The Greatest Software Ever

soldack writes "Information Week has an piece on the 12 greatest pieces of software ever. It also notes some that didn't make the cut and why. Their weblog covers 5 others that didn't make the cut."

Nah

[DaveAtFraud]

Microsoft Bob is clearly superior to Windows ME. It does less far with far more stability.

Cheers,
Dave

Hello World

[Aokubidaikon]

Where's "Hello World"?

You forgot. to mention..

[Anonymous Coward]

the greatest software ever! Quakeworld!

Well if you're going to put Java above the Apollo guidance system software then you have to be willing to go all the way.

Re:actually a pretty good list

[Brickwall]

I also wonder about the choice of Excel. It's a pretty good program - I work with it every day - but to me, the office productivity program that blew me away in 1985 was Lotus Jazz for the Mac. There were so many innovations there - an integrated suite where you could cut and paste easily from different applications, hot links where updating data in the spreadsheet could update the chart that resided in the word processing document, the whole idea of workbooks instead of distinct files - we take all those things for granted today, but as someone trying to produce documentation for telecom systems in those days, I can tell you how difficult it was. Changing a diagram meant laying it out with letraset, pasting in the text by hand, photographing the whole thing - a single change would take most of the day. When the art department saw the ability to make a change and have a laser copy in seconds, it blew their minds.

The whole MS Office platform is a direct descendant of Jazz, as much as MS will deny it.

Re:Corrected

[Anonymous Coward]

You karma whore you. I bet you put out on the first date.

My nomination...

[m00nun1t]

is tetris. No single piece of software has wasted so much time.

Re:What about Deathmaze 5000?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may know the original Pentium version, Deathmaze 4999.994399399192934

Re:Another vote for the shuttle...and here's why:

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for sharing!

One little known fact is that, after every successful launch the 260 men and women smoke a cigarette, asking each other, Was that good for you too?

Re:Somewhere...

[IANAAC]

Like he's ever been laid....

Said the geek in the darkened basement.

Best Hello World ever

[MillionthMonkey]

public interface MessageStrategy {
    public void sendMessage();
}

public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
    public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
}

public class MessageBody {
    Object payload;
    public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
    public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
    public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
        ms.sendMessage();
    }
}

public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
    private DefaultFactory() {}
    static DefaultFactory instance;
    public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
        if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
        return instance;
    }
    public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
        return new MessageStrategy() {
            MessageBody body = mb;
            public void sendMessage() {
                Object obj = body.getPayload();
                System.out.println(obj.toString());
            }
        };
    }
}

public class HelloWorld {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
            MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
            mb.configure("Hello World!");
            AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
            MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
            mb.send(strategy);
      }
}


In order to get through the lameness filter, I was forced to include this sentence that I would otherwise omit.

true!

[dghcasp]

/bin/true!

The ultimate example of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing, one thing only, and doing it right!

No arguments, no parameter lists, no side effects, just true!

Such a beautiful example of Unix doesn't just happen; it takes work! Let's look at /bin/true on a Solaris 2.10 box:

ss027$ grep '@(#)' /bin/true
#ident "@(#)true.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.4 */
ss027$

Don't let anyone tell you the Unix way is the easy way; it took Six Whole Versions for Sun to get true correct! No wonder Windows is so full of bugs - they're trying to do hundreds of things. If they'd only adopt the Unix philosophy, they might have gotten it right in only ten tries! (Ten, because all the smart people work on Unix.)

Worship the true!

brillant paula bean

[JuicyBrain]

What about the brillant paula bean ? http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/40043.aspx/ [thedailywtf.com]
This software blew me away !

Re:Somewhere...

[monoqlith]

That's unfair. His basement totally has flourescent lighting.

Surely nobody didn't notice...

[Tatsh]

"an piece"? I think you meant "an article"!

"Say Bob, did you send that e-mail yet?"
"Nah, but I left an message on their answer machine."
"Really, we don't even have an telephone."
"Well, I used my cell phone. Guess what? It features an walkie-talkie feature."
"You mean I get to hear both sides of the conversation now instead of one?"
"Yes, isn't it an great feature?"
"Indeed. I'll have to go buy an cell phone one of these days."

The number of mistakes in grammar/spelling/semantics these past few weeks has been a lot more than usual.

Notepad

[Wolfier]

Where is it?  It is the most stab

Re:the list

[cp.tar]

no, it would never happen. It would require that email readers have the ability to execute code passed to them, and nobody would be stupid enough to write a mail program that would do that.

So what have we learned, kids?

Every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.

Every time you say you don't believe in fairies, one fairy dies.

If you light a cigarette on a candle flame, a sailor dies.

And - most importantly - whenever someone says nobody would be stupid enough to do something, a programmer in Microsoft gets an idea.

Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?

Re:the list

[ultranova]

Now, who knows what one has to say or do for a Microsoft programmer to die?

"Free, non-propriety standards compliance."

Re:the list

[cp.tar]

Non-proprietary, you mean?

But close enough... the Force is strong with this one.

Re:What about Deathmaze 5000?

[jimicus]

Who doesn't remember Deathmaze 5000?

I don't.

Re:Somewhere...

[TapeCutter]

"Like he's ever been laid...."

It's common knowledge that he's screwed millions of people.

Re:the list

[9mind]

Give an exec a chair...

Re:BSD was just the beginning

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you think BSD is great, you should really checkout BSE."

Or BSF, even - "We don't make the OS that you run, we make the OS that you run better".

Re:Best Hello World ever

[maxwell demon]

Well, I've gotten some book on computing history from the future through a time warp. Here's an interesting excerpt:

The first true artificial intelligence created was the famous "Mindboggler" program. Remarkably, it didn't come from classic AI research, but from code compression research. The goal of the development was to compress executable code into equivalent, but smaller executable code. One of its first applications was to compress its own code. It was a huge success: While the original executable had approximately 200 gigabytes, Mindboggler managed to shrink that into no more than 5 megabytes. When asked how it did it, it said it just fetched old programming textbooks from around 1980 from the archives and re-wrote its own logic following the rules therein.

Re:What about Deathmaze 5000?

[BrokenHalo]

Well, I sort of do remember Deathmaze, but my vote for the greatest (and, incidententally, simplest) software goes to:...

fortune