On Friday 02 March 2007 17:19, Rajko M. wrote:
On Friday 02 March 2007 18:13, Randall R Schulz wrote: ...
I usually consider that a glib criticism that rarely comes from programmers who, much as they want to write tight code, must balance the requirement for producing correct code with the desire for efficient code all in the face of stringent, often unrealistic, scheduling constraints.
I can agree, but the bloat is everywhere and it is brought to the extremes.
"Everywhere?" "Extremes?" Can you quantify these claims? Of course not.
My last "wondering why" was with HP laptop. It has software switch to turn wireless transmitter on and off. I can imagine that the most important function of some 4 MB large progam is to write a byte to certain I/O address on the chip. It should be quite short. What makes the rest?
Why do you care? What are the real consequences of this putative excess? How do you know what's truly involved in altering the state of the wireless connection on any given computer? It's quite likely that simply disabling the transmitter itself ("writing a byte to an I/O address") would simply cause a cascade of errors throughout the networking subsystems and beyond. And you probably want to be notified if something went wrong. And user-level applications cannot be given direct access to hardware, lest grave security holes be opened. And so on and so forth. It's all too terribly easy to underestimate what's involved in any given task. Managers do that all the time, which is one of the reasons there's so much trouble in the software industry. Stand a kilometer away and every task, every problem, every challenge seems trivial. Technology is complicated, and unobvious connections and complications are many. The bottom line is that unless you really know all the pertinent technical details, this kind of criticism is without any genuine basis.
-- Regards, Rajko.
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org