Greatest Software Ever Written 4229

Heh. I was going to write a header blurb warning about the earthquake that should be happening. :-)

I've been noticing that people take pride in this and have made it a religion to spread their anti-knowledge. I have relatives who take pride in staying ignorant.

Possibly. You're not as parnoid as I am.

Without those, nothing would have been accomplished as fast as they have in this biz. Instead of taking 100 years to mature, the biz (with the use of the two above) seems to have matured within 20 years. Note that my time estimates are always off by 10 years. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's important.

DDT did that in real time so you could debug that category of problem. And when it came to comm mixed with people, you had to do realtime debugging. IRMA bit was the first of this flavor that I can remember in our lore; I'm sure there were others. Any CATCH22 problem was usually wall-clock timing. How many times did people have to debug a problem where something happened before it should have? You can't do that with print statements because it takes too long to get that stuff out (you have to swapin the code that prints it).

Now your approach might work with apps that behave serially. You cannot do this with software that is event driven. And anything with a priority interrupt mechanism underneath it has to have a realtime debugging mechanism that will not get in the way of the end of the problem. Reproduction is most important thing when trying to do anything on a computer.

You show a hardware type how to use DDT and they love it because it allows them to see the other side of the system. Combine that with their scopes, and they were able to put any fire out. It was no accident that a really pesky hardware problem required the field service god and the system's analyst working together. Without working systems, you cannot go on to the next innovation.

And that, my son, is a perspective from the OS POV. Without an OS, computer gear is only very expensive measurement devices.

Yes. It gave us manufacturers customers who wanted to buy more. This all is a dependency issue. It reminds me of James Burke's (I think that's the guy) Connections shows. I love chicken egg scenarios because it shows the "bit flows" of knowledge.

We will once people get to start playing with quantum computing results. The biz has no idea what use, if any, that gear will give. In about 10 years' time, when kiddies are allowed to really play with computing and not barred from investigating stuff by an anal retentive OS which is designed to prevent innovations, we're going to see tons of side effects that will not be attributed to computing. Think about autos and planes and all the things within society that were made possible because travel became short-term, safe, fixable, and accepted.

There is a kid who is doing rocket science; he's using teensy camcorder and computers to capture his data. And it's good data with more precision and accuracy than big science insbreastutions had 20 years ago. Any backyard can become a rocket science lab. Kids no longer have to go to Goddard to get started playing with real science.

This is f***ing significant.

emotion gets dizzy from lack of air on its high soapbox and clambers down

BAH

BAH