Isn't there some law about this? Law of weak abstractions or something? From what I understand, basically all program languages don't do a good job of simplifying the way to make a computer do what you want it to do. There is always some little detail/trick below the surface that the language cannot deal with or deals with in a peculiar way. So... learning how the lower level stuff works will only improve your mastery of the higher level stuff. Assembly language is as close to the hardware is your going to get. You have to read hardware manuals to actually do any REAL work in assembly, otherwise you are just writing non portable code.
Was it my my university professor, or Djikstra, or someone else who come up with this law?
Woah there my trigger happy friend. No need shoot any M$onsters with magic silver bullets. I don't know who's trying to sell you them, but I recommend you keep away. If we keep shooting them silver bullets, our house will eventually fall down from all them holes we shot into it.
My post was just to keep watering that seed in the minds of slashdotters. Alternatives to Windows software appear all the time and it could be just about time to have another look at your systems and where those real needs and costs are.
Hi Tech company in Taiwan says "Hey, D-Link we have NTP! Want to OEM our BL-8000?" D-Link either says yes or asks their current OEM "I don't know what the hell NTP is, but why don't you have it?".
In either case some lowly engineer, being paid in noodles, is told to put NTP on their router by tommorrow morning or get their noodles elsewhere.
Bad design decisions often follow bad management decisions.
A year or so ago I sat in on a marketing seminiar by a purveyor of their own embedded linux (This one looked like lots of it had been lifted from Snapgear linux)
It had been rumored that the company had financial backing from a LARGE chip manufacturer. It was very professional and it looked like they had spent a lot of money on the marketing material. It didn't look like a sandle wearing kernel hacker had put it together and I was quite impressed with the demo. But marketing isn't just about fancy demos and expensive looking pens with laser pointers in them.
At the end an attendee stood up and asked "How is licensing your linux based software stack going to be cost effective for us?" No answer was given at the meeting.
My boss made a phone call to them later because the company was going through a software crisis (I was leaving). They wouldn't speak to him unless he paid $100,000US up front. And they still wanted a large per unit license fee after that. He certainly couldn't see any "value proposition" and considering this news, I imagine not many people have since.
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Isn't there some law about this? Law of weak abstractions or something? From what I understand, basically all program languages don't do a good job of simplifying the way to make a computer do what you want it to do. There is always some little detail/trick below the surface that the language cannot deal with or deals with in a peculiar way. So... learning how the lower level stuff works will only improve your mastery of the higher level stuff. Assembly language is as close to the hardware is your going to get. You have to read hardware manuals to actually do any REAL work in assembly, otherwise you are just writing non portable code.
Was it my my university professor, or Djikstra, or someone else who come up with this law?
Woah there my trigger happy friend. No need shoot any M$onsters with magic silver bullets. I don't know who's trying to sell you them, but I recommend you keep away. If we keep shooting them silver bullets, our house will eventually fall down from all them holes we shot into it. My post was just to keep watering that seed in the minds of slashdotters. Alternatives to Windows software appear all the time and it could be just about time to have another look at your systems and where those real needs and costs are.
(chorus) Switch to GNU/Linux.
Hi Tech company in Taiwan says "Hey, D-Link we have NTP! Want to OEM our BL-8000?" D-Link either says yes or asks their current OEM "I don't know what the hell NTP is, but why don't you have it?". In either case some lowly engineer, being paid in noodles, is told to put NTP on their router by tommorrow morning or get their noodles elsewhere. Bad design decisions often follow bad management decisions.
A year or so ago I sat in on a marketing seminiar by a purveyor of their own embedded linux (This one looked like lots of it had been lifted from Snapgear linux)
It had been rumored that the company had financial backing from a LARGE chip manufacturer. It was very professional and it looked like they had spent a lot of money on the marketing material. It didn't look like a sandle wearing kernel hacker had put it together and I was quite impressed with the demo. But marketing isn't just about fancy demos and expensive looking pens with laser pointers in them.
At the end an attendee stood up and asked "How is licensing your linux based software stack going to be cost effective for us?" No answer was given at the meeting.
My boss made a phone call to them later because the company was going through a software crisis (I was leaving). They wouldn't speak to him unless he paid $100,000US up front. And they still wanted a large per unit license fee after that. He certainly couldn't see any "value proposition" and considering this news, I imagine not many people have since.