Re: [LUG] Clueless users

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Julian Hall wrote:
> In some ways Windows is *sort of* modular.  Inasmuch as programmers think
> "Why write a DLL for that function when I can just tell my program to use
> the Internet Explorer DLL?", and thus make their own code a lot smaller.  Or
> at least they SHOULD.

All major general purpose OSes are modular at this level. Although
Window's moduarity is often obscured to the end user, it is obviously
written by teams with well defined roles.

I don't buy the Microsoft deliberately muddled things (in general)- bad
programmers muddled things, and Microsoft let them. Ultimately these
things get sorted or the software ends up dying, it is just more
expensive and messy to do it badly. Microsoft may deliberately have
muddled certain areas through embrace and extend, but ignorance is
greater than conspiracy.. Most of Microsoft's programmers are very good
(they pay well and recruit carefully), but it only needs a few bad ones,
a pointy haired boss, and a pressing deadline, and suddenly it is easier
to fudge X, Y or Z. Also there are cases where performance has been
given higher priority than it deserves, but this may be good marketing
as the software purchasing process in many places focuses on features
and performance because these are easily measured, over quality and
reliability which are easily measured over a products useful life, but
require "clue" to assess upfront. How many times in software purchasing
did I hear - it had feature Y, we don't need Y yet but we might one day.
Or this system can do X thousand operations a second, but this can only
do (X-1) thousand, only to find when it is deployed it never even
requires a fraction of this performance.

I argued when a typical OS install was 10000 files (I make it nearer
100,000 these days) that file level management was too small a unit to
manage, interestingly Microsoft still try to play the patch, and file
versioning game, when Debian is managing about 10,000 packages and
doesn't manage patches at all (other than by rolling them up in package
updates). I suspect this is a key reason Debian provides such rich
functionality through largely volunteer effort (keeping configurable
item count down), it is hardly rocket science either.

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