Bob Hayes Online

Dan Fogelberg has died of prostate cancer at the age of 56.

It’s been many years since I listened to Dan’s music, but there was a time in my life when I enjoyed it very much. (I never stopped liking it, but he had such a long dry period that I just stopped.) He will be missed.

Get screened, kids.

Coding Sanity bites the bullet and upgrades from buggy, slow Vista to the high-performance reliability of Windows XP. Snicker.

My own Vista experiences have been relatively painless, at least personally, for the very good reason that I didn’t install it on any of the machines that I actually use. My long-suffering assistant has a laptop with Vista pre-installed; it’s a buggy, slow, piece of crap. It sucks to be her, and not just because she has to work for me. (I’ve got a desktop with XP for her, but we’re still working on getting it hooked up to the Internet so she can use a real computer again.)

So why DID Microsoft drop billions in R&D and untold billions in direct programming costs to shoot themselves in the foot? I don’t know, but I can guess: it’s the same reason that schools of education are still trying to find new ways of performing basic pedagogy 2500 years after the principles were first, and adequately, laid out. It’s boring to do things the same old way. It’s boring to say to people “this is our OS core, and it will remain stable into the indefinite future, and other than bug fixes and new device drivers, we will leave the kernel untouched.”

Programmers love to re-invent the wheel. Re-inventing the wheel is fun, satisfying, and achievable - and this time, we’ll do it properly with our new wheel flange code… Microsoft has a lot of programmers to keep happy and maybe throwing umpteen thousand person-years of programming time at reworking something that was working perfectly well is the best way for them to do that.

I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to use the resulting crap code.