Macha's Blog - Latest Comments

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

Valerian Precop — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:39:35 -0000

I thought the ideea between IE6 and IE8 is about lifespan. Are you actually looking at the market share and not the lifespan of these browsers?
How many years did the world used (and probably will still use) the old IE6 browser, and how many years do you think the world will use IE7, or IE8... or any other new IE browser?

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

Emz — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:42:53 -0000

Hey,
WHen I start the DOS box up after typing in your commands to make it happen when it starts runing it just ends up on a dark black screen...Ive installed it and everything and am so close but whatever Im typing must just be wrong. Any thoughts?

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

SilentLennie — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:26:47 -0000

Do you really think IE6 will remain longer than IE8 ? Looking at the other comments about IE7 and IE6 and at the stats I can't believe IE6 will remain longer than IE8. The stats are: IE6 in Jan. 2010: 20.34% (marketshare.hitslink) / 13.33% (Statcounter) and IE6 last month: 2.23% / 8.03% while IE8 in Jan. 2010: 25.63% / 21.86% and IE8 last month: 28.2% / 24%

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

Devil's Kitchen — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:29:23 -0000

Two of our large clients—one a UK local council, the other an NHS authority—upgraded their browsers to IE7.

In January. Of this year. Yes, that's January 2011. Our customers upgraded their browser to IE7 in January 2011.

*weeps*

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

Mary Johnson12 — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:22:32 -0000

I am totally lost, need some help. How do I install this on DOS? Am using vista, and have installed dosbox, now what?

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

sniffer71 — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:33:24 -0000

I don't think you can count out IE7 for a while yet (well I certainly can't). I work in the financial service industry in the UK and a few of the larger banks have decided incredibly to upgrade to IE7 from IE6 - mainly because they have so many internal systems that rely on the older browser. Considering the amount of time it has taken them to move from IE6, I dread to think how long it will be before they get onto a decent version of IE.

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

tchalvakspam — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:38:32 -0000

Part of the problem is the "we don't provide you with a path to upgrade within the browser itself" issue. Microsoft is tied to their OS, so they make their browsers tied to their OS. As long as that's the case, it's going to be a vicious cycle.

Re: 76 IEs? Not Likely. - Macha

Alexander Trefz — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:32:18 -0000

Windows 8 is not new and scary, Metro is. Windows 8 is to Windows 7 as W7 was to Vista: it is a performance upgrade with some Features, Metro is the thing that is running on the tablet-stuff but not on enterprise, which is MS-Core business. That is why they promise: every W7 app runs on W8. They need that compat after the big NT5.x NT6.x switch(XP->Vista).

P.S.: Nice Post, though ;)

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

anon — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:58:52 -0000

total DOS noob here. theme hospital installer doesn't appear after the mount cdrom part. can anyone make a printscreen tutorial? will be greatly appreciated

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

guest — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:41:14 -0000

http://code.google.com/p/corsi...
use this it just works!

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

Macha — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:04:31 -0000

You download the file for Windows. It is at the top of the list.

Re: Theme Hospital on modern computers - Macha

34637 — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:42:38 -0000

hello i clicked the link on the dosbox but there are so many files to download, which do i download

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Casey Leask — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:03:06 -0000

Everyone was a beginner at some point. Why are you so hostile to new programmers?
If the project has effective tests and procedures for accepting commits, why do you care?
This does seem to be part of a nasty attitude that shouldn't be acceptable (see http://thingist.com/t/item/437... ).

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Macha — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:37:56 -0000

No. This is mostly about programs done by a programmer themslves for fun or for learning, not programs written during work.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

John Kaster — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:26:48 -0000

You make some good points, but there are plenty of "new" problems to solve that could use existing frameworks. As for the framework code itself there are lots of "old practice" frameworks that could benefit from refactoring to the latest techniques, so newbies could try to apply themselves there as well.

As always, it's a matter of spending your time and effort wisely. I just had the newest, very smart, developer on my time rewrite the SMTP and POP components in .NET from scratch because he never looked to see if there was something already existing for them, and didn't ask. He was writing them so he could USE them to solve the real business problem we needed solved -- and there were a few dozen existing components he could have used for what he needed.

With this "brave new world" of "most of what you need has already been written" the skills to quickly evaluate the options of competing frameworks when you need to adopt one is AT LEAST as important as knowing how to reinvent the wheel.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Oscar Martinez — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:08:07 -0000

In an ideal world, employers would give some time to (all) developers (not only new) to mess around with projects. In reality, we have to do it on our own time.
I do think that getting our hands dirty makes us understand and appreciate frameworks.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Jamie — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:31:33 -0000

Very well said. The right place to land is a balance, of course, but the reality of programming is that the building blocks that are available, while perhaps covering a great deal of what you might ever want to do with an application, are far from perfectly suited for every situation. They may not do exactly what you want, or they may not be extensible enough, or they may be overkill. Then there's always a risk in using someone else's code. Nothing is without bugs, and it's a lot harder to figure out problems when you've put absolute faith in a black box. The question is, is that risk greater or less than the inherent risk in starting from scratch? If you're writing code for something that you know you'll use lots and lots of times, and there's nothing that's a perfect fit out there, then it may well be perfectly justifiable to build it yourself.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

sorgfelt — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:49:18 -0000

Your statement: "Usually, this is someone who has done a much better job of it than any newbie code" brings to mind all of the inconsistencies and horrible workarounds that many programmers who use expert-written frameworks have to deal with. Experts can't always think of everything, or they may change their concepts mid-stream, after many others have started using their work, resulting in a difficult to fix mess. A newbie who has thought things through can often outdo those experts.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Rob — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:11:18 -0000

Great post. It touches on some great points about learning programming.

I agree that coding up a big project "from scratch" is a great way to learn; I went through a very similar experience in my first job as a coder (a custom ecommerce back end). But In some ways I wish that I was more aware of some of the frameworks out there that would have taken some of the heavy lifting out of the process.

The way I see it: as much as django or whatever MVC framework takes the hard parts out of building a project, there is still *plenty* to do in order to build, say, a social network project. Django or cakePHP will go a long way to get the thing up and running, but it still takes a lot of know-how to do it right. And instead of taking time to figure out out how to write a DAL you can take time to, say, develop better algorithms to manage the data (my personal itch I like to scratch).

For that matter, it could be argued that coding in high-level languages takes away all the hard work of writing machine code and therefore young developers don't have to really learn how to manage bits.

Ultimately I think there is no "best" way to learn how to code. Everyone has to find their own path.

Again, great post! Very though provoking.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Jono — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:10:14 -0000

Doesn't this presuppose that the reason for hiring newbies is to help them learn rther than to create applications?

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Schlingel — Tue, 10 May 2011 07:57:35 -0000

I started with C and begun C# because of the Visual Designer. Through this I build visual appealing applications and started to dig into the guts of the system to do more and more cool stuff with the program.

I think the point is: You have to have something in mind. I don't see the point in writing a sorting algorithmen as beginner because that's just not a fun thing for me to do. Go get hacking on processing and write a littel game with bouncing balls instead!

For me - as a visual type - nothing else works. If I don't have a picture I don't get it and therefore playing arround with Frameworks may be a good way. (Python, Processing, etc.)

Flow Based Programming may open up the matter to more people. Maybe End User Development get some people doing "real" programming. Everything should be learnable by trying or better said by playing arround with it. Frameworks may help here a lot.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Peter — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:59:19 -0000

ANSI SQL should be used when possible instead of the custom, incompatible syntax. Their "Complex Find Conditions" can be written in ANSI SQL.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

cheater — Mon, 09 May 2011 05:34:35 -0000

Oh yeah, let's have newbies contributing idiotic code to cakePHP or Drupal. Oh wait... they are already, nm.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Superdog — Mon, 09 May 2011 03:24:06 -0000

There are loads of new langauges all the time. Rather then reinvent the wheel why not for example go re-implement it in the Go language or D for example.

Re: Not Invented Here and New Programmers - Macha

Dathu — Mon, 09 May 2011 03:02:05 -0000

That's what the problem with using APIs.I am java programmer i wrote so many programs in NET BEANS IDE which can provide every thing but after getting a job in start up i faced a difficult thing to execute the program through command line.Using IDE i didn't know how the programs executing,and less scope to learn but it's different using command line especially for Newbies like me.Good article to read..