middle of a project where I am basically hacking an embedded controller whose firmware was written (very elegantly, in a certain sense) in C++. But it isn't fast enough. I talked the engineer into giving me a backdoor so I could run some assembly language. That .asm
code is now up to 12,000 lines and is performing
over 1,000 times faster than the normal development
environment coded in C++. Even the guys who
built the box can't believe what I made it do.
As I learned in the casino, if you keep eating
away at your position a few percent at a time
you eventually face a real loss.
And whose fucking consensus might that be?
I have three CD's in the drawer to my left. They are labelled Win 95b, Win95 upgrade, and Win95SE. (Yes, they're all pirated. Tell 'em to sue me.) I've used all of them and the only one I'd ever consider telling someone to use would be the Win98SE. Why?
Because they clearly hadn't finished the fucking thing in 1995.
I also know coworkers who have legitimate copies of upgrade-after-upgrade, who use such pirated copies of 98 SE to format their machines, simply because the train-of-upgrades doesn't work. Oh, it might (if you're lucky) get the computer to boot but it won't be as stable or have all the features or [insert complaint].
For a few years, Win 3.1 was the preferred "stable release" even though 95 was out. But it got tiresome to tell people to try to find a legal copy of this OS that actually worked (at least if you were gentle with it). You could restrict multitasking and bump up the RAM and 3.1 would run for months. But '95 would crash for no apparent reason when running nothing but the screen saver. (Can you say "we haven't figured out this pre-emptive multitasking shit yet?")
I am running 98 SE right now on the machine I am typing into. At work we are running actual legal copies of NT 4.0 and one of 2000 (which is, I must admit, amazingly stable, if you have >300Mb of RAM). I have constant problems with NT4 and '98 isn't stable enough for what I do at work, but for casual use it serves, and it supports my wide array of useless crap.
To say that '95 was the most stable release of anything is simply a lie. '95 was garbage and '95b was garbage with some of the more obvious shit wiped off. '95 really should have been '98 but if uSoft had waited, OS/2 might have grabbed some of their market share, and hey, it doesn't matter how many people they rip off or inconvenience, they have to prevent that at all costs.
Next time RTFA. All I said about 2.0 was "almost equal to CP/M", which was true. Sure it was slower and buggier but it was much cleaner, unlike 1.0 which was of course a stolen bad ripoff.
DOS 3.0 did not break any applications.
Maybe not any that you used. "TSR's were not well understood?" Maybe not by the idiots in Redmond but there were several that I was using that broke after the re-grade. Of course if MS had acted normally or honorably they just would have published the information necessary to support TSR's and kept the API's consistent, but NOOOOOO. MS has never done that. People like me had to reverse-engineer the damn thing, and do it again after every release.
Your statement on DOS 4.0 is also inacurrate. It introduced a new shell, which few people used, but it was pretty much 3.3 with a few more device drivers.
d00d, 4.0 introduced FAT16. It broke a bunch of stuff. It broke so much stuff I was still dealing with the fallout when 5.0 was released. (Finally, an editor that works! Except it's just QB with a lobotomy. Won't load without 340KB of RAM. Typical uSoft crap.)
Windows 95 might have been released earlier. Did anyone care?
I'd say the millions of folks who have had their data lost and had to reformat hard drives might have wished for a little less eagerness and a little more QC before they received their gift from Redmond. Especially since they had, by that time, almost gotten Win 3.1 into a state that could be described as "working," and instead of finishing it they abandoned it, never finished it, and did everything corporately possible to force their entire customer base to re-grade to '95, even thought it was more at a Win 2.0 level at that time.
Out of curiosity, exactly how much does Microsoft pay you to come up with this bullshit?
Because they said so in a press release. This wasn't about .NET, it was about one of their other efforts -- Hailstorm IIRC.
But like any service, it is something you subscribe to and decide to participate with. Microsoft's hope is that you'll find it conveninient and want to use it. If not, then well what are you worried about?
Well, it's like this. I have credit cards. Now there is no reason on Earth I need credit cards; I'm debt-free and have plenty of money in checking. I have credit cards because of the absurdly large number of things you can't do without them. Like rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or get stuff delivered next-day when you order it online. Microsoft is positioning itself to be the next "credit card," only moreso because they will invade every area of life that involves a computer. Do I get to "opt out" of the police, hospitals, fire stations, ambulance services, ADT (who write paychecks for my employer), or my employer placing itself in Microsoft's grand scheme of things? Of course not. So as in the movie, if BillG really were to put a backdoor into the architecture, he could create a great deal of mischief for me despite my aversion to his wares.
They certainly have a history of producing high quality software. I don't know what software you've been using that you consider low quality.
Well, it's like this.
1970's
1980's
- DOS 1.0, basically stolen
- DOS 2.0, nearly equal to CP/M
- DOS 3.0, broke half the apps that ran on 2.0
- DOS 4.0, broke 3/4 of the apps that ran on 3.0 AND was a memory hog AND full of bugs (but then, "DOS isn't done until LOTUS won't run")
- Their first series of compilers, which were unaware of the 8088 failure to complete string copy operations after an interrupt, and so crashed randomly
1990'sIt's true that they have done a few things right, especially w/r/t Microsoft Office. But I could have told you in 1978 that their corporate style wasn't capable of developing a stable operating system. Early versions of Word tended to blow up a lot too, but then they didn't tend to take the whole universe with them when they did.
You then claim that this software is rammed down users throats. Are you just gullible? I've never had software rammed down my throat.
You've never received a document as a .DOC after you had multiply and explicitly demanded .RTF because of the totally unnecessary virus threat caused by their irresponsible security defaults, you've never had to install a Windoze partition on a machine just to run some app that is unavailable in non-Windoze version which turns out to be indespensible either to you or a coworker, you've never...
Wait a minute. Of course you haven't been forced to because you're so ignorant you actually like this shit. Never mind.
Remember how funny that was? Remember how funny it was that the Net portrayed in that movie was so fast you could practically do full-motion video? That was a real scream when you got home to log onto this net with your 56K. And now that you've got a cable modem, well, things are looking a bit faster. And now that you have a 1.2 GHz processor and 512 Mb of RAM the scene where Sandra opens about 50 windows whilst seeking out BillG, er, the bad guy's identity doesn't look quite as foolish any more.
And the idea of using one application to hack all those different real-world apps -- police, jails, drivers' licenses, hospital records, all stored in a completely compatible and accessible form. Baloney, you remember thinking, thinking of all those old WordPerfect 5.1 docs the boss wants you to convert to Word for Windows 6.0.
Well, it's not so funny any more because that's exactly what .NET is. MS want not only to perfectly integrate all your apps, they want to hold the data on their servers. It's almost as if BillG saw that movie and thought, "gee, what a swell idea."
I've lost count of the number of apps I've run across written with Access, or SQL, when flat files would have been more efficient and made more sense. But flat files tend to be proprietary in form, distribution, and content. If you've ever gone into an 80's-era accounting system you know what I'm talking about -- hundreds of files with enlightening names like X878190.DAT.
But put it all on a SQL server, especially one owned by BillG, and things become much clearer. Every record is tagged as to type and you can much more quickly work out what data go where. It wouldn't be perfect, but tricks like switching the photos on a couple of driver's licenses would become much simpler (assuming, of course, that you go for the last piece of the puzzle and install your back door).
Microsoft has the ultimate history of irresponsibility. Since their first days in business they've specialized in producing slow, buggy, unfinished code which they've rammed down our throats through brilliant (and often illegal) marketing tactics. Now they want to centralize all the data in the world under their own aegis. Excuse me while I go puke.
He probably are a injunear. You know, 135 hours credit with 12 humanities (and you can take "Boolean Logic" for the philosophy requirement). Injunears don't have to know how to spell anything except FORTRAN keywords.
Exactly. Like I said, it's about power.
And the answer to your question is "enlightened self-interest." I have demanded, and gotten, certain concessions as a result of my influence, but I'm smart enough to know what the company can afford and will put up with. They've worked with me long enough to know that I am a reasonable person. In short, they treat me like a human being and I return the favor.
I suppose they just assume everyone is out to grab as much as they can, which is just natural, considering they are the 'mind' of the corporations which are agents of greed.
Exactly. It's about power. It's not about satisfying the customers, it's not about building something we can be proud of, it's not about being the leaders in our sector, it's not about being efficient or beating the competition, it's about being in control. It's about responding to a human situation with the knee-jerk response of a machine that isn't capable of understanding pride, craftsmanship, or loyalty.
Fortunately, the feeling is mutual. I wouldn't want to work for someone who would act that way anyway. For that matter, I suspect a lot of people who share my skills feel that way. Maybe that's why some of the managers who have posted here have such trouble finding people who know what they are doing.
I've studied engineering and I've been a programmer for 15 years. Today I couldn't solve a second-order differential equation to save my life. And I'd need a couple of hours with my old textbooks before I even tried to do an integral.
OTOH programming does use some math skills which aren't generally taught to either engineers OR programmers. If I hadn't been given a copy of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming I'd still be in the dark as to some of the mysteries of floating point math. Finite math is very different from the variety usually used by engineers and physicists, and few people understand why it sometimes betrays them.