So I typed out a longer reply, but it just boiled down to "No, it's still just macho bullshit."
So I'll leave it at that.
I certainly wouldn't trust someone who says:
For Microsoft's self-protective skin is really only a show, a lure to the determined engineer, a challenge to see if you're clever enough to rip the covers off. The more it resisted me, the more I knew I would enjoy the pleasure of deleting it.
Two hours later, I was stripping down the system. Layer by layer it fell away. Off came Windows NT 3.51; off came a wayward co-installation of Windows 95 where it overlaid DOS. I said goodbye to video and sound; goodbye wallpaper; goodbye fonts and colors and styles; goodbye windows and icons and menus and buttons and dialogs. All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus.
Or, if you're not a muppet, you could just run fdisk, delete the partitions and prep the disk for a new OS. About 3 minutes work, I'd guess. Ooooh, I'm so clever - I defeated Microsoft!
From that I assume you don't live in the UK - if you did, you'd know how utterly ludicrous it is to rely on the ASA's expert analysis of Operating Systems (or to believe they have much effect at all, in fact).
Most programmers with a Windows background will be forced to make a paradigm shift while embarking to program for Linux. While the Windows programmers are used to taking deceptive comfort within the cozy confines of a Visual IDE, when they make the shift to write Linux programs, they are suddenly faced with the hard facts of programming as it really is.
What a fantastic fantasy world to live in. Did I miss something, or is the software that millions of people run worldwide on Windows PCs somehow not 'real software'? Did the Windows developers who wrote large and/or mainstream applications such as Word, Photoshop, Quark, Winamp, Skype, etc somehow not actually know how to program?
I really would like to hear more about these 'hard facts' of programming...it makes it sound like it is harder to program for Linux - is this supposed to be a good thing? However, I don't believe this, and suspect it's the usual macho Linux bullshit that some F/OSS advocates seem to be afflicted with.
Luckily the rest of us can just get on with programming our software for whatever platform using the most appropriate tools, instead of banging nails in with our fists.
Safari uses its own custom font rendering, so doesn't integrate with Windows font settings, and all the dialogs and dialog controls look like OS X - seriously, try running Safari. It doesn't look like a Windows app at all. Buttons are luminous blue and curved, etc. Some dialogs slide out from underneath the title bar when they appear.
Precisely the kind of thing Mac users lambasted Microsoft for with Office 6, iirc.
Still, at least it maximises when you double-click the title bar, which is more than iTunes for Windows managed to do for a few releases. I could do without the Hitchhikeresque Black Text on Dark Grey Background thing though.
Presumably you never tried early versions of QuickTime or iTunes on Windows either. (Although they're both still a bit Mac-ish.)
QuickTime was the worst - there is no centralised menu bar on Windows, so the QT guys just made one. There was a window with just a menu in it for QTPlayer that would float around, and you'd have separate windows for each movie (with no menu). It was a freaking joke.
And at the same time Apple would write documents to explain to poor Windows devs why the apps they wrote for MacOS would annoy Mac users because they didn't respect the platform's conventions.
The day I trust Sony's views on what makes good software is the day I call up Satan for his advice on which Snow-Plough model gets you to work fastest.
The only amazing thing about this is that it is such a novel insight that it is necessary for you to be modded as such.
And yet, historically it has proven to be incorrect. The usual result of getting hardware developers to write compilers is that you get shitty compilers. The amazing reason for this is that people who spend their career writing compilers turn out to be way better at it than people who spend their career developing hardware.
The Intel compiler is a notable exception - but it wasn't that long ago that code correctness was not that high on the Intel compiler's list of qualities. The code was fast, but not reliable (compared to, e.g. gcc or msvc). To paraphrase Gerald Weinberg, "I can write a program that executes in zero seconds if the output doesn't have to be correct."
Just because you designed the hardware doesn't mean you have the best idea of what goes on in most 'real world' software - in some cases, you can be totally blindsided because you thought you knew best. iirc, some versions of the VAX processor had a bunch of instructions put in that were 'useful for compilers'. The compiler writers took a look at them, and said "Er, no thanks." There are other examples in the field's history.
If SQLite can do the filtering and sorting faster than the difference between parsing SQL and calling a function, then it's a performance win. As I found, this seems likely.
Odd, because that's not been my experience of SQLite at all - I wonder exactly what the chat log stuff was doing, as that seems exactly the kind of thing that SQLite eats for breakfast.
When I read the SQLite mailing list regularly, I was amazed how often people used it for jobs I would have thought to be outside its remit/scope - logging was a common example. People would ask questions about SQLite and mention their multi-gigabyte SQLite DB files with millions of records and I would think "Wow, that must suck in terms of performance." When asked about performance, these people invariable say "Oh no, that's fine, that's not the problem I'm asking about."
So adding a record to a DB whenever a chat message comes in? Seems like gravy for SQLite. I'm curious as to what the hell could cause it to thrash for 10 seconds to perform a single INSERT. Maybe they had lots of indices configured? Even so, 10 seconds still seems like ages.
In my own experience I've written code that converted DBs to SQLite, and did, say, 1000 inserts in the process, and this took a fair amount of time (of the order of 30 seconds, which surprised me), but that's due to the locking model SQLite uses. Wrap it in a transaction and those inserts took 1-2 seconds, iirc.
I'm not doubting the evidence of your own eyes, but I do wonder what the heck was going on there.
I recently got a new Buffalo Linkstation NAS drive, and a nice feature is that the web interface to it has a 'Make a noise!' button so you can tell where it is if you lost it.
Gosh, was it only IE2? Crikey. Well I expect it goes double for IE2 then. I just know it didn't work when I tried it. Can't remember what I did next. Downloaded IE4 via another PC I expect.
That's why (in the UK at least) all such cordless phones have a warning somewhere on the box/in the manual that you should keep a 'regular' wired phone installed for emergency purposes.
This is not the fault of Motorola, it is the fault of your wireless company. Motorola allows the phone company to add any features to the phone that they want, and allows them to "lock" several features so they cannot be changed/deleted/etc.
That reminds me of a great feature of the original version of NT4.
You install it, run the default IE3 to go to www.microsoft.com for updates...and IE3 can't display the page because MS buggered up their home page for IE3...nice.
Reminds of of the 'Palm Vx will kill your motherboard' problem. Oft disputed, but I personally saw it happen to a colleague at work. We were going to lunch, and he wanted to sync his Palm Vx. I watched him place it in the docking cradle (as he had many times before), and the PC's screen went black and all the fans and lights went off. The motherboard never worked again.
I once had to use a Motorola tri-band phone when I went to the US on a trip.
When you turned the phone on, it would do about a second of vibrate to let you know it had turned on. Apparently the screen display wasn't sufficient.
This is MIND-NUMBINGLY stupid, because if you're running low on battery and you turn off the phone to conserve power until you need to make a call, the vibrate drains the battery when you turn it on.
In fact, I have one of those wind-up chargers that give you about 5 minutes of phone time in emergencies. I tried it on the Motorola phone - the phone turned on, vibrated (thus killing the battery) and then said "No Battery" and turned itself off. Fantastic.
And let's not forget that I couldn't even work out how to set the time on the phone when I arrived in the US. I had to consult a colleague who owned a Motorola phone and 'knew the trick' (it's on a hidden or 'extended' menu or something).
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Actually that ad wasn't that great (imho) - but this one is much better, and is one of my favourite ads ever.
Same basic principle but just executed much better, I think. And I love the last line of the ad.
The Dark Ages called. They want their crass ignorance back.
So I typed out a longer reply, but it just boiled down to "No, it's still just macho bullshit."
So I'll leave it at that.
I certainly wouldn't trust someone who says:
For Microsoft's self-protective skin is really only a show, a lure to the determined engineer, a challenge to see if you're clever enough to rip the covers off. The more it resisted me, the more I knew I would enjoy the pleasure of deleting it.Two hours later, I was stripping down the system. Layer by layer it fell away. Off came Windows NT 3.51; off came a wayward co-installation of Windows 95 where it overlaid DOS. I said goodbye to video and sound; goodbye wallpaper; goodbye fonts and colors and styles; goodbye windows and icons and menus and buttons and dialogs. All the lovely graphical skins turned to so much bitwise detritus.
Or, if you're not a muppet, you could just run fdisk, delete the partitions and prep the disk for a new OS. About 3 minutes work, I'd guess. Ooooh, I'm so clever - I defeated Microsoft!
From that I assume you don't live in the UK - if you did, you'd know how utterly ludicrous it is to rely on the ASA's expert analysis of Operating Systems (or to believe they have much effect at all, in fact).
For Word, I really don't think so. To be clear, I'm talking about programming as separate from UI design, of course.
Especially Quark.I may have to let you have Quark, though :)
What a fantastic fantasy world to live in. Did I miss something, or is the software that millions of people run worldwide on Windows PCs somehow not 'real software'? Did the Windows developers who wrote large and/or mainstream applications such as Word, Photoshop, Quark, Winamp, Skype, etc somehow not actually know how to program?
I really would like to hear more about these 'hard facts' of programming...it makes it sound like it is harder to program for Linux - is this supposed to be a good thing? However, I don't believe this, and suspect it's the usual macho Linux bullshit that some F/OSS advocates seem to be afflicted with.
Luckily the rest of us can just get on with programming our software for whatever platform using the most appropriate tools, instead of banging nails in with our fists.
Safari uses its own custom font rendering, so doesn't integrate with Windows font settings, and all the dialogs and dialog controls look like OS X - seriously, try running Safari. It doesn't look like a Windows app at all. Buttons are luminous blue and curved, etc. Some dialogs slide out from underneath the title bar when they appear.
Precisely the kind of thing Mac users lambasted Microsoft for with Office 6, iirc.
Still, at least it maximises when you double-click the title bar, which is more than iTunes for Windows managed to do for a few releases. I could do without the Hitchhikeresque Black Text on Dark Grey Background thing though.
Presumably you never tried early versions of QuickTime or iTunes on Windows either. (Although they're both still a bit Mac-ish.)
QuickTime was the worst - there is no centralised menu bar on Windows, so the QT guys just made one. There was a window with just a menu in it for QTPlayer that would float around, and you'd have separate windows for each movie (with no menu). It was a freaking joke.
And at the same time Apple would write documents to explain to poor Windows devs why the apps they wrote for MacOS would annoy Mac users because they didn't respect the platform's conventions.
...Sony have a fecking clue about software.
The day I trust Sony's views on what makes good software is the day I call up Satan for his advice on which Snow-Plough model gets you to work fastest.
...uses sentences like:
"Do you have a specific ask of Microsoft?"Er, that would be a question or request, you tosser.
And:
I would much prefer that we reached an amicable solution, but I don't feel that we're trending in that direction.Hateful. Just hateful. The guy probably spends most of the day synergising his potentials.
Q. What do you call 100 dead language lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
A. Microsoft UK
And yet, historically it has proven to be incorrect. The usual result of getting hardware developers to write compilers is that you get shitty compilers. The amazing reason for this is that people who spend their career writing compilers turn out to be way better at it than people who spend their career developing hardware.
The Intel compiler is a notable exception - but it wasn't that long ago that code correctness was not that high on the Intel compiler's list of qualities. The code was fast, but not reliable (compared to, e.g. gcc or msvc). To paraphrase Gerald Weinberg, "I can write a program that executes in zero seconds if the output doesn't have to be correct."
Just because you designed the hardware doesn't mean you have the best idea of what goes on in most 'real world' software - in some cases, you can be totally blindsided because you thought you knew best. iirc, some versions of the VAX processor had a bunch of instructions put in that were 'useful for compilers'. The compiler writers took a look at them, and said "Er, no thanks." There are other examples in the field's history.
Look closer.
If you're counting that, then the PS2 is an example of an extremely widely-used parallel system. I think the topic is referring to SMP though.
Odd, because that's not been my experience of SQLite at all - I wonder exactly what the chat log stuff was doing, as that seems exactly the kind of thing that SQLite eats for breakfast.
When I read the SQLite mailing list regularly, I was amazed how often people used it for jobs I would have thought to be outside its remit/scope - logging was a common example. People would ask questions about SQLite and mention their multi-gigabyte SQLite DB files with millions of records and I would think "Wow, that must suck in terms of performance." When asked about performance, these people invariable say "Oh no, that's fine, that's not the problem I'm asking about."
So adding a record to a DB whenever a chat message comes in? Seems like gravy for SQLite. I'm curious as to what the hell could cause it to thrash for 10 seconds to perform a single INSERT. Maybe they had lots of indices configured? Even so, 10 seconds still seems like ages.
In my own experience I've written code that converted DBs to SQLite, and did, say, 1000 inserts in the process, and this took a fair amount of time (of the order of 30 seconds, which surprised me), but that's due to the locking model SQLite uses. Wrap it in a transaction and those inserts took 1-2 seconds, iirc.
I'm not doubting the evidence of your own eyes, but I do wonder what the heck was going on there.
I recently got a new Buffalo Linkstation NAS drive, and a nice feature is that the web interface to it has a 'Make a noise!' button so you can tell where it is if you lost it.
Gosh, was it only IE2? Crikey. Well I expect it goes double for IE2 then. I just know it didn't work when I tried it. Can't remember what I did next. Downloaded IE4 via another PC I expect.
That's why (in the UK at least) all such cordless phones have a warning somewhere on the box/in the manual that you should keep a 'regular' wired phone installed for emergency purposes.
The fact that someone produced a turbo loader for the C64 tape drive that loaded data faster than the 1541? :-)
So, in other words, it is the fault of Motorola?
Because it's shiny! :-)
Cursor keys are your friend.
That reminds me of a great feature of the original version of NT4.
You install it, run the default IE3 to go to www.microsoft.com for updates...and IE3 can't display the page because MS buggered up their home page for IE3...nice.
Reminds of of the 'Palm Vx will kill your motherboard' problem. Oft disputed, but I personally saw it happen to a colleague at work. We were going to lunch, and he wanted to sync his Palm Vx. I watched him place it in the docking cradle (as he had many times before), and the PC's screen went black and all the fans and lights went off. The motherboard never worked again.
I once had to use a Motorola tri-band phone when I went to the US on a trip.
When you turned the phone on, it would do about a second of vibrate to let you know it had turned on. Apparently the screen display wasn't sufficient.
This is MIND-NUMBINGLY stupid, because if you're running low on battery and you turn off the phone to conserve power until you need to make a call, the vibrate drains the battery when you turn it on.
In fact, I have one of those wind-up chargers that give you about 5 minutes of phone time in emergencies. I tried it on the Motorola phone - the phone turned on, vibrated (thus killing the battery) and then said "No Battery" and turned itself off. Fantastic.
And let's not forget that I couldn't even work out how to set the time on the phone when I arrived in the US. I had to consult a colleague who owned a Motorola phone and 'knew the trick' (it's on a hidden or 'extended' menu or something).