Made of Everything You're Not

One of my favorite parts about programming is the design part of a project. No, not the pretty sparkly pretty design; I know I suck ass at that and it's just a bad idea for me to even attempt. Instead, I like the part where the program itself gets designed; the part where the order of things gets worked out and you, the programmer, gets to be creative and connect A to B to C on all the parts that were left out of the scope.  Sure, you know you need to add, for example, a form to a webpage but unless anyone told you how it should be written it's entirely up to you how to do it; that's the good stuff.

There are all sorts of places people go to sharpen their program design skills, which, and let's not kid ourselves here,  is a way subjective but difficult specialty; personal favorites of mine are sites like Gamasutra, which has a great postmortem section, and The Daily WTF, books about projects like Dreaming in Code and Showstopper! and, to look at how other programs function and what other people like or dislike about that program, Reddit (of all places).

One of the better posts I've seen on Reddit, in regards to insight, was for Adobe Reader. On Reddit the question of why Adobe Reader is constantly updated is often asked but, what with the hive mind and all coming to the proper conclusions, is almost always linked to the "correct" answer:

Ok.. here is a comment from somebory who knows his shit:

the adobe reader you have isnt a simple PDF reader.

TL;DR: Adobe Reader is a huge system and reading PDFs is one of its many functions. If all you care is reading PFDs only then you should ditch it and get Sumatra or Foxit.

Long version:

lets follow the rabbit..

There is a reason its not called "Adobe PDF reader" but "Acrobat reader" or "Adobe reader". It is a monster of a system.
reading PDFs is one of many functions.
For a project i had to read into adobe acrobat and heck its a real monster: it has

a complete mail server, document lifecycle management system, DRM client, full fledged document tracking system, form capabilities, statistics for your docs (imagine sending a survey and tracking the collected data), video AND audio playing capabilities (yes you can embed audio and video in pdf) as well as capabilites for other formats (such as displaying CAD(!) data in its own 3Dviewer).

all in all the full acrobat SDK is like 500 MB and its manual a couple tousand pages long.

merely displaying PDFs is one function out of like 100.
To you as the consumer its the bait... but the full fledged system behind it is what Adobe sells to its corporate consumers.

they basically say: "You want a full fledged content tracking system? we got it... and the best part is all your customers have the clients already installed! in form of the acrobat reader".

Its like a monster sleeping in every computer.

see this link. Its the function comparisson of the acrobat family..

and here comes the scoop: all functions you see are supported by acrobat reader... but you cant use them. They are there so you can provide them to the guys who paid for "pro extended".

Basically the pro extended package can create all that shit and all drones using acrobat reader will support the functionality. wheter they want it or not.

And here is the screamer: being a normal guy you will most likely never need all that crap. You know what does it mean when i say " document tracking system"? its just a fancy word for the dream of every adverstiser : Corporate customers can track how succesful their
newsletter, advertising and customer Polls are.

Yup.. they can track how efficient their spam is. And all you sheeples who over the years keep complaining "omg i just want to read pdfs why is the install file soo big" never cared to actually read what is included.

My advice: if all you care for is reading PDFs (and im sure 99% of Acrobat reader users are in this group) install Foxit or Sumatra.

That's just poor design right there; forcing a large percentage of your users to suffer a poor experience for the benefit of a smaller portion of users is just flat out dumb and one of those decisions I'm fairly certain couldn't be made by a team that's dogfooding their project. It's just basic math; make life easier on the majority.

One question I get asked from time to time by, well, pretty much anyone I've ever worked for or with, is why their hard drive was marketed at one size yet the available size is far smaller. For example, they may buy a hard drive that's marketed at 320 Gigabytes but when they get it installed there are only 286 Gigabytes of space available. On the surface this can be pretty frustrating in the "Bait and Switch" kind of way; you buy one thing and get another, lesser, thing but like most things about computers, the reality is actually pretty rational if not simple.

Traditionally, when confronted with the question I had always just gone with the tried and true line that I cribbed from Tom's Hardware:

Hard Disk Drive (HDD) makers define "GB" or "Gigabyte" as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Microsoft (in Windows) defines it as 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

Thanks to Stack Overflow I now know that the real, thorough, answer is:

There are 3 reasons why the amount of space you can actually use is different from that listed for the drive, all of which work against you:

1. Hard drive manufactures treat 1GB as one billion bytes, while the operating system calls it 1,073,741,824 bytes (1000 * 1000 * 1000 vs 1024 * 1024 * 1024).
2. You lose some space for file tables when formatting.
3. Disk space is divided into chunks larger than 1 byte (typically 4K). Using typical Windows defaults, a 1 byte file takes up 4K of space on disk.

Of these, the first two can influence the amount of space reported by the drive (though IIRC the 2nd one was more of an issue with FAT32 than NTFS). The last one only influences the amount of free space remaining, but will still prevent you from using the full capacity of your 80GB drive.

It's almost reminiscent of the Mars rover debacle about metric vs standard measurements; HDD makers use a decimal metric while the operating system uses binary. Anywho, this means that if you have a 320 Gigabyte HDD Windows will recognize it as 286 Gigabyte HDD. Pretty straightforward really and aside from having to dodge the occasional rant about how illogical that is and how come I just don't know more about the ins and outs of HDD business practices it's not really been that big of a concern for me professionally. Well, now as my client's needs for storage are increasing well, it's, in a sorta kinda way, becoming a bit of an annoyance.

A recent project I had was to design a system for obscene storage space; the client is a civil engineering firm so they deal in those HUGE CAD files for city planning and architectural plans and they want to do version control on them. So, lots and lots of space was needed and while investigating a possible solution that involved a dedicated RAID array it dawned on me that the specs were a little more complicated than they aught to be. Math was going to be required above the normal RAID calculations you have to do for setting up a RAID array.  I mean, God forbid I say they'll have one amount of space when the reality is they'll get a lesser amount; I don't need that kind of attention.

On the surface setting up a RAID 5 device with 8 2 terabyte HDDs would yield a total of 16 terabytes before the RAID and, according to the RAID calculator, around 13 terabytes of usable space after the RAID setup. The reality though is that each 2 terabyte HDD is only going to yield 1.8 terabytes each and once the RAID is configured the total size is going to be 11.7 terabytes. A little over a full terabyte is missing; a non trivial amount to be sure.

So it's a knowable problem and it just requires a little math but the more I think about it the more I'm starting to empathize with the reactions of previous clients. Put simply; wtf man? Why don't the HDD makers put on the box the amount of space most people will experience; at least as a sub text on the box? For example, putting both the decimal and the binary amounts side by side or maybe listing the amount of space available for the big 3 operating systems (Windows, Mac and *nix) would be way more helpful and truthful than just listing the binary amount and leaving customers feeling ripped off.

canThere are 3 reasons why the amount of space you can actually use is different from that listed for the drive, <em>all</em> of which work against you:</p>

<ol>
<li>Hard drive manufactures treat 1GB as one billion bytes, while the operating system calls it 1,073,741,824 bytes (1000 * 1000 * 1000 vs 1024 * 1024 * 1024).</li>
<li>You lose some space for file tables when formatting.</li>
<li>Disk space is divided into chunks larger than 1 byte (typically 4K).  Using typical Windows defaults, a 1 byte file takes up 4K of space on disk.</li>
</ol>

<p>Of these, the first two can influence the amount of space reported by the drive (though IIRC the 2nd one was more of an issue with FAT32 than NTFS).  The last one only influences the amount of <em>free space</em> remaining, but will still prevent you from using the full capacity of your 80GB drive.

This Sunday I had one of those moments I've heard about but never experienced: my Xbox Live account was compromised and someone had purchased a crap load of points and transferred them to someone else. Since I default to the outlook that corporations don't give a crap anymore (have they ever?) I was thinking I was screwed and was out of the money unless I contact my bank. Not the case though; turns out Micro$soft actually seemed to care and everything turned out better than expected.

On Sunday, I woke up to a series of 4 emails confirming the purchase of 10,000 points from Xbox Live Marketplace, a renewal of my Xbox Live Family account (dude actually changed my plan to include his account) and an email confirming the transfer of those points to another Xbox Live account. Now, my first thought was that I had really tied one on the night before and had just blacked out while doing some shopping on Xbox Live.  Then I remembered that I didn't drink (just smoked) and, after checking the email timestamps, the purchases were made while I was sleeping. Fuck me.

Now, I'm not a stranger to the odd charge on my credit cards and know exactly what to do; call the bank and contest the charges. Because I actually use my Xbox though, and I do purchase a lot of content through Zune and Xbox both, I thought it would be a good idea to contact Microsoft and let them know about what was going on. God forbid I contest the charges and Microsoft thinks I'm the one ripping them off, right? So, I call them up and, after waiting on hold for a good 10 minutes, I get on the phone with Regina.

Regina was very pleasant and, after she confirmed I was who I said I was, she was actually pretty sympathetic and understanding as well. I honestly didn't expect actual sympathy though and was pretty taken back by it; going through the motions and patronizing wouldn't have surprised me in the least but Regina was very accommodating, knowledgeable and helpful. Regina explained that while this isn't what she would call a common issue it does happen from time to time and, to me at least, she came across as having dealt with similar issues in the past personally. This really put me at ease when dealing with her which was good because I was in fight mode, expecting to be screwed at any moment.

One key part that struck me about this whole thing was the paper trail; because the system emailed me confirmations about each transaction it was obvious who was responsible and Regina made it clear that this a good thing. I had the username of the person the points were transferred to so, apparently, it's pretty trivial for them to respond though I find the idea that the account wasn't temporary ridiculous. I don't want to underestimate the stupidity of criminals but surely the jackass who ripped me off must know the username they sent the points to would be flagged and investigated. Right?

Anyway, Regina gave me some details about what Microsoft were going to do on their side (which I'll post once the investigation is completed lest I tip someone off in the event I know the asshole) and what my expectations should be as far as resolution (pretty good since it was caught within hours of the purchases). She also made sure to make a point of contacting my bank and letting them know as well which, while I was going to do regardless, I definitely appreciated.

It should be about a week until I hear something about the investigation and, hopefully, the resolution. All told the process took only 34 minutes and left me feeling a lot better about Xbox and Microsoft as companies to, if not completely respect, not worry about screwing me given half a chance.

That said, I'm not an idiot (well, about this stuff anyway); I still contacted my bank and contested the charges so my money is back safely where it should be. The bank, as a matter of policy, invalidated my credit card and is going to send me a new one but it's a small price to pay I think. Well, that and now there's no way I'm ever going to let a service keep my credit card on file ever again.