I just finished switching a 500 page document
(The draft Fortran 2000 standard) from Frame to
LaTeX. Frame isn't supported on Linux (there
was an old beta that can still be hacked to work,
but it isn't supported), it had a bugs that kept
biting me (and I don't mean just in the beta),
it's attempts at html output were abysmal, and
it had a bunch of other things that annoyed me.
I was forever running into things that I could
do only with lots of gui mousing - really
annoying when you need to do 100 cases and it
isn't automatable. Corresponding things in
LaTeX are often easily doable with simple
global search and replace in emacs (or your
favorite other editor/tool).
This isn't the first ruling of this nature. In
essense, the whole ADA is being pretty much
gutted by a catch 22.
If your disability is such that you are not
capable of doing the job, then you have no
case under ADA. Reasoanbly enough, the ADA
doesn't demand miracles - the employer only
has to make "reasonable accomodation". If
"reasonable accomodation" won't allow you to
do the job, then you have no case.
If your disability is such that you might be
able to do the job with reasonable accomodation,
then you don't have a disability recognized by
the ADA.
Have you ever tried to get an extra key copy
of one of those things in case you want more
than the two (I think it was 2) that came with
the car. You can't go down to your handy corner
key duplication place and get it done for $1.50
(or whatever trivial amount it is these days).
You have to buy one from Honda for $75.
Many moons ago, I wrote and used scientific
applications on NASA mainframes. When time came
to buy a new computer (we had only one, and
replacing it was a big deal) I was on the
selection committee as a user representative.
I became convinced that it was time to make
what was at the time a controversial change,
to go with a new, upstart vendor instead of
just another CDC. I pushed that decision
through.
Then I had to make it work.:-)
That was a decade and a half ago. I still
occasionally do development, but spend an awful
lot of my time helping other users/developers
on one way or another - keeping their systems
running, debugging their code, whatever.
And I still remember that the reason I'm doing
this is to help the users. This tends to make
me unpopular with the bureaucracy, but the users
trust and stand behind me. Even when I tell them
that I can't allow something they would like to
do, they trust that I've got good reasons.
He "turned NASA around" from an agency for aeronautics and space research to an agency
whose primary mission is just to run a
bureaucracy. Getting anything at all useful
done is secondary to making sure that your ass
is covered, and we all know the best way to make
sure that you do nothing wrong (do nothing at all).
I don't know who is to follow him. Might be
a disaster, but frankly I don't think it could
be worse. He's been the longest-tenured of all
NASA administrators, and the worst.
P.S. Yes, I work there.
They have a bad reputation on other matters
on
Closed-Source Tests
·
· Score: 2
One reason some school districts like the Terra Nova-based tests is that it is pretty dumbed down.
An acquantaince of ours had a highly gifted kid that they were trying to get a grade skip for. She got a shockingly poor (for her) score of 70 percentile in one section on one of the Terra Nova tests and this was being used by the school district as an argument that she wasn't advanced enough for a skip. After getting the raw scores (which there was a lot of resistance to giving, but our acquantance is...tenacious), they found out that she had gotten every question in the section correct. But so had 30% of the students taking it, so that was a 70 percentile. On some of the other standardized tests, the report has a special notation if you "topped out" the test; the
Terra Nova test didn't show that. But most shocking was that 30% of the students got every quetsion in the section right. That indicates an awfully dumbed down test.
This will save me a bunch of bother. I was seriously thinking about setting the date back on my laptop (and using it over the net from the nicer monitor on my workstation - I'd prefer not to muck with the system date on the workstation as that impacts too many other things).
I don't even like Frame, but it was selected for a project I'm responsible for (I'm editor for the Fortran standard). I preferred something non-proprietary like LaTeX, but I lost that vote quite a few years ago. Far too much pain to change now. I was using Frame on Solaris. When I moved to Linux, Frame was the only application that I needed and couldn't get on Linux. Decided I'd move anyway and run that one application remotely from one of the Solaris boxen. I was thrilled when the Linux beta of Frame came out.
I could go back to remote on the Solaris box, but I'd rather minimize dependence on it. And the laptop thing would have been awkward also.
Thanks.
P.S. Sombody ought to mod the parent of this up as informative.
Note that the Dec^h^h^hCompaq compiler is a Fortran 95 compiler. I'd agree with pretty much everything you say about F77...but that was 20+ years ago. I don't do much in f77 any more either (except when I can't avoid it). Its too painful to deal with the lack of decent data structures and several other things.
F95 compilers will compile old f77 code because f77 is basically a subset of f95. And many people (obviously including yourself until 3 years ago) still code in f77 for various reasons: comfort with the language, maintenance of large codes already in f77 (although there are ways to mix the old and new stuff).
Sometimes its purely from prejudice. In a high visibility project that I better not name, I've been required to use about anything except for f90/f95 - for no coherent reason. Anything else is ok. F77 is fine. F77 extensions are fine (as long as I don't point them out as f90 features). Various autocoders are fine. As best as I can tell, if I used the NAG f90 compiler to translate my f90 code into C, I could claim that it was a C auto-coder and all would be fine...as long as I didn't reveal that the name of the autocoder was f90.
And, for some relevance to slashdot, sometimes its because of such things as free compiler availability.
But "real" f90/f95 is a very different language in many ways from the f77 that you are obviously familliar with. Don't judge f95 based on experience with its 20+ year old predecessor.
It seems to be a common theme - to critique Fortran based on f77 not having lots of more modern features, but then to discount the modern versions of Fortran as not being f77 and therefore not counting.:-(
I use Fortran (a modern version) preferentially in most of my coding. Why? Not because of speed, but because I find it far more productive of my time compared to any alternative I've tried. Yes, that includes C/C++. It also includes f77. Others obviously have different priorities, and some others also have different experience in what language they are most productive in. These things do vary.
To summarize. I advise against making judgements about modern Fortran if you haven't actually used it....or just because its not the operating system that "everybody" uses....Um. I mean language. How did "operating system" slip in there. There couldn't possibly be any similarities in the issues, could there?:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Konqueror is in /usr/bin on redHat 7.2 anyway.
(I have no idea what, if any, programs depend on that).
I just finished switching a 500 page document
(The draft Fortran 2000 standard) from Frame to
LaTeX. Frame isn't supported on Linux (there
was an old beta that can still be hacked to work,
but it isn't supported), it had a bugs that kept
biting me (and I don't mean just in the beta),
it's attempts at html output were abysmal, and
it had a bunch of other things that annoyed me.
I was forever running into things that I could
do only with lots of gui mousing - really
annoying when you need to do 100 cases and it
isn't automatable. Corresponding things in
LaTeX are often easily doable with simple
global search and replace in emacs (or your
favorite other editor/tool).
Really happy we switched to LaTeX.
This isn't the first ruling of this nature. In
essense, the whole ADA is being pretty much
gutted by a catch 22.
If your disability is such that you are not
capable of doing the job, then you have no
case under ADA. Reasoanbly enough, the ADA
doesn't demand miracles - the employer only
has to make "reasonable accomodation". If
"reasonable accomodation" won't allow you to
do the job, then you have no case.
If your disability is such that you might be
able to do the job with reasonable accomodation,
then you don't have a disability recognized by
the ADA.
Have you ever tried to get an extra key copy
of one of those things in case you want more
than the two (I think it was 2) that came with
the car. You can't go down to your handy corner
key duplication place and get it done for $1.50
(or whatever trivial amount it is these days).
You have to buy one from Honda for $75.
Speaking of theft....
Many moons ago, I wrote and used scientific
:-)
applications on NASA mainframes. When time came
to buy a new computer (we had only one, and
replacing it was a big deal) I was on the
selection committee as a user representative.
I became convinced that it was time to make
what was at the time a controversial change,
to go with a new, upstart vendor instead of
just another CDC. I pushed that decision
through.
Then I had to make it work.
That was a decade and a half ago. I still
occasionally do development, but spend an awful
lot of my time helping other users/developers
on one way or another - keeping their systems
running, debugging their code, whatever.
And I still remember that the reason I'm doing
this is to help the users. This tends to make
me unpopular with the bureaucracy, but the users
trust and stand behind me. Even when I tell them
that I can't allow something they would like to
do, they trust that I've got good reasons.
He "turned NASA around" from an agency for aeronautics and space research to an agency
whose primary mission is just to run a
bureaucracy. Getting anything at all useful
done is secondary to making sure that your ass
is covered, and we all know the best way to make
sure that you do nothing wrong (do nothing at all).
I don't know who is to follow him. Might be
a disaster, but frankly I don't think it could
be worse. He's been the longest-tenured of all
NASA administrators, and the worst.
P.S. Yes, I work there.
One reason some school districts like the Terra Nova-based tests is that it is pretty dumbed down.
An acquantaince of ours had a highly gifted kid that they were trying to get a grade skip for. She got a shockingly poor (for her) score of 70 percentile in one section on one of the Terra Nova tests and this was being used by the school district as an argument that she wasn't advanced enough for a skip. After getting the raw scores (which there was a lot of resistance to giving, but our acquantance is...tenacious), they found out that she had gotten every question in the section correct. But so had 30% of the students taking it, so that was a 70 percentile. On some of the other standardized tests, the report has a special notation if you "topped out" the test; the
Terra Nova test didn't show that. But most shocking was that 30% of the students got every quetsion in the section right. That indicates an awfully dumbed down test.
I send A's junk mail to B and vice versa.
This will save me a bunch of bother. I was seriously thinking about setting the date back on my laptop (and using it over the net from the nicer monitor on my workstation - I'd prefer not to muck with the system date on the workstation as that impacts too many other things).
I don't even like Frame, but it was selected for a project I'm responsible for (I'm editor for the Fortran standard). I preferred something non-proprietary like LaTeX, but I lost that vote quite a few years ago. Far too much pain to change now. I was using Frame on Solaris. When I moved to Linux, Frame was the only application that I needed and couldn't get on Linux. Decided I'd move anyway and run that one application remotely from one of the Solaris boxen. I was thrilled when the Linux beta of Frame came out.
I could go back to remote on the Solaris box, but I'd rather minimize dependence on it. And the laptop thing would have been awkward also.
Thanks.
P.S. Sombody ought to mod the parent of this up as informative.
I sometimes play a female because my 9-year-old daughter insists on it.
Note that the Dec^h^h^hCompaq compiler is a Fortran 95 compiler. I'd agree with pretty much everything you say about F77...but that was 20+ years ago. I don't do much in f77 any more either (except when I can't avoid it). Its too painful to deal with the lack of decent data structures and several other things.
:-(
:-(
F95 compilers will compile old f77 code because f77 is basically a subset of f95. And many people (obviously including yourself until 3 years ago) still code in f77 for various reasons: comfort with the language, maintenance of large codes already in f77 (although there are ways to mix the old and new stuff).
Sometimes its purely from prejudice. In a high visibility project that I better not name, I've been required to use about anything except for f90/f95 - for no coherent reason. Anything else is ok. F77 is fine. F77 extensions are fine (as long as I don't point them out as f90 features). Various autocoders are fine. As best as I can tell, if I used the NAG f90 compiler to translate my f90 code into C, I could claim that it was a C auto-coder and all would be fine...as long as I didn't reveal that the name of the autocoder was f90.
And, for some relevance to slashdot, sometimes its because of such things as free compiler availability.
But "real" f90/f95 is a very different language in many ways from the f77 that you are obviously familliar with. Don't judge f95 based on experience with its 20+ year old predecessor.
It seems to be a common theme - to critique Fortran based on f77 not having lots of more modern features, but then to discount the modern versions of Fortran as not being f77 and therefore not counting.
I use Fortran (a modern version) preferentially in most of my coding. Why? Not because of speed, but because I find it far more productive of my time compared to any alternative I've tried. Yes, that includes C/C++. It also includes f77. Others obviously have different priorities, and some others also have different experience in what language they are most productive in. These things do vary.
To summarize. I advise against making judgements about modern Fortran if you haven't actually used it....or just because its not the operating system that "everybody" uses....Um. I mean language. How did "operating system" slip in there. There couldn't possibly be any similarities in the issues, could there?