Real programmers

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An interesting article I found today:

Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary object code directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original Fortran code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job– no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called “job security”.

(Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal, by Ed Post, Tektronix)

Funny how many things today we consider to be obscure and to require a master to deal with were considered toys twenty years ago.

Why do servers ship with slow CDROM readers?

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Every time I sell a server to a client, I always hear him crying about the CDROM reader: “it’s only 24x and it costs 150$”, they say. Yes, that’s true. It’s expensive. It’s slow.

Why? Good question. I do not know a single IT worker who does not wonder the same question.

Most people say Sun, IBM, HP, etc bought those slow CDROM drives in the thousands years ago and now they have a pile of slow drives and they must sell them using any means. Well, sorry, but I don’t buy that hypothesis. Should that be true, the CDROM drive would be 15$ instead of 150$. After all, wasn’t your theory Sun wanted to get rid of those drives? Then they should sell them very cheap, even at a loss! (last week I bought 100 USB Logitech ball mice with the HP logo at 0.74 EUR/piece; that’s exactly what I mean when I say “even at a loss”)

Today I came up with a better hypothesis on why servers ship with slow CDROM drives.: you have to blame the CDROM media (the disk itself).

“WTF!?”, you are thinking now.

Let me explain.

When you buy a CDROM drive for a server, you will usually employ it only twice: when installing the operating system and when installing a driver you need before you have an Internet connection. That’s exactly twice, so you won’t care if it works at 24x or at 52x. In case you didn’t know, 52x is the technology limit for CDROM drives, otherwise you couldn’t read it properly because pitches are too small in the media.

Did you notice the emphasis in “you couldn’t read it properly”? That’s the key for my hypothesis on why servers ship with slow CDROM drives. Our world is loaded with crap CDROM media.

A lot of software vendors and IT people use crappy XinXunXao CDs instead of Verbatim CDs because they are a full cent cheaper! (wow, what a huge savings). Well, the problem is XinXunXao CDs are crap and if you try to read them at, say, 32x they will probably fail and you will be reading a 0 when you should have read a 1.

Now comes the interesting part: Sun, HP, IBM are not responsible for you (or your software vendor) to be using XinXunXao CDs. After all, they did not choose to use XinXunXao instead of Verbatim and their advice would be to use Verbatim! The problem is when the US $4000 IBM server you have just bought does not read that XinXunXao CDs at 32x or 48x, most probably you are going to blame IBM and that’s bad for them.

So what could IBM do? Easy, IBM sells you a 24x CD so you cannot read a CDs faster than 24x. Now IBM can rest sure even those XinXinXao CDs will work flawlessly and you will be happy.

Summary: as you might be using bad-quality CD media, IBM sells you a slow CD for you to be able to read even the worst-quality CD with it. They are fixing a problem they did not cause.

PS: On related news, 90% of the times I sell a server with Windows, clients also complain about the Windows Server license fees. But that’d be another post

Fancy statement

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You can identify intelligence when you see it:

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)

(from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press)

Update: And wait until you read the Perlis epigrams on programming. Awesome!

¿Feliz Navidad?

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[via Magonia]

Los enigmas de la Navidad – La Navidad gira alrededor de cinco o seis páginas de la Biblia. 1.900 millones de personas celebrarán en las próximas dos semanas la gran fiesta cristiana: el nacimiento de un bebé en la Palestina ocupada por los romanos hace dos milenios. Jesús, según narran Mateo y Lucas, nació de madre virgen, se salvó milagrosamente de ser asesinado por Herodes I el Grande y fue adorado por peregrinos de lejanas tierras que llegaron hasta él guiados por una estrella. ¿Esta historia responde a hechos reales o es una fábula?

Asus Z92K-Q311H keyboard under Linux

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By means of the Asus Hotkeys project and this this keyboard definition file I created for Hotkeys, I almost got my new laptop’s keyboard to fully work.

The only thing that still doesn’t work is the touchpad enable/disable key and the sleep key, the problem being those keys do not trigger an X event (at least, not one I could view with xev).

I will try to merge my keyboard definition file for Hotkeys with the Asus Hotkeys project in the following days, as it will be a cleaner and more elegant solution.

By the way, the Z92K is sometimes referred as A6K or A6000 and it works great with Linux. I am running KUbuntu 5.10 on it since the beginning of November and I couldn’t be happier.

Update: Here is the script I installed in /etc/init.d for Hotkeys to start at boot. Copy it to /etc/init.d then run update-rc.d hotkeys defaults as root.

Asus Z92K-Q311H keyboard under Linux

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By means of the Asus Hotkeys project and this this keyboard definition file I created for Hotkeys, I almost got my new laptop’s keyboard to fully work.

The only thing that still doesn’t work is the touchpad enable/disable key and the sleep key, the problem being those keys do not trigger an X event (at least, not one I could view with xev).

I will try to merge my keyboard definition file for Hotkeys with the Asus Hotkeys project in the following days, as it will be a cleaner and more elegant solution.

By the way, the Z92K is sometimes referred as A6K or A6000 and it works great with Linux. I am running KUbuntu 5.10 on it since the beginning of November and I couldn’t be happier.

Novell moving to Gkt? Shame on them!

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Everybody is talking about Novell’s decision to move from KDE and Qt to Gnome and Gtk. Me too.

My point: Novell is stupid. Plain and simple. Very stupid.

Gtk is ugly to develop with, inconsistent, lacks a lot of functionality and it is a complete joke for multi-platform development.

KDE is so superior to Gnome, the next version of Novell Desktop will be a joke. Kiosk in Gnome? No. Integration and consistency rather than a collection of non-cooperating Gtk tools? No. Lots of advanced software? No.

People say the reason behind the move from KDE to Gnome is the Qt license (pay for commercial use). What a joke. Qt is so superior to Gtk it pays for itself so soon you will never regret buying it. A Qt license is worth half the pay of one developer for one month. Your company will recover that money immediately.

Had Suse used Gtk instead of Qt, Novell would be firing twice the people they are firing now. And the movement from KDE to Gnome is so stupid they are firing theirselves on the foot.

Bye, bye, Novell, you had the best (Suse Linux, ZenWorks and eDirectory) and you decided to suicide. You can thank Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman and those Ximian people. This reminds me of Netscape & Collabra.