Nah. The skill is when you can hold eight-track paper tape up to the light and read out what it says! A vital skill when you want to splice a section into a few hundred feet!

Swapping a card in a deck is kid's stuff.

I wouldn't disagree Robert, but when you have got 50+ million lines of code in Windows 10, some 44 million in Office 2013, 10 million in Firefox 4.5 million in Photoshop etc, etc, etc, the potential for things to go wrong is enormous. Most is produced by different companies, all hoping it will be compatible with the OS together with other 3rd party software and hardware, its a wonder that it works as well as it does.

Edited by deleted (Mon 10-Aug-15 00:11:32)

... but you didn't disagree about my second point.

Ah, I started as a trainee programmer, and that was pretty much the case.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The people using or inheriting OOP code become wholly unaware of how it works, and so wholly unaware of how their adaptation can screw thing a few levels of inheritance up the tree

I think that is mostly when someone uses an object based on how it actually works rather than how it is supposed to work then gets caught out when the object behaviour is "corrected". Default behaviours are a popular sources of disasters in waiting.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:
The people using or inheriting OOP code become wholly unaware of how it works, and so wholly unaware of how their adaptation can screw thing a few levels of inheritance up the tree

True, and why interoperability testing is so important. So important that MS named it the Insider Program rather than do it themselves.

Personally I find W10 underwhelming but then all I ask of an OS is that it efficiently runs the programs I want and not those that MS forces upon me.

With MS forcing updates on W10 with no option to exclude them - unless you have the Pro version - it will be a case of 'If it ain't broke, it don't have enough features'. Constant gratuitous updates to the OS and Apps that were working perfectly well and now have to be re-learned because someone thought change is necessary is annoying. Often there is a loss of functionality.

BTW: I can recall programming old military mobile systems by setting switches to the appropriate binary pattern and pushing the load button.

We sometimes needed to patch running code in a banking system on the fly with no chance to test it but lots of separate eyeballs to check it. Invariably when the "Go" button was pressed someone would shout BANG!.

In reply to a post by Banger:

You can still use windows feedback to report problems and they do read the reports.

they may read, but how much notice do they take?

anyway, I do not have 10 installed anymore.

In reply to a post by rogerfp:

I don't think that most understand the development of an operating system from inception to release. Obviously there is an Alpha version which is usually pretty buggy. Then along comes the Beta versions. There can be 1000's of these. Often a new Beta every day. Every reported problem is investigated and is determined to be either requiring investigation and a fix, or not worth bothering with. Even those that are fixed may of course cause more problems as a knock on effect. Eventually a Beta version is deemed to stable enough to be chosen as the "Gold" version or RTM (released To Manufacturing). This will still have multiple issues, but there is no way that an operating system will ever be perfect when it contains millions of lines of code. It would take years to perfect if even then. Add to this the 10's of thousands of companies producing software and hardware to be compatible with the OS, it's a wonder that it works as well as it does. The version of Windows 10 just released may be a beta from 2/3 months ago and new problems have since been found and worked on. That's why Service Packs an bug fixes are almost a daily occurrence. Anyone who expects a Operating System to run perfectly from day one is seriously misguided.
The only way that an operating system could be more stable is to use the Apple approach and only release 3rd party software through Microsoft after having been thoroughly tested for compatibility. But this would be an impossible task, even if it was deemed acceptable for Microsoft to have such overall control, which of course, would quite rightly, never be agreed to.

i remember someone saying a few years back in XP days, that Windows was a good OS as long as you do not install anything on it.

Linux seems to do things right and I doubt the programmers get paid anywhere near the amount MS pays theirs and it is open source.

In reply to a post by Spuriousfish:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:
The people using or inheriting OOP code become wholly unaware of how it works, and so wholly unaware of how their adaptation can screw thing a few levels of inheritance up the tree

True, and why interoperability testing is so important. So important that MS named it the Insider Program rather than do it themselves.

Personally I find W10 underwhelming but then all I ask of an OS is that it efficiently runs the programs I want and not those that MS forces upon me.

With MS forcing updates on W10 with no option to exclude them - unless you have the Pro version - it will be a case of 'If it ain't broke, it don't have enough features'. Constant gratuitous updates to the OS and Apps that were working perfectly well and now have to be re-learned because someone thought change is necessary is annoying. Often there is a loss of functionality.

BTW: I can recall programming old military mobile systems by setting switches to the appropriate binary pattern and pushing the load button.

you can't stop updates on the pro version either, you can defer non-security ones for a while, but that is it.