Sorry, but does all this matter? Rose said he heard Apple were at work on a 'Konfab killer'. Apple did not need to make this thing. What's bad is that people are still smarting from the Watson-Sherlock thing and they're seeing it again. I don't think it matters if it's a rip-off or not, or if you can even qualify something like that.
What does matter is that some people will continue to see it as a rip-off, and that's bad publicity and PR Apple should have understood would come.
Glad you guys find joy in this, and I sympathise with you, for I suspect the culprit is not C but C++. I've never had a problem with C compile times in any environment, but OTOH when has C++ been anything but a problem?
A fake OO language with link-time binding, incremental linking, hopeless attempts to retrofit dynamic binding, pre-compiled headers (oh jesus) - it never stops: there are not enough crutches to hold that loser language up on its tiny confused wobbly legs.
I do Objective-C 100% today (thank you very much) and I was worried about build times for a while - until I discovered there was yet another C++ crutch built into GCC - and when you omit that crutch by using 'no-cpp-precomp' (and you figure out what it stands for) then things go blazingly fast.
So might I suggest that the answer to everyone's prayers is not in distCC but in ostracising that horrid language C++ once and forever and sending Bjarne back home to Aahus?
Gotta go - someone's at the door (I think it's Domino's.)
I too 'thing' it's a 'good think' that Jobs runs Apple ('incident[al]ly'). But I do not 'thing' that working with statistics changes much.
Forgive me for being selfish, but I do not want to see Apple remain a niche player doomed to the margins, to quote good old Bill G.
Bill long ago advised Steve to open up his OS (the original Mac OS) and license it. This was not interesting to me, but opening up OS X with its NeXTSTEP fundament is.
The world of IT is today crippled beyond belief because of unwieldy software burdened for the most part through the use of hybrid languages such as (primarily) C++. To quote Alan Kay, inventor of both the term 'object orientation' and Smalltalk:
I invented the term object orientation and I can assure you I did not have C++ in mind.
The world has been in a tailspin ever since the introduction on a wide front of the GUI (no mention of Pascal at Apple please - C++ is bad enough) and what should have been used all along could not be used: Objective-C.
Anyone who has worked with Cocoa knows: this brings it all back home.
I care about the grunts in the business. I care what happens to the industry as a whole. And Steve Jobs indeed has the tools to turn the entire industry around. Objective-C has developed along with NeXTSTEP and now Cocoa. They have to be considered together if at all. And 2% market share is not where they belong. They belong out in front as the language and environment of choice, used by the majority, and not by 2%.
So as long as Apple do not make dramatic inroads into SMB and as long as their most promising fiscal results are with iTMS and the iPod, I will not be encouraged. We need to see them both increase their own market share and make their development tools the number one choice on all platforms.
You want a technical answer but I think the ethical one is overriding here: I just don't believe networks should be run in this fashion.
First, it's totally insane to require Microshite Windoze. It speaks of the cerebral poverty of the faculty at many an institution where these supposed gifted people can barely save a document in Microsoft Word and then require everyone else do the same.
Second, any open standard should do just as well, and yet - and do I smell graft here? - Microsoft are in there, Dell are in there, IBM are sometimes in there, and demands are made that students get a computer of a definite make, model, configuration, etc - just to qualify for enrolment. If this isn't lobbying and bribery, I don't know what is.
Finally, if you want to connect to a network, then you should be able to prove you're malware-free. I don't have the technical details on this, but forcibly downloading junk on students' computers is just wrong.
Yes, the venerable BBC were accused of this at the outbreak of the Love Bug, and Scandinavian news sources were like this too, and we suspected collusion with local MS offices, but there is another partial and very plausible theory:
Namely that these people are so terminally clueless they think ALL computers run Microsoft Windows.
Or Work, or WordPerfect, or whatever it's called. Actually I don't know what operating system I'm running. What do you mean, 'operating system'? I'm looking at a program window right now that says Outlook Express - is that my operating system?
You've never written better. In two short grafs you sum this one up better than anyone could have done - bloody brilliant.
To tell the truth, what's left to discuss? Microsoft is shit - anyone still disagree? Put up your hands and say 'aye!'
This is the ultimate irony, the ultimate poetic justice, the ultimate karma for a company that never cared about quality or about product. They wanted to be in on the personal computer revolution, so they traveled to Albuquerque, wooed Jobs, finagled Mac prototypes, bought a source code Unix - and when the web came, did a skip with Spyglass to make IE not to make a good product but to keep Netscape out of the market. Who amongst us could think of wasting five billion dollars just to keep those Mosaic dudes out of our back yard? Who would have even entertained such a thought? Look at IE today. Has it gone on? No. Who cares about the DOJ trial in Redmond? Maybe a cleaning lady at most. Netscape got the count to ten and they're gone. No reason to pursue IE development anymore, and guess what? It stopped all right. Look at DR-DOS - OEMs petitioning Gates for years to improve MS-DOS and did he care? No. But when DR-DOS was poised to enter the market, what does Gates do? Writes that notorious memo 'is there anything we can do about this?' Borland takes over the compiler market and they have Quattro Pro too. WP is still strongest in the world. What does Gates do? Initially nothing. Microsoft compilers are so bad they can't even use them internally. But WP and Borland become too much of a threat, so what does Gates do? Does he own up and say 'sorry, my products are shit, we're going to fix that now' or does he improve them just enough to crush the competition?
[Remember when he wrote in his infamous letter about wanting to hire ten programmers to write the best software ever?]
Gates tells the world 'I'm so sorry so very very sorry my software has hurt you all and now we're going to write trustworthy code.' And OK, that day will never be seen, but it's a long jump from code that can't be exploited to code that is good, that is driven on by a zeal to be excellent. That sentiment is verboten in Redmond. It doesn't have a place. And finally things are looking good - oh excuse me, I mean bad. No really, we're discussing it here over a dinner and we think it's bloody beautiful.
There's justice in the world after all. Try to make a good product, really try, have that as your #1 goal, and things like this won't happen - not to this degree, not normally. Position yourself with the ethics of Gates - IT mongrels in the extreme - and it's bound to happen sooner or later if there's any justice in the world.
I've got my fingers crossed. I have a profession I am proud of, and it's going to be good to feel that pride and satisfaction again.
Below parent I see the world's most cynical comment:
And just WHY should CNN, or any other news service, "push" one product over another? What possible interest could they have?
OK schmuck, let me tell you: it's called 'the common good'. It's called 'charity'. It's called 'caring for one another' or 'looking out for one another'.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your kind of cynicism has helped get the world into this sorry mess in the first place.
We care. We have our Internet. We have each other. We have a fifth column - as yet unregulated to a large part. Slashdot themselves represent an important power. We have that if we can preserve the integrity and security of the Internet.
The world is a far better place today for the communication people can achieve on the net. For that to continue well, it must be secure.
I do not want my fellow man losing his life savings to criminal gangs.
Another word is 'public service'. Again, as John le Carre said: 'you sometimes have to play the hero to be just an ordinary human being'.
People have done things like this before, and will do it again, and that's what makes us a good race, us good old homo sapiens - even if you find that wrong, strange, naive, or downright stupid.
I prefer to be on their side in such case. The company's better.
Sorry for being a disbeliever, but I just don't think anyone who has waited this long to ditch IE - much less Windoze - and still tries to be cool hanging out at/. is going to stay away from IE for very long.
Me, I couldn't possibly understand it, but I see this lameness daily, and when someone starts mouthing praise for products they don't use while wandering around in 'enemy territory' I don't regard them as particularly sincere.
I think your intentions are good, but I think you will fool yourself, if not us. If you'd had any sense, you'd have got out four years and several hundred billion dollars ago. It's not exactly like Linux is price-prohibitive or hard to use - not anymore.
Anyone, speak up now or forever hold your peace: name just one justifiable reason to run Windows. Just one.
Just one.
[My friend, good luck to you. Hope you like FireXXX. Hope you switch away from that monstrosity Windoze soon - you will be doing yourself a favour and setting a good example. I hope you stick with it. What did John le Carre say? Sometimes you have to play the hero just to be an ordinary human being? Consider yourself a hero then - and go for it.]
This is so obviously astro-turfing there's no point in even carrying on here anymore. Someone points to an MS article; 'Joely' has to get in on it; MS send their hordes in to dilute the conversation; you freaks aren't real. Get a life: your posts serve no purpose other than to be provocative, and what's really clever is how you call all else a troll when that's exactly what you're doing. Having fun? We're not. Go away and we might again.
First off, GCC is a -generic- compiler. XLC might be better too - on a PPC. But GCC works EVERYWHERE.
VS won't - hell, MS bought this one too, they could not write it themselves. In fact, they used to licence from Zortech because their own was so shitty.
And MSC? Originally? Where did that come from? Clueless? Lattice Corporation. Like everything else, Microsoft bought it outright - and immediately raised the price from $225 to $275 of course.
Talking about VS being a good product: don't get me started: it's literally abysmal and you know it. Were there more proof needed what a weedy bug farm the MFC is, the world would be unreasonable.
But then again, everyone knows Microsoft laugh at their own MFC and refuse to touch it with a barge pole, don't they? Or can you name any flagship products aside from WORDPAD that have used it?
Messaging etc in VS is a mess. A glorious mess. It has been and remains a very unstable product. MSC under the bonnet has at times been good, but honestly we've been keeping an eye on OVER ten versions since the mid-80's and only two versions have ever been good.
Want to go back to the Watcom days when MSC 7.0 wouldn't even launch?
No sir: VS is not a good product. Moving on, I presume you have something good to say about its abysmally moronic resource editor, but I'd be careful if I were you: you might get legions of angry grunts the world over on your case.
Remarks like yours are what take what could have been a serious constructive discussion and deprave it into nothingness - and considering the parent, I assume we are here seeing the classic Microsoft astro-turfing again.
So you have been a professional software engineer all of - what is it? A MAXIMUM of six years?
And you take airs to tell other people what the score is? That Turbo Pascal and the Mac didn't do you much good, did they?
Sonny boy, everyone knows the first two years are wasted and your job is basically emptying trash cans. That leaves you four years. Learned a lot in that time, have we?
Please do not spread the ugly rumour that all software has to be flawed anymore. We have enough grannies and AOL lusers in the world thinking all computers are like Microsoft. Please.
I mean no disrespect, but I'm going to guess you've never been a software developer. If you were you'd know that every piece of software has bugs and issues, regardless of the language you use to describe them.
I don't care much either way on your first issue, but I am a pro, and I can tell you that you are totally full of it. Totally. In fact, just relaxing and kicking back in your attitude is IMHO one of the chief causes of bad software today. It's not an art anymore.
Why cite examples of software you know full well exist? You know it; everyone knows it; gray zone stuff you put on it like deadlines and what-not have nothing to do with the issue.
Go at it mathematically and see what a cop-out you're making. Make me a bar bet - for a substantial sum of money - and I will prove to you it can be and is done every day.
Just an idle question: I guess you've never heard of James Martin?
Whatever: the day programmers (and wannabes) stop telling people 'software will always be flawed' is the day software stops being flawed.
Don't pull rank on me BTW - you wouldn't have a chance.
It's not a farce. Rhetoric is everything. Your own post is full of rhetoric. It wasn't enough for you to talk about your trainer - you had to call him the 'idiot trainer' rather than suspending your judgement and letting readers of your post draw their own conclusions.
There are thousands of words with both positive and negative connotations that mean the same thing. Is it wrong for a company to try to use words that don't carry negative connotations?
Having a rough time with that? OK, try this: what's the difference between 'hot babe' and 'skank'?
That being said, actions speak louder than words anyway, so I don't give a flying FOOK what they call it, but it shouldn't have been there in the first place and they'd damn well better fix it fast - the problem - er bug - er issue that is. Resolve it, fix it - remember IBM - may their words haunt you forever:
'If it's a bug, fix it; if you can't, call it a feature.
I am a developer, and I am aware that the only software that has zero bugs is unwritten software.
Maybe yours, my friend...
OTOH I do believe (but cannot prove) an empirical truth I have seen evidence of (time and) ^ n time again: software can always be improved on, no matter how many times it's already been reviewed and tweaked, no matter how many years it's been under scrutiny.
But bugs? No, definitely not - and worse: relaxing here is a direct cop-out. See Mark Minasi's 'The Software Conspiracy' for an excellent diatribe against 'accepting bugs'.
Mediocre programmers cite 'there are always bugs', but people like Theo de Raadt avoid them and an organisation I have been affiliated with found three bugs in eight years in all told hundreds of programs.
There are 'bug-free' programs: believe it. Even if it weren't true, believe it. Accepting bugs is the worst possible stance a programmer can take.
OK, now you'll please excuse me - I have to run for cover...
Definitely. I took it as far as rule 7 before I woke up - I mean who more in the software world need a reality check?
My friend, that is the tragedy as I see it: they really think they have great products. It's unbelievable they think this, but I can offer this tidbit as a possible insight:
In my wayward youth I joined a McDonalds organisation. We're talking frozen cheap shit hamburgers. Their quality team were so fanatic they literally thought they were marketing things of quality on a par with Paul Bocuse - not in so many words, but they treated a Big Mac with freaking REVERENCE.
They're blown upstairs - brainwashed, warped the minute they set foot on the campus. They could work for Nixon's plumbers. They'd be totally convinced they're always doing the right thing.
Lots of people know people working at Microsoft, and I do too, and all I can say is we all shake our heads. At one organisation, a consultant had a twin brother working as product manager at a local Microsoft office. He couldn't talk to his freaking twin brother anymore. If ever they got together (and this guy would now avoid it), his twin would pummel him with Microsoft propaganda until it was coming out of his ears. He called and talked every day for forty five minutes at a stretch and all it was, was more propaganda, and in the end he had no twin brother anymore so to speak and had to tell his twin to stop calling - the Microsoftie twin never got it.
How many people know that Microsoft have an official division called:
SECRET WEAPONS AND NEW TECHNOLOGY
??
I am sure some know of this. I am sure some have met these dudes on their whirlwind world tours. They have such a department - or at least used to.
Ever see Microsofties on a world tour? See how they play tandem on stage? One talks for thirty minutes while the other... Ever check what the other is doing while his partner has the podium?
They call home to Mother. They have to report by phone after every speech or portion thereof and give an account of how things are going - halfway around the world...
And this guy is not going to need a reality check?
Remember Dave: Bill couldn't open his mouth with Dave in the room. Dave didn't mean harm, but Bill is always so full of it and Dave would correct him. In front of his employees. And Bill would look bad. He shut up.
That's not how bad it is: the truth is it's a lot worse. A lot worse.
Don't go scratching your heads wondering why the world's most powerful software company continues to put out the world's shittiest software. Bill knows it's shit; he also knows quality doesn't mean a damn. Control of employees does.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, it should be noted that the release is only a beta version, not a final release. That might explain the bugs.
No. It's a Microsoft product - that explains the bugs.
The BBC report the name of the litigant as 'Thomas Slattery'. This is incorrect.
His name is 'Darl McBride'.
'rammifications'?
Mmmmmmm...
All the more reason to make people understand that they're not to use 3rd party software that demands your administrator passphrase to install.
Does anyone know? Can anyone know? That would be a thing too,
Apple's recently released Tiger
Is this article due for publication summer 2005?
Sorry, but does all this matter? Rose said he heard Apple were at work on a 'Konfab killer'. Apple did not need to make this thing. What's bad is that people are still smarting from the Watson-Sherlock thing and they're seeing it again. I don't think it matters if it's a rip-off or not, or if you can even qualify something like that.
What does matter is that some people will continue to see it as a rip-off, and that's bad publicity and PR Apple should have understood would come.
Am I missing something here?
This is a Microsoft book and you want to give it to 'team members'?
Are you nuts?
Glad you guys find joy in this, and I sympathise with you, for I suspect the culprit is not C but C++. I've never had a problem with C compile times in any environment, but OTOH when has C++ been anything but a problem?
A fake OO language with link-time binding, incremental linking, hopeless attempts to retrofit dynamic binding, pre-compiled headers (oh jesus) - it never stops: there are not enough crutches to hold that loser language up on its tiny confused wobbly legs.
I do Objective-C 100% today (thank you very much) and I was worried about build times for a while - until I discovered there was yet another C++ crutch built into GCC - and when you omit that crutch by using 'no-cpp-precomp' (and you figure out what it stands for) then things go blazingly fast.
So might I suggest that the answer to everyone's prayers is not in distCC but in ostracising that horrid language C++ once and forever and sending Bjarne back home to Aahus?
Gotta go - someone's at the door (I think it's Domino's.)
I too 'thing' it's a 'good think' that Jobs runs Apple ('incident[al]ly'). But I do not 'thing' that working with statistics changes much.
Forgive me for being selfish, but I do not want to see Apple remain a niche player doomed to the margins, to quote good old Bill G.
Bill long ago advised Steve to open up his OS (the original Mac OS) and license it. This was not interesting to me, but opening up OS X with its NeXTSTEP fundament is.
The world of IT is today crippled beyond belief because of unwieldy software burdened for the most part through the use of hybrid languages such as (primarily) C++. To quote Alan Kay, inventor of both the term 'object orientation' and Smalltalk:
I invented the term object orientation and I can assure you I did not have C++ in mind.
The world has been in a tailspin ever since the introduction on a wide front of the GUI (no mention of Pascal at Apple please - C++ is bad enough) and what should have been used all along could not be used: Objective-C.
Anyone who has worked with Cocoa knows: this brings it all back home.
I care about the grunts in the business. I care what happens to the industry as a whole. And Steve Jobs indeed has the tools to turn the entire industry around. Objective-C has developed along with NeXTSTEP and now Cocoa. They have to be considered together if at all. And 2% market share is not where they belong. They belong out in front as the language and environment of choice, used by the majority, and not by 2%.
So as long as Apple do not make dramatic inroads into SMB and as long as their most promising fiscal results are with iTMS and the iPod, I will not be encouraged. We need to see them both increase their own market share and make their development tools the number one choice on all platforms.
then I can see him going up in it.
Bye, Bradley.
Hey and what are we expecting to see then anyway? Suicides riding to the top floor to jump off the roof?
Whoa.
These are all historical facts.
Historical facts cannot by definition be flamebait.
PFYs slipped mod points are still PFYs.
You want a technical answer but I think the ethical one is overriding here: I just don't believe networks should be run in this fashion.
First, it's totally insane to require Microshite Windoze. It speaks of the cerebral poverty of the faculty at many an institution where these supposed gifted people can barely save a document in Microsoft Word and then require everyone else do the same.
Second, any open standard should do just as well, and yet - and do I smell graft here? - Microsoft are in there, Dell are in there, IBM are sometimes in there, and demands are made that students get a computer of a definite make, model, configuration, etc - just to qualify for enrolment. If this isn't lobbying and bribery, I don't know what is.
Finally, if you want to connect to a network, then you should be able to prove you're malware-free. I don't have the technical details on this, but forcibly downloading junk on students' computers is just wrong.
Too often these stories are very generic
Yes, the venerable BBC were accused of this at the outbreak of the Love Bug, and Scandinavian news sources were like this too, and we suspected collusion with local MS offices, but there is another partial and very plausible theory:
Namely that these people are so terminally clueless they think ALL computers run Microsoft Windows.
Or Work, or WordPerfect, or whatever it's called. Actually I don't know what operating system I'm running. What do you mean, 'operating system'? I'm looking at a program window right now that says Outlook Express - is that my operating system?
Cowboy Neal m'boy!
You've never written better. In two short grafs you sum this one up better than anyone could have done - bloody brilliant.
To tell the truth, what's left to discuss? Microsoft is shit - anyone still disagree? Put up your hands and say 'aye!'
This is the ultimate irony, the ultimate poetic justice, the ultimate karma for a company that never cared about quality or about product. They wanted to be in on the personal computer revolution, so they traveled to Albuquerque, wooed Jobs, finagled Mac prototypes, bought a source code Unix - and when the web came, did a skip with Spyglass to make IE not to make a good product but to keep Netscape out of the market. Who amongst us could think of wasting five billion dollars just to keep those Mosaic dudes out of our back yard? Who would have even entertained such a thought? Look at IE today. Has it gone on? No. Who cares about the DOJ trial in Redmond? Maybe a cleaning lady at most. Netscape got the count to ten and they're gone. No reason to pursue IE development anymore, and guess what? It stopped all right. Look at DR-DOS - OEMs petitioning Gates for years to improve MS-DOS and did he care? No. But when DR-DOS was poised to enter the market, what does Gates do? Writes that notorious memo 'is there anything we can do about this?' Borland takes over the compiler market and they have Quattro Pro too. WP is still strongest in the world. What does Gates do? Initially nothing. Microsoft compilers are so bad they can't even use them internally. But WP and Borland become too much of a threat, so what does Gates do? Does he own up and say 'sorry, my products are shit, we're going to fix that now' or does he improve them just enough to crush the competition?
[Remember when he wrote in his infamous letter about wanting to hire ten programmers to write the best software ever?]
Gates tells the world 'I'm so sorry so very very sorry my software has hurt you all and now we're going to write trustworthy code.' And OK, that day will never be seen, but it's a long jump from code that can't be exploited to code that is good, that is driven on by a zeal to be excellent. That sentiment is verboten in Redmond. It doesn't have a place. And finally things are looking good - oh excuse me, I mean bad. No really, we're discussing it here over a dinner and we think it's bloody beautiful.
There's justice in the world after all. Try to make a good product, really try, have that as your #1 goal, and things like this won't happen - not to this degree, not normally. Position yourself with the ethics of Gates - IT mongrels in the extreme - and it's bound to happen sooner or later if there's any justice in the world.
I've got my fingers crossed. I have a profession I am proud of, and it's going to be good to feel that pride and satisfaction again.
Cowboy dude, thanks for a great story.
Below parent I see the world's most cynical comment:
And just WHY should CNN, or any other news service, "push" one product over another? What possible interest could they have?
OK schmuck, let me tell you: it's called 'the common good'. It's called 'charity'. It's called 'caring for one another' or 'looking out for one another'.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your kind of cynicism has helped get the world into this sorry mess in the first place.
We care. We have our Internet. We have each other. We have a fifth column - as yet unregulated to a large part. Slashdot themselves represent an important power. We have that if we can preserve the integrity and security of the Internet.
The world is a far better place today for the communication people can achieve on the net. For that to continue well, it must be secure.
I do not want my fellow man losing his life savings to criminal gangs.
Another word is 'public service'. Again, as John le Carre said: 'you sometimes have to play the hero to be just an ordinary human being'.
People have done things like this before, and will do it again, and that's what makes us a good race, us good old homo sapiens - even if you find that wrong, strange, naive, or downright stupid.
I prefer to be on their side in such case. The company's better.
Ahem...
/. is going to stay away from IE for very long.
Sorry for being a disbeliever, but I just don't think anyone who has waited this long to ditch IE - much less Windoze - and still tries to be cool hanging out at
Me, I couldn't possibly understand it, but I see this lameness daily, and when someone starts mouthing praise for products they don't use while wandering around in 'enemy territory' I don't regard them as particularly sincere.
I think your intentions are good, but I think you will fool yourself, if not us. If you'd had any sense, you'd have got out four years and several hundred billion dollars ago. It's not exactly like Linux is price-prohibitive or hard to use - not anymore.
Anyone, speak up now or forever hold your peace: name just one justifiable reason to run Windows. Just one.
Just one.
[My friend, good luck to you. Hope you like FireXXX. Hope you switch away from that monstrosity Windoze soon - you will be doing yourself a favour and setting a good example. I hope you stick with it. What did John le Carre say? Sometimes you have to play the hero just to be an ordinary human being? Consider yourself a hero then - and go for it.]
This is so obviously astro-turfing there's no point in even carrying on here anymore. Someone points to an MS article; 'Joely' has to get in on it; MS send their hordes in to dilute the conversation; you freaks aren't real. Get a life: your posts serve no purpose other than to be provocative, and what's really clever is how you call all else a troll when that's exactly what you're doing. Having fun? We're not. Go away and we might again.
Bye.
GCC was inferior to Visual Studio
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read.
First off, GCC is a -generic- compiler. XLC might be better too - on a PPC. But GCC works EVERYWHERE.
VS won't - hell, MS bought this one too, they could not write it themselves. In fact, they used to licence from Zortech because their own was so shitty.
And MSC? Originally? Where did that come from? Clueless? Lattice Corporation. Like everything else, Microsoft bought it outright - and immediately raised the price from $225 to $275 of course.
Talking about VS being a good product: don't get me started: it's literally abysmal and you know it. Were there more proof needed what a weedy bug farm the MFC is, the world would be unreasonable.
But then again, everyone knows Microsoft laugh at their own MFC and refuse to touch it with a barge pole, don't they? Or can you name any flagship products aside from WORDPAD that have used it?
Messaging etc in VS is a mess. A glorious mess. It has been and remains a very unstable product. MSC under the bonnet has at times been good, but honestly we've been keeping an eye on OVER ten versions since the mid-80's and only two versions have ever been good.
Want to go back to the Watcom days when MSC 7.0 wouldn't even launch?
No sir: VS is not a good product. Moving on, I presume you have something good to say about its abysmally moronic resource editor, but I'd be careful if I were you: you might get legions of angry grunts the world over on your case.
Remarks like yours are what take what could have been a serious constructive discussion and deprave it into nothingness - and considering the parent, I assume we are here seeing the classic Microsoft astro-turfing again.
Begone, evil one.
OMG is this true? Do you know where one can find references to this on the web?
This is great - absolutely great.
From your own site:
In early 1998, nearing graduation
So you have been a professional software engineer all of - what is it? A MAXIMUM of six years?
And you take airs to tell other people what the score is? That Turbo Pascal and the Mac didn't do you much good, did they?
Sonny boy, everyone knows the first two years are wasted and your job is basically emptying trash cans. That leaves you four years. Learned a lot in that time, have we?
Please do not spread the ugly rumour that all software has to be flawed anymore. We have enough grannies and AOL lusers in the world thinking all computers are like Microsoft. Please.
I mean no disrespect, but I'm going to guess you've never been a software developer. If you were you'd know that every piece of software has bugs and issues, regardless of the language you use to describe them.
I don't care much either way on your first issue, but I am a pro, and I can tell you that you are totally full of it. Totally. In fact, just relaxing and kicking back in your attitude is IMHO one of the chief causes of bad software today. It's not an art anymore.
Why cite examples of software you know full well exist? You know it; everyone knows it; gray zone stuff you put on it like deadlines and what-not have nothing to do with the issue.
Go at it mathematically and see what a cop-out you're making. Make me a bar bet - for a substantial sum of money - and I will prove to you it can be and is done every day.
Just an idle question: I guess you've never heard of James Martin?
Whatever: the day programmers (and wannabes) stop telling people 'software will always be flawed' is the day software stops being flawed.
Don't pull rank on me BTW - you wouldn't have a chance.
Grrrr.
What a farce.
It's not a farce. Rhetoric is everything. Your own post is full of rhetoric. It wasn't enough for you to talk about your trainer - you had to call him the 'idiot trainer' rather than suspending your judgement and letting readers of your post draw their own conclusions.
There are thousands of words with both positive and negative connotations that mean the same thing. Is it wrong for a company to try to use words that don't carry negative connotations?
Having a rough time with that? OK, try this: what's the difference between 'hot babe' and 'skank'?
That being said, actions speak louder than words anyway, so I don't give a flying FOOK what they call it, but it shouldn't have been there in the first place and they'd damn well better fix it fast - the problem - er bug - er issue that is. Resolve it, fix it - remember IBM - may their words haunt you forever:
'If it's a bug, fix it; if you can't, call it a feature.
I am a developer, and I am aware that the only software that has zero bugs is unwritten software.
Maybe yours, my friend...
OTOH I do believe (but cannot prove) an empirical truth I have seen evidence of (time and) ^ n time again: software can always be improved on, no matter how many times it's already been reviewed and tweaked, no matter how many years it's been under scrutiny.
But bugs? No, definitely not - and worse: relaxing here is a direct cop-out. See Mark Minasi's 'The Software Conspiracy' for an excellent diatribe against 'accepting bugs'.
Mediocre programmers cite 'there are always bugs', but people like Theo de Raadt avoid them and an organisation I have been affiliated with found three bugs in eight years in all told hundreds of programs.
There are 'bug-free' programs: believe it. Even if it weren't true, believe it. Accepting bugs is the worst possible stance a programmer can take.
OK, now you'll please excuse me - I have to run for cover...
Definitely. I took it as far as rule 7 before I woke up - I mean who more in the software world need a reality check?
My friend, that is the tragedy as I see it: they really think they have great products. It's unbelievable they think this, but I can offer this tidbit as a possible insight:
In my wayward youth I joined a McDonalds organisation. We're talking frozen cheap shit hamburgers. Their quality team were so fanatic they literally thought they were marketing things of quality on a par with Paul Bocuse - not in so many words, but they treated a Big Mac with freaking REVERENCE.
They're blown upstairs - brainwashed, warped the minute they set foot on the campus. They could work for Nixon's plumbers. They'd be totally convinced they're always doing the right thing.
Lots of people know people working at Microsoft, and I do too, and all I can say is we all shake our heads. At one organisation, a consultant had a twin brother working as product manager at a local Microsoft office. He couldn't talk to his freaking twin brother anymore. If ever they got together (and this guy would now avoid it), his twin would pummel him with Microsoft propaganda until it was coming out of his ears. He called and talked every day for forty five minutes at a stretch and all it was, was more propaganda, and in the end he had no twin brother anymore so to speak and had to tell his twin to stop calling - the Microsoftie twin never got it.
How many people know that Microsoft have an official division called:
SECRET WEAPONS AND NEW TECHNOLOGY
??
I am sure some know of this. I am sure some have met these dudes on their whirlwind world tours. They have such a department - or at least used to.
Ever see Microsofties on a world tour? See how they play tandem on stage? One talks for thirty minutes while the other... Ever check what the other is doing while his partner has the podium?
They call home to Mother. They have to report by phone after every speech or portion thereof and give an account of how things are going - halfway around the world...
And this guy is not going to need a reality check?
Remember Dave: Bill couldn't open his mouth with Dave in the room. Dave didn't mean harm, but Bill is always so full of it and Dave would correct him. In front of his employees. And Bill would look bad. He shut up.
That's not how bad it is: the truth is it's a lot worse. A lot worse.
Don't go scratching your heads wondering why the world's most powerful software company continues to put out the world's shittiest software. Bill knows it's shit; he also knows quality doesn't mean a damn. Control of employees does.