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No. Not when the code is loaded as a user mode program. IOW, this code is does not have a requirement to be...
snip But code loaded as a user mode program .... Doesn't that limit the amount of damage the code can do? which would seem...
When I said "experiment", I was referring to "this is what you guys get when I try to strip all DECese out of my sentences." I would have thought the rest of the sentence would have made that clear. Guess not. Okay, moving on ....
How is the copying of bits being done, then?
Earlier you said:
As an example, the cold-start procedure on the Burroughs-Unisys V-series mainframes involved using the maintenance processor (in latter systems a convergent-Burroughs B25) to load a loader program from its floppy...
What did you mean by "made by the installer"? that's what I was describing as "on-the-fly computation of the bits", but it seems likely that I'm confused.
Can we agree that some discussions of exactly which word to use are productive, and some are not? I'll take your word for it that the ones among bit gods are productive. Some of the ones I've heard among academics don't seem to be.
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I think I must just not get what you mean by "PCthink" or "PCitis". What I buttumed you meant .... It hardly seems possible for someone who works in an environment in which there are many machines that are thought of as multi-user.
So I must not be getting it. Would you be willing to attempt a short explanation of what you mean by "PCitis"?
Could be. I'm not sure what you mean by "how things get developed". If you mean high-level decision-making (about what features are to be included in a new release of a product, say), then yeah, I was never really at that level, and I was putting most of my time and energy into acquiring technical skills and knowledge. I would claim that, having spent some years doing maintenance programming on decade-old software, I do sort of understand the difference between the kinds of programs we encourage students to write in CS courses and what they might have to work on in the real world. (I started to say "the kinds of programs students write in CS courses", and then it occurred to me that the experience I acquired at that job in debugging imperfectly-written and undocumented code was good training for helping beginning students debug their programs. Pressure to finish an buttignment and pressure to ship a product seem to produce somewhat similar results. Your word "mess" applies, I think.)
This is a device driver not an application. That depends on the architecture of the OS. Most device drivers have to be intimate with the kernal in some fashion. I don't know about...
Partly it's a lab; partly it's computing service for some of department members. Agreed that there are differences between what we're doing and what's done by the group that provides computing services to the whole campus. I think if anything I would be more enmeshed in "PCthink" if I worked for that group, however, since they seem very Windows-centric. Perhaps I still don't understand what you mean by "PCitis", though.
I suspect that many of our students field more questions from non-technical people (their non-CS friends and family) than we faculty types do. That might teach them something about the range of user viewpoints. I'll agree, though, that some kinds of learning are difficult to get until one gets one of those "real-world" jobs.
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
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