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...one of many like phenomena that confirm they're recruited from homes for the autistic and mentally deficient, and before hiring are required to demonstrate absolute illiteracy. Note in this connection that they think "one" is misspelled
Incidentally if you're a Bill contemplating a switch to Mac: Yes it's faster and there's less chance for virus attack but if you're a compulsive writer like me you might be disappointed to find that the latter takes at least twice the number of keystrokes to do nearly anything
dalehileman
OpenOffice does. And it's available for all flavors of software.
I agree with you that something is wrong with The Giants; however, I'm not sure I agree that 'incompetence' is a correct summary.
In the same way, I often feel that some particular thing that M$ does is utterly stupid - and yet I know very well that Bill Gates must be a truly brilliant person. Also, the people whom I personally have known who have gone to work for him are among the smartest people I ever knew. (One was a former intern of mine an the other was a fellow student in my master's program who has since retired a millionaire. I knew her husband better than I knew her, but in a very few conversations I came to the obvious conclusion that she was brilliant.)
Incompetence could be the root problem, as could stupidity. I don't completely write them off - and yet it just doesn't jibe for me.
I have other ideas that for the most part are not as emotionally fulfilling as the conclusion that Bill is an idiot.
1. They are so big and so focused on growth and money, they don't actually have to stop and think about the customer. I saw the same thing happen to SGI. In the beginning they would fall all over themselves trying to help customers, but once they got successful, their phone service became unbearable.
2. They are arrogant. The philosophy of Windows, e.g., is incredibly rude and condescending.
3. They ARE handling their big customers - the medium to huge corporations who buy 500 to 50000 machines at a pop.
4. Operating Systems are just incredibly complex - too complex to manage. That doesn't entirely explain why windows resource management sucks, but it's still true that OSes are among the most complicated things that humans have constructed. We put so much crap in them and so many features - and something's bound to go wrong.
I do not have recent experience with Macs. It's been 17 years since I was a regular user and my understanding is that they have radically changed their underlying OS to some flavor of Unix. This was probably a very good move. Still, it's possible that some of these root problems that I think exist for M$ likewise exist for Apple.
5. (or 4a) Those that actually *implement the OS are mostly simple folk like you and I, who can't possibly grasp the "big picture", whatever that may be.
-joe (simple) friday
time
because I don't speak computerese, and have only been at this
less than a year.
But NBC nightly news last night had Brian Williams warning
that some are out there stealing email addresses to play
computer games. So check virus protectors and firewalls.
If anyone can help the likes of me (and, I presume others)
it would be appreciated.
----please, draw me a sheep----
5. (or 4a) Those that actually *implement the OS are mostly simple folk like you and I, who can't possibly grasp the "big picture", whatever that may be.
-joe (simple) friday
I agree, but I subsume that under 4, complexity. There was a time in the history of programming when the idea of writing programs on the order of a million lines was considered to be extremely high risk - probably even impossible for some companies to undertake. I can imagine that the builders of the first pyramids felt the same hesitation. The history of software engineering is in large part the history of trying to manage complexity - assembler language, high level, general purpose languages, top-down design, structured programming, extreme programming, object-oriented programming, specification writing, design reviews, etc. They all fit specific needs, but one of the over-arching goals is to be able to get a handle on complexity.
Decades ago, the manager types used to consider programmers like any other kind of human resource. Pretty much we are all inter-changeable. To my chagrin, I've met senior management who STILL think this way. But programming has proven itself a unique human activity when examined by industrial engineers.
I can't recall my source or even the exact numbers here, but what I'm about to relate is approximate information: If you take the people who do any job and bin them by performance into quartiles, you discover that in every field the top quartile do about 1.8 times as much work as the bottom. Now you might think that the guys who are going slower do better work, but that's not the case. The faster guys generally are doing better than the slower guys. This figure of 1.8 to 2.0 holds true for a large array of human tasks - with one notable exception, programming. The top quartile of programmers produces about 5 to 10 times as much code as the bottom quartile. It almost always contains fewer errors, is more efficient, and is better engineered than that produced by the bottom quartile. If you break it down finer than quartiles, the effect of comparing the top to bottom is even more startling.
Here's the consequence: in a large s/w project, not everybody working on the team is going to be in the top 1%. Even at the best place you're going to have some of them who are at or below the median; that is, some of the people on a really big project are going to be less than average. But that's okay. That's one of the reasons we have software engineering practices - so we're not 'completely' limited by what the smartest guy can do. We can do pretty amazing things, by having the really, really smart guys do the main design, and maybe some of the initial coding. THEN the other guys who are pretty good, and maybe brilliant, but not quite so brilliant as the others come in and fill things out. But this is much easier to say than it is to do. Sometimes it's like a grandmaster explaining his philosophy to someone who is just, say, a mere expert or a class A or B player. It's not that the mere expert it dumb or incompetent, but getting that vision correctly can be a serious challenge. Not everyone is going to be a grandmaster - no matter how much they study.
An exacerbating factor is that managing projects - and PARTICULARLY managing large projects requires completely different skills from programming. Nevertheless, having a manager who understands the subject area is critical - otherwise, we're back to using questionable heuristics like "programmers are interchangeable."
So to go back to your point which if you are not being sarcastic I answer again, "Yes, I agree."
About neglecting th needs of th hoi polloi (me): You have hit th nail on th head with this one. Google, for instance, is slow to improve because it's th leader and doesn't really need to. For instance Googling "percent" yields a widely different set of hits than "per-cent" possibly necessitating two separate searches
Incidentally and by coincidence Bill/Mac don't recognize "the" as a possible spelling for "th"
dalehileman
and why should they? don't you?
GIGO
formerly known as etaoin...
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