Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
I'm with PDR here
Damn, I'm not used to people agreeing with me. Can I have another go at it?
I know a lot of people like "working under the hood" and I'm willing to believe they may get a better product than vanilla W10 - but the same applies to cars
I COULD spend hours and have fun tweaking my motor - but I choose to get my kicks elsewhere and all I want is for it to start every morning. Not exciting but it works 99.9999% of the time
That's an excellent analogy. When I went to uni I had all the usual young man's aspirations - fame, fortune, fast cars and hot babes. But as I was an engineer by temperament as well as by education choices the fame, fortune and hot babes weren't an option so I was left with just the cars. I modified cars (ever seen what a Mk4 Triumph Spit is like with 200bhp? I still have the scars to prove it!), I had "special" cars (lotus elan S4SE with the 26R back end), and I built kit cars with moronically high power-weight ratios. I had a machine shop and used to get withdrawal symptoms if I spent more than 24 hours away from it. I always modified the engines of any car I owned, and usually had at least one spare engine so I could have one in the car, one being modified and (ideally) one rebuilt and ready for installation. There was the occasion when I dropped a valve on the way home, got towed in by the AA and did an engine swap in under 45 minutes making me only 15 minutes late picking up my blind date (she wasn't impressed) - that's a different story altogether.
In those days I was very familiar with the under-the-hood stuff with DOS and Windows. Part of my job was creating automated PC-based test and measurement systems for the NC machines, so I was writing low-level code in C and ASM86. The last one I was fully familiar with was WFWG3.11 - I could look at, tinker with and actually
understand all those curious statements in the WIN.INI and SYS.INI, seeing a memory exclusion statement and thinking "Yes, of course it needs that".
But the arrival of Win95 coincided with my meeting a hot babe who was a particularly poor judge of character, and at that point the enthusiasm to learn a new OS and even the workshop withdrawal symptoms faded, and when we moved into a larger house to provide room for ensprogment the machine tools and car spares were sold off. Now that said sprogs have reached uni-stage I have re-established the workshop, but I'm no longer that interested on building cars or in computers as a hobby - they are just tools which I use. But I still have a life, and I don't feel the urge to waste any of it doing pointless under-the-hood messing about any more. YMMV.
Same with computer systems - and I go back to ALGOL..................
I go back to commodore PETs, but I do remember at Uni the more complex assignments were done by punching a pile of cards and taking them over the the data-processing building to put them in the queue for running. And I amd still very much of the view that all
proper engineers can write Fortran in ANY language...
PDR