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On 05/01/2014 23:26, walt wrote: |
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> I'm thinking about the era when GM's CEO complained that if GM made |
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> cars the way Bill made software (I paraphrase) then tow-truck drivers |
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> would be millionaires. |
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> |
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> For several years the IT people where I work have been making hundreds |
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> of lives a living hell because failure is greeted every day with a shrug |
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> and a hostile apology, |
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I know that attitude very well; I'm usually the guy shrugging about |
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software, along with a |
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"what the fuck do you want me to do about it? I didn't write that code" |
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where "that code" is often in-house Ops stuff written years ago in php. |
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I'm trying hard to get rid of the attitude, not succeeding much though. |
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But I do think that MS's track record is not really a result of malice, |
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it's more a case of "ship it when it's good enough to run, not when it's |
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correct" for varying definitions of good enough and on how many machines |
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it was good enough. |
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I'll give you a parallel in the Linux world: |
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gtk+/gnome vs efl/e18 |
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GTK is the worst possible of all GUI toolkit. It's getting better but by |
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god early versions sucked hugely. Ever looked into what it takes to |
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write a gtk-engine for themeing?And as for Gnome they can never make up |
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their damn mind how the back-end comms are going to work. We've been |
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through endless iterations of corba and Miguel trying to get mono forced |
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in, now I think they settled on dbus. What was that Corba thing called? |
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Bonobo? But it ran, and ran good enough to be used. |
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Contrast efl and e18. That project strives to be correct and raster |
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refused to release anything until it was better than correct. For ten |
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years it sat in cvs only, until one day MikeB stepped up and said "hell |
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or high water we release what we have 21 Dec 2013". I think there would |
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be arguments behind the scenes but no matter, on that day e17 and efl |
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was released. One year later exactly e18 was released. It's a beautiful |
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toolkit, you don't have to touch any code at all to theme it and it's |
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slick, neat and runs on just about anything with a cpu. Even does |
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amazing amounts of OpenGL smoothly in software if you need to. But who |
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uses it? |
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MS:Gnome::<not MS>:efl-e18 |
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But I'm still not going to forgive Bill for IE6 :-) |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |
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