MB> Here in the U.S., it was popular for many years to remove mufflers
MB> from cars. 
MB>  That may have really marginally improved engine power at 
MB> one time decades ago, but the real motivation was that cars 
MB> sounded more powerful if they could make a lot of loud, 
MB> obnoxious noise

Huh? I missed that. We can discuss further in local N1BEE,
but you mean cut-outs? Only idiots used them. Briefly. If
you mean, like glass pacs, I kind of like the sound and
w/headers and big, dual pipes, DID improve performance- 20%.

The V77-600 mini was microcoded, so panel lights were static,
'cept in maint. mode. In the end, the OS had to twiddle the
lights in maintenance mode and put something(task ID) there
to satisfy the users. This is one of the very few examples
I can think of where designers deliberately made software
fiddle with the hardware to dazzle users. Often, one sees
fancy stuff in the user interface, but in hardware??

I can believe lots of things about the people (designers, mar-
keters, etc.) behind Visual Age C++ upgrade, many of them
quite evil after I saw the price and resource requirements.
But NOT that they wasted valuable design time making the PC
running the compiler sound like it's getting a hernia.

JdBP> brains out.  It's   because the compiler is so damned *big*
JdBP> that it is thrashing your   system to death.

The compiler is big because no one had the time or wanted to
budget the time to make it smaller and more efficient. Often,
the designers get what the rest of us consider "dream systems"
to develop or at least integrate on and pretty soon the whole
operation is working in a fantasyland few purchasers can hope
to achieve. If your tools are Pentium 100, 1 GB disk, 64 MB
RAM, well, everyone else has that, too, right?

Everyone knows that table look-up is the fastest processing
scheme; maybe VA C++ compiles by looking up each line in
in their table of all possible compiler lines...

Brian Converse  ag899{at}osfn.rhilinet.gov

___
 X KWQ/2 1.2i X Northwest: We know how to fly
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