The Strake ?

I found myself watching The Dead Pool on the treadmill this weekend. TDP of course being the final Dirty Harry movie released back in 1988 (hey, back off - the streaming Netflix options are very limited). It was full of 80s action cheese, but it put me in quite the nostalgic mood as it featured two things I was very much into in 1988: R/C cars and Guns N’ Roses.

The movie has a great car chase scene with Harry trying to evade a C4-loaded, gas-powered R/C Corvette:

The GN’R members themselves had a couple of cameos in the film:

What I didn’t realize was that a very young Jim Carrey had a small part. He played a strung out rock star shown here (badly) lip-syncing Welcome to the Jungle:

If you have read the recently reprinted interview, it’s definitely an interesting read. I was still in college at the time, so I wasn’t aware of the industry’s fascination over the OOP silver bullet.

Here are some snippets I found most amusing:

“This time the Holy Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial revolution had on manufactured goods.” - RS writer

“Object-oriented programming will change that. To put it simply, it will allow gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of starting from the ground up every time, layering in one line of code after another, programmers will be able to use preassembled chunks to build 80 percent of a program, thus saving an enormous amount of time and money.” - RS writer

“…decent performance out of NeXT’s software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24 megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive…” - RS writer

“As you may know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn’t have any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft’s advantage.” - Steve Jobs

“The thing I don’t think is good is that I don’t believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying — and indeed, in the beginning, that’s just what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate — look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can’t say the same thing about Microsoft.” - Steve Jobs

“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not.” - Steve Jobs