When I was a lad c.a. 14 yrs old we hand punched those hollerith cards using a lookup table on the wall, sent off our cards and lo and behold three weeks later we got back - Syntax error on line 1050.
Rolls eyes. Yeah sure, and it doesn't cost more to QA and test your "portable" (sic) product on all those OS's. It doesn't cost more to roll out updates across those OS's. It doesn't cost more to get support desk people to support all those OS's in all those configurations... How many Linux distros are there? Do you really understand how support heavy some software houses are? Coders are a minority...
If you just code and do nothing else then fine, I can see you won't see the problems. OK, here's a *simple* example from c.a. 1990: You have a simple dictionary program which runs on MS-DOS (using a memory swapping TSR). Three editions. Easy huh? Wrong - dead wrong - try QA/ing that across at least (I stopped counting at 13) variants of DOS, network shells, DR-DOS, PC-MOS 386.. (it goes on and on).
Oh and by the way marketing doesn't want pirates to be able to take the Lite version and use it with the "Pro" files etc. etc..
(That's just in this example a little Greek-English dictionary called Gword).
This was also a good example of insane copy protection as it (I fought this hard but lost!) locked to many of the hardware features of the machine it installed on. Net result: the more copies the company sold, the more support calls generated for new S/N's...
The funniest thing was that someone *did* hack me (yippee!) and I got sent a SYMDEB script to patch the code. Took a while to stop laughing about that.
The later windows version only had a registration number and was (is?) widely pirated, but I always took the view that it was a good advert for the company anyway...
Re "most users don't want tech support" - here's another anecdote, this time from the mid 80's. When I was at TDI in Bristol UK in the 80's porting the UCSD p-system one of my colleagues ported it to the Sinclair QL. TDI had decided that there was to be *no* tech support for this system. Very clearly in the manual it said that. Didn't stop Sinclair QL users swamping tech support - nobody reads the manual anyway.
Recently when I was browsing some articles on wikipedia for Wallace and Gromit, I came across a comment that in the US versions "Happy Birthday" was replaced by another song. So here is perhaps the most insane example of US copyright...
See for instance the difference between Heroes of Might and Magic III and IV. The graphics styling on IV make it really hard to find anything.
TFA's designer comments re change in environments was interesting too - and anyone wanting to see exactly how dull things can get with limited
graphics props ought to checkout the game "Nightstone" (no not darkstone) which on the
surface is diablo like, but manages somehow to completely miss the point...
.. Ha! They took the *wrong* computers. What the parent is saying is that the "public" machines run Deep Freeze or another program which starts out in a clean state every time you reboot. Yes, you would use this for the public workstations (if you have any sense). Either the "agents" were complete twerps or they really took the servers... (which I hope weren't public...)
If you think *those* plans are bad, then consider the case here in Greece, where a while ago (and probably now) there were plans which were 5MB
(yes I did say that) and 50MB per month with effectively 1 euro per MB over that. One week after I warned a friend of mine about "reading
the small print" he got slapped with a 500 euro bill. Cellular internet is a real no-no unless you're just checking your email - consider the
traffic watching a few youtube videos per day...
The FSM only knows how big the bill would be if you torrent (or more likely run Limewire or Bearshare)
See here (a very well known biological stain) - so short term toxicity is probably well understood - long term? Who knows yet. At the very least it ought to open the way to a new class of drugs for this terrible condition
Mostly HP, Acer notebooks, but also at least one new Sony (scrabble keyboard). The worst so far was a brand new Toshiba Satellite A300 - couldn't find XP support for the card reader or onboard modem for love nor money... (oh, and the sound driver left the built in mic completely deaf (with no mic boost)). So, watch out if you're upgrading.
FWIW, built in webcams on most new notebooks work out of the box with no drivers (for which I'm thankful).
The real issue is - user perception. If any of the "Apple Clones" which *run* (consider the emphasis here) OSX take off to any great extent then Apple
will get tarred and feathered with any problems users get as a result.
Apple is a hell of a lot smaller outfit than Microsoft, and even MS had a pretty strict HCL in the old pre win2k days.
For slashdotters, simply playing around and kicking the tyres, sure - most of us *know* the risks we'd be taking. For Joe Sixpack, well - he or she (!) doesn't.
Incidentally, the Apple sticker thing is an old trick - back in the early 80's Whitesmiths had a Unix V6 clone called "Idris" (which ran on old machines like the Sage/Stride 68k boxen). The joke was that the Floppies for Idris were free and the sticker was $1000.
At the end of the day I guess Apple will pull the old IBM trick of printing some stuff (for IBM it was the BIOS source) in the manual and relying on copyright to at least temporarily hose cloners...
Programming per se seems dull when you're that age, so you really want something where he can play and *see* stuff. So, I'd suggest an emulator
for the good old Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Amiga or whatever. You need to do a little research to find
out which has a good lively user community though.
A bit further down the line you might get a gameboy advance emulator e.g. VisualBoy Advance and devkitpro. Nothing beats banging the metal for sheer excitement. Before you know it he'll be writing *new* games for the DS...
Oh, and don't forget to set him some pretty programming tasks like the gingerbread man, mandelbrot set etc....
can be found here(Gliese 581) and here(Gliese 581c). It's a sad day when wikipedia seems to be more reliable than SciAm, but oh well, the rot set in many years ago...
Mod parent up. The other reason is IE6 is "in the tin" with XP. Slashdotters (who are a minority of a minority anyway) might be puzzled as to why
plenty of people don't upgrade to IE7 or use firefox, but I sure wouldn't upgrade my friend's internet cafe to 7 - the result would be 30-40% of
the users not being able to use a browser. Why? Because *any* change is traumatic to people who learnt how to do something by rote. Simply moving
the webcam button in Yahoo Messenger gives a substantial fraction grief - so IE6 -> IE7 , no
way. (I've managed to wean some users from IE to firefox but I'd guess that's only about 20-30%. Hopefully now I'm rolling out 3.01 FF (today!) I'll persuade a few more).
Observationally, IE6 on a 2.4GHz celeron is *slower* loading pages than FF3 on my ancient toshiba (celeron 500).
I respectfully have to disagree with you. Given the *scale* of the engineering at the LHC. Lord knows what safety procedures you need (quench
anyone?). It's not the temperature that's the thing, it's maintaining the whole darned thing at that temperature... Engineering is *always* in the
details, and oh my god the LHC has most of those maxed out to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
You can only get blase about this if you think
E.E.Doc Smith's space operas are dull..
You've hit the nail on the head. Even this techie of 25 years in the business gets annoyed by the ivory tower attitude - Linux on the desktop is one thing, but Linux publicly visible in internet cafes? Sure, if your customers don't need to use Yahoo Messenger as a video phone to their families half way around the planet. Don't even get me mumbling curses about the project formerly known as Gaim.
(Explanation: many many internet cafe customers at least from my experience here in Athens Greece really want a videophone appliance, and access to some social networking sites - they don't care about the OS. Even more to the point they've learnt just enough by *rote* to talk to their kids - even resizing windows or copying files phases them. Anything other than a clone of the whatever windows messenger is a no no for them).
Observationally it breaks down like this:
Egyptians - mostly yahoo msgr, 6arab.com
Moroccans,Tunisians - mostly windows live
Filipino - yahoo messenger, friendster.
Bulgarians - skype, mIRC
oh , and even if you get past the messenger level, how about font/language support for my
friends who speak amharic, sinhala etc?
Good luck with that
Incidentally, one of the driving factors in upgrading Vista to XP (at least in my experience) is that many new first time users are *already* using XP in an internet cafe. (A quick comment here to enlighten the more abstracted slashdotters - the change in Yahoo Messenger 9 moving the webcam button from the toolbar phases about 60-80% of users the first time).
If it's assembler then write pseudo ADA comments which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the badly
commented code following - Bonus points if the pseudo code itself has bugs...
If it's Delphi code make all units UNITx, all forms FORMx and all variables equally inanely named - if it's good enough for most Delphi books
then obviously it's the right way to do things
Avoid function prototypes - if it was good enough for Brian and Dennis it's good enough for
anyone
Overload operators in surprising and pleasing ways, preferably so that "-" does bitwise set
inclusion
Use macros extensively (without ()() because everyone knows only losers need them).
Mix tabs and spaces indiscriminately
Pick at least *two* styles for braces - Bonus points for gratuitously adding them where they
aren't needed - (to really make the reader happy use the "{" on next line style here)(extra points if you are mixing tabs and spaces)
Use if (1==x) , (x==1) and just plain old if (foo) randomly to add variety
Write big huge case (switch) statements spanning 5 pages because no one would possibly understand
dispatch tables
Seriously though, if you're programming anywhere you're expected to conform to the local customs, wacky and out of it or not. It's part of the adaptability expected of a programmer...
Back around 1988-89, I was working for a largish Greek software developer. At the time, they had one Stride 68000 machine with all their dev software (libraries, apps etc.) (p-system).
Well, one monday morning I rolled in a little late with a hangover and was real puzzled that all the programmers were playing cards, reading newspapers and doing anything except programming. When I asked I was told - "But Andy, there's *no* software".
"Oh come on, you're joking right?"
"No software. No libraries, No source".
(scratches head, curses, signs in with the CTO's password (heh!) and sure enough - No software.
All the disk volumes except the OS wiped clean.
"OK, we have a backup right?"
"Sure, Alexis has it"
(... in the meantime Mike, the CTO arrives).
Andy to Mike - "We have a little problem...."
One hour later Alexis walks in, sits down at his desk and reads his newspaper. Two minutes later, various clearly audible (from 100km away) discussions about the feeping backup.
It turns out that Alexis had gotten cross when the backup did a full rather than incremental backup so in a fit of anger he scrubbed the system clean.
That folks is how Singular Computer Applications almost died c.a. 1989.
(I won't even describe the chaos the same person did to a running Novell server - things get interesting when logged in users are deleted (especially when they're still building programs)).
But you're right about the "run over by bus" thing. At Singular, if the CTO had been hosed in the early days the company would have died - he'd written most if not all of the core libraries.
Don't shoot the poor guy or gal in the middle who made the snap decision. I guess in an outfit the size of UbiSoft it takes about 6 months to get anything approved.
Top management want answers *yesterday* regardless...
More to the point, you've got to understand the psychology of some management people. Here's an example - "we don't steal software". Five minutes later a request to load a boatload of stolen software onto a customers machine.
The truth is though that a widely used crack has likely seen more testing than any delta a maintenance programmer would cook up - although
any sane dev team *already* has at least conditionally compiled code which builds to a No
CD or backup CD version.
(You don't really tell *everything* to the people in marketting do you?).
Ubisoft should at least do the right thing a la Epic and some time after the initial release has made enough cash release a real update which doesn't need the CD or at least plays off a CD image . (c.f. Unreal Tournament).
Aha, the new Emacs vs. Vi debate. But of course there *is* another major project which always gets forgotten on slashdot - thats Firebird.
(Around 1989-90 I evaluated most of the commercial SQL DB's for Unix for a company here in Greece. None were particular good back then - we would have *killed* for any of the current crop). You youngsters are *spoilt* I tell you!
Slashdot Mirror
to pick up both the knife and the fork...
Andy
Andy
Andy
If you just code and do nothing else then fine, I can see you won't see the problems. OK, here's a *simple* example from c.a. 1990: You have a simple dictionary program which runs on MS-DOS (using a memory swapping TSR). Three editions. Easy huh? Wrong - dead wrong - try QA/ing that across at least (I stopped counting at 13) variants of DOS, network shells, DR-DOS, PC-MOS 386.. (it goes on and on). Oh and by the way marketing doesn't want pirates to be able to take the Lite version and use it with the "Pro" files etc. etc.. (That's just in this example a little Greek-English dictionary called Gword).
This was also a good example of insane copy protection as it (I fought this hard but lost!) locked to many of the hardware features of the machine it installed on. Net result: the more copies the company sold, the more support calls generated for new S/N's...
The funniest thing was that someone *did* hack me (yippee!) and I got sent a SYMDEB script to patch the code. Took a while to stop laughing about that. The later windows version only had a registration number and was (is?) widely pirated, but I always took the view that it was a good advert for the company anyway...
Re "most users don't want tech support" - here's another anecdote, this time from the mid 80's. When I was at TDI in Bristol UK in the 80's porting the UCSD p-system one of my colleagues ported it to the Sinclair QL. TDI had decided that there was to be *no* tech support for this system. Very clearly in the manual it said that. Didn't stop Sinclair QL users swamping tech support - nobody reads the manual anyway.
Andy
Andy
TFA's designer comments re change in environments was interesting too - and anyone wanting to see exactly how dull things can get with limited graphics props ought to checkout the game "Nightstone" (no not darkstone) which on the surface is diablo like, but manages somehow to completely miss the point...
Andy
Andy
You see, I know a lot of people who've bought potentially affected machines just for "videophone" use to their families
- people for whom a thousand euros is a lot of money.
(In many cases their first (ever) notebook or computer).
Even if you get a replacement, or you apply the bios fan kludge, you're *still* going to end up with a dead notebook
- it just might take a while after the warranty ends. Treat this one like the "bad caps" motherboard problem -
get your replacement and sell it really really quickly!
Does anyone know if ambient temperature plays a part in the failure? or is it temperature cycling?
Andy
The FSM only knows how big the bill would be if you torrent (or more likely run Limewire or Bearshare)
Andy
Andy
Andy
FWIW, built in webcams on most new notebooks work out of the box with no drivers (for which I'm thankful).
Andy
Apple is a hell of a lot smaller outfit than Microsoft, and even MS had a pretty strict HCL in the old pre win2k days.
For slashdotters, simply playing around and kicking the tyres, sure - most of us *know* the risks we'd be taking. For Joe Sixpack, well - he or she (!) doesn't.
Incidentally, the Apple sticker thing is an old trick - back in the early 80's Whitesmiths had a Unix V6 clone called "Idris" (which ran on old machines like the Sage/Stride 68k boxen). The joke was that the Floppies for Idris were free and the sticker was $1000.
At the end of the day I guess Apple will pull the old IBM trick of printing some stuff (for IBM it was the BIOS source) in the manual and relying on copyright to at least temporarily hose cloners...
Andy
A bit further down the line you might get a gameboy advance emulator e.g. VisualBoy Advance and devkitpro. Nothing beats banging the metal for sheer excitement. Before you know it he'll be writing *new* games for the DS...
Oh, and don't forget to set him some pretty programming tasks like the gingerbread man, mandelbrot set etc....
Andy
Quick Lime = Calcium Oxide
Andy
Andy
Observationally, IE6 on a 2.4GHz celeron is *slower* loading pages than FF3 on my ancient toshiba (celeron 500).
Andy
Andy
(Explanation: many many internet cafe customers at least from my experience here in Athens Greece really want a videophone appliance, and access to some social networking sites - they don't care about the OS. Even more to the point they've learnt just enough by *rote* to talk to their kids - even resizing windows or copying files phases them. Anything other than a clone of the whatever windows messenger is a no no for them).
Observationally it breaks down like this:
Egyptians - mostly yahoo msgr, 6arab.com
Moroccans,Tunisians - mostly windows live
Filipino - yahoo messenger, friendster.
Bulgarians - skype, mIRC
oh , and even if you get past the messenger level, how about font/language support for my friends who speak amharic, sinhala etc?
Good luck with that
Incidentally, one of the driving factors in upgrading Vista to XP (at least in my experience) is that many new first time users are *already* using XP in an internet cafe. (A quick comment here to enlighten the more abstracted slashdotters - the change in Yahoo Messenger 9 moving the webcam button from the toolbar phases about 60-80% of users the first time).
Andy
If it's assembler then write pseudo ADA comments which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the badly commented code following - Bonus points if the pseudo code itself has bugs...
If it's Delphi code make all units UNITx, all forms FORMx and all variables equally inanely named - if it's good enough for most Delphi books then obviously it's the right way to do things
Avoid function prototypes - if it was good enough for Brian and Dennis it's good enough for anyone
Overload operators in surprising and pleasing ways, preferably so that "-" does bitwise set inclusion
Use macros extensively (without ()() because everyone knows only losers need them).
Mix tabs and spaces indiscriminately
Pick at least *two* styles for braces - Bonus points for gratuitously adding them where they aren't needed - (to really make the reader happy use the "{" on next line style here)(extra points if you are mixing tabs and spaces)
Use if (1==x) , (x==1) and just plain old if (foo) randomly to add variety
Write big huge case (switch) statements spanning 5 pages because no one would possibly understand dispatch tables
Seriously though, if you're programming anywhere you're expected to conform to the local customs, wacky and out of it or not. It's part of the adaptability expected of a programmer...
Andy
Well, one monday morning I rolled in a little late with a hangover and was real puzzled that all the programmers were playing cards, reading newspapers and doing anything except programming. When I asked I was told - "But Andy, there's *no* software".
"Oh come on, you're joking right?" "No software. No libraries, No source". (scratches head, curses, signs in with the CTO's password (heh!) and sure enough - No software. All the disk volumes except the OS wiped clean. "OK, we have a backup right?" "Sure, Alexis has it" (... in the meantime Mike, the CTO arrives). Andy to Mike - "We have a little problem...." One hour later Alexis walks in, sits down at his desk and reads his newspaper. Two minutes later, various clearly audible (from 100km away) discussions about the feeping backup.
It turns out that Alexis had gotten cross when the backup did a full rather than incremental backup so in a fit of anger he scrubbed the system clean. That folks is how Singular Computer Applications almost died c.a. 1989.
(I won't even describe the chaos the same person did to a running Novell server - things get interesting when logged in users are deleted (especially when they're still building programs)).
But you're right about the "run over by bus" thing. At Singular, if the CTO had been hosed in the early days the company would have died - he'd written most if not all of the core libraries.
Andy
Top management want answers *yesterday* regardless...
More to the point, you've got to understand the psychology of some management people. Here's an example - "we don't steal software". Five minutes later a request to load a boatload of stolen software onto a customers machine.
The truth is though that a widely used crack has likely seen more testing than any delta a maintenance programmer would cook up - although any sane dev team *already* has at least conditionally compiled code which builds to a No CD or backup CD version.
(You don't really tell *everything* to the people in marketting do you?).
Ubisoft should at least do the right thing a la Epic and some time after the initial release has made enough cash release a real update which doesn't need the CD or at least plays off a CD image . (c.f. Unreal Tournament).
Andy
(Around 1989-90 I evaluated most of the commercial SQL DB's for Unix for a company here in Greece. None were particular good back then - we would have *killed* for any of the current crop). You youngsters are *spoilt* I tell you!
Andy
it *downloads* real player