Network configuration just seems to get worse and worse in later versions of Windows. I set up a Vista box for my neighbour and I still can't get my head around the "architecture" of all the different networking views. God alone knows what W7 will be like.
Win2K made sense,, XP was still reasonably sane, but I think you might be right in thinking there's a bug (either in XP or the VBox addons) that mean the shared folders aren't always visible depending on how you use explorer.
Alternatively, typing "\\vboxsvr\" in the run box, or the explorer address box, should do the trick. I would test but I deleted my last Windows VM (finally!)
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
Learn to understand your moods. It took me ages to realise that I have "thinking" moods and "doing" moods, and they're not really interchangeable:
Great insightful designs, or even just a clear understand of what needs to be done and in what order, usually comes to me when I'm relaxed, and often when I'm away from the computer, possibly hiking or something like that. In that mood, however, I rarely actually want to drag myself back to the computer and implement stuff.. "Doing" moods, on the other hand, have a slight edginess to them, a need to make progress (or fear of not making it) which unfortunately tends to inhibit deeply creative thinking. The only solution is to make fairly detailed plans in thinking mode (and bludgeon myself into jotting them down if necessary), so that I know what I need to do in the next doing mood. Non-trivial problems that arise while "doing" have to be put off until the next "thinking" time, but it's a system that works for me.
Your ideal system will probably differ, but with a bit of introspection and practice, you can probably find it..
Possibly. I've not kept up to date with all the new-fangled toys you kids have these days;-) Does it support generic programming? Also, isn't it only cross-platform because of Miguel de Icaza?
There are lots more elegant, reasonably high-performing, cross-platform languages around now. It's probably a much more interesting time to be getting into IT - as long you as you can find a company that actually lets you use the cool new stuff..
The problem is, the alternative with these big, old, crusty legacy systems is to convert them in a "big bang", and it is usually pretty bloody difficult to just to figure out what the existing system is doing and and why. For some reason businesses seem to be quite happy to effectively "encrypt" lots of knowledge about their processes and throw away the key.. doubtless the understanding of the system did at one time exist in the brains of some humans, but they've usually long since moved companies, retired, or even died.
In this situation, a line-by-line transcoding that might (with some in-depth study) be comprehensible by Java coders and yet (with some gnashing of teeth) still by comprehended by COBOL coders, and more importantly be reasonably likely to duplicate the logic of the old system, is probably not a bad stepping stone. Hopefully it's a base from which the system can be converted piecemeal into "proper" Java, and extended.
I sympathize, but I suspect you're out of date. I remember doing some projects in Java in 1996/97. My conclusions at the time were that the language was pretty nice and clean, but lacked some of the stuff that seemed to me at the time to be important (type-safe generic programming capability), the runtime was too slow and too clumsy (shouldn't have felt like installing another OS on top of my OS), and the standard libraries were reasonable except for some stupid omissions (no interruptible I/O primitives.. from a Unix company??), and a horrible GUI (twice: AWT didn't expose the richness of the native GUI, Swing was slow as a dog for a long, long time.)
I felt it had its place but couldn't understand what all the hype was about, and went back to my C++. Now I gather most of my grievances are fixed.. but I still don't understand why it took so long, or why everyone got so excited by version 1.0. Looking back, I'd've been interested in, say, a version of C++ with the direct memory access removed, i.e. no pointers, and some decent cross-platform standard libraries. The VM didn't interest me, but could easily have been added as an option later, as has happened with languages (Perl, Python,...)
Of course, "web hype" sells stuff in IT, just like sex does everywhere else. Witness the current Web 2.0 lunacy, where everyone's excited that we might just finally manage to produce web apps with usability that approaches that of the native applications we had 15 years ago. *sigh*
The company that's produced this sounds like they're very keen on XP-ish development. Having a "transcoded" version of the COBOL that can be run on commodity platforms, while certainly not ideal from the viewpoint of maintainability (by people with modern skillsets), is a good first step to gradually converting to / extending with "natively written" Java.
Doing things step-by-step like they have done (and, I imagine, intend to continue to do) is a good way of making sure that they're on the right track and producing stuff that works. Too many "big bang" IT projects turn out to be utter disasters that ultimately have to be canceled, or only succeed years late and many times over budget.
Depends how they do it I guess (it sounds like it's a controlled descent, not just whenever the gas escapes the balloon.) I presume you'd want to do it reasonably slowly so the electronics package has a good chance of surviving landing.
According to another commentor ascent, OTOH, might actually be pretty rapid - inflate the balloon with a low density guess and watch the sucker go.
No, but AFAICT they haven't discovered a way of teleporting the balloons from the ground straight up into the stratosphere. Especially given that the lifecycle is only 24 hours, they're going to spend quite a lot of time ascending and descending.
Ludicrous. Some guy was on the radio the other day saying that kitchen knives don't need points.
How do you cut up stuff like large cabbages? You either need an *insanely* large knife, or you do what everybody else does at the moment which is to stab the fucker with the point and then cut around until you've got all the way through.
Anybody seriously intent on wounding, of course, will still have access to screwdrivers, awls, and doubtless hundreds of other sharp, pointed everyday objects. Hell, even with this new knife, a quick chop to the side of the neck could probably still open the jugular vein or the carotid artery.
It's probably utterly un-PC to say it, but at her age you can get away with pretty much anything and still look bloody cute -- she *does* look fantastic. I think I'd be inclined to gradually start having them lasered off, though. It might hard to grow old gracefully otherwise..
And yes, how/do/ you "fall asleep" while getting a tat? How much of exactly what do you have to take? Enquiring minds want to do know:/
People keep having stabs at it, and to give MS their due they did try pretty hard with Win95 and OLE/COM, and got rid of MDI in later versions of Office.. but some it never seems to have been perfected on mass-market machines. The tab-view that we have in browsers now seems to be actively moving away from it (this is your application.. with your documents as child objects to it.. - though at least Chrome has the decency to put the tabs at the top of window.)
It'll probably get leap-frogged as an idea by all this Web2.0 stuff and in-browser apps (which again is a regression: you still have to think about which SoaS-providing site you have to go to get a particular job done.)
680x0 was, IIRC, around at the time, and had a much more elegant, though still CISC, instruction set. Plus it was 32bit internally, though the 68000/10 only had 24 external address lines.
I seem to recall that writing (GUI) apps in assembler for the (68000-based) Amiga was, although time consuming, perfectly possible. I'd have hated to do it on the register-starved 80x86.
I was involved in a project about that time to roll out PCs to the all the UK dealerships of a certain Japanese car manufacturer. Every machine that went out had to have certain hardware installed, like ISDN cards and (I think) removable harddisk cages, so we had to open each one up. In the end we we had to make it part of our standard despatch procedure to check the cases for blood stains before packing them up..
(This was the same time that PC cases moved away from simply being held together by those terribly user-unfriendly things called screws, and instead had all sorts of cheap and nasty plastic clips that had to be yanked apart with brute force. Our major cause of blood-letting was getting the front panel off, which - I think - was required to get at whatever it was the secured the side panels.)
It looks to me like this system is more of an OS-level v12n solution than a VM, which judging by some of the vulnerabilities (to be fair, I only looked at the first few) might have been its problem. Full-blown v12n might have been less vulnerable here, but as you say if anything did worm its way into a hypervisor or equivalent it would be bloody hard to notice.
I'm with you up to a point. What bugs me though is not being able to get stuff that I would be willing to pay for, or stuff that other people can legally get for free because of their software platform.
If I miss TV programs on the BBC, I can pull the wool over the eyes of their iPlayer service and download them. Last time I checked, which was a while back, I couldn't do this for ITV, C4, Five, etc.
The are various US TV series which I can't get hold of over here despite the fact that they began airing months ago in the US. I'd be quite happy to pay for a legal download, and will buy the boxed set when it's available.
I don't expect stuff for free, but I do expect not to be discriminated against because of my geographical location or choice of software platform.
I stopped (or rather, wished I had) when they started 'net-enabling' their MD players and switching over to MP3 players.. which all seemed to need their crappy proprietary software. (If it had been relatively *decent* proprietary software, a la iTunes, I wouldn't have minded as much - after all ATRAC is proprietary but still a bloody nice codec.)
As it stands I have a personal audio player that I can barely use because it won't play AAC and because the files have to mangled in some arbitrary way before being copied over, which is pretty unpleasant to do under Linux (i.e., involves running some 3rd party Java app which hasn't been updated in years..)
Fair point, I will admit to being a few years out of date in my habits these days.
The important thing is to cultivate an appropriate level of mild paranoia — the universe is out to get us, and our data in particular.. but you definitely seem to have got the hang of that..:)
Heh. These psychologists and cognitive scientists would discover more about the mind by actually trying to do something in the real world rather than reading and writing all this gobbledegook.
In the last few years they've finally cottoned on to something they've called "cognitive flexibility", which I think any good scientist, engineer or autodidact is born unconsciously knowing about and quickly comes to consciously realize when given the opportunity for some introspection..
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, looks like bridged mode doesn't always play nicely with wireless.
Host-only mode with pptpproxy or parprouted might do the trick - there's a recipe for using the latter here.
Network configuration just seems to get worse and worse in later versions of Windows. I set up a Vista box for my neighbour and I still can't get my head around the "architecture" of all the different networking views. God alone knows what W7 will be like.
Win2K made sense,, XP was still reasonably sane, but I think you might be right in thinking there's a bug (either in XP or the VBox addons) that mean the shared folders aren't always visible depending on how you use explorer.
Alternatively, typing "\\vboxsvr\" in the run box, or the explorer address box, should do the trick. I would test but I deleted my last Windows VM (finally!)
Could you not just use bridged mode (or "host interface networking" or whatever it's called this week) instead of NAT?
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
There was also the SlugBot..
It's common enough in various regions of the UK that I think it probably constitutes "dialect."
..")
Ditto learn v. teach ("I'll learn you a lesson you won't forget
All of which is not to say that I like it.
Learn to understand your moods. It took me ages to realise that I have "thinking" moods and "doing" moods, and they're not really interchangeable:
Great insightful designs, or even just a clear understand of what needs to be done and in what order, usually comes to me when I'm relaxed, and often when I'm away from the computer, possibly hiking or something like that. In that mood, however, I rarely actually want to drag myself back to the computer and implement stuff.. "Doing" moods, on the other hand, have a slight edginess to them, a need to make progress (or fear of not making it) which unfortunately tends to inhibit deeply creative thinking. The only solution is to make fairly detailed plans in thinking mode (and bludgeon myself into jotting them down if necessary), so that I know what I need to do in the next doing mood. Non-trivial problems that arise while "doing" have to be put off until the next "thinking" time, but it's a system that works for me.
Your ideal system will probably differ, but with a bit of introspection and practice, you can probably find it..
Exactly. The code degenerates into an unreadable mess and the type-safety goes out of the window. *sigh*
Possibly. I've not kept up to date with all the new-fangled toys you kids have these days ;-) Does it support generic programming? Also, isn't it only cross-platform because of Miguel de Icaza?
..
There are lots more elegant, reasonably high-performing, cross-platform languages around now. It's probably a much more interesting time to be getting into IT - as long you as you can find a company that actually lets you use the cool new stuff
The problem is, the alternative with these big, old, crusty legacy systems is to convert them in a "big bang", and it is usually pretty bloody difficult to just to figure out what the existing system is doing and and why. For some reason businesses seem to be quite happy to effectively "encrypt" lots of knowledge about their processes and throw away the key .. doubtless the understanding of the system did at one time exist in the brains of some humans, but they've usually long since moved companies, retired, or even died.
In this situation, a line-by-line transcoding that might (with some in-depth study) be comprehensible by Java coders and yet (with some gnashing of teeth) still by comprehended by COBOL coders, and more importantly be reasonably likely to duplicate the logic of the old system, is probably not a bad stepping stone. Hopefully it's a base from which the system can be converted piecemeal into "proper" Java, and extended.
I sympathize, but I suspect you're out of date. I remember doing some projects in Java in 1996/97. My conclusions at the time were that the language was pretty nice and clean, but lacked some of the stuff that seemed to me at the time to be important (type-safe generic programming capability), the runtime was too slow and too clumsy (shouldn't have felt like installing another OS on top of my OS), and the standard libraries were reasonable except for some stupid omissions (no interruptible I/O primitives .. from a Unix company??), and a horrible GUI (twice: AWT didn't expose the richness of the native GUI, Swing was slow as a dog for a long, long time.)
.. but I still don't understand why it took so long, or why everyone got so excited by version 1.0. Looking back, I'd've been interested in, say, a version of C++ with the direct memory access removed, i.e. no pointers, and some decent cross-platform standard libraries. The VM didn't interest me, but could easily have been added as an option later, as has happened with languages (Perl, Python, ...)
I felt it had its place but couldn't understand what all the hype was about, and went back to my C++. Now I gather most of my grievances are fixed
Of course, "web hype" sells stuff in IT, just like sex does everywhere else. Witness the current Web 2.0 lunacy, where everyone's excited that we might just finally manage to produce web apps with usability that approaches that of the native applications we had 15 years ago. *sigh*
The company that's produced this sounds like they're very keen on XP-ish development. Having a "transcoded" version of the COBOL that can be run on commodity platforms, while certainly not ideal from the viewpoint of maintainability (by people with modern skillsets), is a good first step to gradually converting to / extending with "natively written" Java.
Doing things step-by-step like they have done (and, I imagine, intend to continue to do) is a good way of making sure that they're on the right track and producing stuff that works. Too many "big bang" IT projects turn out to be utter disasters that ultimately have to be canceled, or only succeed years late and many times over budget.
Depends how they do it I guess (it sounds like it's a controlled descent, not just whenever the gas escapes the balloon.) I presume you'd want to do it reasonably slowly so the electronics package has a good chance of surviving landing.
According to another commentor ascent, OTOH, might actually be pretty rapid - inflate the balloon with a low density guess and watch the sucker go.
No, but AFAICT they haven't discovered a way of teleporting the balloons from the ground straight up into the stratosphere. Especially given that the lifecycle is only 24 hours, they're going to spend quite a lot of time ascending and descending.
Ludicrous. Some guy was on the radio the other day saying that kitchen knives don't need points.
How do you cut up stuff like large cabbages? You either need an *insanely* large knife, or you do what everybody else does at the moment which is to stab the fucker with the point and then cut around until you've got all the way through.
Anybody seriously intent on wounding, of course, will still have access to screwdrivers, awls, and doubtless hundreds of other sharp, pointed everyday objects. Hell, even with this new knife, a quick chop to the side of the neck could probably still open the jugular vein or the carotid artery.
It's probably utterly un-PC to say it, but at her age you can get away with pretty much anything and still look bloody cute -- she *does* look fantastic. I think I'd be inclined to gradually start having them lasered off, though. It might hard to grow old gracefully otherwise ..
/do/ you "fall asleep" while getting a tat? How much of exactly what do you have to take? Enquiring minds want to do know :/
And yes, how
As mentioned by others, document-centric computing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa#Historical_importance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star#User_interface
People keep having stabs at it, and to give MS their due they did try pretty hard with Win95 and OLE/COM, and got rid of MDI in later versions of Office .. but some it never seems to have been perfected on mass-market machines. The tab-view that we have in browsers now seems to be actively moving away from it (this is your application .. with your documents as child objects to it .. - though at least Chrome has the decency to put the tabs at the top of window.)
It'll probably get leap-frogged as an idea by all this Web2.0 stuff and in-browser apps (which again is a regression: you still have to think about which SoaS-providing site you have to go to get a particular job done.)
680x0 was, IIRC, around at the time, and had a much more elegant, though still CISC, instruction set. Plus it was 32bit internally, though the 68000/10 only had 24 external address lines.
I seem to recall that writing (GUI) apps in assembler for the (68000-based) Amiga was, although time consuming, perfectly possible. I'd have hated to do it on the register-starved 80x86.
I was involved in a project about that time to roll out PCs to the all the UK dealerships of a certain Japanese car manufacturer. Every machine that went out had to have certain hardware installed, like ISDN cards and (I think) removable harddisk cages, so we had to open each one up. In the end we we had to make it part of our standard despatch procedure to check the cases for blood stains before packing them up..
(This was the same time that PC cases moved away from simply being held together by those terribly user-unfriendly things called screws, and instead had all sorts of cheap and nasty plastic clips that had to be yanked apart with brute force. Our major cause of blood-letting was getting the front panel off, which - I think - was required to get at whatever it was the secured the side panels.)
It looks to me like this system is more of an OS-level v12n solution than a VM, which judging by some of the vulnerabilities (to be fair, I only looked at the first few) might have been its problem. Full-blown v12n might have been less vulnerable here, but as you say if anything did worm its way into a hypervisor or equivalent it would be bloody hard to notice.
Voice-grade cable within the house is likely to be << Cat5, sadly.
I'm with you up to a point. What bugs me though is not being able to get stuff that I would be willing to pay for, or stuff that other people can legally get for free because of their software platform.
If I miss TV programs on the BBC, I can pull the wool over the eyes of their iPlayer service and download them. Last time I checked, which was a while back, I couldn't do this for ITV, C4, Five, etc.
The are various US TV series which I can't get hold of over here despite the fact that they began airing months ago in the US. I'd be quite happy to pay for a legal download, and will buy the boxed set when it's available.
I don't expect stuff for free, but I do expect not to be discriminated against because of my geographical location or choice of software platform.
I stopped (or rather, wished I had) when they started 'net-enabling' their MD players and switching over to MP3 players .. which all seemed to need their crappy proprietary software. (If it had been relatively *decent* proprietary software, a la iTunes, I wouldn't have minded as much - after all ATRAC is proprietary but still a bloody nice codec.)
As it stands I have a personal audio player that I can barely use because it won't play AAC and because the files have to mangled in some arbitrary way before being copied over, which is pretty unpleasant to do under Linux (i.e., involves running some 3rd party Java app which hasn't been updated in years..)
Fair point, I will admit to being a few years out of date in my habits these days.
The important thing is to cultivate an appropriate level of mild paranoia — the universe is out to get us, and our data in particular .. but you definitely seem to have got the hang of that .. :)
Heh. These psychologists and cognitive scientists would discover more about the mind by actually trying to do something in the real world rather than reading and writing all this gobbledegook.
In the last few years they've finally cottoned on to something they've called "cognitive flexibility", which I think any good scientist, engineer or autodidact is born unconsciously knowing about and quickly comes to consciously realize when given the opportunity for some introspection ..
(Excuse me, this is one of my hobby-horses.)