Re: Randy's inherent hate of Apple IIs

[toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates) writes:

>   Scanner's box at AX '97 was linux because of the terminal interface
>support, even though Scanner's normally a freebsd folks.
...
>   The 10 or 16 byte leak was part of Print Manager. Pointless was good

Hmm, my memory is usually a lot better than this would indicate, but then
again I was writing that post at something like 3 AM so I guess I should
not be too alarmed.

>I still want a ProDEV board for my GS--

I have one, never used. It's yours on "indefinite loan" if you want it.
email me.

>   Read the MIME manpage sometime for laughs. "Uuencode had too many
>variants, so we wanted to create a standard." Now every mailer and
>every webpage has their own 'standard' of mime. I think the cure is
>worse than the disease here. :)

Hmm again. Might there be a "MIME Haters Handbook" somewhere? I gave up on
BinSCII II because (a) I was buried at work and so was Dave Whitney, and
(b) while B2 was sufficiently better than uuencode to invade its monopoly,
B2 was _not_ sufficiently better than MIME to invade the monopoly I assumed
it would soon have. Years later, however, MIME has become synonymous with
email attachments but that's about it. Years later, and I have an extensive
amount of hindsight about what mistakes BinSCII II would have eventually
been found to have, had we released it. Hmm.

No promises. These days I know better.

>   Lot that's well known? News to us. :) When your documentation is
>(A) in Japanese, (B) misleading (C) wrong (D) nonexistant (E) All of
>the above, there's a LOT of headscratching that can go on. A
>shelf-foot of documentation on platform X may be worse than about 800
>pages on platform Y, but there's still a good chunk not covered or
>misdocumented.  [Manufacturers' names changed to protect the guilty :]
>Then, there's DirectX/Direct3D for PCs, which is almost the same, but
>change (A) above to 'Barely english' :)

Sorry, I wasn't talking about the reverse-engineering part. I was talking
about the central architecture of the games themselves, where you control
all the source code and the people who wrote it are probably still working
for you. I should have instead focused on the real advantage that most
embedded systems have: when you've got all the source code, you can fix
anything you need to on _your_ schedule, not someone else's.

On the desktop where every one wants the paradox of API standards (read:
reusable software, still a myth but no one wants to admit that) that are both
stable and superior to the competition at the same time, it is far more often
the case that your bugs depend on someone else's schedule, say Microsoft's.

But I guarantee you the Microsoft application competing with yours is being
tested against more recent versions of the same DLLs you are forced to test
against, thus you waste time on bugs that aren't yours and Microsoft does
not. This happened with the 32 bit versions of winsock.dll, if anyone was
following that. At Green Hills we found "features" unique to the Microsoft
winsock that I am convinced were deliberate attempts to burn any 3rd party
who neglected to test against Microsoft's DLL.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu