Bookkeeping might be done by computers, assuming there's someone around to type in the numbers.
The purpose of accounting is to tell you how the company is doing.
Here's my example. You're a publisher, and you have a warehouse of paper books. Lost of copies of few best-sellers, and a lot of others. Now how much is that inventory worth?
The easy way is just do add up the wholesale price of all those copies and add them together.
That would probably be dead wrong. The best-sellers might sell that much, but the others? In the next ten years, you might sell quite a few of these, but you don't know which ones. And if you take a guess which ones are going to sell and which are worthless, you'll probably be wrong, and if you go so far as to throw out ones you think are worthless ones, you'll end up tossing a lot of books that someone might suddenly want to buy five years from now.
So how much is this inventory worth? I dunno. A good accountant should be able to give you a better estimate than "I dunno".
It that's what industry needed, Modula 3 could have been a great hit. Object-oriented, statically typed, run-time secure, and compiles to efficient machine code as well.
But the truth is that language popularity is largely a question of fashion, not of technical merits at all.
Trestle is the UI system that comes with Modula 3. Its programmers' manual is *excellent*. And, furthermore, it was machine-generated from the source code, which made it easy to keep the manual up-to-date as the code evolved.
And, yes, it still manages to be excellent.
There was a lot of thought put into it. There was a lot of thought put into writing the comments in the code so that they would yield comprehensible documentation, including a gradual (though quite technical) introduction to the subject matter.
Generating documentation from source code doesn't have to produce garbage, though it will if the programmer pays insufficient attention to the issue. And paying attention to the generated documentation during coding pays off in clean interface design, because a clean design makes documentation easier.
But if her long-term aim is to use only Linux, she should run LInux on the bare machine. The virtualisation hardware on modern processors has cut down drastically on the virtualisation overhead, making it practical, and it may well turn out to be her preferred mode of operation on her final laptop
I can't run a virtual machine with any speed on my ancient laptop; it just doesn't have the right hardware. Her old laptop may be as decrepit s mine; she needs to be aware that dual boot is an alternative.
And even so, aren't there still issues with high-speed graphics? I've heard rumours that they've started making some graphics processors so they can be partitioned for virtual machines, but I hadn't heard that they were actually practical yet.
First, find out what the lab whe's going to woork at provides. No point duplicating that.
Then install Linux in a dual-boot scenario on her existing laptop. She might need a hard disk upgrade if the disk is full already. She can still use Windows when she needs it, and Linux when she needs *it*.
Note: Most Linux software is free. She should try it, install something else, try it, until she has a mix that works for her. Get on the mailing lists of the distro she's using. Try another distro. She can triple-boot if she likes. Distros are similar, knowledge transfers well, but they're not at all identical.
Then after some experience, she'll have some idea what's lacking. Don't waste your money until you know what she needs.
If you can wait a while, you might find it simpler to switch to devuan. When ready, it's supposed to be a but of pinning and a new line for/etc/apt/sources.list. You still keep the use of debian repositories, with a few different packages provided form devuan.
And lithium will burn aggressively in water. ripping the oxygen right out of the water molecules to do so, incidentally releasing hydrogen, which is also flammable if it ever escapes to the atmosphere.
There are very very few production contexts in whch stopping a moment for garbage collection is a problem. Outside of those, failing to use a type-safe, garbage-collected language is malpractice..
I've been trying to maintain an e-subscription to to Analog for some time now, mostly because I've run out of room for books in my hose and I've reached the point where, for every paper book that comes into the house, I need to find a book to throw out. It has been an exercise in frustration. e-subscriptions are handled by independent businesses, not by the publisher (as paper ones seem to be). And they've been closing one after another. First fictionwise closed, apparently subsumed by Barnes & Noble, which sells only within the US. I switch to Sony despite their reputation with rootkits. Then the Sony reader drops my subscription so I have to resubscribe, and a few months later the reader store closes to North American subscribers. They've handed over their customers to Kobo, which in OK for books (I read my books on a Kobo device anyway), but they abandoned their magazine subscribers. Kobo, on the other hand, treats Analog like most epublishers treat magazines, that is, as throwaway items. They even delete your magazines as a service when they're a certain number of months old. I'm told it's possible to take some action to keep them around longer, but I have no idea what that is.
Not to mention the ever-present DRM.
Publishers need to get their act together if e-publication is to work for readers. Tor and Baen seem to have figured it out. Few others.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada is already adopted this. RCMP, CSIS, an so forth.
I suggest you ask again on soylent news; there's quite an active technical community thers.
Also on the devuan mailing list. They might end up being your users.
-- hendrik
Bookkeeping might be done by computers, assuming there's someone around to type in the numbers.
The purpose of accounting is to tell you how the company is doing.
Here's my example. You're a publisher, and you have a warehouse of paper books. Lost of copies of few best-sellers, and a lot of others. Now how much is that inventory worth?
The easy way is just do add up the wholesale price of all those copies and add them together.
That would probably be dead wrong. The best-sellers might sell that much, but the others? In the next ten years, you might sell quite a few of these, but you don't know which ones. And if you take a guess which ones are going to sell and which are worthless, you'll probably be wrong, and if you go so far as to throw out ones you think are worthless ones, you'll end up tossing a lot of books that someone might suddenly want to buy five years from now.
So how much is this inventory worth? I dunno. A good accountant should be able to give you a better estimate than "I dunno".
-- hendrik
It that's what industry needed, Modula 3 could have been a great hit. Object-oriented, statically typed, run-time secure, and compiles to efficient machine code as well.
But the truth is that language popularity is largely a question of fashion, not of technical merits at all.
Trestle is the UI system that comes with Modula 3. Its programmers' manual is *excellent*. And, furthermore, it was machine-generated from the source code, which made it easy to keep the manual up-to-date as the code evolved.
And, yes, it still manages to be excellent.
There was a lot of thought put into it. There was a lot of thought put into writing the comments in the code so that they would yield comprehensible documentation, including a gradual (though quite technical) introduction to the subject matter.
Generating documentation from source code doesn't have to produce garbage, though it will if the programmer pays insufficient attention to the issue. And paying attention to the generated documentation during coding pays off in clean interface design, because a clean design makes documentation easier.
-- hendrik
Yes, VM's can work, and have advantages
But if her long-term aim is to use only Linux, she should run LInux on the bare machine. The virtualisation hardware on modern processors has cut down drastically on the virtualisation overhead, making it practical, and it may well turn out to be her preferred mode of operation on her final laptop
I can't run a virtual machine with any speed on my ancient laptop; it just doesn't have the right hardware. Her old laptop may be as decrepit s mine; she needs to be aware that dual boot is an alternative.
And even so, aren't there still issues with high-speed graphics? I've heard rumours that they've started making some graphics processors so they can be partitioned for virtual machines, but I hadn't heard that they were actually practical yet.
-- hendrik
First, find out what the lab whe's going to woork at provides. No point duplicating that.
Then install Linux in a dual-boot scenario on her existing laptop. She might need a hard disk upgrade if the disk is full already. She can still use Windows when she needs it, and Linux when she needs *it*.
Note: Most Linux software is free. She should try it, install something else, try it, until she has a mix that works for her. Get on the mailing lists of the distro she's using. Try another distro. She can triple-boot if she likes. Distros are similar, knowledge transfers well, but they're not at all identical.
Then after some experience, she'll have some idea what's lacking. Don't waste your money until you know what she needs.
-- hendrik
Mathematicians tend to use Latex, not Word.
Or long?
If you can wait a while, you might find it simpler to switch to devuan. When ready, it's supposed to be a but of pinning and a new line for /etc/apt/sources.list. You still keep the use of debian repositories, with a few different packages provided form devuan.
If seven ate nine, I can imagine them wanting to stay clear of the whole cannibalistic feud.
I just encountered a link about refracta. It turns out to be absurdly easy to fork Debian, at least for now.
Refracta is rather close to Debian testing. Its home page
is http://www.ibiblio.org/refract...
At http://forums.debian.net/viewt... it is described as
(for testing, without libsystemd0, it's pinned).
It even uses the Debian repositories!
Are there any other forks?
-- hendrik
OK. I don't know enough about FreeBSD and Dragonfly to get the joke. Can someone explain?
Yes, so it does. I stand recorrected.
-- hendrik
I missed that it was lithium *ion* cells.
-- hendrik
And lithium will burn aggressively in water. ripping the oxygen right out of the water molecules to do so, incidentally releasing hydrogen, which is also flammable if it ever escapes to the atmosphere.
There might just be aa safety concern.
There are very very few production contexts in whch stopping a moment for garbage collection is a problem. Outside of those, failing to use a type-safe, garbage-collected language is malpractice..
Since there was an 'and' between the main clauses, commas were appropriate.
Don't know about phones, but an Android tablet, the Asus Transformer, works fine with a real keyboard.
One Password to rule them all, One Password to find them,
One Password to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Still waiting for my ARM Linux laptop with a good touchscreen.
You probably mean prescribed, not proscribed, in several places.
Because I like writing code generators, and the ARM has a nice instruction set.
Not to mention battery life.
I've been trying to maintain an e-subscription to to Analog for some time now, mostly because I've run out of room for books in my hose and I've reached the point where, for every paper book that comes into the house, I need to find a book to throw out. It has been an exercise in frustration. e-subscriptions are handled by independent businesses, not by the publisher (as paper ones seem to be). And they've been closing one after another. First fictionwise closed, apparently subsumed by Barnes & Noble, which sells only within the US. I switch to Sony despite their reputation with rootkits. Then the Sony reader drops my subscription so I have to resubscribe, and a few months later the reader store closes to North American subscribers. They've handed over their customers to Kobo, which in OK for books (I read my books on a Kobo device anyway), but they abandoned their magazine subscribers. Kobo, on the other hand, treats Analog like most epublishers treat magazines, that is, as throwaway items. They even delete your magazines as a service when they're a certain number of months old. I'm told it's possible to take some action to keep them around longer, but I have no idea what that is.
Not to mention the ever-present DRM.
Publishers need to get their act together if e-publication is to work for readers. Tor and Baen seem to have figured it out. Few others.
And, no, not a locked-down one.