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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pink Minion who wrote (602)	1/23/1998 1:54:00 AM
From: Kal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1600

Anyone heard the DOJ-MS partial agreement? I feel the gov is chikening. Seems to me MS will get its way. opinions?

To: Pink Minion who wrote (602)	1/23/1998 3:26:00 AM
From: K. M. Strickler	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1600

You have made some very good points to be sure. Let's tak a look! I have always believed that it was the programmers job to write and document code so that it could be followed by the programmers that follow. Any programmer can write OO code, and do it in any language they choose. What bothers me more is that I now have a multitude of people trying to tell me how to write my code! If it is so damn easy, they can do it themselves. All of a sudden there is a hush in the room because many of the 'programmers' that are churned out today are not much more than 'macro-hackers' who write a few macros and paste them in a shell provided by another party, then release the software as some great inovation! As for the 2 byte date problem, where were you when 128K Ram was all ther was and storage cost $.30 a bit? It is really easy to look back and see the errors we made at the time, but we were forced into some pretty tight spots. In 1961, I was working on a vacuum tube computer complex ( 2 computers, each w/50,000+ vacuum tubes) which had 65K of 32 bit core memory (called Big Mem) and a smaller 4K (called Little Mem), 12 drums which stored 4K for a total of 96K. The complex had a steady state power load of 3megawatts, and we had 6 - 970hp diesel generators, 4 of which had to be online at all time to power the complex. With this we monitored 870,000 square miles of airspace tracking hundreds of aircraft at speeds up to 3000+ mph. Try anything but machine language here, and you are out of room, NOW! By the way, the computer clock was 1Mhz. Carefully constructed code was required to make that work. Jump ahead 35 years, and everybody has multi-megs of RAM, multi-Gigs of Disks and speeds in the 300+ Mhz range. As for the telephone problems, I have done a tour of duty there also. You want to try to write code that will tolerate some jerk knocking out a 2400 pair feeder cable, or try striking your system with lightening once or twice. See how she holds up then! My tour at Bell Northern Research in Canada allowed first hand experience with trying to 'code' around those problems! It may work on paper, but there is nothing like the real world to burn your butt! You know that AT&T was the developer of UNIX, and that is used in the switches today, and you are comfortable with your 100 or maybe 1000 user complex. Try running a complex that has 100,000 on it, and during a 'snow storm' everybody wants to see if it is snowing somewhere? You haven't a clue what a 'real load' is! It all comes down to 'NOTHING IS TOO TOUGH FOR THE PERSON THAT DOESN'T HAVE TO DO IT!' Food for thought. K.M.