Why I steal Microsoft software

[Texas Diesel]

Originally posted by rhickman

don't buy it then idiot,

idiot:

"1. A foolish or stupid person.

2. A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive. "

hypocrite:

"A person given to hypocrisy. "



hotshot:

" 1 (Slang. ) A person of impressive skill and daring, especially one who is highly successful and self-assured.

2 A nonstop freight train.

Calling me a idiot and hypocrite is ok but calling me a FREIGHT TRAIN really pi$$es me off!!!!!



And, for the record, I didnt buy it!

 

[Sled Puller]

:--)

Its just a computer!!

 

[Doc Tinker]

It isn't "just" a computer, Gene. What other tool do you use that entertains you, informs you, makes you mad, makes you glad, brings you love (if you think porn sites are a means of being 'loved'), keeps you up to date with far away family and friends, causes you to lose sleep and maybe a hundred other usefull(?) activities.



Doc

 

[Badunit]

I believe Outlook 2002 has no way to turn off this "security" feature. According to the help file, the "Level I' security setting cannot be changed, it will block attachments with certain extensions (like exe files) whether you like it or not. To get a file with one of those attachments the sender has to change the extension name and you have to save it to disk and rename it with the corect extension. I believe this lack of a setting is new to 2002, I never had it before moving to Windows XP and Office XP.

 

[Sled Puller]

Doc,

My truck.

 

[illflem]

Originally posted by Doc Tinker

I What other tool do you use that entertains you, informs you, makes you mad, makes you glad, brings you love (if you think porn sites are a means of being 'loved'), keeps you up to date with far away family and friends, causes you to lose sleep and maybe a hundred other useful(?) activities.

And they said that computers were going to allow us more leisure time, I think most folks are taking that leisure time at work.

Biggest shopping day of the year used to be the day after Thanksgiving, now it's the Monday after because people wait till they go back to work to order over the net.

 

[Mike Ellis]

If your PC sucks,

and there's no UNIX,

Who ya gonna call?



AMIGA!



No need to steal software, just get one of the alternatives.



If you can't get an Amiga, the Mac is a very viable and desirable alternative to the PC nowadays. Still expensive, but you get a lot of power for the $$$. A dual G4 machine, for example, can give you 20 Gigaflops performance on optimized code. Unfortunately not many people do any signficant number crunching so it's more or less irrelevant to the ordinary user.



I am one of the last Mac users at work, I use it for programming. Unfortunately the bean counters have decided we must all use Microsoft exclusively so I have been sentenced to Hades working with the Godforsaken Visual Studio environment. All the objects drive me nuts. Jeez, what happened to just churning out deterministic code? FORTRAN baby, FORTRAN!!!



There's a very simple reason why programs have become so huge and complicated, and why software development costs so much money. Programmers, like diesel truck owners, can't resist diddling with things and modifying them. The 600+ Mb Operating System is just the end result of a few years BOMBing on a 512K operating system.

 

[fbaurley]

I thought yhat when you registered new software, that it would recognize that two users are using that software, or have it registered. Or at least this is what I was told with my copy of office xp. ( from shady sources) So if this isnt the case then my whole family can have office on there computers.

 

[merryman]

Bill Gates??



Quick--name a couple other individuals who have provided us with as many computer resources AND

provided as many people directly and indirectly with good paying jobs.

Seems that for a bunch of junk, we do pretty well with it.

Always strikes me as a bit strange how really successful people are always some sort of terrible villan in some peoples minds. Wonder why they don't go out and do better???

Vaughn

 

[Rman]

Originally posted by Mike Ellis

If your PC sucks,

and there's no UNIX,

Who ya gonna call?



AMIGA!



No need to steal software, just get one of the alternatives.



If you can't get an Amiga, the Mac is a very viable and desirable alternative to the PC nowadays. Still expensive, but you get a lot of power for the $$$. A dual G4 machine, for example, can give you 20 Gigaflops performance on optimized code. Unfortunately not many people do any signficant number crunching so it's more or less irrelevant to the ordinary user.



I am one of the last Mac users at work, I use it for programming. Unfortunately the bean counters have decided we must all use Microsoft exclusively so I have been sentenced to Hades working with the Godforsaken Visual Studio environment. All the objects drive me nuts. Jeez, what happened to just churning out deterministic code? FORTRAN baby, FORTRAN!!!



There's a very simple reason why programs have become so huge and complicated, and why software development costs so much money. Programmers, like diesel truck owners, can't resist diddling with things and modifying them. The 600+ Mb Operating System is just the end result of a few years BOMBing on a 512K operating system.

FORTRAN??? geez whats next COBOL and turbo pascal! They had there day in the sun, object oriented programming is unfortunately the future and there is no way around it. I miss the days of simple operating systems, but ya know what, those systems sure wouldn't be supporting what we want out of our machines these days.



TD, I'm sorry i shouldn't have called you a frieght train that's just way out of line, my apologies.



JHerrlich: I know i shouldn't call people lazy, but it is the truth. I know they've been saddled and erred the wrong way by microsoft's products, but to hear the very same people **** and moan about how **** microsoft is, well come on... stop whining, get educated and see the light. Microsoft's doomsday is coming, give it time. Kind of like how the south will rise again...

 

[Texas Diesel]

Originally posted by rhickman





TD, I'm sorry i shouldn't have called you a frieght train that's just way out of line, my apologies.

Apology accepted, now we can be friends again.

 

[Mike Ellis]

FORTRAN??? geez whats next COBOL and turbo pascal! They had there day in the sun, object oriented programming is unfortunately the future and there is no way around it. I miss the days of simple operating systems, but ya know what, those systems sure wouldn't be supporting what we want out of our machines these days.

rhickman,

FORTRAN is still tremendously useful thanks to its numerical optimization, for engineering calculations / number crunching you can't do better without optimized assembly. That's why so many engineers and scientists still use it. As far as COBOL, SNOBOL etc. , they were used for a LOT of accounting software on mainframes and worked pretty darned good on the mainframes. I contrast this with the modern era where, for example, our company uses a Microsoft Access desktop based tool (no joke) to perform similar accounting tasks with miserable, repeat MISERABLE results.

OOP is good for a lot of tasks, but it ain't the panacea programmers think it is. Makes for darned good programmer job protection though...

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

AMEN brother!

There probably isn't a programmer alive that remembers using Turbo Pascal on an old XT machine, and who is still programming on PCs today, who doesn't look up from the Visual Studio screen full of objects and windows and sockets oh my! and think wistfully about the days when a guy could code, compile and test - code, compile and test - as fast as he could hit the keys.

I are one of those! Still have my copy of Turbo Pascal sitting here on the shelf and believe it or not occasional still bang out a program in it if it's something I need quick and dirty. Cobol on the other hand I had absolutely no use for - I HATED coding in Cobol.

Any manager of today who was around to develop code in the "old days" for engineering work (not games or graphics - talking systems interface here) can't help but marvel looking at the cost to develop equivalent code today.

and it's a nightmare attempting to quote the length of time it takes to develop that code. I pad all my programming quotes to customers by 50% just because of that.

The same basic task takes longer, and costs more, than it did even 10 years ago. Yet the processors, storage, and bus speeds are orders of magnitude greater than they were before. Where did all the benefits of the technology go? Answer: soaked up by increased programming overhead from OS and language (mostly due to object oriented programming).

I still remember my first PC - a Commodore VIC-20 with 5K of ram! I expanded it to the max of 32K and it was amazing what we were able to do with that. I wrote the first bulletin board program for the commodore's and in that 32k I had a message board, user profiles, and 16k of download space - ALL in RAM - couldn't afford a disk drive. Now a single icon on your screen would cause an out of memory error on that machine. I also remember my first hard drive - a 5 meg radio shack 8" behemoth. I remember wondering how anyone could EVER fill up all four partitions on that drive (because the OS couldn't handle more than a 1. 5 meg partition)! There is little to no regard for the speed or size of a running program today and I find it sad. I used to use the PFS Professional series of office apps (Write, File, and I can't remember the name of the spreadsheet) and those apps would fit on 2 1. 44mb floppies - now Office takes up 560MB on my hard drive and I and the majority of people could do 99% of what we do now then. Ugh

 

[Morphious]

alot of the speed/size are trade offs. I've written alot of code that was very time crutial in the milla second range in C++. I can hack out a User interface in VB quick and efficiently, but for real time sensitive apps, it's C++ all the way. I started writing code on an old 8086, and still have a copy of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C floating around my book collection. I've written code in Pascal, C, Posix C, C++, VC++, Basic, Visual Basic 3 and up, Delphi, Jasmine's ODQL (Object Data Query Language), SQL, PL-SQL, TSQL, many different scripting languages and they all had a place for what was best at the time. I've done alot of machine front ends for touch screen operations providing the user live feedback to realtime events..... I've never seen a computer fast enough for all I wanted to do on a frontend in those types of situations. Course, I'm the type of person that currently has 3 chat programs running, two email programs, 4 development projects open and running, SQL Server, IIS, BEA Weblogics, Winamp, and 4 or 5 browser windows open all at the same time.



I've worked on Sun's Solaris, HPUX, Novell, all flavors of windows, Linux, and some truly custom OS's like Steeple Chase's realtime OS.



Do I think Microsoft's os's are way over prices, damned right I do. they have about a 60% or greater profit margin on the OS and a 70% profit margin on thier office product. I'm not sure what the profit margin is on thier Development tools, but those aren't cheap either.





Some of the biggest problems with bloat in software today is the idiots they have writting it. I've worked at places that had people that hacked out code like that, and I'm the one that got to clean up thier 10,000 line functions into nice tidy quick apps. I like OO programming, but I code in a mixture of it and stardard coding, because OO is not the best for all instances.





Morph.

 

[lschultz]

I best not read any more of this. I am getting I have no idea what you are :-{} about,where your going,what your gonna do. I think this is over my head I'm outta hereOo. You might say(wife says it)and daughter too I'm a dumb a** when it comes to puters

 

[fkovalski]

lschultz- I hear ya' it was an interesting and, at times, pretty heated thread. I scrolled back a few time to see if the words "WalMart" and "camping" were somewhere in the text... :-laf :-laf

 

[Rman]

I hear ya Mike, I have the rather unfortunate task of maintaining govn't equipment and yes I program in FORTRAN too and rather like it, it has its niche. I was just giving him a little ribbing. I programmed in Turbo pascal in highschool, well ok maybe junior high. I mostly do ATLAS stuff now though, its archaic, but it gets the job done that's all that matters. A little LabVIEW and and now we're using ATLAS 2000. In my artifical intellingence class i wrote an expert system in prolog, that was kind of fun. I want to get into the AI field i'm just stuck in Utah for a few more years then i can open some doors to other places where the pay and benefits will be better.

 

[Rman]

Originally posted by Morphious





Some of the biggest problems with bloat in software today is the idiots they have writting it. I've worked at places that had people that hacked out code like that, and I'm the one that got to clean up thier 10,000 line functions into nice tidy quick apps. I like OO programming, but I code in a mixture of it and stardard coding, because OO is not the best for all instances.





Morph.

Thats right, OO is not the best. I've tried to hopelessly interpret someone elses jumbled garbage that doesn't work. OO programming lends itself to extreme complexities and makes trouble shooting a real pain. But hey, thats what we get paid for right?

 

[Rams-n-Hogs]

You guys are making me feel stoopid. Glad my truck doesn't have an operating system.



Jim

 

[QRTRHRS]

Originally posted by merryman

Bill Gates??



Quick--name a couple other individuals who have provided us with as many computer resources AND

provided as many people directly and indirectly with good paying jobs.

Seems that for a bunch of junk, we do pretty well with it.

Always strikes me as a bit strange how really successful people are always some sort of terrible villan in some peoples minds. Wonder why they don't go out and do better???

Vaughn

I would not say villan, I would say extremely shrewd businessman. That said, if you have not done so, read into his exploits. Maybe if he had actually written his own code in the beginning, Windows would not be the bloated hog-tied operating system that it is.