While it's true that controversy is not unknown at ISO, there are things happening during this particular process which seem to have surprised and/or alarmed a fair number of those who regularly follow ISO and its processes.
My two 1998 IBM IntelliStations (model 6899, baby!) came with Intel EEPro/100B NICs configured for Wake-on-LAN, which are *very* nice cards, and the Compaq Deskpro 6200's I have came with 3Com NICs. 3C905B-TX cards, I think. I'd have to look.;-)
Networking was commonplace in the PC world in 1998. Heck, my OS/2 box was built in 1996 and has an EEPro/100B in it compliments of Micron.
I have a whole LAN full of 10+ year old PCs running Warp 4, BeOS 5 Pro, various Linux flavors including modern DSL and Puppy distros, and Win2k (which works just fine on a SCSI PPRo/200 albeit a bit slowly as long as you feed it enough RAM). Three of those boxes have CD burners.
Sounds like the issue is yours, not the age of your machines...
Assembly, contrary to popular belief, is not manual everything. Write an assembler to find out. Memory isn't a big continuous page, and hardware doesn't maintain a stack for you.
A decent macroassembler will also allow you to perform all sort of nifty code generation tricks to make your life a lot easier (e.g., generating conditional/repetitive code sequences and conditional data tables at assembly time, etc.). Many of those tricks take time and effort to learn, but if you write a lot of assembler code it's probably worth your while to figure some of those features out.
Some mainframe macro assemblers are VERY sophisticated (I'm thinking about OS2200's @MASM here, but I'm sure there are others), and I've seen a MASM setup using PROCS in that environment which effectively emulates Pascal to some degree. And of course the stack-based Burroughs A-boxes use an ALGOL variant called NEWP (or ESPOL, or whatever), which is a bit more advanced syntactically than one would expect.:-) I've only seen a little of it, but it doesn't look like a traditional assembler to me at all...
Experienced assembler programmers can be quite productive. Not me, really -- I just dabble enough to get in trouble.:-)
Stuff I have installed here at work which is unofficial/unauthorized:
WinXP ----- Firefox PuTTY FileZilla server JFE and FTE KDiff3 Eclipse Cygwin XLiveCD (if you can call that "installed") Source Navigator GNU GLOBAL SQL Navigator SpaceMonger ClipDiary WinXP PowerToys Process Explorer IrfanView Embellish 3m Postit Notes
Solaris/Development ------------------- Midnight Commander DDD NEdit Eskil Exuberant ctags cscope and freescope WCD colorlog.pl colorized ls
This is just another potential area for compromise.
If two people click and want to spend their lives together, why not let them work it out for themselves instead of trying to come up with some sort of "best practice" which isn't going to cover all cases anyway...?
Sincere body of followers convinced of power: What do you think?
That reminds me... If you're an Evil type who is getting perilously close to descending to Godhood due to the unbidden rapture of henchmen, underlings, and other assorted riffraff, just gather them into a single place to celebration the occasion... and wipe them out.
Do it with style if possible, but speed is of the essence!
Man, I've seen it done more than once. Godhood is *such* a hassle...
1) Since many people find it hard to retire at 65 or earlier due to layoffs and whatnot, even that 55- or 60-year-old programmer could provide barrels of binary goodness for well over a decade to come.:-)
2) It's better to hire someone AFTER they've made the basic mistakes (and hopefully learned from them).
Many folks like me who are over 40 and still coding/designing are doing it as much for the fun of it as we are the need for food and rent/mortgage/college money. Hey, I'm juggling Perl, C++, Java, Fortran, and a few other languages for a living. How could that NOT be fun?;-)
And my hair isn't missing... it's simply migrating to other areas. In my case my face. Greying beards are distinguished, don't ya know. Besides, 40 is the new 20. Right? Or is it 30? I forget...
I like Java, and I code in Java for a living (along wthi other languages), so slow down with the attack dogs!:-(
It was a question intended to illustrate that "scripting" isn't enough of a boundary -- it's the nature of the projects themselves which determine the nature of the software developer, IMO, not the toolset being used.
I've written some fairly complex stuff in Telemate's scripting language, for example. Once you get up to a few thousand lines, it ceases to be a trivial undertaking. Again IMO...
Stop calling scripting programming. You web guys are desperate to join the software programmers lunch table and it is not gonna happen guys, so stop calling yourself programmers.
What would you consider a Java programmer? Jave is essentially a scripting language which compiles to bytecode, after all.
Most people in my city think of IBM as that formerly ginormous company that now makes crappy little PCs and PC-based point-of-sale systems. Their support is absolute shite (30+ days turnaround for RMAs to million-dollar regional accounts). The hardware itself is a disaster, they build those PCs worse than the shadiest Chinese OEMs... I guess I should be grateful, IBM gear creates a ton of lucrative support calls for me. The fact that I could build a more reliable machine for less than the cost of one onsite call, well that's just not good no matter how you spin in.
It's interesting how people can see the same company in different (sometimes even opposite) ways.
When I think IBM, I think of refrigerator-sized boxes running OS/390 and zOS, stacks of IBM blade servers running Linux contentedly humming in our corporate data center, and sleek jet-black IntelliStations (which were very well designed and constructed x86 desktop machines, not the consumer PC crap that you're thinking about which was sold to Lenovo quite some time ago). Oh, and Thinkpads.:-)
Not to mention that OS/2 was heavily multithreaded from the beginning, and especially after IBM released the first 32-bit versions of that platform in 1992. That would be 16 years ago now.:-)
All an OS really needs to be useful is to have good networking, a decent browser, and a certain amount of decent applications software.
OS/2 has a fairly decent networking stack, multiple stable and native ports of both Firefox and Seamonkey, and a native port of OpenOffice as well as a fair collection of older less capable applications (Embellish, StarOffice, ColorWorks, Lotus SmartSuite, and friends).
The fact that WinOS2 can fill in a few holes doesn't hurt (I ran Quicken 98 on my Warp 4 box for years, and I still use Visio 4 Pro and a few other Win 3.x programs from time to time on my Warp 4 system when I can't find a way to do some sort of graphics effect using native software).
Yes, COM is the foundation layer upon which OLE, ActiveX, ADO and countless other interfaces are built. Is it as seamless and elegant as SOM/DSOM ? Who knows ?
Well, the poster to which you are responding apparently knows, as do many other folks who have actually used both SOM and COM for development. Remember that OS/2 was a very popular operating system once (albeit a long time ago).
Is it in use today by millions of developers ? YES! Unlike SOM.
Yes, we all know that it's the number of people USING a technology which determines it's overall quality. That's why McDonald's and Burger King are the paragons of American cuisine.:-)
I'm not saying SOM is worse or better than COM; I don't know. On one hand, we're all suspicious of Microsoft, but what has IBM done for us lately ? They stopped being relevant the day they killed OS/2.
If you seriously don't know about the numerous things which IBM has done for the open source community over the past ten years or so, I'm afraid you weren't paying very close attention. And it hasn't been just technology (e.g., JFS) or patents from IBM that have made it into the open source ecosystem -- the very fact that IBM endorses the Linux software stack in an enterprise context in the first place is a huge validating factor for pointy-heads.
If anything, it seems (at least to me) that Microsoft is more brazen today about flouting its monopoly position than it was ten or fifteen years ago...
Absolutely. Linux (and the BSD variants) were developed largely outside the desktop software marketplace because Microsoft's dominance in the desktop space has been it effectively impossible for a for-profit corporations to fund a competing effort by develping their own. Not even IBM could do it back in the 1990's, or Sun in more recent times, and Apple has successful mainly because its desktop fiefdom is still largely contained/protected behind walls made out of proprietary hardware and firmware elements.
In the case of operating systems (and perhaps also in the case of web browsers), you might be able to say that there is a natural tendency towards commoditization in those market segments. That might actually be true. But that does not explain Microsoft's ability to continue to make money hand-over-fist in the OS market, or its ability to snare such a dominant market share in the web browser space even with a largely static and uninnovative browser offering.
Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey are both outside the original market (which was web browsers that were created as a profit center).
Just because free software which comes from outside the market exists and is starting to penetrate doesn't imply that the market isn't being dominated. MSIE is effectively destroying any attempts to create and SELL a competing web browser. Even Opera is free now. It didn't used to be.
I didn't carry mine around that much, but I could have -- the original controller snapped right onto the front of the unit under the screen, and of course the screen was part of the unit itself (no TV required). The fact that it had Minestorm built in meant you didn't even have to bring a cartridge along to impress your friends, and in those days it didn't take much to make an impression!:-)
Huh. I seem to remember something in MacOS 9, but the IIci I had at work between 1993 and 1997 or so didn't have anything that I can remember (that one ran MacOS 7.01, mainly), and the PowerMac G3 tower I had after that might've, but again I don't remember looking for it. And it never even ran MacOS 9.
I guess I wouldn't be shocked, though, even if I don't remember it. I was a corporate Mac user, not a Mac hobyist, and Apple *does* have a reputation for introducing things like that relatively early on.
Slashdot Mirror
See this web site for one example.
My two 1998 IBM IntelliStations (model 6899, baby!) came with Intel EEPro/100B NICs configured for Wake-on-LAN, which are *very* nice cards, and the Compaq Deskpro 6200's I have came with 3Com NICs. 3C905B-TX cards, I think. I'd have to look. ;-)
Networking was commonplace in the PC world in 1998. Heck, my OS/2 box was built in 1996 and has an EEPro/100B in it compliments of Micron.
I have a whole LAN full of 10+ year old PCs running Warp 4, BeOS 5 Pro, various Linux flavors including modern DSL and Puppy distros, and Win2k (which works just fine on a SCSI PPRo/200 albeit a bit slowly as long as you feed it enough RAM). Three of those boxes have CD burners.
Sounds like the issue is yours, not the age of your machines...
Cool! Maybe the DVR will only show my porn channels when my wife isn't in the room! :-) :-)
:-) But I could see some value in context-sensitive cable box a/o DVR behavior.
Actually, it's more fun to watch with her anyway.
A decent macroassembler will also allow you to perform all sort of nifty code generation tricks to make your life a lot easier (e.g., generating conditional/repetitive code sequences and conditional data tables at assembly time, etc.). Many of those tricks take time and effort to learn, but if you write a lot of assembler code it's probably worth your while to figure some of those features out.
Some mainframe macro assemblers are VERY sophisticated (I'm thinking about OS2200's @MASM here, but I'm sure there are others), and I've seen a MASM setup using PROCS in that environment which effectively emulates Pascal to some degree. And of course the stack-based Burroughs A-boxes use an ALGOL variant called NEWP (or ESPOL, or whatever), which is a bit more advanced syntactically than one would expect. :-) I've only seen a little of it, but it doesn't look like a traditional assembler to me at all...
Experienced assembler programmers can be quite productive. Not me, really -- I just dabble enough to get in trouble. :-)
Stuff I have installed here at work which is unofficial/unauthorized:
WinXP
-----
Firefox
PuTTY
FileZilla server
JFE and FTE
KDiff3
Eclipse
Cygwin XLiveCD (if you can call that "installed")
Source Navigator
GNU GLOBAL
SQL Navigator
SpaceMonger
ClipDiary
WinXP PowerToys
Process Explorer
IrfanView
Embellish
3m Postit Notes
Solaris/Development
-------------------
Midnight Commander
DDD
NEdit
Eskil
Exuberant ctags
cscope and freescope
WCD
colorlog.pl
colorized ls
OS2200/Development
------------------
CSHELL/GREP/MORE
UEDIT
VSH
FINDREF
LOCATOR
DOWN
DIFF
CALL
SQED
FTPACK
IDUMP
XCOPY
PRT
etc.
Many are editors, code management/searching tools, file management tools, or misc utilities.
This is just another potential area for compromise.
If two people click and want to spend their lives together, why not let them work it out for themselves instead of trying to come up with some sort of "best practice" which isn't going to cover all cases anyway...?
That reminds me... If you're an Evil type who is getting perilously close to descending to Godhood due to the unbidden rapture of henchmen, underlings, and other assorted riffraff, just gather them into a single place to celebration the occasion ... and wipe them out.
Do it with style if possible, but speed is of the essence!
Man, I've seen it done more than once. Godhood is *such* a hassle...
Better a kobald than than a prootwaddle. Oh, wait, wrong game system. :-)
1) Since many people find it hard to retire at 65 or earlier due to layoffs and whatnot, even that 55- or 60-year-old programmer could provide barrels of binary goodness for well over a decade to come. :-)
;-)
... it's simply migrating to other areas. In my case my face. Greying beards are distinguished, don't ya know. Besides, 40 is the new 20. Right? Or is it 30? I forget...
2) It's better to hire someone AFTER they've made the basic mistakes (and hopefully learned from them).
Many folks like me who are over 40 and still coding/designing are doing it as much for the fun of it as we are the need for food and rent/mortgage/college money. Hey, I'm juggling Perl, C++, Java, Fortran, and a few other languages for a living. How could that NOT be fun?
And my hair isn't missing
I like the operating system numbers on the boxes I play with better.
:-)
Exec Level 47R5D
Is that cool or what?
I like Java, and I code in Java for a living (along wthi other languages), so slow down with the attack dogs! :-(
It was a question intended to illustrate that "scripting" isn't enough of a boundary -- it's the nature of the projects themselves which determine the nature of the software developer, IMO, not the toolset being used.
I've written some fairly complex stuff in Telemate's scripting language, for example. Once you get up to a few thousand lines, it ceases to be a trivial undertaking. Again IMO...
What would you consider a Java programmer? Jave is essentially a scripting language which compiles to bytecode, after all.
It's interesting how people can see the same company in different (sometimes even opposite) ways.
When I think IBM, I think of refrigerator-sized boxes running OS/390 and zOS, stacks of IBM blade servers running Linux contentedly humming in our corporate data center, and sleek jet-black IntelliStations (which were very well designed and constructed x86 desktop machines, not the consumer PC crap that you're thinking about which was sold to Lenovo quite some time ago). Oh, and Thinkpads.
Not to mention that OS/2 was heavily multithreaded from the beginning, and especially after IBM released the first 32-bit versions of that platform in 1992. That would be 16 years ago now. :-)
All an OS really needs to be useful is to have good networking, a decent browser, and a certain amount of decent applications software.
OS/2 has a fairly decent networking stack, multiple stable and native ports of both Firefox and Seamonkey, and a native port of OpenOffice as well as a fair collection of older less capable applications (Embellish, StarOffice, ColorWorks, Lotus SmartSuite, and friends).
The fact that WinOS2 can fill in a few holes doesn't hurt (I ran Quicken 98 on my Warp 4 box for years, and I still use Visio 4 Pro and a few other Win 3.x programs from time to time on my Warp 4 system when I can't find a way to do some sort of graphics effect using native software).
Well, the poster to which you are responding apparently knows, as do many other folks who have actually used both SOM and COM for development. Remember that OS/2 was a very popular operating system once (albeit a long time ago).
Yes, we all know that it's the number of people USING a technology which determines it's overall quality. That's why McDonald's and Burger King are the paragons of American cuisine. :-)
If you seriously don't know about the numerous things which IBM has done for the open source community over the past ten years or so, I'm afraid you weren't paying very close attention. And it hasn't been just technology (e.g., JFS) or patents from IBM that have made it into the open source ecosystem -- the very fact that IBM endorses the Linux software stack in an enterprise context in the first place is a huge validating factor for pointy-heads.
If anything, it seems (at least to me) that Microsoft is more brazen today about flouting its monopoly position than it was ten or fifteen years ago...
...but some of us will still find an excuse or three to run it under emulation. :-) :-)
:-)
Or maybe my PPro will still be working in 2033? Who knows?
Absolutely. Linux (and the BSD variants) were developed largely outside the desktop software marketplace because Microsoft's dominance in the desktop space has been it effectively impossible for a for-profit corporations to fund a competing effort by develping their own. Not even IBM could do it back in the 1990's, or Sun in more recent times, and Apple has successful mainly because its desktop fiefdom is still largely contained/protected behind walls made out of proprietary hardware and firmware elements.
In the case of operating systems (and perhaps also in the case of web browsers), you might be able to say that there is a natural tendency towards commoditization in those market segments. That might actually be true. But that does not explain Microsoft's ability to continue to make money hand-over-fist in the OS market, or its ability to snare such a dominant market share in the web browser space even with a largely static and uninnovative browser offering.
Those UNIX-centric editors all suck. Ever tried to use one of those on a synchronous UTS terminal? I don't think so... :-) :-)
Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey are both outside the original market (which was web browsers that were created as a profit center).
Just because free software which comes from outside the market exists and is starting to penetrate doesn't imply that the market isn't being dominated. MSIE is effectively destroying any attempts to create and SELL a competing web browser. Even Opera is free now. It didn't used to be.
Retrocade wasn't bad for a while, either. Pretty built-in front-end, especially with the topless patch. ;-)
I didn't carry mine around that much, but I could have -- the original controller snapped right onto the front of the unit under the screen, and of course the screen was part of the unit itself (no TV required). The fact that it had Minestorm built in meant you didn't even have to bring a cartridge along to impress your friends, and in those days it didn't take much to make an impression! :-)
Huh. I seem to remember something in MacOS 9, but the IIci I had at work between 1993 and 1997 or so didn't have anything that I can remember (that one ran MacOS 7.01, mainly), and the PowerMac G3 tower I had after that might've, but again I don't remember looking for it. And it never even ran MacOS 9.
I guess I wouldn't be shocked, though, even if I don't remember it. I was a corporate Mac user, not a Mac hobyist, and Apple *does* have a reputation for introducing things like that relatively early on.
Thanks.