I don't hate the USA, but then again, I have many many years of visits to the USA whereas the wast majority of USA haters have never been outside Shitville, Europe. If they have, it's on a daytrip to Backwater, Europe. None of them have ever set foot in the USA nor do they have any idea of all the great things that has come out of the USA and true, some things didn't turn out that great, but then again, what can really be done for France anyway?:-)
Sadly, I think both my paragraph and yours are largely correct.:-(
Both OS/2 2.x and PC/GEOS (Geoworks Ensemble) used the right mouse button heavily (for context menus and for file dragging) well before Microsoft thought about using it for anything other than ESC.
As I've said before here, Microsoft owes at least part of its tremendous success to the fact that IBM was under the Federal Anti-Trust microscope at the time that the MS-DOS contract was signed with IBM.
If MS-DOS wasn't bundled on so many IBM PCs, where do you think Microsoft would be today?
If IBM was free to operate as it wished, do you really they they'd permit another company to write such a simplistic OS for its desktop systems? I'm sure that it could have produced a similar piece of software in a few months at most.
What goes around comes around. Microsoft knowingly hedged its bets by behaving in a manner known to be in violation of existing anti-trust law, and there is usually a price to pay for going out of bounds during a game.
While it might be the most visible one, at least in the press, Linux is hardly the only OS waiting in the wings to fill the Windows vacuum. Some organizations would be quite happy with Solaris on the desktop, for example (the airline I used to work for was already doing that in a few areas anyway), and even platforms like eComStation or FreeBSd would have a shot at winning a certain percentage of the market.
Since there isn't a monolithic "Linux" out there, and since there would be tremendous incentive for various parties to create a user-friendly Linux desktop in the absence of Microsoft Windows, I suspect the "Linux is hard to use" syndrome wouldn't last very long. It isn't all that hard to use now, anyway -- remember that usage != administration.
Where I'm from (North Europe), the US actually seems a bit 'old-fashioned' or 'quaint', when it comes to infrastructure and household technology.
Which part(s) of the US are you referring to? The electric power infrastructure is quite uniform in the US, actually, especially given its size, and I found during my trip to England/Scotland/Wales ten years ago that constant water pressure and temperature seems to be an issue in other parts of the world, not here.:-)
Air quality varies tremendously. The US is a fairly large place, and is a fairly diverse place geographically if not culterally.
I know a lot more former Unisys folks than current, but you're right -- most of the folks I know who are still there were the senior folks when I was there, and that was almost 15 years ago.
Downsizing has been a permanent part of the culture there since the Burroughs/Sperry merger formed the company in the mid 1980's...
Thankfully, the non-IBM systems I work on are abend-free.
Now, program aborts and other types of abormal terminations happen quite a lot in some areas, but we call them what they are and don't make up silly words.:-)
DASD indeed. They're DISKS, damn you. And pels... Sheesh...
Some turn into managers (some still technical, others not), some are deflected into other careers through layoffs or other career events, and some of us are lucky enough to work in industries where it takes 4-5 years to learn the basics and another ten or so to get into the details of the vertical applications we work on.:-)
That was the case for me when I worked at an airline, anyway. There was so much to know that you couldn't learn it all in a single lifetime, and there were a dozen of us all in our separate areas of vertical expertise. At 40, I was the youngest of the group when I was laid off in 2002.
Now I get to play with stuff which uses my old mainframe expertise while also getting to play with slightly more modern stuff on Unix servers, and my hope is to follow the application that I'm currently working on from platform to platform as required (learning more about newer languages and environments along the way).
I just turned 43, and I've been writing code since I first started playing with Apple II boxes back in the late 70's, but I also love what I do. Maybe someday I'll move into management for the pay or in self-defense, but designing and writing applications code is still a lot of fun for me. I love learning about new systems, and I love seeing my code running in production and helping make one little piece of the world go around.
Hopefully I'll be a bit twiddler in some form until the day I die...:-)
It's easy to talk trash when you're employed, and ten-year-old anecdotes don't fly in today's job market.
I was unemployed both in 1992 (mass layoff from Unisys) and 2002 (mass layoff from Northwest Airlines), and let me tell you it was a hell of a lot rougher finding work (both for myself and for my former cow orkers) the latter time around. Not just for us old (well, middle of the road in my case) farts, but also for the younger 20-something types.
These days it's slim pickings in IT, at least in the general case. I still know a few folks up in the Twin Cities who are bouncing between contracting gigs because nothing else exists unless you want to work at Walmart. Look at the statistics from the feds showing how many jobs have been permanently eliminated from the workforce in various areas since 2001. In 1992, that simply wasn't the case.
Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of solid advice for you, but I do want to wish you and all of your (former? current?) teammates the best of luck.
I was laid off back in 2002 in the wake of 9/11 along with a lot of other airline IT folks, and it took a while, but most of us are finally back in the workforce again. A layoff sucks quite a bit, but sometimes the end result is better than where you were.:-)
I do a lot of surfing using a text based browser (Links) on an 80x33 screen, and my guess is that most web site designers never anticipated that type of display. It's nice, however, to be able to read everything using the super-readable screen font generated by my video card, and for the most part it seems to work rather well.
Even with GUI browsers, I tend to override web site fonts with things such as Arial which I know work well on my machine, and which are relatively easy on the eyes.
If a site author really wants to use their own fancy fonts, I think they should create graphics.
Leaders might need to be extroverts, but their advisors had better be people who are more introspective and contemplative. Otherwise, all you'll end up with is leadership which goes charging into everything without thinking first.:-)
In the mainframe-based online transaction application environment where I work, each program is given a fixed block of memory to play with. Period. After the program terminates, that memory is usually freed, but often a transaction has either its code or its data memory area(s) locked into core to speed up program load times (it remains resident but idle until the next time the program is activated).
Transaction programs are event-driven entities, though, and they have very short lifetimes -- they are loaded in response to a specific query, they perform their task (usually in a fraction of a second), and they terminate, returning control to the transaction monitor.
Performance (as in "reponse time") is one of the key design criteria for such an environment. The whole idea is to break an application into a series of discrete transactions, each performing its predefined task and then terminating. Most of the time a task consists of reading a series of files and creating a display screen, or parsing a data entry screen and saving the result to a file or files.
All in all it's quite slick, and it completely avoids the kinds of traps that one sees in the world of typical PC or UNix applications (where a program remains resident for many minutes or hours and has to do dynamic memory allocation/deallocation on its own).
I have it running on a handful of PPros, mainly for use as a fileserver (ext3fs+Samba), but also sometimes as a desktop distro. It comes with a decent version of Webmin as well as VNC for remote administration, and the version of KDE it comes bundled with (2.2) will run relatively well on a PPro with 64MB.
I have a Compaq Proliant 2500 (PPro/200 with 64MB) running Win2k SP4, and it's just fine for web surfing using Firefix 1.0.7 or Opera 8.5 and also just fine for doing light application work.
If I try to do too much it'll slow down a bit, but as long as I keep things to only a few applications it's just as fast as Win95 was (the idea is to keep swapping down).
Even if the LEGO folks continue to produce such a product, it won't be popular (or well known) if stores like Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, etc. won't carry it.
Or _When Harlie Was One_ by David Gerrold.
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 1
I actually liked that one a bit better than P-1, I think.
Yes. Ironically, though, the mention of mainframes and OS/2 just shows consistency on my part -- the use of older (but in some contexts arguably better) tools in various contexts even though I'm also aware of newer alternatives.:-)
I also write C and C++ code under Solaris professionally, for example, and yet I choose (and actually prefer to work in) the Unisys OS2200 mainframe transaction environment when I can for a wide variety of reasons.
I also use "newer" OSes like Windows 2k and XP and Solaris 9 (soon 10) on various boxes on my LAN at home, and yet I choose to use OS/2 as my primary desktop.
If you've never used Google's Group search to search for answers to such questions as "why doesn't my NIC work with Linux Distro X.X", or "what's the best way to perform a recursive grep on a Solaris 9 box using standard Sun tools", then I suggest you try.:-)
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I don't hate the USA, but then again, I have many many years of visits to the USA whereas the wast majority of USA haters have never been outside Shitville, Europe. If they have, it's on a daytrip to Backwater, Europe. None of them have ever set foot in the USA nor do they have any idea of all the great things that has come out of the USA and true, some things didn't turn out that great, but then again, what can really be done for France anyway? :-)
:-(
Sadly, I think both my paragraph and yours are largely correct.
"Lu-cy... In the sky... With diamonds..."
:-(
My poor brain will never forget that sound...
Where does this forum reside? Inside of France, or outside of it?
:-)
"Yes" is a valid answer.
Are you aware that you're suggesting that European businesses operating in the US should be able to break the law and go unpunished?
Didn't Microsoft do just that just a few years ago?
Seriously.
Both OS/2 2.x and PC/GEOS (Geoworks Ensemble) used the right mouse button heavily (for context menus and for file dragging) well before Microsoft thought about using it for anything other than ESC.
As I've said before here, Microsoft owes at least part of its tremendous success to the fact that IBM was under the Federal Anti-Trust microscope at the time that the MS-DOS contract was signed with IBM.
If MS-DOS wasn't bundled on so many IBM PCs, where do you think Microsoft would be today?
If IBM was free to operate as it wished, do you really they they'd permit another company to write such a simplistic OS for its desktop systems? I'm sure that it could have produced a similar piece of software in a few months at most.
What goes around comes around. Microsoft knowingly hedged its bets by behaving in a manner known to be in violation of existing anti-trust law, and there is usually a price to pay for going out of bounds during a game.
While it might be the most visible one, at least in the press, Linux is hardly the only OS waiting in the wings to fill the Windows vacuum. Some organizations would be quite happy with Solaris on the desktop, for example (the airline I used to work for was already doing that in a few areas anyway), and even platforms like eComStation or FreeBSd would have a shot at winning a certain percentage of the market.
Since there isn't a monolithic "Linux" out there, and since there would be tremendous incentive for various parties to create a user-friendly Linux desktop in the absence of Microsoft Windows, I suspect the "Linux is hard to use" syndrome wouldn't last very long. It isn't all that hard to use now, anyway -- remember that usage != administration.
Where I'm from (North Europe), the US actually seems a bit 'old-fashioned' or 'quaint', when it comes to infrastructure and household technology.
:-)
Which part(s) of the US are you referring to? The electric power infrastructure is quite uniform in the US, actually, especially given its size, and I found during my trip to England/Scotland/Wales ten years ago that constant water pressure and temperature seems to be an issue in other parts of the world, not here.
Air quality varies tremendously. The US is a fairly large place, and is a fairly diverse place geographically if not culterally.
I know a lot more former Unisys folks than current, but you're right -- most of the folks I know who are still there were the senior folks when I was there, and that was almost 15 years ago.
Downsizing has been a permanent part of the culture there since the Burroughs/Sperry merger formed the company in the mid 1980's...
Thankfully, the non-IBM systems I work on are abend-free.
:-)
Now, program aborts and other types of abormal terminations happen quite a lot in some areas, but we call them what they are and don't make up silly words.
DASD indeed. They're DISKS, damn you. And pels... Sheesh...
Some turn into managers (some still technical, others not), some are deflected into other careers through layoffs or other career events, and some of us are lucky enough to work in industries where it takes 4-5 years to learn the basics and another ten or so to get into the details of the vertical applications we work on. :-)
:-)
That was the case for me when I worked at an airline, anyway. There was so much to know that you couldn't learn it all in a single lifetime, and there were a dozen of us all in our separate areas of vertical expertise. At 40, I was the youngest of the group when I was laid off in 2002.
Now I get to play with stuff which uses my old mainframe expertise while also getting to play with slightly more modern stuff on Unix servers, and my hope is to follow the application that I'm currently working on from platform to platform as required (learning more about newer languages and environments along the way).
I just turned 43, and I've been writing code since I first started playing with Apple II boxes back in the late 70's, but I also love what I do. Maybe someday I'll move into management for the pay or in self-defense, but designing and writing applications code is still a lot of fun for me. I love learning about new systems, and I love seeing my code running in production and helping make one little piece of the world go around.
Hopefully I'll be a bit twiddler in some form until the day I die...
It's easy to talk trash when you're employed, and ten-year-old anecdotes don't fly in today's job market.
I was unemployed both in 1992 (mass layoff from Unisys) and 2002 (mass layoff from Northwest Airlines), and let me tell you it was a hell of a lot rougher finding work (both for myself and for my former cow orkers) the latter time around. Not just for us old (well, middle of the road in my case) farts, but also for the younger 20-something types.
These days it's slim pickings in IT, at least in the general case. I still know a few folks up in the Twin Cities who are bouncing between contracting gigs because nothing else exists unless you want to work at Walmart. Look at the statistics from the feds showing how many jobs have been permanently eliminated from the workforce in various areas since 2001. In 1992, that simply wasn't the case.
Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of solid advice for you, but I do want to wish you and all of your (former? current?) teammates the best of luck.
:-)
I was laid off back in 2002 in the wake of 9/11 along with a lot of other airline IT folks, and it took a while, but most of us are finally back in the workforce again. A layoff sucks quite a bit, but sometimes the end result is better than where you were.
Again, good luck...
I do a lot of surfing using a text based browser (Links) on an 80x33 screen, and my guess is that most web site designers never anticipated that type of display. It's nice, however, to be able to read everything using the super-readable screen font generated by my video card, and for the most part it seems to work rather well.
Even with GUI browsers, I tend to override web site fonts with things such as Arial which I know work well on my machine, and which are relatively easy on the eyes.
If a site author really wants to use their own fancy fonts, I think they should create graphics.
Check this out:
:-)
QuickView - DOS Multimedia Viewer including DivX, AVI, MPEG, MOV and MP3
It works quite well in an OS/2 VDM, also.
Heck, I have BOXES of punch cards somewhere. :-) :-)
As long as folks are willing to pay high prices, companies will continue to sell at high prices. That applies to games as well as music.
Screw diplomacy unless we're talking about the gunboat variant. :-)
Leaders might need to be extroverts, but their advisors had better be people who are more introspective and contemplative. Otherwise, all you'll end up with is leadership which goes charging into everything without thinking first. :-)
In the mainframe-based online transaction application environment where I work, each program is given a fixed block of memory to play with. Period. After the program terminates, that memory is usually freed, but often a transaction has either its code or its data memory area(s) locked into core to speed up program load times (it remains resident but idle until the next time the program is activated).
Transaction programs are event-driven entities, though, and they have very short lifetimes -- they are loaded in response to a specific query, they perform their task (usually in a fraction of a second), and they terminate, returning control to the transaction monitor.
Performance (as in "reponse time") is one of the key design criteria for such an environment. The whole idea is to break an application into a series of discrete transactions, each performing its predefined task and then terminating. Most of the time a task consists of reading a series of files and creating a display screen, or parsing a data entry screen and saving the result to a file or files.
All in all it's quite slick, and it completely avoids the kinds of traps that one sees in the world of typical PC or UNix applications (where a program remains resident for many minutes or hours and has to do dynamic memory allocation/deallocation on its own).
I have it running on a handful of PPros, mainly for use as a fileserver (ext3fs+Samba), but also sometimes as a desktop distro. It comes with a decent version of Webmin as well as VNC for remote administration, and the version of KDE it comes bundled with (2.2) will run relatively well on a PPro with 64MB.
FWIW...
I have a Compaq Proliant 2500 (PPro/200 with 64MB) running Win2k SP4, and it's just fine for web surfing using Firefix 1.0.7 or Opera 8.5 and also just fine for doing light application work.
If I try to do too much it'll slow down a bit, but as long as I keep things to only a few applications it's just as fast as Win95 was (the idea is to keep swapping down).
Even if the LEGO folks continue to produce such a product, it won't be popular (or well known) if stores like Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, etc. won't carry it.
I actually liked that one a bit better than P-1, I think.
Yes. Ironically, though, the mention of mainframes and OS/2 just shows consistency on my part -- the use of older (but in some contexts arguably better) tools in various contexts even though I'm also aware of newer alternatives. :-)
:-)
I also write C and C++ code under Solaris professionally, for example, and yet I choose (and actually prefer to work in) the Unisys OS2200 mainframe transaction environment when I can for a wide variety of reasons.
I also use "newer" OSes like Windows 2k and XP and Solaris 9 (soon 10) on various boxes on my LAN at home, and yet I choose to use OS/2 as my primary desktop.
If you've never used Google's Group search to search for answers to such questions as "why doesn't my NIC work with Linux Distro X.X", or "what's the best way to perform a recursive grep on a Solaris 9 box using standard Sun tools", then I suggest you try.