what's a callback?

If a cold reading, screen test or other audition is successful, you will get a callback.

Every actor in LA and NY will tell you that. The majority of people on this thread are morons.

Now, there's also this fringe use of the term used by "computer programmers", whatever that means. Basically, if you call a function with a pointer to one of your own function, such that your function will be called at some time either synchronously (a-la qsort) or asynchronously (a-la signal(), or interrupt or button-press) then that target function is a callback.

An interrupt is a low-level callback, of sorts. A POSIX signal handler is a callback, of sorts. The qsort comparator is a callback. Basically any "registered" or "plug-in" function call is a callback. A callback can be used within a module or library for its own purposes or used as a mechanism to call external functions.

A virtual function in a child class is not, by definition, a callback, but the overall observer framework may use it like a callback, so for example you can have a CButtonObserver class with a buttonPress() method.

So if a framework defines a non-local control flow, where an application's functions are called somewhat asynchronously, then callbacks are used.

So if I pass a library a pointer to function X, but that library has no knowledge of function X other than the fact that it now has a pointer to it... and at some point the library calls function X, then X is a callback. This is what I mean by non-local control flow. X is not part of the core library implementation (a-la qsort), it's an externally provided function.

God damn it.

There are three types of programmer: Those who can use "callback" without having to write an essay, those like me who will write an essay, but still not articulate it clearly, and those who just write a

You obviously have never looked at the 1 Floppy demo from QNX. (Download from

One does NOT need hundreds of megabytes for a GUI based desktop userinterface. Also look at RiscOS 3.11 that was available on a machine with 1MB of RAM (512kB of ROM for OS). Now almost 20 years later it is a bit dated, but Windows XP today does not have that much extra, and it still does not have anti-aliased font handling. A fullt featured DTP App with scaleble fonts (anti-aliased), with vector, and bitmap embedded picture support. (The pictures can actually be rotated, in the document which is still not possible with MS Word). This App ran from 1x 3.5" floppy.

The expectation that one needs multi-megabyte applications, that has been created largely by Microsoft is actually holding things up these days. Todays hardware, with apps written a bit better would be unbelievably fast.

Regards Anton Erasmus

"Anton Erasmus" schreef in bericht news:1103802690.d16ba34b331eb6562ca740108e8bb67e@teranews...

something.

You obviously never looked at a typical Linux distribution that comes on 4 CD's. Or what about 8 CD's and a DVD:

A complete WIN98SE installation directory is 109MB.

No, but it comes as hundreds of megabytes these days, because there is little reason to squeeze it in less. What I remember from ~10 years back is that windows 3.x came on a bunch of floppies. That were perhaps 20 floppies or 30MB. Those were also the days that you really ran out of memory or disk space, if you were careless. Today I don't bother about it all. I save/keep everything, even emails that have megabyte attachements. It is not that it is a lost art or something, for instance PocketPC Windows doesn't take up that much space either.

My point is that the argument that Windows is 'bloated' doesn't hold. I bet that there are more PIC's running (relative) bloated code than PC's. Programmers at Microsoft aren't that stupid.

But I could be wrong about all that. My buggiest application is Protel. It is full of bugs. That said, I find it a brilliant piece of software.

I don't look at the size of an application to judge it's value. Who knows what's in there, or wants to know.

Yes, and nobody seems to be able to deliver. Have you tried open-office ? Last time I checked, their spreadsheet was about 5 times slower than an older version of Excel (2000).

But here is a great oppertunity for you. You only have to write it a 'bit' better.

In Java, COM, DCOM, OLE, etc., they are called interfaces. In C++, "prototype" and "function declaration", are synonymous. A function name without parameters is a pointer, but you can also declare a variable name for a pointer to a function with a... call it a special syntax. You knew that, right?

ActiveX really is a good way to write reusable code - DLLs on steroids. And the remote access (DCOM+/RPC) capability is the balls. Version control is a positive side benefit of the whole architecture. It's still a mess - a miracle that MS could pull it off IMO.

DHTML isn't a COM thing, it's a DOM thing.

They're not stupid, but, working as a team, they do manage to produce prodigious amounts of very bad code. After a decade of effort, they still seem incapable of preventing buffer overflow exploits, and every generation of Windows runs slower and is more difficult to maintain.

I've seen a bit of the Windows source code, and it's a mess. Windows is simply bad programming.

John

The hardware struggles to keep up with the bloat of Windows. My current PC has roughly a thousand times more compute power than my first DOS machine, boots in about 20x the time, and crashes maybe 10x as often. That's progress?

Well, my stuff starts up instantly and runs 24/7 for decades without crashing. The sources are more comment than code, so maintenance is easy.

Every Windows source module has a mandatory header, that's supposed to document the function, the author, and the revs. A typical module will have some gibberish name, and in the header section called "Module Function" the author generally fills in something like (I quote) "what it says".

Comments are rare and, when they do exist, are often useless or obscene.

That's because the Windows paradigm was kluged up in a hurry, and got worse from then on. Decades before Windows has cobbled up, real, solid, multiuser, bulletproof OSs had been running for years... literally running without crashing for years. DECs OSs used an event flag structure that made programs, basicly, into synchronous state machines; Windows uses an event-driven architecture that makes programs into asynchronus-logic hairballs.

The irony is that both Windows and the x86 architecture were designed entirely out of the mainstream of computing.

Well, that says it all. My products don't crash because I don't allow them to. But then, I'm not getting rich off forced upgrades like certain parties I could name. The only thing Windows does well is make money; that's all it was intended to do.

John

Some of the people at Microsoft write very ggod books about writing software, or managing large software projects.

I guess no one has any time to read or be trained.

I have been involved in the past with serious efforts to replace aircraft mechanical instruments with computer displays. If the OS crashes, people die.

No Windows need apply.

One of my customers builds jet engines and their control computers. An engine control computer is a suitcase-looking thing that's just under the cowling, exposed to the altitude and temperature and all. They run the jet fuel through the computer before they burn it, to moderate the computer's temperature. They program bare-metal because they can't trust any available OS. I think they are looking at QNX or Wind River or something, but no deployment so far. All their test cell stuff is Unix or lately Linux with VME i/o. They laugh at Windows.

In my company, most of our test racks run DOS.

John

If you believe that statement, you're posting to the wrong newsgroup.

They may well indeed not be stupid, but having the wrong mind-set, values, or whatever is applicable.

Microsoft didn't invent loadable drivers (hell, they barely *have* loadable drivers) or 3rd party hardware or documented APIs. They just stole others ideas, played catch-up by pre-announcing their products years ahead of availability, turned out bug-ridden crap, charged everybody to fix it, and ruthlessly and illegally leveraged the OS to kill off the people whose ideas they stole.

Microsoft recently announced another ripoff of somebody else's market and product, bundling it with the OS, thus killing the company that pioneered the concept. When Bill was asked how the victim company could possibly survive, he said that they should "learn to innovate."

John

Ehrr, does that WIN98SE include the equivalent set of applications, including all source code? Apples and pears again....

Compare it to Palm OS and it's applications and you'll see that even PocketPC is bloatware. Do you remember the phrase that WinCE brought back the hourglass on the PDA...

Tsss, compare a Internet Explorer with FireFox: half an OS compared to a browser pur sang.

Yes.

Well, the moment "hello world" produces an .exe of over 400kbyte, I do like to know....

Unfortunately, you ARE right here :-) OO really sucks with that.

Meindert

Mechanical instruments have serious problems of their own, and "glass cockpits" are slowly moving down to general aviation. One of the best approaches is redundant systems, but they can have bizarre failure modes of their own. Here is an analysis from Risks Digest on the Airbus fly-by-wire:

"According to Airbus Industrie, there are several ways in which the exchange of data and/or a problem in one computer can affect the other computer. Often the computers reset themselves after a few seconds but occasionally a fault results in repetitive resets or attempts to resynchronise. The fifth reset relatches the computer, which will not recover without a power interrupt. Reset breakers for manual power interrupts are on the flight deck overhead panel. Dual resets occur when both FMGECs encounter failures at the same time. They generally occur after a pilot entry that involves use of the navigation database or to an event synchronised between both flight management systems. Latched double failures usually occur if pilots successively perform three inputs that cause a reset, or if an `impossible' computation of predictions occurs."

Sounds a bit like Windows:)

Best,

Mike Monett

I had a high-speed paper tape reader, so it wasn't bad. And Focal seemed to be very reliable... I could run apps for weeks without reloading. I got a lot of mileage out of Focal-11, too; I actually contributed the random number generator to Rick Merrill (I did a pseudorandom xor shift register in software, replacing his classic old modulo code) and got acknowledged in the source code.

But it's not very fair to compare 35-year old iron running at 1 MHz to modern stuff. But I recall loading Focal-11 from high-speed paper tape in about the same time as my Windows boots today. I could load it from magtape in a second or two.

John

John,

I run DOS also and often need more than the 640k of base ram. Extended memory is terribly slow if you have to go through Himem, but you can bypass Himem and use flat mode which is much faster. It is compatible with DOS real mode code, and it avoids the speed and reliability issues of Protected mode.

One of the problems with flat mode is debugging code that addresses memory above 1 meg. The solution is a small tsr that allows you to view arrays and data anywhere in memory. Four markers are provided that can be set by your code so you can see if data is transferred properly to and from extended memory. Here's the url:

Best,

Mike Monett

How many grannies can run RegEdit? Or change their IP address? Or set IE to its non-default (ie, somewhat secure) settings?

Changing from modem to DSL, or setting up your internet stuff, on a Mac is stunning; you just do the obvious stuff, and it's all obvious.

My next-door neighbow is a sweet gay guy with zero technical competance; naturally, he's a Mac person. When I got my DSL, we drilled a hole through our walls and ran a Cat5 from my hub to his iMac. He clicked a few times, typed in his new IP, and was online in a couple of minutes. It took me, a programmer and EE, about an hour to persuade Windows to do the same thing. I used his Mac to go to my provider's web site to read the Windows procedures.

John

No, a Win PC with some decent apps is a enormously useful productivity tool. I just wish, from an engineering point of view, that it wasn't such a crappy implementation, and from an ethics point of view, that they weren't such greedy, vicious bastards. They have fifty billion dollars, in cash, more than they can ever use; what they are about now is power.

John

Well, he *does* let me borrow his chainsaw.

John

"Frank Bemelman" wrote

That's because you get all the source code and about 3000 other applications as well. You should download a Knoppix live cd and see what comes packed on that. You just stick it in your drive and boot it. It detects all your hardware on the fly at boot time, no installation required.

A fresh install of XP with a copy of Office is about 3GB, that's a bit fat don't you think?

That's just plain wrong, Win 3.11 came on 6 floppies. It literally boots in about 2 seconds on anything faster than 200Mhz, I really need to dig out that old 40MB drive and try it on my p4 now. ;-)

Gem desktop ran on an 8088, loaded up quick and gave me a high-res desktop with task switching. It was allot better than Win286. AIR, it came on 1 5.25" floppy.

Yes they are, but it's not about stupidity. It's about selling stuff. It's just simple collusion between the hardware makers and MS. Why do you think Intel pushes software based hardware (printers, modems, sound cards, etc...)? HP needs at least four background start-up tasks just to run a printer as well as the driver. It's just to make sure you want something faster. OEMS preload so much junk onto new machines that they are crawling right out of the box. What about the fact that Excel contained a full 3D flight simulator game easter-egg? How can that not qualify as bloat?

Protel.

software.

these

knows

You should, if you put personal information into it.

open-office ?

an

It's written in Java, what would you expect? It also didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Have you tried the latest version of Excel? I promise you that it loads whole lot slower than the