Record locking
Bill Campbell
bill at celestial.com
Thu Apr 1 10:23:28 PST 2004
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:32:14PM -0800, Bill Campbell thus spoke:
>> On Thu, Apr 01, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>> >Simon--er, no...it was Brian K. White--said:
>
...
>> I do find it interesting that Apple's OS X has been getting
>> faster with each new release while adding new features such as
>> expose. Panther is considerably faster than the first version
>> of OS X I used about two years ago on the same machine, a
>> 450MhZ G4.
>
>THere is a reason for that - something that is gone from other OSes
>- and does have to do with the fact that there is one man who
>dictates how things should be done.
>
>Jobs was adamant that any new feature addes to OS/X could not
>impact performance. The machine had to be as fast after the
>addition as it was before, and there were to be no exception.
>
>So the code gets optimized every step of the way, and along the
>line some old pieces get improved. He seems to take the opposite
>approach of the rest of the industry thinking that power and memory
>is so cheap you can afford to program in a sloppy manner.
There are some extremely serious development tools available on the latest
``Panther'' release that allow developers to debug on the fly including the
ability to recompile shared libraries of a running application, and see the
results in real time. Compiles can be distributed across multiple OS X
servers on a network which has should cut that 30 hour OpenOffice.org build
down to size on a network with a bunch of dual processor G5s.
>Gates vs Jobs has always shown two different approaches, Gates with
>the code taken via dumptster diving to build the first BASIC for
>the Altair to make money, and Jobs finding more elegant and cheaper
>ways than traditional hardware approaches. One started with
>software and the other with hardware.
Gates' BASIC left out the only thing that made Dartmouth BASIC at all
useful, the matrix operators. I've always suspected that BillyG couldn't
understand the math so had to leave them out.
Bill
--
INTERNET: bill at Celestial.COM Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
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-- Robert Heinlein
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