Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Preparing a shared USB stick

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 05/01/2014 23:26, walt wrote:
> I'm thinking about the era when GM's CEO complained that if GM made
> cars the way Bill made software (I paraphrase) then tow-truck drivers
> would be millionaires.
> 
> For several years the IT people where I work have been making hundreds
> of lives a living hell because failure is greeted every day with a shrug
> and a hostile apology,


I know that attitude very well; I'm usually the guy shrugging about
software, along with a

"what the fuck do you want me to do about it? I didn't write that code"

where "that code" is often in-house Ops stuff written years ago in php.
I'm trying hard to get rid of the attitude, not succeeding much though.

But I do think that MS's track record is not really a result of malice,
it's more a case of "ship it when it's good enough to run, not when it's
correct" for varying definitions of good enough and on how many machines
it was good enough.

I'll give you a parallel in the Linux world:

gtk+/gnome vs efl/e18

GTK is the worst possible of all GUI toolkit. It's getting better but by
god early versions sucked hugely. Ever looked into what it takes to
write a gtk-engine for themeing?And as for Gnome they can never make up
their damn mind how the back-end comms are going to work. We've been
through endless iterations of corba and Miguel trying to get mono forced
in, now I think they settled on dbus. What was that Corba thing called?
Bonobo? But it ran, and ran good enough to be used.

Contrast efl and e18. That project strives to be correct and raster
refused to release anything until it was better than correct. For ten
years it sat in cvs only, until one day MikeB stepped up and said "hell
or high water we release what we have 21 Dec 2013". I think there would
be arguments behind the scenes but no matter, on that day e17 and efl
was released. One year later exactly e18 was released. It's a beautiful
toolkit, you don't have to touch any code at all to theme it and it's
slick, neat and runs on just about anything with a cpu. Even does
amazing amounts of OpenGL smoothly in software if you need to. But who
uses it?

MS:Gnome::<not MS>:efl-e18

But I'm still not going to forgive Bill for IE6 :-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com