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Programming

Hardware Is Cheap, Programmers Are Expensive 465

Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."

Comment Re:innovative (Score 0) 771

The logout kickstarts the windowing system again, they could rewrite it to make it switch on the fly, but that would probably break something else, and not something you would expect in a 10.5.X release.

Of course, they could write their own MacBook Pro specific windowing / graphics code, and just have that as a 'temporary' solution that supports live switching until 10.6 (where the entire graphics engine is having a major overhaul), but that defeats the whole "write once, use many" design philosophy of Apple's development cycle.

So Apple adopted a slick, bleeding edge tech, but instead of holding back for them to be able to make it work 'as it should' they introduced what could be considered the best practical work around that would involve the least amount of damage. I would hate to have to test any code that uses the graphics engine specifically on the newest macbook pro, because Apple decided to break their own development procedures to provide 'live' switching in a service pack. I'd rather just wait for the code to be in place globally, and have more incentive than "it sometimes breaks on macbook pros" to rework my code. Like being able to utilize a lot of the new low level stuff coming in 10.6.

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