Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Thu, 12 May 2011 20:44:57 +0200, <tmoran@acm.org> a écrit:

>   A few years ago an NTFS disk became corrupted and Windows stuck its  
> nose
> in the air and pretended it didn't exist.  So I got out my old Janus DOS
> compiler and, accessing disk sectors via the BIOS, was able to copy
> almost everything.
>   More generally, hardware is simple - a few pages would tell you
> everything you needed to know about, say, DMA.  Today you need to learn
> a massive library even to do a simple thing, and then spend a lot of time
> discovering what the docs left out or lied about.
I agree :( and I feel that's a design mistake

> I suspect programmers
> today spend much more time gathering information and much less time
> creating programs.
I suspect no programmers of widely used systems (Windows, Linux kernel,  
MySQL, and so on) understand the whole of these systems (another matter  
too). May be that's one of the reason of these permanent increases of  
resources consumption ?


-- 
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour  
les chiens.
“ c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */ ” [Anonymous]