Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Sun Apr 21 18:19:36 2002

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:


> So you are assuming that commercial code is somehow better than UNIX/GNU
> code? Having worked at a few commercial software companies (except for IBM,
> always hired to port code from MS-DOS/Windows to Unix) I can tell you that
> the commercial code is full of ugly hacks and undocumented modifications,
> among comments (when they actually exist---the first company I mentioned
> above had, as part of their coding standards, mandated that no comments be
> added to the code) relevant only to the original code. At the second
> company I mentioned, the core of the product was written and maintained by
> *one guy* and only *one guy* because no one else in the company could
> understand the code. I saw the code in question and yes, I could see why no
> one else wanted to touch this code. So code quality is just as bad (or
> worse) in commercial products.

  A fairly trivial case in point - IBM's 24-bit MCA graphics adapter -
the "Sabine" card set. Several RS/6000 developers that I know claim
that the guy (singular) who developed it designed a prototype, wrote a
driver, and redesigned the hardware to compensate for limitations in his
code. Mark swears there were several cycles of that. The result was a
piece of hardware and its driver that couldn't be ported even to the
next version of AIX.


        Doc
Received on Sun Apr 21 2002 - 18:19:36 BST