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By the end of February 2009, Mike McCarthy wrote an article called: The Pointless Search for Payware Perfection. I'll want to write an answer/expansion/agreement about it.
As him, I'm a software developer. With a different and lesser market, but this is another history. The point is that I've been developing software from twenty plus years ago, since the Sinclair ZX-81, and selling software since the IBM PCs running at 4 MHz with 256 Kb RAM.
The point is that ANY developer, you, me, Mike or anyone, has to battle with many drawbacks. Some of them are:
Each user has a very different hardware: ranging from upgraded computers with second-hand video cards and components from different generations, to computers so new that they did not exist when the software was developed. The same applies to this wonderful software called Flight Simulator. It was developed to run into any computer that was or wasn't designed when released, with any possible hardware combination: something unreal.
But: how was believed to work that? Well, when you installed Windows, you installed a group of dlls: "pieces" of software that translates the requisites of any part of your machine into Windows "language" and vice verse. There are not always made specificly to the proper piece: sometimes a generic dll, or driver, is installed. It will happen because the installation CD was lost, because the hardware seller is a newcommer in the bussines, because the employed assembling your machine is a just graduated, because your son installed a CD without knowing what it does...
Now comes the Windows configuration: it will be configured to work with English keboards, french language, Taiwanese time zone, Bolivian currency and Japanese numeric configuration. I, personally, had some problems installing my systems into some client computers until I discovered that some sellers used to deliver machines with Spanish keyboard but Mexican currency configuration. There was a time, too, when I lost some sales until I discovered that the hardware sellers where installing a DOS 5 beta version with a flaw that prevented my sistems to work (Yes, I used DOS... and CPM, if you care!). Fortunately, the finished DOS 5 release doesn't have this flaw.
Next problem, the hidden programs: not necessary virus and trojans, but ipod organizers, ares downloaders, screen savers, two or three antivirus at the same time (when you must have only one), intranets, electronic calendars, windows messenger, aplications that some time ago you or your friends instaled, ran for a week and never acquiered the license (but never removed)...
Of course, our loved Flight Simulator: today there are two main versions: FS2004 and FSX, some upgrades, ALL the gauges and dlls that you installed each time you installed a plane, ALL the gauges and dlls that you removed when you uninstalled a plane...
And, by last, the just normal reading mistakes, caused by electronic surges, cosmic rays, knee kicks in the table, cuantic tunnel-efect indetermination...
Just let's put it in clear: Sometimes, I wonder when my machine can write and print a two lines document.
Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist2@cantv.net
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