On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 10:46:55PM -0500, James Rohde wrote: > Actually, my comment was more to the point that a lot of the major > software players tend to throw in features which aren't necessarily > needed by most people (anyone recall Word 6? I tried it out on a > friend's Mac when I was in grad school, and the grammar checker flagged > most of my sentences - but they were written in the exact format > expected in my field).
There are a lot of people who still use Word 5 for the Mac, because they feel that it serves most of their needs. There is an article out there where somebody collected a list of those "single missing features" from Word 5 (ie. users could suggest the one feature they thought Word 5 needed) and figured out that you pretty much end up with the current version of Word. All of the features are used, albeit by no single person. I think the real problem is that we have a one-size-fits-all mentality, in a market which is much larger and much more diverse than it was twenty years ago. So what you end up with are buggy pieces of bloatware which are supposed to please everybody. > I do recognize that the Apple II series can't do everything > [...]'Chrome' does slow down programs, but poor programming > probably does even worse. When I learned how to program in high school, the teacher always told us to use the smallest data type we could get away with and placed a fair amount of emphasis on algorithms -- ie. make it small and make it fast. Well, I went through the first year and a half of a computer science programme and they rarely mentioned algorithms. A friend of mine, who went through the complete computer science programme and the same high school course, noted that they were continually using 32-bit wide integers to represent small numbers (ie. numbers between 0 and 255). While I'm willing to bet that compilers would end up storing 8-bit values as 32-bit words anyhow, it is a bit disturbing to think of how inefficiently memory is being used by programmers. Then again, how often do you hear about developers optimising for memory use? (Never.) Byron. -- Apple2list is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... / Buy books, CDs, videos, and more from Amazon.com \ / <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/lowendmac> \ Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Apple2list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/apple2.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/apple2list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
