I was browsing tweets out of boredom when I came across this funny tweet:
okay the latest windows vista update 955020 is 56mb, to add 5 words to the windows dictionary
So I followed the link to KB955020 and sure enough Microsoft released today a patch that adds the words Friendster, Klum, Nazr, Obama and Racicot to the English dictionary in Vista and Server 2008. They have 5 separate downloads for the different platforms and the Vista x86 download ( Genuine Validation Required ) is 56.4 MB. x64 clocks in at 63MB!
Wow
It seems that the system stores all of it's keywords in dll's. There is a Custom.dic file for augmenting user provided words but there is no concept of extending the pattern with additional layers of keywords from Microsoft. So large dll's have to be sent over the wire to fix the problem.
Who wants to take a guess that the person who designed this system never didn't' really care about deployment?
And I thought the .NET Framework was getting huge...
Wow, that is horrible! Unfortunately it is a sad reality that even if a company considers deployment they very rarely consider the maintenance of deployment when developing the architecture of their apps.
ReplyDeleteI have yet to be invited to a design meeting to weigh in on the area of my expertise, deployment and maintenance of applications after deployment. I wonder if I am the exception or more likely the rule.
Yes, servicability is the better word.
ReplyDeleteThe really funny thing is if you look at Q934269 you'll see that this has been a known issue for over a year. You'd think with that amount of time somebody would have extended the system to allow an incremental update the dictionary.