This is an excellent suggestion, and it's a practice I've followed since college. I think it helps me to organize my approach to a given problem, and it often results in a nicely structured program (even in the old dialects of Fortran I'm used to coding in for a living).
I'd like to see benchmarks comparing OS/2 to Linux and MacOSX -- I'd bet OS/2 wouldn't fare all that badly compared to its much newer counterparts.
One thing OS/2 seems quite good at doing is adjusting various process priorities to make the user experience a smooth one. Maybe OS/2 just makes UI processes slightly higher priority, I don't know, but I find that I run into mouse pauses on even newer Linux systems that I almost never see under OS/2 Warp 4.
...If Microsoft had such a large part in creating a platform like OS/2 which was lightweight and could handle heavy multithreading smoothly with very little hardware -- why can't they do the same thing with their current offerings?
I suspect there isn't enough money to be made from a smaller, more efficient system...
Register dumps and the like. I've always wondered why the X screen saver that shows all those obscure (and not so obscure) error screens never had an OS/2 example. It's interesting to look at.
Particularly these days as JP Software has released their former 4OS2 shell product to the community for free (both source and binaries) and made their 4DOS shell freeware as well (binary-only for now, but the source is likely to be released at some future point).
Combine that with a couple of additional utilities (HSWITCH and CLIPIT come to my mind immediately), and you've got something which rivals Linux and blows Windows away as a command-line environment.
There's even a version of Midnight Commander for OS/2, and I use tools like slrn and Links on a regular basis (native versions recompiled using GCC/EMX).
I check eBay on a regular basis for older commercial OS/2 (and Windows 3.x) applications and utilities, and I'm not the only person I know who does that.
You might not get a lot for it, but your software sale will probably make someone's day.
There's a lot of software there that I would love to run but which is almost impossible to (legally) find these days...
I think the DOSEMU and DOSBOX projects could derive some serious benefit from OS/2's MVDM technology, for example, and there are a number of concepts in the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell which might be encumbered by NeXT licensing or something but not MS, and which both KDE and GNOME could benefit from.
Not only were people dialing up BBSes long-distance and using Zmodem (or Xmodem, or Kermit, or...) to get such files in the past, but mainframes were exchanging data with each other in various formats (sometimes worldwide) well before TCP/IP came along.
...and he doesn't represent one of the major players in terms of patent issues, so the whole "conflict of interest" concern wouldn't be there.
Context is important.
The question is, can you point to the means by which the company in which Allen owns a lot of stock is going to have a "strangle hold" over the commission?
Good question. How did Microsoft manage to pull it off with the US Justice Department?
Mainframe-based transaction systems, specialized apps like aircraft gross weight and optimal flap and thrust calculations, weather/ACARS message retention and distibution, etc., and now specialized application gateways between government systems.
Also a certain amount of systems software and utility development.
Not a lot of "database" work. We mostly use flat files or specialized transaction-system file types that are designed for high-speed access.
The best description of my role over the years has been "programmer/analyst". I do requirements gathering, technical design (usually in conjunction with one or more end users or user reps), coding, testing, documentation, and support.
There isn't much complex math involved at all unless the applications I'm writing involve complex equations, or unless some of the solutions involve some form of mathematical computation.
While I respect people who have my qualifications and perform the types of tasks that I do, I've always considered "engineering" to be a somewhat more rigorous discipline.
...seem mostly meaningless to me except perhaps in a university or very large corporate or government environment where research is done.
I've never met a "Computer Scientist" in the companies I've worked for, since that title implies a mainly research-oriented role.
I've also never met a "Software Engineer" except for the few folks I know who have that title and are also EE's, but they tend to be involved in the design of firmware or other hardware components.
Most of the folks I've run into in applications development tend to be described by more practical titles:
* "Project Manager" typically does task and resource allocation and coordination, but often remains somewhat non-technical.
* "Programmer/Analyst" tends to be heavily involved in both the design, coding, and testing stages and approaches things from a technical perspective.
* "Business/Analyst" tends to be heavily involved in both the design and testing stages and approaches things fron a functional end-user standpoint.
* "Programmer" is usually someone who is very inexperienced, and who helps the Programmer/Analyst during the coding and testing phase and sometimes in the design phase. In time, they typically turn into Programmer/Analysts.
There are also sysadmin and database admin folks, operators, and a few others, but they aren't as involved with formal softwae development (though the writing of scripts, stored procedures, and other things can often be significant tasks).
You mean you never heard about it because you never hit it. If you were using the full bandwidth available to you 24/7, OTOH, you would have.
If I were using the full bandwidth available to me 24/7, then someone must've replaced by Linux and OS/2 boxes with infected Windows boxes.
I simply can't conceive of any reason I'd need to saturate a 3MB download connection 24x7, and I don't have any need to run servers that are accessible to the public.
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This is an excellent suggestion, and it's a practice I've followed since college. I think it helps me to organize my approach to a given problem, and it often results in a nicely structured program (even in the old dialects of Fortran I'm used to coding in for a living).
Uh oh... I'm being followed. :-)
I'd like to see benchmarks comparing OS/2 to Linux and MacOSX -- I'd bet OS/2 wouldn't fare all that badly compared to its much newer counterparts.
One thing OS/2 seems quite good at doing is adjusting various process priorities to make the user experience a smooth one. Maybe OS/2 just makes UI processes slightly higher priority, I don't know, but I find that I run into mouse pauses on even newer Linux systems that I almost never see under OS/2 Warp 4.
...If Microsoft had such a large part in creating a platform like OS/2 which was lightweight and could handle heavy multithreading smoothly with very little hardware -- why can't they do the same thing with their current offerings?
I suspect there isn't enough money to be made from a smaller, more efficient system...
Register dumps and the like. I've always wondered why the X screen saver that shows all those obscure (and not so obscure) error screens never had an OS/2 example. It's interesting to look at.
That said, I haven't seen one for quite a while.
Particularly these days as JP Software has released their former 4OS2 shell product to the community for free (both source and binaries) and made their 4DOS shell freeware as well (binary-only for now, but the source is likely to be released at some future point).
Combine that with a couple of additional utilities (HSWITCH and CLIPIT come to my mind immediately), and you've got something which rivals Linux and blows Windows away as a command-line environment.
There's even a version of Midnight Commander for OS/2, and I use tools like slrn and Links on a regular basis (native versions recompiled using GCC/EMX).
I thought I was a figment of my own imagination. :-)
I check eBay on a regular basis for older commercial OS/2 (and Windows 3.x) applications and utilities, and I'm not the only person I know who does that.
You might not get a lot for it, but your software sale will probably make someone's day.
There's a lot of software there that I would love to run but which is almost impossible to (legally) find these days...
I think the DOSEMU and DOSBOX projects could derive some serious benefit from OS/2's MVDM technology, for example, and there are a number of concepts in the OS/2 WorkPlace Shell which might be encumbered by NeXT licensing or something but not MS, and which both KDE and GNOME could benefit from.
Not only were people dialing up BBSes long-distance and using Zmodem (or Xmodem, or Kermit, or...) to get such files in the past, but mainframes were exchanging data with each other in various formats (sometimes worldwide) well before TCP/IP came along.
Hey -- it could be! :-)
...and he doesn't represent one of the major players in terms of patent issues, so the whole "conflict of interest" concern wouldn't be there.
Context is important.
The question is, can you point to the means by which the company in which Allen owns a lot of stock is going to have a "strangle hold" over the commission?
Good question. How did Microsoft manage to pull it off with the US Justice Department?
How many proprietary UNIX flavors can one run on Sparc hardware besides Solaris?
Linux is constantrly improving, but that means it is also constantly changing, and that makes it a constantly moving target.
That applies to most distros as well as the kernel itself.
It's hard to put a lot of effort into testing something when it's possible those tests will be invalidated a few months down the road...
OS/2 is still a formally supported client platform.
It was annoying at first, but I've gotten used to it. You'd think they'd use a mechanism that wasn't trigged by common devices, though.
Mainframe-based transaction systems, specialized apps like aircraft gross weight and optimal flap and thrust calculations, weather/ACARS message retention and distibution, etc., and now specialized application gateways between government systems.
Also a certain amount of systems software and utility development.
Not a lot of "database" work. We mostly use flat files or specialized transaction-system file types that are designed for high-speed access.
The best description of my role over the years has been "programmer/analyst". I do requirements gathering, technical design (usually in conjunction with one or more end users or user reps), coding, testing, documentation, and support.
There isn't much complex math involved at all unless the applications I'm writing involve complex equations, or unless some of the solutions involve some form of mathematical computation.
While I respect people who have my qualifications and perform the types of tasks that I do, I've always considered "engineering" to be a somewhat more rigorous discipline.
...seem mostly meaningless to me except perhaps in a university or very large corporate or government environment where research is done.
I've never met a "Computer Scientist" in the companies I've worked for, since that title implies a mainly research-oriented role.
I've also never met a "Software Engineer" except for the few folks I know who have that title and are also EE's, but they tend to be involved in the design of firmware or other hardware components.
Most of the folks I've run into in applications development tend to be described by more practical titles:
* "Project Manager" typically does task and resource allocation and coordination, but often remains somewhat non-technical.
* "Programmer/Analyst" tends to be heavily involved in both the design, coding, and testing stages and approaches things from a technical perspective.
* "Business/Analyst" tends to be heavily involved in both the design and testing stages and approaches things fron a functional end-user standpoint.
* "Programmer" is usually someone who is very inexperienced, and who helps the Programmer/Analyst during the coding and testing phase and sometimes in the design phase. In time, they typically turn into Programmer/Analysts.
There are also sysadmin and database admin folks, operators, and a few others, but they aren't as involved with formal softwae development (though the writing of scripts, stored procedures, and other things can often be significant tasks).
There are many browsers which don't display images at all. Some do so for speed purposes, some because they're simply running in text mode.
:-)
Maybe advertisers need to start learning how to use about the effective use of ALT tags.
While FreeBSD and bretheren aren't taking off like hotcakes the way Linux is, they're still doing quite well in their corner of the market.
I think that having clearly spelled out contractual terms is worthwhile.
Yes, I agree completely.
You mean you never heard about it because you never hit it. If you were using the full bandwidth available to you 24/7, OTOH, you would have.
If I were using the full bandwidth available to me 24/7, then someone must've replaced by Linux and OS/2 boxes with infected Windows boxes.
I simply can't conceive of any reason I'd need to saturate a 3MB download connection 24x7, and I don't have any need to run servers that are accessible to the public.
Why not complain about something worthwhile?
Sure, but that isn't the base product. I can downoad an X server for Windows as well, but that doesn't mean that Windows supports X. :-)
So make it an option. They have many options in the Filemanager already that toggle features that mean nothing to the typical user.