Time to Shoot the Programmers?
This old computing world is a world of woe!
Virus attacks daily! Microsoft security warnings daily! PC users are not
safe anymore!
Besides that, these Windows PCs are ever more complex and hard to learn. Common people will never figure out how to set all them security features to protect themselves and all their data on their cheap store-bought personal computers.
How did it all get so complicated? How did it all get so bad? Every PC
commentator is screaming about a pending worldwide Digital Pearl Harbor. What’s worse, they may be right!
How did this whole problem start, and what is the Final Solution to all our problems on the computer?
When I first started on the computer in the Eighties (I am not *really* that old!) the software was small enough to fit on a floppy, and that floppy would have room for a few data files too.
But before long, the next versions of the software we were using started coming on multiple disks.
Yeah, the software was buggy, but it was all new to us, so we kind of
understood that there would be crashes and such. But our data was also on those floppies, so very little was ever lost.
Then the software started coming to us on many disks, and there was no more room for data on them, but we either had a hard drive (10 MB, $1800) or another floppy disk drive to safely put our data on.
Guess what? Machines got more memory and more speed (25MHz) and the software suddenly had a lot more features – mostly things we did not need, nor want. This was the beginning of Bloatware.
You know the rest of the story.
Why did software programs become so big and unstable? Why all the stuff we neither needed nor wanted?
Well, those expensive programmers who first wrote the code did all the testing, and who savagely learned to shrink everything to fit on a 400k floppy disk, -they HAD to find a way to keep their jobs, right?
What resulted was an ever increasingly complex interface, with more menus, more features, more complexity, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
And the machines grew too, along with disk drive storage and ROM, so hey, these guys had ‘license’ now to expand theyÕre bloated and feature laden software and operating systems to fill the void.
Only in places like NASA, and such, did programmers still fight to make their code lean and mean to fit in the miniscule memory mods of their satellites and probes, proving it still can be done.
But on the PC, the Mac and other commercial computers, bloatware reigned. It was time to shoot the programmers, as they say in Aerospace. Their usefulness to the computing public was at an end.
But, since we live in a free country instead of Mother Russia, no one got around to offing these guys.
And guess what, all these programmers are still creating bloatware, but not only in their multiple CD applications, but in our OS’s and Browsers.
We now have millions of lines of code that almost no one can get a handle on. Who is there who can see where there could be weaknesses, unknown backdoors (programmers like those, which are like escape hatches for their testing)?
— Well, you get my point, and you already know the rest of the story.
The Linux OS, with its sparsely written code can still fit on a floppy, and is surprisingly secure for an OS. Yeah, most PC users would run in horror at its user interface, which is why it never got off the ground commercially with everyone. So Linux is not really an option for Mom and Pop PC User, is it?
I think the Linux OS and their programming design philosophy, along with their Open Source (somebody make a note to line up SCO on the wall with all them M$ programmers) software is the direction people ought to go to fix these horrific world-class problems we are all experiencing.
Or perhaps some other UNIX based OS . . .
Waitaminnit!
Isn’t OS X Unix based?
ArenÕt their OS and all their free applications rather minimal in their
coding?
Don’t their menus and features make sense, and are easy to navigate and find things?
Isn’t their whole software platform also relatively secure and virus-free?
Doesn’t Apple sell all that stuff running on the fastest IBM powered G5 CPUs in the world?
–Never mind! I found the solution we were all looking for! We all got to
move to the Macintosh!
(But we still gots to shoot them programmers over in Redmond… –NOT!
=)
[ [ [ DISCLAIMER – – – please nobody actually consider shooting any of those sweet programmers! Not even those nasty Microsoft ones! They all got to make a living too, and besides, although most of them are probably overweight single guys with questionable personal habits, some of them might be family men with little children. So be nice to any programmers you know, and DO NOT take this article as a suggestion or a license in any way, to harm any human-type person currently living on this tiny little planet of ours, regardless of what they do for a living. Life is too short to do harm to anyone, right? END OF DISCLAIMER ] ] ]
. . . coverin’ my ass
. . . now where is that Gold Disk codebook? . . .
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