3 Aug
2006
3 Aug
'06
10:05 a.m.
On Thursday 03 August 2006 12:40 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 8/3/2006 at 12:11 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I have observed from *way* back when the tendency on the part of those folks
to say one thing and then get you to commit and then they turn around and
nail you. One of the reasons I don't want to do business with them, ever.
In my view it's not necessary or desirable to do business like that, much as
they may differ on that issue. I don't care how much money billyboy is
throwing at his various chosen charities, looking at how he got that money
in the first place kinda puts me off of any appreciation of that whatsoever.
A floppy driver? Why? This isn't making
sense to me at the moment (gotta
go get that second cup of coffee I guess...)
'Cause the OS says you have to. There was a huge grumble of displeasure in
the NT community after MS assured developers that NT 4.0 kernel-mode
drivers would work just fine with 2K. And they did--until RC1, when, just
a month or two before official launch, you discovered that you had to
implement the complete litany of power management services or you'd get a
BSOD. I haven't even looked at Vista requirements
yet--and probably won't until
Vista's released because MS is making the same claim "You can use XP
drivers on Vista". Sometimes, it seems to me that OS software at Microsoft
is created as a sort of involuntary spasm.
Right.
"We're not lying to you this time, honest!"
I won't bother looking at any of that stuff these days, in spite of the fact
that I could have involved myself with it a while back and probably have
managed a comfortable living out of it instead of struggling. It's a
treadmill I have no intention of getting on.
But as to why software is buggy and complex, consider
ACPI. One of the
densest, most incomprehensible, violated-in-practice "standards" that
exists on the face of the planet.
Hm. From wikipedia, "developed by HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and
Toshiba". There's a clue, probably.
Or, consider the way the already-complex USB standard
has "bloomed" since
1.0.
I still have nothing here that uses USB, and no near-term plans to acquire
anything. Someone pointed out that the reason for the proliferation of it is
driven by manufacturing costs, with cabling and connectors and such being
much more expensive than small bits of silicon running the necessary drivers
to deal with it, which strikes me as being perhaps accurate, but since I
already _have_ the cabling and connectors and whatnot and I'm not planning on
doing any manufacturing I'm not going to worry about it.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin