In explorer I use it to rename files, also lets me used my customised 'send to' to choose which editor I want to use on the file (usually emacs or t.h.e. depending upon task). As my editing is done text-only wherever possible it is very useful.
I also use a nifty little utility called WinKey which allows you to assign operations to combinations with the 'windows' keys in addition to the standard, e.g. I use win-X to open Excel, win-Z to open mozilla, win-1 to win-0 open explorer windows on network pcs - it all helps me not to use the mouse any more than I have to, and makes my wrists/hands more comfortable. Many years ago I wrote an INT19h C hack to assign functions to alt key combinations in DOS - I love coding to save drudgery later. Now you can add shortcut keys to items on the start menu too, the problem is finding ones that aren't used by apps. CTRL+ the numpad keys are usually a safe bet - I use ctrl+numpad to invoke cygwin. I really am a keyboard kind of guy and hate it when I haave to use the mouse, except when I use the wheel to scroll through/. pages:-)
I have to say if anyone is developing a USB 'natural' version of the Model M I'd be quite happy to test it for a few years...
My suspicion is that SCO could run out of money in the discovery phase-the death of a thousand cuts. Otherwise who knows? IBM could sue SCO for bringing a nuisance suit (if IBM win) and get some cash, but SCO would take it to appeal so IBM would get little.
It's worrying but I'm starting to miss them - if I don't see one for a few days I wonder what's gone wrong with the world, I don't feel right without my daily hit that can only come from reading about this case. Nothing else quite gives me the high that the combination of hilarity, bemusement, righteous indignation and downright bafflement brought on by sco stories can.
Why? I know it's not normally done in OS but get a kernel dev to write up a detailed spec (but stop short of pseudocode obviously) and give it to a 'new' body to code up. Back to kernel devs for testing etc. It would be slower than usual but it would be a valid black box implementation.
Here in the UK a friend was owed money by an agency for some contract programming he had done for them and they wouldn't pay his final invoice. Not couldn't, just wouldn't. As he routinely refers to agents as 'parasites' or 'scum' when in a good mood, he didn't want to mess around and play nice. AFAICR he checked out his legal status first (saw a lawyer about his contract) and then contacted the company threatening them with a winding up order if they didn't pay. This would basically do what it says and end the existence of the agency as an entity - instant extinction, no business able to be transacted etc. - basically a 'nuke the bastards' option, perhaps a trifle extreme but he really doesn't like agents. Apparently they laughed at him, but when they shared the joke with their legal staff full payment was made immediately. He can be a little over the top, and he would probably have been happy to take the loss so long as the other guys came off a lot worse, I think he was disappointed that they coughed up. Did I mention that he doesn't like agents?
I don't know if you have such a mechanism in your state, but if you do a (real) threat to terminate the company is a much bigger stick than garnishing the account - it may be empty, they may just change banks etc. It could be fun to check if you have the ability to do this.
Actually, I thought it was Income Tax which was to pay for the Napoleonic Wars...And I am all in favour of using it to pay for its original cause, kicking France's butt!! In fact, I'm sure that America would contribute as well.....
I'm not so sure - discounting WWI,WWII and Korea because the US,UK and France were all on the same side, the US supported France in Indochina (now known as Viet Nam), and fought with France against the UK in the early 19th C - 1812 and all that!
Mind you given the degree of rapprochement shown lately you may be right after all. Aside from the rights and wrongs of the recent war in Iraq the French promise to veto any resolution no matter what it said was extremely stupid and unhelpful.
I used to have a VAT-registered Company. Deep Joy, much paperwork:-(
Anyhow, yes, if you run a business you have to charge VAT on sales of secondhand goods. I checked.
It's not fraud by the vendor, but it may be considered extortion by HMG...
What fascinates me is how much intellectual property can you fit into 10 or 15 lines of code?
That depends on your brace/indent style. If you are wasteful and like unreadable code you can put { and } on separate lines, so you can't fit too much in. On the other hand if you like neat readable C and fit your braces on lines with other code as it shuold be you can get more in!
Just in case it isn't obvious, elsewhere in this story we've had os v ms, vi/emacs and palestine mentioned so I thought it would be fun to start another flame war - this time on C coding styles... nomex suit on:-)
I am hugely entertained by this Novell press release, but I was wondering if IBM and Novell had been discussing this privately? It would explain IBMs inoccuous response to SCOs suit - SCO called it a bland law 101 filing or something, but if IBM knew the position (quite likely) that would more than suffice against a pre-school effort... It looks more like Rope A Dope - I'd love to find Novell appearing as witness for IBM. Oh and yay LunxTag, go! SCO could now be in deep trouble in Germany.
I wouldn't have said that if I were you. I understand that these honourable businessmen may be somewhat aggrieved at being so crassly insulted. If I were Yakuza I would take a dim view of being called the Japanese MPAA, it might not be a horses head in your bed.......
Instead I filter all of my mail for wanted/expected mail into a (large) tree of input folders, mailing lists, company mailings etc. Most of what's left is spam, so a quick scan of the inbox (and creation of new rules) weeds out the uncaught desirables and the rest gets dropped in the bitbucket. The point being that legitimate mail doesn't try to spoof my filters. I haven't (yet) had any spam arriving where it shouldn't. I'd rather my ISP dumped all the crud in the bin for me, but my marginal cost is low as I'm on ADSL. I now also use a distinct email for each purpose, making it easy to spot where spammers got it from and to create new rules as needed. It's a shame I didn't do this at the start as I have a couple of early ones that are spammed but I can't dump.
Microsoft's other option is to turn Windows into a loss leader for other goods and services.
<humour>Like a dealer giving first hits for free?</humour>
If Windows were free (as in beer) Linux would lose much of its appeal.
Linux still has appeal as you wouldn't need to buy lots of the other softwre that MS would still be selling. Although you still have the option to buy commercial software if you wish, of course. NB I run MS oses and linux, my choice is to migrate to linux as I can. That means as I learn more and depends upon what work I get. Lots of companies use MS and that's what they want software written for. Time will tell.
I wouldn't regard a Solaris box (even a big one) as a mainframe:-(
It may be cultural (coming from an IBM mainframe background) but I tend to think of mainframes as from IBM, Hitachi, Amdahl, Honeywell, ICL, Fujitsu etc - basically designed for reliability, ridiculous levels of connectivity and huge data throughput. I know a big Sun box is at least as powerful as a small (older?) mainframe but there you go. I suppose it's more a matter ot role than power? Some of the brands I list may no longer exist (or been taken over) but I bet they're all still in use!
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
Actually I quite like emacs, but I prefer xedit anyway - I've used it for 10+ years on VM/CMS and MVS/TSO.:-) btw you can run a very similar editor on windows or *nix - it's called The Hessling Editor (t.h.e.), and if you install rexx you have most of the capability you have under VM/MVS with a bit of rewriting to handle the different I/O mechanism (no EXECIO).
What no vi??! You've got to be joking. I've yet to meet a platform without at least a couple crappy clones.
Nope, not joking, never even heard rumours of vi on big iron, but you'll probably have xedit, which is a very powerful editor in it's own right. I easily prefer xedit to vi (yuk), it does some things better than emacs too. You're scripting language on any IBM platform is REXX - which is also your editor macro language.
Seriously though, any system not supporting the tools you mention would seem halfway dead already.
There are other tools, specific to the platforms, some better, some worse, most are just different. The whole point is that it's different, if you can learn new stuff you can handle it - just don't expect it to be the same as anything else because it's not.
In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close:
-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba
-You can know Apache
-You can know X11
-You can know sendmail/postfix
-You can know telnet/ssh/rsh
-You can know how to install security updates
I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.
You are wrong:-) For the most part most of the things you list are at best peripheral - they are now appearing but are not mainstream. Learn z/OS (or os370, MVS etc) and or one of the VM family. Study Rexx, JCL and RACF/ACF2 and a few of the common utilities such as IEFBR14, IEHLIST, IEBGENR, IEBPTPCH (there are hundreds more). That lot may get you a junior post, unless a company is running a linux partition on their machine the linux skills will be next to useless. An old fashioned site (most, I suspect) will have no perl, vi, emacs or anything you'd expect on a nix box, and there is no gui, interaction is screen based, probably using ISPF under TSO. Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a possibility. Some of the m/f software I mention may have been superceded, but the new versions build on the old. IBM are, deliberately, rarely revolutionary, evolution is their strong point. They do their best to ensure old programs run on new machines wherever possible.
That SCO happened to be a Linux-company is practically irrelevant to this case since it could easily be shown by SCO that they did not know until recently that they were redistributing that very same code.
You mean they can prove that didn't know who owned the code they were selling? Great management, but ther have still distributed the code under the GPL themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I also use a nifty little utility called WinKey which allows you to assign operations to combinations with the 'windows' keys in addition to the standard, e.g. I use win-X to open Excel, win-Z to open mozilla, win-1 to win-0 open explorer windows on network pcs - it all helps me not to use the mouse any more than I have to, and makes my wrists/hands more comfortable. /. pages :-)
Many years ago I wrote an INT19h C hack to assign functions to alt key combinations in DOS - I love coding to save drudgery later. Now you can add shortcut keys to items on the start menu too, the problem is finding ones that aren't used by apps. CTRL+ the numpad keys are usually a safe bet - I use ctrl+numpad to invoke cygwin. I really am a keyboard kind of guy and hate it when I haave to use the mouse, except when I use the wheel to scroll through
I have to say if anyone is developing a USB 'natural' version of the Model M I'd be quite happy to test it for a few years...
My suspicion is that SCO could run out of money in the discovery phase-the death of a thousand cuts.
Otherwise who knows? IBM could sue SCO for bringing a nuisance suit (if IBM win) and get some cash, but SCO would take it to appeal so IBM would get little.
It's worrying but I'm starting to miss them - if I don't see one for a few days I wonder what's gone wrong with the world, I don't feel right without my daily hit that can only come from reading about this case. Nothing else quite gives me the high that the combination of hilarity, bemusement, righteous indignation and downright bafflement brought on by sco stories can.
Why? I know it's not normally done in OS but get a kernel dev to write up a detailed spec (but stop short of pseudocode obviously) and give it to a 'new' body to code up. Back to kernel devs for testing etc. It would be slower than usual but it would be a valid black box implementation.
(Well, we've had every other /. cliche on this subject...)
Agreed, it's a shame he's modded down for being right, but then on /. anything goes.
Daffy's other catchphrase springs to mind in connection with this thread:
You're Desssspicable!
Forgot to mention you need a debt of £750 to go for a winding up order here (about $1275 at present).
Here in the UK a friend was owed money by an agency for some contract programming he had done for them and they wouldn't pay his final invoice. Not couldn't, just wouldn't. As he routinely refers to agents as 'parasites' or 'scum' when in a good mood, he didn't want to mess around and play nice. AFAICR he checked out his legal status first (saw a lawyer about his contract) and then contacted the company threatening them with a winding up order if they didn't pay. This would basically do what it says and end the existence of the agency as an entity - instant extinction, no business able to be transacted etc. - basically a 'nuke the bastards' option, perhaps a trifle extreme but he really doesn't like agents.
Apparently they laughed at him, but when they shared the joke with their legal staff full payment was made immediately.
He can be a little over the top, and he would probably have been happy to take the loss so long as the other guys came off a lot worse, I think he was disappointed that they coughed up.
Did I mention that he doesn't like agents?
I don't know if you have such a mechanism in your state, but if you do a (real) threat to terminate the company is a much bigger stick than garnishing the account - it may be empty, they may just change banks etc. It could be fun to check if you have the ability to do this.
What about US tariffs on imported steel?
Mind you given the degree of rapprochement shown lately you may be right after all. Aside from the rights and wrongs of the recent war in Iraq the French promise to veto any resolution no matter what it said was extremely stupid and unhelpful.
Anyhow, yes, if you run a business you have to charge VAT on sales of secondhand goods. I checked.
It's not fraud by the vendor, but it may be considered extortion by HMG...
(NB: you can turn of the 'phone electronics and leave the PDA active on a P800)
If you are wasteful and like unreadable code you can put { and } on separate lines, so you can't fit too much in. On the other hand if you like neat readable C and fit your braces on lines with other code as it shuold be you can get more in!
Just in case it isn't obvious, elsewhere in this story we've had os v ms, vi/emacs and palestine mentioned so I thought it would be fun to start another flame war - this time on C coding styles... nomex suit on :-)
I am hugely entertained by this Novell press release, but I was wondering if IBM and Novell had been discussing this privately? It would explain IBMs inoccuous response to SCOs suit - SCO called it a bland law 101 filing or something, but if IBM knew the position (quite likely) that would more than suffice against a pre-school effort...
It looks more like Rope A Dope - I'd love to find Novell appearing as witness for IBM.
Oh and yay LunxTag, go! SCO could now be in deep trouble in Germany.
I wouldn't have said that if I were you.
I understand that these honourable businessmen may be somewhat aggrieved at being so crassly insulted.
If I were Yakuza I would take a dim view of being called the Japanese MPAA, it might not be a horses head in your bed.......
Instead I filter all of my mail for wanted/expected mail into a (large) tree of input folders, mailing lists, company mailings etc.
Most of what's left is spam, so a quick scan of the inbox (and creation of new rules) weeds out the uncaught desirables and the rest gets dropped in the bitbucket.
The point being that legitimate mail doesn't try to spoof my filters. I haven't (yet) had any spam arriving where it shouldn't. I'd rather my ISP dumped all the crud in the bin for me, but my marginal cost is low as I'm on ADSL. I now also use a distinct email for each purpose, making it easy to spot where spammers got it from and to create new rules as needed. It's a shame I didn't do this at the start as I have a couple of early ones that are spammed but I can't dump.
NB I run MS oses and linux, my choice is to migrate to linux as I can. That means as I learn more and depends upon what work I get. Lots of companies use MS and that's what they want software written for. Time will tell.
I wouldn't regard a Solaris box (even a big one) as a mainframe :-(
It may be cultural (coming from an IBM mainframe background) but I tend to think of mainframes as from IBM, Hitachi, Amdahl, Honeywell, ICL, Fujitsu etc - basically designed for reliability, ridiculous levels of connectivity and huge data throughput. I know a big Sun box is at least as powerful as a small (older?) mainframe but there you go. I suppose it's more a matter ot role than power?
Some of the brands I list may no longer exist (or been taken over) but I bet they're all still in use!
btw you can run a very similar editor on windows or *nix - it's called The Hessling Editor (t.h.e.), and if you install rexx you have most of the capability you have under VM/MVS with a bit of rewriting to handle the different I/O mechanism (no EXECIO).
The whole point is that it's different, if you can learn new stuff you can handle it - just don't expect it to be the same as anything else because it's not.
For the most part most of the things you list are at best peripheral - they are now appearing but are not mainstream.
Learn z/OS (or os370, MVS etc) and or one of the VM family. Study Rexx, JCL and RACF/ACF2 and a few of the common utilities such as IEFBR14, IEHLIST, IEBGENR, IEBPTPCH (there are hundreds more). That lot may get you a junior post, unless a company is running a linux partition on their machine the linux skills will be next to useless. An old fashioned site (most, I suspect) will have no perl, vi, emacs or anything you'd expect on a nix box, and there is no gui, interaction is screen based, probably using ISPF under TSO. Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a possibility.
Some of the m/f software I mention may have been superceded, but the new versions build on the old. IBM are, deliberately, rarely revolutionary, evolution is their strong point. They do their best to ensure old programs run on new machines wherever possible.
Uh, are you sure you don't mean the other end?
Their linux distro is still available for download from their ftp site, so their "good faith" seems a little lacking....