Comment Re:Simple (Score 1) 509
The only upside is that the process is more public than it used to be and there is at least a modicum of oversight these days.
-Matt
Macs didn't "make USB", they forced it on their users while giving a big "fuck you" to all of their old customers running anything else. It's not like the old stuff was horrible either (ADB, SCSI).
I'm sure they were out there (probably writing anti-Mac magazine articles), but I didn't know anyone with a Mac who looked back from the introduction of USB. It was superior in every way! It was mere months before I had all the USB adapters I needed...the parallel->USB converter I still use to this day and never - not once since it was first used on my Blue and White "Yosemite" G3 Mac - have I needed to load a driver for it.
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As far as "USB was everywhere on PC's" that's just wrong. At the time Apple switched over, 99% of PC users had never heard of a USB port. I know, I was managing a computer store at the time.
Confirmed! It was a long time before the PC people I know grudgingly started switching to USB. GRUDGING! No respect for something that's actually superior.
"The bigger injustice," Edwards writes, "is that programming has become an elite: a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication.
LESS TODAY THAN EVER BEFORE
Remember what Programming the PDP11 was like?
The perspective is supposed to be from that of the microcomputer revolution, which was to have ended that elitism of mainframe and minicomputer "once and forever".
Programming, as a field, is still (apparently) in lock-step with that elitism....evidenced all over this thread! LOL.
It must be very easy to imagine oneself as "An Elite Programmer" and one's programming problems as "the sum of Programming".
I'm a little surprised that it's so hard for so many folks - even if you ARE "elite" - to imagine the layman and his possible computing problems.
[...]Someone with an IQ of 100 can become a perfectly competent Java or C++ programmer with two years of intensive training.[...]
Every personal computer owner could be a computer programmer with from 2 hours to 2 weeks of training. Sometimes less!
I get what you are saying, but you're looking at the wrong paradigm and imagining the wrong use-cases.
I don't need to be a trained plumber to unclog the wife's bathroom sink drain once a month, or even to replace some of the basic plumbing fixtures in the house. If plumbing were like software developing, I would need to be - but not for safety, or any "good reason"...just because the tools themselves were so complicated to use!
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine