Re: Randy's inherent hate of Apple IIs

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <6a2165$jpu@gap.cco.caltech.edu>,
Todd P. Whitesel <toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>ASCII data from the freebsd (chosen because it supported the surplus 8-port
>terminal interface that had been scrounged) box and print it.

   Scanner's box at AX '97 was linux because of the terminal interface
support, even though Scanner's normally a freebsd folks.

>During all the time we used the IIgs's, there were only a few crashes under
>fire. Because of the robust design I had used, we never lost any important
>data. But one year we did discover a memory leak.

>When we were done for the day, we set up a couple IIgs's in our hotel
>room and Nathan went after the leak with Segfaulter. Later that night he
>had located the culprit in part of Pointless.

   The 10 or 16 byte leak was part of Print Manager. Pointless was
well-behaved for us at AX. [You don't want to know how I'm breaking it
right now at home with segfaulter :] I still want a ProDEV board for
my GS-- I can usually find out the what and where of memory trashing
in a hurry. Learning the when can be a *lot* of tracing; if I can
learn that in a hurry, much more time to spend in the why and a fix.

>If it _is_ useful as is, then it will become a de facto standard for
>something and everyone will rail on how crappy yet entrenched it
>is. One word:  uuencode.

   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. :)

>> [That's kinda why I *like* working on console
>>videogames-- no chance in hell of patching, so you gotta do it right
>>the first time]

>Ah, but there's a lot in video games that is well known, thus feasible to get
>right.

   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' :)

Nathan Mates


--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? -R.A. Heinlein