Dr. Dobb's Journal October 1997
Through careless racking of magazines, I find myself with the August issues of Upside and Red Herring staring me in the face as I work. The Red Herring cover shows Oracle CEO Larry Ellison brandishing a sword, while Upside's cover has Larry in the cockpit of a fighter jet. The message is clear: Larry is a Samurai Top Gun. Never mind that he's a figurehead with little connection with the day-to-day running of his company. Business is war, and Larry is a warrior prince. This theme of business as war was not invented by Upside or Red Herring; it comes from the business leaders themselves. I take it as evidence that most businesses are run by people who never got beyond the schoolyard bully stage of development. I don't mean that they were schoolyard bullies; rather, I suspect that they were the victims of bullies, who aspired to be bullies when they grew up, and who have realized their pathetic aspiration.
Not content with his "Real-Time" soapbox in our sister publication Embedded Systems Programming, Tyler Sperry has expanded his franchise. Sperry fans will find more of his trenchant perspectives and invectives in "Tyler's Tirades" for Inquiry.com. But sometimes Tyler goes too far. His August "Real-Time" is titled "Pesky Details: The Sequel" and explores the idea of Batman as a mythic figure descriptive of the world of the embedded programmer. This enfringes on my franchise. Batman is mine: For years I've been referring to my home as "Stately Swaine Manor." Tyler Sperry is a pesky detail.
I never much liked Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today" slogan, so I was tickled by an item that ran in the San Diego Union and elsewhere in July: Apparently the TV ad for Internet Explorer uses the musical theme of the "Confutatis Maledictis" from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem. Where do you want to go today? "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis," the chorus sings, which I am told means "The damned and accursed are convicted to flames of hell."
While I have your attention, Microsoft -- this mouse thing has been bugging me. Since Windows was first introduced, all your documentation and all third-party documentation that I've seen has referred to a "right mouse button" and a "left mouse button," which have different functions. Also since introduction, it has been possible to reverse the functions of these buttons, which many of us left-handed people routinely do. Which makes the documentation wrong. So we have learned to mentally translate it, reading "left" for "right" and "right" for "left." How come we gotta do that? Has it ever in all these years crossed your collective mind to give functional names to the mouse buttons?
In this age of bloated software, DDJ ought to give a special award in honor of the early peek-and-poke programmers who knew how to squeeze every last byte out of their code. Some of the old-timers out there may remember that there were some powerful and easy-to-use programs before graphical-user interfaces came along. For the Running Light Award, should we ever decide to create one, I nominate that legendary coder Frank Borland.
Network computers are here, and there are various contenders for the NOS to run 'em. For what it's worth, I point out that "nos" is a prefix that means illness, "nostrum" is a quack medication, and "nostomania" is intense homesickness.
Here's what the world needs -- an emulator for the Altair computer. Michael Hyman, author of the very funny PC Roadkill, has posted his throwback machine at http://www.nwlink.com/ ~tigger/altair.html.
--Michael Swaine