[geeks] Sun a possible takeover target - rumours

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 10 May 2003, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> I've always thought that the way colleges are, giving students a
> screaming fast machine which runs even bloated code fast, is wrong.
> They rarely have to worry about speed or memory use, and when you don't
> share a machine you never learn about writing code which is a good
> "process table citizen".

And then there are schools like my alma mater which just come out and
say "performance is nothing.  Write beautiful and interesting code."
Their definition of "interesting" seems to be "see if you can used
everything you've ever learned at least once in every program".

> Sometimes I think an end to Moore's Law would be a good thing.

Have you heard of Gates' Law?  "Every 18 months, the speed of software
halves."  It doesn't seem to be limited to the Windows world, either.
Sun has the abortion that is SMC.  The free software world has GNOME and
KDE.  Oracle has their installer.

> I know, and I keep meaning to put the system together.  It didn't work
> too well this time last year, but I should put the time into building
> a system up to see it.

GNUStep can be a pain.  It's -really- picky about which version of GCC
you have, since the ObjC compiler doesn't seem to be a priority for the
GCC team.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke *) "The grabbing hands grab all they can, all for
Thorndale, TX     (*  themselves, after all, it's a competitive world;
                  *)  everything counts in large amounts."
                  (*                --Depeche Mode "Everything Counts"