I guess this should goes in the vent and rant thread, but we are here....
(And please, please, don't think I'm trolling. I'm not. Just frustrated.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Unless you are in the embedded space, you mostly don't care. Hardware is cheap. Programmer time is expensive. You want modular code that can be reused to avoid reinventing the wheel every time. Inefficient? Throw more hardware at it...
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Dennis, I'm at the end of 20+ years of thinking like that. I have a machine as powerful as a 1980 CRAY I supercomputer, doing the type of tasks I was doing 20 years ago, on a machine 100 times faster than what I had 20 years ago, and yet it still seems to run no faster... Why, because the answer was always, too slow?, throw some more hardware at it. And quick, let's add some more features that less that 1% of the users will use so we can sell a new release. (But it'll run too slow! No problem, throw some more hardware at it. Repeat ad infinitum.) And it's an easy pattern, as the people writing the programs
aren't paying for the hardware!
I want to get off this ridiculous treadmill...But I want to keep what I've got already, circa 2002-3. And I
can't. Instead I have to keep feeding the troll. And swapping new bugs for the old ones.
(A sidebar. I took a core Java course several months ago. The instructor talked about garbage collection. I asked for more detail. Yep, the same garbage collection from Basic, circa 1978. Java was created in 1995. The problem of garbage collection had been solved in the dinosaur world by 1975.
Twenty years later, Sun was creating a new language with the same problems that had been solved 20 years ago. I know, I know...throw some more hardware at it.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
What were the roadblocks?
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Dennis
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They fell into two categories, hardware interface and and drivers. And they stepped on each other.
First, hardware - these nettops don't have a built in optical drive. So I had a USB 2.0 external optical drive. Some times the BIOS would find it, most times not. I would later find out that if you used the external power supply that the optical drive came with, the nettop couldn't find the optical drive via usb 2.0. However, it you used a double USB 2.0 plug for power
and connection, the BIOS would then find it. That was not obvious, and took me days to figure out.
The drive were SATA. OK, not in the WIN 2000 Pro SP2. So I downloaded the NVIDIA drivers from ACER. Slipstreamed them into a Legit copy of 2000 pro. Finally got the slipstream copy to load. Died on the boot. Of course I shouldn't be surprised, they were XP drivers. (actually I should be surprised, as most XP drivers will work in 2000.) Died on the Ethernet drivers. Well, I wasn't using Ethernet anyway, drop them out of the slipstream. Next pass, installed and died on the boot again, with an NTOSKRNL problem. Hey, if the drivers can no longer use the 2000 kernel, just prop the feet up and throw the disc in the fire...( And remember each pass tries to format the hard drive. Win 2000 won't load on a system with a windows defined partition on it. So after each fail, you have to to de-partition the OS hard drive. On the Revo, that means you have to completely field strip the machine, as the brilliant engineers put the screws to the hard drive on the other side of the motherboard from all the other screw holding the machine together. So I was continually taking apart and putting back together the machine. Over and over...)
Just for fun, I then tried the same procedure with my copy of XP PRO SP2. Died over and over again with a 0x000007b on the initial OS load. I didn't bother to try upgrading to SP3...
I have stated before that I consider software to be immortal, as long as you can get hardware to run it. Windows 2000 was the last immortal version of Windows. Everything since then has to be activated to keep running. Whenever Microsoft decides to stop activating a piece of software, it then becomes a toaster for any future use on a replacement machine...
And for those who say Linux is the answer, it has it's own set of problem...
Sorry Dennis, but you asked....
(Side joke. It took me a long time to key the response. So I made a copy before trying to post. The post procedure had timed out and when I re-logged on, it looped, saying go back a screen, then it would reprocess the logon and give me the identical message. I had to leave MR totally and get back in to post...RSE)