UNIX shop... before the web... only one PC... rendering to -- PDF?!
I think I smell a tiny fib.
I would have believed you if you had told me that you used Windows' (native since 3.1) Apple Laserwriter printer driver set up to print to a file, then mailed the resulting (PostScript) file to yourself to print or view with GhostScript/gv.
Well, except that I didn't think the Word viewer was released until either '95 (or as late as '97?), and it was released because MS broke the Word 6.0 (Office 4.3) document format, which was in fairly widespread use at the time (putting Wordperfect 5.1 out of business).
At least in the US, GM could not require GM oil, coolant, or service... not because of consumer demands, but because of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1976.
I'm amazed how many American vehicle owners have never heard of this puppy, y'all should read it sometime. And the next time your new car salesman says anything about the warranty, you'll know where you can tell him to stick his head.
I can't believe I've never read that before. After reading the bit about AOL being a big, smoking bus full of ebola victims... I started laughing so hard I'm still crying.
I'd like to take my kids out tonight, this sounds like a good excuse to drive north of the city.
Will I still be able to see it, or will it be below the horizon? Any viewing tips?
I live in south-eastern Ontario, Canada (near ll=44.5,-76.7).
I used to have a computer program that told me about this stuff, and where to look... but, alas, it ran on my C-64 and probably doesn't know about this chunk of ice anyhow.:)
> is the question this begs (in my mind at least). > is it the UI? or is it the architecture? the kernel?
From an application developer's perspective: all of those. Or none.
What we REALLY care about is the APIs we're comfortable with, and all the little gotchas.
Like WinCE not supporting 8-bit characters through any of the OS APIs. That was entertaining.
Or, like, everything in Windows seems to be a handle. Everything in UNIX is a file. It feels different to program a Windows TCP/IP application -- which uses BSD sockets -- than it does to program a UNIX TCP/IP application, even sticking to pure C (besides the TCP/IP stuff, of course) -- because under Windows you have to turn on the winsock layer, and then the handles you get aren't interchangeable with file handles, so you can't read() and write() to them like you could.. and Lord help you if you want to select() on files and sockets at the same time..
It's just those idiot Americans that drink in tiny pints.
Up north, we drink in 20 Oz pints, except at the German bar, where beer is served by the Liter.
I suspect their pints are so small because their beer is so awful. Really, it is. And there's no alcohol in it! Pour one of those poor Yankees a pint of Smithwick's and he's likely to pass out before he finishes it!
They are studying us as undergraduate project in Weapology! Once the project is finished, they will probably terminate us!
Note that I said Weapology! They likely have weapons of mass disintegration! Quick, it is time to pave over their planet.. and turn it into an intergalatic bypass!
> Plus, radio is our current means of communicating with our spacecraft(isn't it? I may be wrong).
No, we use quantum entanglement for long-distance communication, and gravity waves for short-distance (say, under 5 light years). Radio is too slow for the distances involved.
No, you're probably using parts that would classify as having failed capacitors -- but overall, they still work.
I have a couple of IBM Netvista P3 566s here.. The capacitors on the motherboard are so bad, they are bad upon *visual* inspection (swollen cases). Yet, one of them has been on since before Christmas without issues.
Like I said, it really comes down to how you define "failed". A capacitor which has, say, a 1 meg-ohm short that reads 25% below the value stamped on it with a lousy ESR would certainly be classified as "failed" by any reasonable capacitor-evaluating standard... but it would also probably still do whatever filtering job it was spec'd for.
I suspect your version of "fail" and "3 years" is different from theirs.
I'm guessing by "fail", they mean that N percent of them are Y percent out of spec, and by "3 years" they mean "3 years run-time", not "3 calendar years".
That said, I seem to recall electrolytic caps on digikey typically being rated for around 2,000 of use.... and their definitions of "fail" are exactly as I've said above.
Caps can (and often do) work in their intended application well after they have ceased to behave as the spec sheet says they should. Sometimes, they are not that critical; other times, the design engineers know how to derate parts to get a reaonable lifetime out of whatever it is they are building.
To compare notes, I live 30 klicks from the nearest MAJOR crossing (I-81 / Hwy 401 in ON).
Haven't been over since the summer after 9/11 -- didn't like being treated like a criminal.
Used to go over WEEKLY to cross-border shop. Haven't been there professionally since just after Y2K. That trip, I spent nearly $10,000 in a week. Now... I just conference call.
PS: My linkage comment *specifically* references plain-vanilla-C-only. The C++ name munging scheme DID change with version 3, throwing all kinds of stuff into seizure-land.
> If you passed the GCC2->GCC3 barrier, you either reinstalled > every packaged or recompiled every library. You can't link binaries > compiled with v3 against libraries compiled with v2.
This is why God invented LD_LIBRARY_PATH and dlopen()... and added the -R flag to ld for use by the runtime linker...
Oh, and yes, you CAN link 2.95.3 libraries with 3.4.2 binaries. I haven't tried any other combinations, though, it wasn't necessary.
Hey, I never claimed that that page was a shining example of good web authoring, but it sure as hell shouldn't crash ANY browser.:) You're right, though, it's far from my best work. It followed the old "Does it work with IE4? Yes, ship it!" QA path. Which, IMHO, is quite reasonable for seldom-used (but useful) hobby pages. (Note that I have VERY different standards for professional work).
All that said -- I don't do much web work anymore (haven't since IE5.5), and haven't even THOUGHT of data binding in years. So, double-plus-thanks for the troubleshooting.
HA!
I'm actually reading through the source for the first time in a LONG time. The points you raise are certainyl valid.. I wonder why in God's name I stuffed that OBJECT in the HEAD..? I can also tell that this was one of my first pages with "modern" CSS in it. (I cut my DHTML teeth with Navigator 4.. swore off CSS for a long time after that. Navigator's fault, not CSS'... Remember type=javascript style sheets?).
*hmmm* kill-kill-kill, yank
Hey, I remember why there are five columns in the header but four in the data... I typed all those torque specs in one morning on my Christmas holiday a few years back, into Excel. I was going to add some "personal experience" in the 5th column ("Comments"), and then I never did. I'm not sure if that's illegal or not (I'd have to check the tdc.ocx docs), but it sure as heck ain't smart. (control-k)
You're right that the JavaScript is a little... crufty. I wouldn't classify it as "awful", but I wouldn't call it "good" either. The problems in there are that I was having a hard time iterating through the TDC and getting it to work the way I wanted it to. (That page was largely a "hey let's see if I can do this...." page which accidentally became very handy)
I find it kind of funny to see that I clearly wasn't aware of the "hover" selector in CSS. (Was it implemented in those days? I don't know..).... I also seem to recall there was wierdness with the TDC's methods' calling conventions... I seem to recall bumping into similarly uncomfortable zones when trying to iterate over stuff in either MediaPlayer or Acrobat's ActiveX controls. (I'm not a MS guy -- C & UNIX -- but I like to play in MS land now and then, change is a great learning catalyst).
Okay. I've pulled the filter from the object (that's not a valid filter? Time to re-rtfm I guess) -- still crashing the browser. Oh, clear-the-cache. Yeah, baby. Page loads. (Hey, looks like they've got some neat stuff in ie7.. phishing filter? "Reset All", I like that feature.. need to look at this stuff soon).
Great. Page more-or-less works, that will buy me enough to time to fix it properly. Thanks!
I'm still cheesed that it was crashing the browser, though.:)
Data binding -- neat IE-only technology I played with... twice. (because it was non-portable, not because it sucked).
It's an interesting technique the boys at MS came up with for doing two things:
1. Binding a data source to a form 2. Binding a data source to a table with iteration
In the case of 1, you can, say, have an HTML form with a one-to-one relationship with a database table. You can then select what record number you want, and the form populates with that record's data. Change the stuff on screen, and the backend gets the changes.
Number two is also quite interesting, it allows you to iterate over data and display it in a table. You can also paginate (i.e. display a max numbers of records per "page" and flip through the pages", as well as filter and sort the data.
Now -- you can certainly do any of this stuff in JavaScript; particularly now that XML-http-request-and-friends exist. But what's still interesting to me, YEARS after playing with Data Binding for the last time -- are these factors:
1) Sorting large data-bound tables is FAST (compared to sorting JavaScript arrays) 2) Filtering large data-bound tables is FAST (compared to traversing JavaScript arrays or object trees) 3) The data binding happens in the *markup*, with the DATAFLD attribute indicating which backend-storage column the data belongs to 4) Rendering tables is MUCH faster, because the browser only has to parse one row
Now, faster CPUs and more RAM might have made 1, 2, and 4 irrelevant (but somehow I doubt it..) -- but item #3 is still quite interesting to me. If there was a data-binding standard that was implemented reliably among the big two browser makers, web application development would be quite a bit easier for certain design patterns.
In fact, data binding addressed quite a few issues in 1997 which today are answered by XML data islands, XSL, etc.... but with a much lower barrier to entry.
Slashdot Mirror
UNIX shop... before the web... only one PC... rendering to -- PDF?!
I think I smell a tiny fib.
I would have believed you if you had told me that you used Windows' (native since 3.1) Apple Laserwriter printer driver set up to print to a file, then mailed the resulting (PostScript) file to yourself to print or view with GhostScript/gv.
Well, except that I didn't think the Word viewer was released until either '95 (or as late as '97?), and it was released because MS broke the Word 6.0 (Office 4.3) document format, which was in fairly widespread use at the time (putting Wordperfect 5.1 out of business).
At least in the US, GM could not require GM oil, coolant, or service... not because of consumer demands, but because of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1976.
I'm amazed how many American vehicle owners have never heard of this puppy, y'all should read it sometime. And the next time your new car salesman says anything about the warranty, you'll know where you can tell him to stick his head.
Holy CRAP
I can't believe I've never read that before. After reading the bit about AOL being a big, smoking bus full of ebola victims... I started laughing so hard I'm still crying.
Thanks for sharing!
I'd like to take my kids out tonight, this sounds like a good excuse to drive north of the city.
:)
Will I still be able to see it, or will it be below the horizon? Any viewing tips?
I live in south-eastern Ontario, Canada (near ll=44.5,-76.7).
I used to have a computer program that told me about this stuff, and where to look... but, alas, it ran on my C-64 and probably doesn't know about this chunk of ice anyhow.
I have some E450s collecting dust because they're too heavy to move.
Want one?
> is the question this begs (in my mind at least).
> is it the UI? or is it the architecture? the kernel?
From an application developer's perspective: all of those. Or none.
What we REALLY care about is the APIs we're comfortable with, and all the little gotchas.
Like WinCE not supporting 8-bit characters through any of the OS APIs. That was entertaining.
Or, like, everything in Windows seems to be a handle. Everything in UNIX is a file. It feels different to program a Windows TCP/IP application -- which uses BSD sockets -- than it does to program a UNIX TCP/IP application, even sticking to pure C (besides the TCP/IP stuff, of course) -- because under Windows you have to turn on the winsock layer, and then the handles you get aren't interchangeable with file handles, so you can't read() and write() to them like you could.. and Lord help you if you want to select() on files and sockets at the same time..
...OS X phones then must run OS X CE.
"Oh-Ess Sexy"
I think Jobs can live with that.
(Of course, he could have popularized "SCSI" as "sexy" as well but somehow missed out on that)
I wouldn't mind doing a vacuum cleaner, by why the hell would ANY geek want to do a spiderman comic??!? Easy clean-up?
> Apple already conceded the "i"-prefixed name from
> the iTV to Elgato, makers of the "EyeTV":
That's because cats eat apples.
But the Cisco does not.
No, he just eats pah-wraiths. And Cardassians. And other cool shit like that. Oh yeah, and jambalaya, of course.
It's just those idiot Americans that drink in tiny pints.
Up north, we drink in 20 Oz pints, except at the German bar, where beer is served by the Liter.
I suspect their pints are so small because their beer is so awful. Really, it is. And there's no alcohol in it! Pour one of those poor Yankees a pint of Smithwick's and he's likely to pass out before he finishes it!
Your PC came with freedos?
Like inside the case, or were they still in the bag? Barbecue, or plain?
They are studying us as undergraduate project in Weapology! Once the project is finished, they will probably terminate us!
.. and turn it into an intergalatic bypass!
Note that I said Weapology! They likely have weapons of mass disintegration! Quick, it is time to pave over their planet
> Plus, radio is our current means of communicating with our spacecraft(isn't it? I may be wrong).
No, we use quantum entanglement for long-distance communication, and gravity waves for short-distance (say, under 5 light years). Radio is too slow for the distances involved.
Yes. I have a pair of IBM Netvista P3 533s with a dozen or so popped caps each on the mobo. They work fine.
No, you're probably using parts that would classify as having failed capacitors -- but overall, they still work.
I have a couple of IBM Netvista P3 566s here.. The capacitors on the motherboard are so bad, they are bad upon *visual* inspection (swollen cases). Yet, one of them has been on since before Christmas without issues.
Like I said, it really comes down to how you define "failed". A capacitor which has, say, a 1 meg-ohm short that reads 25% below the value stamped on it with a lousy ESR would certainly be classified as "failed" by any reasonable capacitor-evaluating standard... but it would also probably still do whatever filtering job it was spec'd for.
I suspect your version of "fail" and "3 years" is different from theirs.
I'm guessing by "fail", they mean that N percent of them are Y percent out of spec, and by "3 years" they mean "3 years run-time", not "3 calendar years".
That said, I seem to recall electrolytic caps on digikey typically being rated for around 2,000 of use.... and their definitions of "fail" are exactly as I've said above.
Caps can (and often do) work in their intended application well after they have ceased to behave as the spec sheet says they should. Sometimes, they are not that critical; other times, the design engineers know how to derate parts to get a reaonable lifetime out of whatever it is they are building.
To compare notes, I live 30 klicks from the nearest MAJOR crossing (I-81 / Hwy 401 in ON).
Haven't been over since the summer after 9/11 -- didn't like being treated like a criminal.
Used to go over WEEKLY to cross-border shop. Haven't been there professionally since just after Y2K. That trip, I spent nearly $10,000 in a week. Now... I just conference call.
PS: My linkage comment *specifically* references plain-vanilla-C-only. The C++ name munging scheme DID change with version 3, throwing all kinds of stuff into seizure-land.
> If you passed the GCC2->GCC3 barrier, you either reinstalled
> every packaged or recompiled every library. You can't link binaries
> compiled with v3 against libraries compiled with v2.
This is why God invented LD_LIBRARY_PATH and dlopen()... and added the -R flag to ld for use by the runtime linker...
Oh, and yes, you CAN link 2.95.3 libraries with 3.4.2 binaries. I haven't tried any other combinations, though, it wasn't necessary.
No.... Snakes a on a sea plane!
You're fucking kidding me, right?
I'm still using the same OS I did five years ago.. but I've upgraded through SEVERAL versions of gcc...
> Besides which, a recompile every month or so is good for your system.
What, is that the Gentoo equivalent of rebooting a Windows box? *!@*!*@!!
Hey, I never claimed that that page was a shining example of good web authoring, but it sure as hell shouldn't crash ANY browser. :) You're right, though, it's far from my best work. It followed the old "Does it work with IE4? Yes, ship it!" QA path. Which, IMHO, is quite reasonable for seldom-used (but useful) hobby pages. (Note that I have VERY different standards for professional work).
:)
All that said -- I don't do much web work anymore (haven't since IE5.5), and haven't even THOUGHT of data binding in years. So, double-plus-thanks for the troubleshooting.
HA!
I'm actually reading through the source for the first time in a LONG time. The points you raise are certainyl valid.. I wonder why in God's name I stuffed that OBJECT in the HEAD..? I can also tell that this was one of my first pages with "modern" CSS in it. (I cut my DHTML teeth with Navigator 4.. swore off CSS for a long time after that. Navigator's fault, not CSS'... Remember type=javascript style sheets?).
*hmmm* kill-kill-kill, yank
Hey, I remember why there are five columns in the header but four in the data... I typed all those torque specs in one morning on my Christmas holiday a few years back, into Excel. I was going to add some "personal experience" in the 5th column ("Comments"), and then I never did. I'm not sure if that's illegal or not (I'd have to check the tdc.ocx docs), but it sure as heck ain't smart. (control-k)
You're right that the JavaScript is a little... crufty. I wouldn't classify it as "awful", but I wouldn't call it "good" either. The problems in there are that I was having a hard time iterating through the TDC and getting it to work the way I wanted it to. (That page was largely a "hey let's see if I can do this...." page which accidentally became very handy)
I find it kind of funny to see that I clearly wasn't aware of the "hover" selector in CSS. (Was it implemented in those days? I don't know..).... I also seem to recall there was wierdness with the TDC's methods' calling conventions... I seem to recall bumping into similarly uncomfortable zones when trying to iterate over stuff in either MediaPlayer or Acrobat's ActiveX controls. (I'm not a MS guy -- C & UNIX -- but I like to play in MS land now and then, change is a great learning catalyst).
Okay. I've pulled the filter from the object (that's not a valid filter? Time to re-rtfm I guess) -- still crashing the browser.
Oh, clear-the-cache. Yeah, baby. Page loads. (Hey, looks like they've got some neat stuff in ie7.. phishing filter? "Reset All", I like that feature.. need to look at this stuff soon).
Great. Page more-or-less works, that will buy me enough to time to fix it properly. Thanks!
I'm still cheesed that it was crashing the browser, though.
Data binding -- neat IE-only technology I played with... twice. (because it was non-portable, not because it sucked).
It's an interesting technique the boys at MS came up with for doing two things:
1. Binding a data source to a form
2. Binding a data source to a table with iteration
In the case of 1, you can, say, have an HTML form with a one-to-one relationship with a database table. You can then select what record number you want, and the form populates with that record's data. Change the stuff on screen, and the backend gets the changes.
Number two is also quite interesting, it allows you to iterate over data and display it in a table. You can also paginate (i.e. display a max numbers of records per "page" and flip through the pages", as well as filter and sort the data.
Now -- you can certainly do any of this stuff in JavaScript; particularly now that XML-http-request-and-friends exist. But what's still interesting to me, YEARS after playing with Data Binding for the last time -- are these factors:
1) Sorting large data-bound tables is FAST (compared to sorting JavaScript arrays)
2) Filtering large data-bound tables is FAST (compared to traversing JavaScript arrays or object trees)
3) The data binding happens in the *markup*, with the DATAFLD attribute indicating which backend-storage column the data belongs to
4) Rendering tables is MUCH faster, because the browser only has to parse one row
Now, faster CPUs and more RAM might have made 1, 2, and 4 irrelevant (but somehow I doubt it..) -- but item #3 is still quite interesting to me. If there was a data-binding standard that was implemented reliably among the big two browser makers, web application development would be quite a bit easier for certain design patterns.
In fact, data binding addressed quite a few issues in 1997 which today are answered by XML data islands, XSL, etc.... but with a much lower barrier to entry.
Hmm, must've not clicked "back" when I thought I did. Anyhow
> Oh. And using innerText requires annoying browser detection.
No, it requires using innerText detection. Somewhat the same, but a lot more portable.