OT: Was: Re: LINUX on Windows 98

[Mike McMullin]

On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 10:45 -0500, Jimmy Montague wrote:
> I once knew the head of a computer science department at a major
> university. He told me that as the demand for ever more and more
> powerful software goes up, the quality of the programmers involved in
> the process and the quality of the programming they produce become ever
> more dismal. He saw the regression as the result of some natural law. He
> thought there'll someday come a time when the development process
> becomes wholly dysfunctional: like they'll start out to build a
> word-processor and end up with a cement mixer.
> 
> On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 12:26 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Jimmy Montague wrote:
> > 
> > > My point is that if you printed everything on that DVD and put it in
> > > binders, it would take up even more space now than it did then. Thank
> > > God for plastic -- in this, the information age, our trees no longer
> > > stand a chance
> > 
> > I was kidding - really I _did_ get your point.  I was just noting that while
> > the information & data capacity and speed of the systems keep expanding,
> > the actual footprints go down.  I have practically no manuals any more, and
> > when I buy texts, I try for softcopies.
> > -- 
> > derek

  How many new programmers can even read Assembler neumonics. let alone
grep what they mean, and how they have (and should) influenced coding?