OS/2, for example, still has three full application suites (Lotus SmartSuite, OpenOffice 1.1, and StarOffice 5.1), two decent Mozilla-based browsers, and access to the entire legacy DOS and Windows 3.x app base, and I'll take my 16-bit copies of Quicken 98 and Visio 4 Pro running on WinOS2 over any of the equivalents I've seen in the Linux world.
In spite of this, and in spite of its continued active support by Serenity past the end of 2006, it's still considered "dead".
It seems the requirements are impossibly high when those who make the definitions are so biased against alternatives they don't understand...
Many of the differences in GIMP's UI don't appear to be designed to give some advantage -- they seem to take a different approach for no particular reason, and much of it seems like a kludge (to me, anyway).
Why not follow Photoshop's lead if there's no real disadvantage to doing so?
Also, unlike video tape recorders or operating systems, there isn't a strong drive for consumers to "standardize" on a single player in the market, so it's quite possible that alternatives like ReplayTV will never go away.
I think your analogy is somewhat misplaced.
Re:Uhhh, Mr. Gates? Unix? Multics, fer chrissake?
on
Bill Gates Speaks Out
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· Score: 1
My lifetime-subscription ReplayTV 5040 links into my LAN and automagically pulls down schedule updates just fine via cablemodem, while a betamax VCR isn't even capable of playing current tapes.
If you're suggesting that a ReplayTV is somehow obsolete, perhaps you should take a closer look at one. Even though it only has a single tuner and doesn't do hi def video, it does what I want it to do extremely well. I put it on the Vid2 port, anyway, so I use my TV's own dual tuners if I want live PIP!:-)
For a while I drove 59 miles each way to a contract position, and most of it was on a rural interstate that explicitly prohibits unmotorized traffic for at least part of the way.
A bike would have been possible, but impractical.
Right now, I commute eight miles each way, but the roads in question are (1) lacking shoulders and (2) populated with Atlanta drivers. #2 in particular makes me scared enough to not want to bike.:-)
You can often make good guesses as to where people fit in their respective ranges (based on grade level), but often the range for each grade is large enough that you can't guess any closer than 10-15k or so.
In my experience, a vast number of programmers are working on internal software projects for systems that are used in-house and are continually being altered over time, not working on products which have formal release dates or which directly account for corporate revenue.
In those cases, there are no "billable hours".
Also, in those instances, the 60-80-hour/week crunch time scenarios rarely occur.
Because of the lack of knowledge (or ability?) of the patent examiners at the US Patent Office, it seems like very little research into prior art or the actual originality of the ideas present in a patent application are rarely investigated in detail (or apparently at all in some cases, like this one).
It seems the USPTO is to patents what FEMA is to hurricane relief.:-(:-(
Otherwise known as Google Groups, or formerly known as DejaNews.
If a piece of hardware or software has been released and used by more than a few people, the chances are quite good that someone has discussed that item or piece of software somewhere on USENET over the past ten years.
...with embedded images and such that were created by Geoworks Ensemble back in the early 1990's, and converting them to another format has proven to be a bit of a pain due to the lack of good export filters in GeoWrite or its successors, and also due to the fact that nobody else seems to be able to read GeoWrite files.
Thankfully, I can still get the PC/GEOS environment to work on various PCs at home, but at some point that won't be an option.
(1) Typical employment lasts for 26 weeks in the United States. That's six (6) months. It's equal to roughly half your previous net paycheck with a ceiling around $300-500/week before taxes (which you own on any benefits you are paid).
(2) During times of high unemployment, a federal extension of 13 weeks also exists. I was lucky(?) enough to be laid off during such a period.
(3) As a former airline employee, I also qualified for an additional six-month extension because my career with an airline was terminated due to 9/11.
(4) I spent eight of those 32 months doing contract work (60-mile commute each way). That's all I could find in the Minneapolis metropolitan area between 2002 and 2005. Ask any programmer who was unemployed in that area during that stint -- with Northwest Airlines dumping a few hundred experienced people into the job market and a number of other companies following suit, the job hunting situation there was very harsh. It still is -- I know several people who are still out of work, and one was laid off before I was!
(5) I opened up my job search to a nation-wide search at the beginning of 2004, and it still took me an additional nine (9) months to locate work (an airline-related programming job here in Atlanta).
(6) My resume is online and in full view for all to see. I thought I was quite employable, but the folks doing hiring didn't. I'm not alone in this experience -- check out any of the discussions on Slashdot about job searches in the past five years.
(7) No, I couldn't find a job within a 100-mile radius that would pay me enough to meet basic expenses for my family (food, housing, utilities). Unemployment didn't meet basic expenses either, but it gave me a change to search for work, hone my skills, learn new skills, and figure out how to get out of the situation I found myself in.
(8) I fervently hope you never find yourself in a similar position. If you do, however, I will wish you the best of luck. I've been through two layoffs in the past 17 years, and I know what it's like. You obviously do not.
Yeah, the lack of real peer-to-peer networking in the original Warp 3 (assuming it wasn't a copy of Warp 3 Connect) would have made it less useful, at least to me.
At least if you count eComStation 1.2 as a version of the OS/2 client.
The last release of the OS/2 client from IBM (not including informal kernel releases) was Warp 4.52 in July 2002, I think. I could be off by a month.
Given that it'll run OpenOffice and Firefox, it seems too useful to just toss away. Too bad you didn't offer your discs on eBay -- I could use another set...
Flash works just fine under Odin (a Win32 Wine-alike for OS/2), and Innotek would create a wrapper for it so us OS/2 folks could run it as a "native" process, but the license explicitly limits the platforms on which Flash can be used.
Because of this, Innotek is unable to legally release their wrapped version of the latest Flash player for OS/2.
Well, the COBOL class I took was mainly focused on language syntax and on typical business computing tasks, as well as the process of creating and submitting batch compilation jobs to the mainframe, but keep in mind that when I was going through the BSCS program (early 1980's) a sizable percentage of the students had little experience with programming computers outside of a little microcomputer BASIC.
That class also taught me about flowcharting templates, coding forms, and punch cards, three things which I'm glad were dropped from most courses (and the computing environment) after that year's classes. Even a line editor on a VAXed which replaced the 1004's is a lot nicer than having to use an IBM keypunch, but I was glad to have one quarter where card decks were required -- it taught me to *really appreciate* interactive terminals.:-)
I've been building PCs and installing/configuring various operating systems for the past 15+ years, and I picked up a copy of Mike Meyer's latest A+ certification book because it looked interesting as a reference.
I don't know what the actual certifications test covers, but I was rather impressed with the hardware-related topics covered in the text.
If it coveres even a significant fraction of that material, I could see that cert having some value, at least in terms of an employer wanting to see a certain minimal understanding of PC hardware.
Re:But they didn't deliver; they provided a stop-g
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.
That's because it _had_ to be to meet it's primary design criteria of backwards compatibility.
Neither the FAT filesystem nor the underlying DOS kernel bundled with Windows 95 was a hard requirement for backwards compatability.
(1) IBM proved three years earlier with OS/2 2.0 (and again with OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 before Win95's release) that DOS and Windows programs could work just fine from a more advanced filesystem like HPFS without missing a beat (or having a clue about the true nature of the underlying directory structures).
Yes, a few low-level utilities like Norton Utilities or PC Tools needed to adjust, and some older programs that used unapproved techniques to get at things directly, but that was the case with Windows 95 anyway.
(2) Guess how much DOS is in an OS/2 Virtual DOS Machine? If you guessed "none", you're right.
IBM even rewrote Windows 3.1 as a DPMI client and got their OS/2 product to run it just fine in a VDM (that's what WinOS2 is), and both OS/2 for Windows 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3 red spine could take an existing WinOS2 installation and run *it* in a VDM.
If you needed specific compatibility, OS/2 could use a boot diskette image to run *any* version of DOS (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, or MS-DOS) in a VDM, and you could run all of them concurrently, all without needing a FAT filesystem except in the boot images.
Maybe it was a requirement for Microsoft, but after all they're more a marketing company than a technology company. IBM had the knowhow to do it differently, and IMO correctly.
Not to mention those "32-bit DLLs (or VxDs)" replaced just about every aspect of DOS. In just about evrey way, DOS was little more than a bootloader.
Unless you wanted to run a number of DOS games, in which case Windows 95 did the effective equivalent of an OS/2 "dual boot" and booted into an actual DOS, tossing all of the background processes out of the way in the process.
OS/2, on the other hand, handled many of those in a VDM without needing to boot to a real DOS, so that modem download in the background could keep on chugging along even when you were playing Warcraft or Descent or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
See these links for examples:
m .html
http://www.softheap.com/internet/viruses-on-cd-ro
http://www.nha.com/news/archives/msvirx.htm
OS/2, for example, still has three full application suites (Lotus SmartSuite, OpenOffice 1.1, and StarOffice 5.1), two decent Mozilla-based browsers, and access to the entire legacy DOS and Windows 3.x app base, and I'll take my 16-bit copies of Quicken 98 and Visio 4 Pro running on WinOS2 over any of the equivalents I've seen in the Linux world.
In spite of this, and in spite of its continued active support by Serenity past the end of 2006, it's still considered "dead".
It seems the requirements are impossibly high when those who make the definitions are so biased against alternatives they don't understand...
Many of the differences in GIMP's UI don't appear to be designed to give some advantage -- they seem to take a different approach for no particular reason, and much of it seems like a kludge (to me, anyway).
Why not follow Photoshop's lead if there's no real disadvantage to doing so?
...but it certainly isn't there today.
Also, unlike video tape recorders or operating systems, there isn't a strong drive for consumers to "standardize" on a single player in the market, so it's quite possible that alternatives like ReplayTV will never go away.
I think your analogy is somewhat misplaced.
Bitter, perhaps, but also dead-on accurate.
My lifetime-subscription ReplayTV 5040 links into my LAN and automagically pulls down schedule updates just fine via cablemodem, while a betamax VCR isn't even capable of playing current tapes.
:-)
If you're suggesting that a ReplayTV is somehow obsolete, perhaps you should take a closer look at one. Even though it only has a single tuner and doesn't do hi def video, it does what I want it to do extremely well. I put it on the Vid2 port, anyway, so I use my TV's own dual tuners if I want live PIP!
For a while I drove 59 miles each way to a contract position, and most of it was on a rural interstate that explicitly prohibits unmotorized traffic for at least part of the way.
:-)
A bike would have been possible, but impractical.
Right now, I commute eight miles each way, but the roads in question are (1) lacking shoulders and (2) populated with Atlanta drivers. #2 in particular makes me scared enough to not want to bike.
Ooh, I can write it all off... or I can just not pay in the first place. It comes out the same, net.
:-)
Until you get caught.
You can often make good guesses as to where people fit in their respective ranges (based on grade level), but often the range for each grade is large enough that you can't guess any closer than 10-15k or so.
In my experience, a vast number of programmers are working on internal software projects for systems that are used in-house and are continually being altered over time, not working on products which have formal release dates or which directly account for corporate revenue.
In those cases, there are no "billable hours".
Also, in those instances, the 60-80-hour/week crunch time scenarios rarely occur.
Because of the lack of knowledge (or ability?) of the patent examiners at the US Patent Office, it seems like very little research into prior art or the actual originality of the ideas present in a patent application are rarely investigated in detail (or apparently at all in some cases, like this one).
:-( :-(
It seems the USPTO is to patents what FEMA is to hurricane relief.
Otherwise known as Google Groups, or formerly known as DejaNews.
If a piece of hardware or software has been released and used by more than a few people, the chances are quite good that someone has discussed that item or piece of software somewhere on USENET over the past ten years.
A plethora of examples can be found here
...with embedded images and such that were created by Geoworks Ensemble back in the early 1990's, and converting them to another format has proven to be a bit of a pain due to the lack of good export filters in GeoWrite or its successors, and also due to the fact that nobody else seems to be able to read GeoWrite files.
Thankfully, I can still get the PC/GEOS environment to work on various PCs at home, but at some point that won't be an option.
You must mean Compaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHewlett Packard. :-)
Some corrections to your misplaced diatribe:
(1) Typical employment lasts for 26 weeks in the United States. That's six (6) months. It's equal to roughly half your previous net paycheck with a ceiling around $300-500/week before taxes (which you own on any benefits you are paid).
(2) During times of high unemployment, a federal extension of 13 weeks also exists. I was lucky(?) enough to be laid off during such a period.
(3) As a former airline employee, I also qualified for an additional six-month extension because my career with an airline was terminated due to 9/11.
(4) I spent eight of those 32 months doing contract work (60-mile commute each way). That's all I could find in the Minneapolis metropolitan area between 2002 and 2005. Ask any programmer who was unemployed in that area during that stint -- with Northwest Airlines dumping a few hundred experienced people into the job market and a number of other companies following suit, the job hunting situation there was very harsh. It still is -- I know several people who are still out of work, and one was laid off before I was!
(5) I opened up my job search to a nation-wide search at the beginning of 2004, and it still took me an additional nine (9) months to locate work (an airline-related programming job here in Atlanta).
(6) My resume is online and in full view for all to see. I thought I was quite employable, but the folks doing hiring didn't. I'm not alone in this experience -- check out any of the discussions on Slashdot about job searches in the past five years.
(7) No, I couldn't find a job within a 100-mile radius that would pay me enough to meet basic expenses for my family (food, housing, utilities). Unemployment didn't meet basic expenses either, but it gave me a change to search for work, hone my skills, learn new skills, and figure out how to get out of the situation I found myself in.
(8) I fervently hope you never find yourself in a similar position. If you do, however, I will wish you the best of luck. I've been through two layoffs in the past 17 years, and I know what it's like. You obviously do not.
Have a day.
Software patents have no requirement for a hardware component in the US.
Yeah, the lack of real peer-to-peer networking in the original Warp 3 (assuming it wasn't a copy of Warp 3 Connect) would have made it less useful, at least to me.
At least if you count eComStation 1.2 as a version of the OS/2 client.
The last release of the OS/2 client from IBM (not including informal kernel releases) was Warp 4.52 in July 2002, I think. I could be off by a month.
Given that it'll run OpenOffice and Firefox, it seems too useful to just toss away. Too bad you didn't offer your discs on eBay -- I could use another set...
Compared to Links? Or Dillo?
Flash works just fine under Odin (a Win32 Wine-alike for OS/2), and Innotek would create a wrapper for it so us OS/2 folks could run it as a "native" process, but the license explicitly limits the platforms on which Flash can be used.
Because of this, Innotek is unable to legally release their wrapped version of the latest Flash player for OS/2.
Well, the COBOL class I took was mainly focused on language syntax and on typical business computing tasks, as well as the process of creating and submitting batch compilation jobs to the mainframe, but keep in mind that when I was going through the BSCS program (early 1980's) a sizable percentage of the students had little experience with programming computers outside of a little microcomputer BASIC.
:-)
That class also taught me about flowcharting templates, coding forms, and punch cards, three things which I'm glad were dropped from most courses (and the computing environment) after that year's classes. Even a line editor on a VAXed which replaced the 1004's is a lot nicer than having to use an IBM keypunch, but I was glad to have one quarter where card decks were required -- it taught me to *really appreciate* interactive terminals.
I've been building PCs and installing/configuring various operating systems for the past 15+ years, and I picked up a copy of Mike Meyer's latest A+ certification book because it looked interesting as a reference.
I don't know what the actual certifications test covers, but I was rather impressed with the hardware-related topics covered in the text.
If it coveres even a significant fraction of that material, I could see that cert having some value, at least in terms of an employer wanting to see a certain minimal understanding of PC hardware.
Not a very portable way to play tunes, though...
Windows 95 still had a crappy FAT filesystem (even though Microsoft had developed HPFS years before) and it was still a pile of 32-bit DLLs (or VxDs) running on top of DOS instead of a compartmentalized 32-bit OS with a classic kernel/shell design.
:-)
That's because it _had_ to be to meet it's primary design criteria of backwards compatibility.
Neither the FAT filesystem nor the underlying DOS kernel bundled with Windows 95 was a hard requirement for backwards compatability.
(1) IBM proved three years earlier with OS/2 2.0 (and again with OS/2 2.1 and 3.0 before Win95's release) that DOS and Windows programs could work just fine from a more advanced filesystem like HPFS without missing a beat (or having a clue about the true nature of the underlying directory structures).
Yes, a few low-level utilities like Norton Utilities or PC Tools needed to adjust, and some older programs that used unapproved techniques to get at things directly, but that was the case with Windows 95 anyway.
(2) Guess how much DOS is in an OS/2 Virtual DOS Machine? If you guessed "none", you're right.
IBM even rewrote Windows 3.1 as a DPMI client and got their OS/2 product to run it just fine in a VDM (that's what WinOS2 is), and both OS/2 for Windows 2.1 and OS/2 Warp 3 red spine could take an existing WinOS2 installation and run *it* in a VDM.
If you needed specific compatibility, OS/2 could use a boot diskette image to run *any* version of DOS (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, or MS-DOS) in a VDM, and you could run all of them concurrently, all without needing a FAT filesystem except in the boot images.
Maybe it was a requirement for Microsoft, but after all they're more a marketing company than a technology company. IBM had the knowhow to do it differently, and IMO correctly.
Not to mention those "32-bit DLLs (or VxDs)" replaced just about every aspect of DOS. In just about evrey way, DOS was little more than a bootloader.
Unless you wanted to run a number of DOS games, in which case Windows 95 did the effective equivalent of an OS/2 "dual boot" and booted into an actual DOS, tossing all of the background processes out of the way in the process.
OS/2, on the other hand, handled many of those in a VDM without needing to boot to a real DOS, so that modem download in the background could keep on chugging along even when you were playing Warcraft or Descent or whatever.
I *do* agree with your last sentence, though.