• (cs) in reply to felix
    felix:

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    an internet/intranet based Office/Collaboration system that would deliver "90% of functionality that 90% of [Microsoft Office] users use...

    ...already exists (interestingly enough). It's called AbiWord, takes up 20Mb on the HDD, reads and writes a good number of word processor file formats (even Palm Doc!) and does exactly what most Word users need, no more, no less. And to top it all, it's open source. Did it kill MS Word? Of course not...

    Another "non-bloat" alternative is TextMaker.

    Like Abiword, it's also available for Linux; and even for PocketPCs.
  • DOA (unregistered)

    Great, now I have to wait till Monday for my daily fix of tech disaster.

    Well, at least I got to bitch about something... 

  • aeternus (unregistered)

    How come there were no comments to the greatest WTF of this site ever? Or am I just not seeing them? I had a pretty good laugh of this:

    [image]

    (screenshot taken 9 Oct 2006, 09:40 CET)

     

    captcha: chocobot(?)

  • egilhh (unregistered) in reply to GoatCheez
    GoatCheez:

    Alex Papadimoulis:

    An avid programmer himself, the CIO knew exactly how they could accomplish this. He convinced The Founder that, with a handful of programmers helping him, he could develop a client/server Microsoft Office Killer using Visual Basic 6. And with the latest hardware available, their application could easily scale to support twenty million users using one, maybe two servers. And best of all, it would all take only six months to create.

    <sarcasm>Just like I'm creating the next Halo/Doom/Quake/UT killer in javascript... And because I'm using javascript, I won't have to worry about browser compatibility since all browsers support javascript...</sarcasm>

     

    Awesome!

    Can't wait to play it using Links

     ~egilhh

     

  • (cs) in reply to DOA

    Everyone here is saying that the CEO of this company is really stupid.  I couldn't disagree more.    The Dot Com bubble was something that was well known to happen by the rich.  The rich got richer and the shareholders got stuck with the bill.   

    I know this because I worked at a dot com during that time and the CEO knew he would walk away with 30+ million even if the business failed.   I watched the company grow and then blowup.   The CEO knew it was going to happen and he walked away with a ton of money.    Everyone lost their job and he was laughing.

    What you have to understand is that during that time it was all about the hype and not substance.   Most of the people who started companies then had no intention of staying around.   

    The real WTFis all the shareholders who gave this company money for a dream.   I'm sure the CEO of this company gave himself a ton of stock options very early and well before the stock even started selling.     

    I'll bet the CEO of this company knew exactly what he was doing and made a ton of cash at it too.   

     

     

     

     

     

  • RC1 (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    >Wait a minute - MS has been trying to debug Office for - what, 20 years now?

    >and they're still at it. Why would anyone think they, or any army of programmers

    >could do it a mere six months?

    You just need 1/40th of the number of Office programmers that MS has, and you

    can do it in 1/40th of the time.  It's a well-known law of programming.

    Ah yes: nine women and a month do a baby make.

    Wouldn't that be more like 1/9 a woman and a month do a baby make? 

    One real programmer on the job and a matter of minutes do lots of release candidates make... <!-- End: CommunityServer.Discussions.Controls.PostDisplay.TextPost -->

  • Tragomaskhalos (unregistered)

     

    I wonder how many of the yo-yos embarking on the predictable VB bashing have actually used it in a commercial environment. Back in the COM/DNA days VB6 was _usually_ the best choice not only for fat clients but also for server-side components, because it is so tightly integrated with COM and hides so much of the plumbing. I speak from having done COM development in both C++ and VB and also as a big fan of C++ in general.

    The real WTF here is not the choice of language, it's the whole idea of a client-server office suite.

     

  • jjim (unregistered)

    I think these stories where more interesting/fun when they concentrated on code, not business.

     

  • (cs) in reply to Jason Roelofs
    Anonymous:

    Isn't Step 1 to building a competing project not to use the competitor's proprietary technology (VB6 and thus Windows only)?

     

    I thought Step 1 was collect underpants...

  • Redshirt Coder (unregistered) in reply to kuroshin

    Twenty million users using one , or two servers ? 


    I think it went a bit different...

    It was more likely that the estaminate was that you need half a year of hiring, not time. Also, i strongly belive that it was something like 2 users and 20 servers with 6 GB of space. You see, V and G are pretty near to each other, so this might happen ;)

     

    captcha: 1337- hey, thats my old licence plate number! 

  • (cs) in reply to GoatCheez
    GoatCheez:
    smbell:
    GoatCheez:

    Anonymous:
    Well, it could have been worse... They could have tried to do it in Java!

    Ever hear of OpenOffice? 

    You mean the OpenOffice(.org) that is written in C++?

    foot in my mouth yet again.... soab... I just assumed it was written in java because it was 1. xplat, 2. required JRE (doesn't actually require i just found out, it's only needed for certain things.... ), and 3. is slow as shit. 

    Don't feel too bad. There are a couple of other examples - Corel Office in Java, from many many years ago (demonstrated exactly why Java wasn't feasible as a platform back then), FlySuite, the very modern ThinkFree (whose founders clearly didn't learn from history)...

    It's one of those ideas whose time comes once every half decade or so, observes that it's about as welcome as a fart in a lift, and promptly passes unmourned.

  • (cs) in reply to Who wants to know

     SHOOT!  You stole half my thunder!  I was going to say the SAME thing!  VB, however, is a LOUSY and WORTHLESS language to write an good editor in though!  It DOES come with tools to ADD prebuilt functionality but M/S FORBIDS its use to compete, and it is NOT generally as good as M/S word! 

    And 20,000,000????  With VB????  FORGET IT!  On 2 servers?  What were they smoking?

     BESIDES, who uses a competitors proprietary interpretive technology to compete against that competitors NATIVE technology?  Just THAT spells DISASTER!

     Steve

     You wouldn't be R. Steve Walz, by any chance...?
     

  • (cs) in reply to its me
    its me:

    Of course the idea of creating an "Office Killer" with VB6 scalable to millions of user on a couple of servers (scan someone say 8-thread COM limit?) is so ridiculous you might as well say you're creating the next internet with string and tin cans....

    -Me 


    I was thinking more along the lines of a series of tubes.
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to JamesCurran
    JamesCurran:

    The 80/20 rule is what is more common, 80% of all users uses 20% of the same functions.

    side note -- Ever notice that whenever someone cites a statistic like this, the two numbers always add up to 100%, even though they are percentages of different things, and are therefore independent of each other.  To me, this greatly calls into doubt the credibility of such a statistic (i.e., it was clearly made up on the spot)

     Time for math class- brought to you today by Wikipedia (see Pareto Principle):

     "Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants. However, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources. There is nothing special about the number 80, but many systems will have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution."

     

    Of course, the problem with applying this to software is, software functions aren't "shared" in the sense of consumed by a single participant, that the math requires.  Now, you can extend the math to fuzzy sets, but there isn't a lot of evidence that, in that case, "many systems will have k somewhere around this region [80] of intermediate imbalance in distribution."

     

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to aeternus
    Anonymous:

    How come there were no comments to the greatest WTF of this site ever? Or am I just not seeing them? I had a pretty good laugh of this:

    [image]

    (screenshot taken 9 Oct 2006, 09:40 CET)

    captcha: chocobot(?)

    You are new here?  older versions of this forum are legendary.

     captcha: irony

     

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Saarus

    Saarus:

    I was thinking more along the lines of a series of tubes.

    Theres already one on Brazil (info)

    [image][image]

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • (cs) in reply to BA
    Anonymous:
    musigenesis:
    Anonymous:

    For all those who are quick to bash VB (including myself), I was surprized to read the following comment from Linus Torvalds:

    "...For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades.

    And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example..."

    This is from an article posted on slash: http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stiff-asks-great-programmers-answers/ 

    I find it funny that VB is so often referred to as not being an object-oriented language.  In fact, since version 4 VB has supported the Encapsulation and Polymorphism aspects of the OO Holy Trinity.  Before .NET, VB did not support True Inheritance, but as we used to say at a previous job, "Inheritance is a great way of ensuring that the bad decisions you make at the start of a project stay with you forever." 

    Object-Oriented Polymorphism is not function/operator overloading. Although people have warped the meaning of polymorphism to the point where we must distinguish between OO and non-OO polymorphism, they are not the same.

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_in_object-oriented_programming

    OO Polymorphism requires Inheritance and virtualisation. If you don't have those, you can't have polymorphism.
     

     

    Perhaps your're referring to something other than the Wikipedia article you cite.  That article is pretty clear about polymorphism being the capability of objects of different types to present the same interface to a calling object.

    Or perhaps you're just not very familiar with VB (although I find this hard to believe - critics of VB are always incredibly knowledgeable about the platform).  VB has implemented interfaces since version 5 (maybe version 4 - I forget). 

  • BA (unregistered) in reply to JamesCurran
    JamesCurran:

    OO Polymorphism requires Inheritance and virtualisation. If you don't have those, you can't have polymorphism.

    Actually, no. Inheritance is only require to the extent that in a true OO system, all classes derive from Object.  Virtualisation is purely an implementation detail.

    The essence of OO polymorphism was implemented quite literally by the Win32 window message pump, where an object (hWnd) would receive an message (Msg) and some associated data (LParam, WParam).   In a true OO system, window.Open(FULLSCREEN) and file.Open("readme.txt") are examples of polymorphism even those neither inheritance nor virtualiation are in use there, because they show, as stated in the very article you cite "the ability of objects belonging to different types to respond to method calls of methods of the same name, each one according to an appropriate type-specific behaviour. "

    But this wouldn't be valid:

    baseClass *bThing[2];

    bThing[0] = new Window();
    bThing[1] = new File();

    for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
    {
        bThing[i].open("Whatever goes here");
    } 


    They must be the same objects of different types. Like dogs and cats are different types of animal. Not like how doors and your fist are different types of objects and can both open and close. The examples in the Wikipedia article illustrate the concept more explicitly. Polymorphism allows me not to care about the type of the derived class, I can treat it like the base class and it will behave appropriately according to its type.

  • (cs) in reply to egilhh
    Anonymous:
    GoatCheez:

    Alex Papadimoulis:

    An avid programmer himself, the CIO knew exactly how they could accomplish this. He convinced The Founder that, with a handful of programmers helping him, he could develop a client/server Microsoft Office Killer using Visual Basic 6. And with the latest hardware available, their application could easily scale to support twenty million users using one, maybe two servers. And best of all, it would all take only six months to create.

    <sarcasm>Just like I'm creating the next Halo/Doom/Quake/UT killer in javascript... And because I'm using javascript, I won't have to worry about browser compatibility since all browsers support javascript...</sarcasm>

     

    Awesome!

    Can't wait to play it using Links

     ~egilhh

     

    Okay, whose bright idea was it to name a text-mode browser a homonym of another text-mode browser?  They couldn't have called it, I don't know, cougar or puma or something?
     

  • BA (unregistered) in reply to cconroy
    cconroy:

    Okay, whose bright idea was it to name a text-mode browser a homonym of another text-mode browser?  They couldn't have called it, I don't know, cougar or puma or something?
     

    Mikulas Patocka

    captcha: (whiskey tango) _foxtrot_
     

  • Anon Coward (unregistered) in reply to Tragomaskhalos
    Anonymous:

     

    I wonder how many of the yo-yos embarking on the predictable VB bashing have actually used it in a commercial environment. Back in the COM/DNA days VB6 was _usually_ the best choice not only for fat clients but also for server-side components, because it is so tightly integrated with COM and hides so much of the plumbing. I speak from having done COM development in both C++ and VB and also as a big fan of C++ in general.

    The real WTF here is not the choice of language, it's the whole idea of a client-server office suite.

    You mean like Microsoft SharePoint?

  • A Nonny Mouse (unregistered) in reply to Anon Coward

    So... The Founder had an Egyptian Room, and thought he could cobble together MS Word in 6 months? Sounds like he's in De Nile.

     drrrrrrrrrrr.. TISH!

  • grg (unregistered) in reply to Chris

    Yep, that's the danger of all those "shallow learning curve" languages.  They're slick enough to impress the boss during a 30-minute demo. 

     

    But then when it comes time to do REAL coding, you find out the language hits the wall, due to lack of speed, generality, lack of modularity, shaky interfaces, etc....

     

     

  • Martin (unregistered) in reply to grg

    I think the person citing the 80/20 model was just a little confused. It is 80% / 20% of functionality (which should add to 100%).  Basically it is the notion that a company can produce a basic product that has has functionality commonly needed, which should be around 80% of the functionality that an individual client wants.  Then they build the remaining functionality into releases specific to individual clients.  I believe Oracle markets this approach for business software (accounting, human resources, inventory, etc).

  • BtM (unregistered) in reply to musigenesis
    musigenesis:

    as we used to say at a previous job, "Inheritance is a great way of ensuring that the bad decisions you make at the start of a project stay with you forever." 

     

    By God, I'm having that engraved on a plaque and hanging it in my cube. 

  • Brad (unregistered) in reply to javascript jan
    Anonymous:

    Steve, on my keyboard I have something of great use between the "," and the "/" and under the ">". It looks like this: "."

     

    You're using the wrong keyboard.  On mine it's between the ',' and 'p'. 

    Long live Dvorak!
     

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Right. This comes from a guy who thinks "fast" is more important than "secure," so we should be surprised?

  • Benjamin Smith (unregistered) in reply to Who wants to know

    I find YOUR POSTS with its RANDOM CAPITALISATION very very  HARD to READ.

  • (cs) in reply to BA
    Anonymous:
    But this wouldn't be valid:

    baseClass *bThing[2];

    bThing[0] = new Window();
    bThing[1] = new File();

    for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
    {
        bThing[i].open("Whatever goes here");
    } 

    Sure it would.  Not in a semi-OO language like C++, but in a true OO language like SmallTalk, the equivalent  would work fine.

  • BA (unregistered) in reply to JamesCurran
    JamesCurran:
    Anonymous:
    But this wouldn't be valid:

    baseClass *bThing[2];

    bThing[0] = new Window();
    bThing[1] = new File();

    for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
    {
        bThing[i].open("Whatever goes here");
    } 

    Sure it would.  Not in a semi-OO language like C++, but in a true OO language like SmallTalk, the equivalent  would work fine.

    If, and only if, they share the same base class. Which in C++, they don't. Not even guaranteed in SmallTalk either since from what I gather, not everything has to be derived from a common base class.

    And I was trying to illustrate the point (albeit poorly) that Window.open and File.open took in different parameters and couldn't operate as if they were the same thing. The above code would be valid if Window and File were both derived from baseClass.

    However, since they aren't derived from a common base class and they are contained within seperate namespaces, the original example (where someone tries to prove VB does polymorphism by pointing out window.open and file.open) is not an example of polymorphism or function overloading.

     

  • DaBill (unregistered) in reply to Not so sure about this
    Anonymous:
    jimlangrunner:

    Augh.  Bash away.  I use VB6.  Primary job.  Pays the bills.  But it's not suited to such an app.  Sorry. 

     It is, however, a very good tool for a handful of business Basic programmers who are afraid (yes, afraid) to tackle anything so hard as C or Java.  And the apps it produces can be very good. 

    To the point, however, I believe that _anyone_ who believes that a major app (like office) can be feature-complete and relatively bug-free in 6 months, regardless of the language, has not spent enough time actually trying to produce such an app.

    Wait a minute - MS has been trying to debug Office for - what, 20 years now? and they're still at it. Why would anyone think they, or any army of programmers could do it a mere six months?

     

    It's the "relative" part. ;) 

  • Jonadab the Unsightly One (unregistered) in reply to jimlangrunner

    I use VB6. Primary job. Pays the bills.
    But it's not suited to such an app. Sorry.

    Exactly. It's not suited to such an app. Not even remotely.

    This isn't to say VB isn't useful. It's terribly useful, if you know what to use it for. Problem is, people keep trying to want to use it in inappropriate situations.

    Nobody would propose to write a full-featured client/server office suite service in Tcl (another event-oriented scripting language with heavy emphasis on widget-set-based GUI building), but for some reason people who learn VB (which is in many ways better than Tcl but nonetheless useful for approximately the same set of purposes) suddenly start thinking of it as a general-purpose applications programming language. I'm not sure if this is due to the way it's promoted, or the kind of people who tend to learn it, or what, but there is a STRONG tendency for people who know a little VB to get some very strange and unnatural ideas about how that knowledge might be applied.

    When I read the words "using Visual Basic 6" in this article, I cringed. Then when I read that the programming team was selected from a VB user group, I began to whimper, knowing that the remainder of this article series would be exquisitely painful to read. The skillset common in a VB group would almost certainly be a complete mismatch for what would be needed to write an MS Office killer. You might as well try to put together a winning football team by recruiting mostly members of the chess club. I'm sure they could learn the playbook, but they're still not going to win the game.

  • Jonadab the Unsightly One (unregistered) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    I'm 55% sure that only 45% of statistics are made up.

    Rich

    47.3%, and that's only counting the ones that are made up on the spot. Another 22.5% are made up in advance (e.g., you ask the research department for stats and they don't have them so they basically make them up and give them to you, and you use them assuming they're valid), and a further 28.9% are taken from unreliable sources, such as almanacs, factoid books, and customer surveys.

  • Duduta (unregistered)

    In May 2014, Visual Basic 6.0 is 5th and C# is 6th and as usual, VB.NET is 11th. VB6 is king in the jungle, it always was.

  • UNPAREMINUE (unregistered) in reply to JamesCurran

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