stlplaceFrom Reuters: “After more than five years of development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6 billion investment and a few headaches,…”
One thing is for sure, we will not see people lined up in front of Best Buy as they did with Windows 95, Play Station II and III,…Operating system is very much matured market.
I started to use left hand for mouse last week because my right hand did not feel well: being a programmer, I had too many mouse clicks for my job. One of my coworker hurt his right hand permanently so I decided to be more careful. Initially I felt it a bit awkward but I am doing OK now (this is the second week).
The real job is much tough. I had to do lots of work on UNIX. Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan of UNIX and I think I have decent skills on UNIX. It’s just in the past few years I almost used Windows exclusively. Now I felt a bit wield coming back. As I read “Joel on Software” recently I agree with Joel said: Windows is designed for everyday user; UNIX is for the programmer. The mind set of two systems are so different and I need to adjust. Different compilers on different UNIX systems, different debuggers, and different problems: compile error, run time error(bad results or crash). I think that may be one of the reasons that UNIX is losing market share in applications (in addition to higher hardware cost compared to Intel). I don’t know how the new generation programmers are taught in school. Are they using MS Visual Studio IDE for C++ class or gcc/gdb on Linux? The latter is much harder to use and debug; it’s all command line. Years ago I heard there is this thing called “KDevelop” Linux C++ IDE but I have not used it. Personally I do believe it’s important for programmers to know both IDE and command line, because IDE is not always available.
After I upgraded from version 5.0 to 7.5, I had some problems using MSN messenger. Basically when I start the Windows, it will start up the 5.0 first, and then launch the 7.5 version. In doing so it will sign out from 5.0 and then sign in the 7.5. So I will see two or three messages saying “you sign out from MSN messenger because you sign in another computer”, bala bala bala. I am sorry to my MSN friends if you got all these annoying messages. The good thing is I believe I found a workaround: I disabled the automatic sign in for the 5.0 when Windows starts. So we all should not get all these stupid messages.
I think the root cause of this problem is when I installed the new version (7.5), it did not automatically uninstall the old version (5.0). It appears to me 5.0 is a part of Windows Operating System, and it could not be uninstalled separately. In my mind it’s just another bug at Microsoft side.
Now if I could fix my own bugs.