You _can_ find out what it does, rather than trying to guess from poorly written specs. Not as good as BSD/GPL licensed source, but _much_ better than nothing.
IANAE (I am not as eskimo), but I seem to recall from somewhere that with skins or blankets on the floor and walls, an inside temperature of about 55 degrees Farenheit is normal with oil lamps inside and outside winds and temperatures around -55 degrees Farenheit. Not cozy but better than dixie on a frosy morning.
A Microsoft spokeswoman, however, disputes these perspectives [Microsoft security vs Linux security], claiming that Microsoft's closed-source software is more secure than ever [W2K vs NT4, or with vs without the latest security patches]. I'm a bit rusty with logic, but this seems to be the fallacy of equivocation.
We normally have NT uptimes of several months. The servers are overpowered and underworked. The servers do not have Exchange, screen savers or Microsoft Office. Stable? Only as long as no one rocks the boat. Whenever a system is a bit strange, reboot. If it looks like it has lost its marbles, hit the power switch. Security? Enough to prevent most users from installing applications, on a par with locks that can be opened with a penknife or credit card. For us it is more than enough, but we do not assume it meets any reasonable criteria of secure.
When Linux users are quoting uptimes, you can reasonably assume that that box has been subjected to some degree of abuse without having deteriorated the base system. Push NT and best plan on rebooting very soon. Do anything remotely complicated in Microsoft office and plan on rebooting.
Sorry about the ramble, but I am trying to point out that NT _can_ be used effectively, and with long uptimes. I agree with your remark about NT's stability. You just have to walk _very_ carefully. Is this the way systems should be? H*** No!
BSD _can_ "play nice" and use the partition table. In this case you remove the BSD (terminology gets a bit tricky here) BSD-slice or DOS-partition. I think I got that righ. Flame me if it's backwards. BSD can also use the entire disk. No partition table. No partition types. Somehow I expect Microsofts's FDISKs to go beserk.
It takes two (2) fdisks. One (Fdisk#1) (Linux/BSD/Caldera DR-DOS) to remove the partitions. Two (Fdisk#2) (MS-DOS or WIN95/98) to do the/mbr thing. Having two (2) fdisks is too complicated for Microsoft to keep up with.
This whole commentary has been the fuuniest thing I've seen in months.
Image what it's like when things actually do get complicated.
For what it's worth, all versions of DOS and Windows are happy with 3 primary partitions and and extended partition, or with 4 primary partitions. Or at least I've never had a hint of trouble running that way. (Comes from repartitioning disks the hard way with Norton Utilities)
Microsoft belongs to the "single user", "one computer, one OS" school. Utilities in the various MS DOS releases had version specific code to not run on a different version of DOS. I think one version of MS Word was rigged to run only on MS-DOS 5.0. With MS-DOS 6.0, there was VERSION.EXE, a self-modifying TSR, to tell MS-Word that it was running under MS-DOS 5.0. Microsoft provides support for multiple OSes very reluctantly. In contrast LILO asks which kernel (or OS) do you want to load today?
Actually, the first track plus one sector is probably enough. Zeroing entire disk is safer. I have fdisk'd and reformatted and had the logical drive reappear complete with contents! I might have been halucinating, but don't think so. Apparently Microsoft format reads the boot sector and uses _that_ information rather than information from the partition table, so there are situations where you "Overkill" will work and faster means will fail in _very_ strange ways.
Recent Caldera DR DOS FDISK.EXE has a/X parameter which allows deletion and even creation of all known (or at least more than I've ever hear of) partition types. It might have trouble with a disk that is entirely *BSD (no partition table). To really confuse you as to which is which, in contrast to Microsoft's utilities which will bomb out if the version is not the same, at least most of the DR-DOS/Novell DOS/Caldera OpenDOS/Caldera DOS utilities will work on most any version of Microsoft/IBM/DR, etc DOS.
As much as I generally dislike government meddling, any universal solution is inherently monopolistic and should be government run or heavily regulated. Somehow the Post Office seems a better choice than the FCC. Of course, there is always anarchy, but MS, AOL, AT&T will always use too much muscle. Interesting times we live in.
Over a system optimized for 60 Hz (or 50 Hz), 1200 baud is more like the "high speed" internet access. Anyone remember the old standard 300 baud? (Seems like there was something at 110 baud). Actually 100Mb ethernet over mechanically switched phone lines is more plausible, and that's never gonna work.
' is used for contractions (represents missing letters) they're they are
Id (subconscious) as opposed to Ego (conscious) as opposed to Superego (conscience). I'd I would or I had
car's belonging to the car cars one car, two cars, etc.
cute as in She is cute. (The final e is silent but makes the "u" long.) cut as to cut with a knife or hatchet.
litigate as in to litigate a lawsuit. legitimate as in real or genuine (very close to meaning legal)
we're we are were we were is past tense of we are.
prefer as in choice perfere sounds like you are trying to stick holes in something (perforate)
sense as in five senses or a hypothetical sixth sense since as in Ever since...
Also look out for: it's it is. its belonging to it. they're they are. their belonging to them.
Word has a Thesaurus (Tools,Language or Shift-F7). Use it.
Best way to learn spelling is by reading. Good books by good authors. Any subject.
When you write well, it sets a tone of anticipation, and any typo or inappropriate word clashes. Bad art.
To substance.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Church of Scientology trojans in the W2K defragmenter is FUD. Snide remarks about Microsoft marketing are not FUD. Granted, the VBA API is rich enough to include: Options.VirusProtection = False
... supply the necessary shims so that the interfaces match. "IMHO that's a hack. A clean design does not rely on compatibility layers." Precisely. If you have control of the interfaces, you can do a clean design. If you do not have control, you do the best you can with what you have. Still, I'm not sure what you mean by clean design. Single level global variables looks clean until things get complicated and it breaks down. If you treat it as in functional programming, ie f(g(h(... ad nauseum))), each parenthesis is an interface. The power is in the simple concepts. Face it, everything is a string of bits which is about as simple as you can get. Actually I prefer coroutines, preferably recursive, to pipes.
You might be able to do an integrated spell checker in emacs if it (emacs) is lispy enough. Me. I barely know Control-X Control-C to exit the thing. There are people who live inside emacs. If you don't like command line, you probably will not like emacs.
"This is an argument I have a serious problem with." Me too. With the whole thing and the assumptions that seem to underly it. I'm not sure I can do this coherently, but here goes anyway.
"However, I have a serious problem with operating systems or application programs which prevent me from coming up with quick elegant solutions on my own." I think you have hit on the crucial reason that Unix is still around after some 30 years, after better systems have faded into oblivion. Remember "Obstacle" System 360?
Disclaimer: I am NOT fluent in Unix.
Basically, he's looking for quick and easy answers to hard problems. Microsoft does put up a glitzy facade and there are some spiffy (that should date me) things that can be done with it (provided you don't look too closely). Microsoft has succeeded in selling this ersatz to PHBs as if it were the best.
>It's an exercise in pain to get the simplest things working correctly. To accomplish something like a integrated spell checker linux would have... The juxtaposition seems to imply that an integrated spell checker is one of the "simplest things". Either that or he has immense difficulty with the simplest things. A basic rule of computers and automation is that you automate things that you understand thoroughly. You do not substitute automation for lack of understanding.
>the write once run anywhere crap... That's the basic reason for FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I etc., rather than Assembly Language. (4 lines of C per line of Assembly -- comment a few days back). Assembly can be quite productive and is NOT necessarily "low-level".
>The "do it your self" philosophy may be your preference, but my preference is that I don't have to spend time doing things that could be done for me by a machine. This is basic Unix philosophy, from at least the 70's IIRC. A | B | C | D | E type of thing. Many of the basic tools were designed explicitly to fit in the middle of a piping scheme. To fit together smoothly the pieces have to be defined carefully. The "do it yourself" part of Unix is that you can compose the pieces, and if necessary supply any of the missing pieces. BTW, jon_c, were the misspellings added after you composed it or did you substitute them contemporaneously with the composition?
>Take tools that other people have used and use them to create something new. That other people have MADE. Confusing consumption with production.
>Howard rook [Roark] designed beautiful buildings, they we're [were] beautiful because he and only he designed them, it was his "vision". However, he used the results of committees, etc. for the actual construction, the tools used, the building materials, the design of the building materials. It's a dream. Without knowing Strength of Materials I can design a building and everything will be wonderful.
>For any two programs to work together they're [there] needs to be some ground rules. Not really. You do need to know what the interfaces are, and if necessary supply the necessary shims so that the interfaces match.
>even things like command line parameters aren't consistent. Sure they are consistent. HP and TI calculators are consistent. Just not with each other. Big Endian and Little Endian are consistent, but not with each other. The distinction between adding signed integers and unsigned integers can be made with the opcodes (IBM 360+) or with condition codes (PDP 11, VAX). It helps to reduce inconsistency as much as possible, but there is no way to eliminate it.
>it only took Sun a few years to come up with [Java]. After something like 10 or 20 years of Programming Language research. The stuff so that the language is useable without expediting such as Word macro viruses is "non-trivial".
I find it curiously interesting that jon_c wants an integrated spell checker. If you analyze the composition, the writing style is not consistent with the typographical errors. It is possible that he is using a spell checker that has substituted correct spellings of wrong words, and he doesn't read what he writes. However, it seems more plausible that this is a carefully concocted essay, typos and all. Doublethink?
Slashdot Mirror
You _can_ find out what it does, rather than trying to guess from poorly written specs.
Not as good as BSD/GPL licensed source, but _much_ better than nothing.
make that _frosty_ morning. Sorry about that.
IANAE (I am not as eskimo), but I seem to recall from somewhere that with skins or blankets on the floor and walls, an inside temperature of about 55 degrees Farenheit is normal with oil lamps inside and outside winds and temperatures around -55 degrees Farenheit. Not cozy but better than dixie on a frosy morning.
with Windows 2000.
Microsoft.
'nuff said.
A Microsoft spokeswoman, however, disputes these perspectives [Microsoft security vs Linux security], claiming that Microsoft's closed-source software is more secure than ever [W2K vs NT4, or with vs without the latest security patches].
I'm a bit rusty with logic, but this seems to be the fallacy of equivocation.
That is coming from someone in a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats do _not_ speak publicy as a single lone voice.
Completely in line with Microsoft's use of the word innovate.
We normally have NT uptimes of several months. The servers are overpowered and underworked. The servers do not have Exchange, screen savers or Microsoft Office. Stable? Only as long as no one rocks the boat. Whenever a system is a bit strange, reboot. If it looks like it has lost its marbles, hit the power switch. Security? Enough to prevent most users from installing applications, on a par with locks that can be opened with a penknife or credit card. For us it is more than enough, but we do not assume it meets any reasonable criteria of secure.
When Linux users are quoting uptimes, you can reasonably assume that that box has been subjected to some degree of abuse without having deteriorated the base system. Push NT and best plan on rebooting very soon. Do anything remotely complicated in Microsoft office and plan on rebooting.
Sorry about the ramble, but I am trying to point out that NT _can_ be used effectively, and with long uptimes. I agree with your remark about NT's stability. You just have to walk _very_ carefully. Is this the way systems should be? H*** No!
If you've got a lemon, make lemonaide.
touche
Sorry, couldn't resist.
BSD _can_ "play nice" and use the partition table. In this case you remove the BSD (terminology gets a bit tricky here) BSD-slice or DOS-partition. I think I got that righ. Flame me if it's backwards.
BSD can also use the entire disk. No partition table. No partition types. Somehow I expect Microsofts's FDISKs to go beserk.
It takes two (2) fdisks. /mbr thing.
One (Fdisk#1) (Linux/BSD/Caldera DR-DOS) to remove the partitions.
Two (Fdisk#2) (MS-DOS or WIN95/98) to do the
Having two (2) fdisks is too complicated for Microsoft to keep up with.
This whole commentary has been the fuuniest thing I've seen in months.
What's the difference?
Slashdot may be anti-MS, but it seems to be the best available Windows resource on the internet.
Think about it.
Couldn't resist.
Image what it's like when things actually do get complicated.
For what it's worth, all versions of DOS and Windows are happy with 3 primary partitions and and extended partition, or with 4 primary partitions. Or at least I've never had a hint of trouble running that way. (Comes from repartitioning disks the hard way with Norton Utilities)
Microsoft belongs to the "single user", "one computer, one OS" school. Utilities in the various MS DOS releases had version specific code to not run on a different version of DOS. I think one version of MS Word was rigged to run only on MS-DOS 5.0. With MS-DOS 6.0, there was VERSION.EXE, a self-modifying TSR, to tell MS-Word that it was running under MS-DOS 5.0.
Microsoft provides support for multiple OSes very reluctantly. In contrast LILO asks which kernel (or OS) do you want to load today?
Actually, the first track plus one sector is probably enough. Zeroing entire disk is safer. I have fdisk'd and reformatted and had the logical drive reappear complete with contents! I might have been halucinating, but don't think so. Apparently Microsoft format reads the boot sector and uses _that_ information rather than information from the partition table, so there are situations where you "Overkill" will work and faster means will fail in _very_ strange ways.
Recent Caldera DR DOS FDISK.EXE has a /X parameter which allows deletion and even creation of all known (or at least more than I've ever hear of) partition types. It might have trouble with a disk that is entirely *BSD (no partition table).
To really confuse you as to which is which, in contrast to Microsoft's utilities which will bomb out if the version is not the same, at least most of the DR-DOS/Novell DOS/Caldera OpenDOS/Caldera DOS utilities will work on most any version of Microsoft/IBM/DR, etc DOS.
That exchange brightened an old fart's day.
It is very informative even for us with lesser video equipment.
As much as I generally dislike government meddling, any universal solution is inherently monopolistic and should be government run or heavily regulated. Somehow the Post Office seems a better choice than the FCC. Of course, there is always anarchy, but MS, AOL, AT&T will always use too much muscle. Interesting times we live in.
That is funny.
Actually, depending on packet size, UPS can have a very large bandwidth.
Over a system optimized for 60 Hz (or 50 Hz), 1200 baud is more like the "high speed" internet access. Anyone remember the old standard 300 baud? (Seems like there was something at 110 baud). Actually 100Mb ethernet over mechanically switched phone lines is more plausible, and that's never gonna work.
This may help a bit with the spelling.
' is used for contractions (represents missing letters)
they're they are
Id (subconscious) as opposed to Ego (conscious) as opposed to Superego (conscience).
I'd I would or I had
car's belonging to the car
cars one car, two cars, etc.
cute as in She is cute. (The final e is silent but makes the "u" long.)
cut as to cut with a knife or hatchet.
litigate as in to litigate a lawsuit.
legitimate as in real or genuine (very close to meaning legal)
we're we are
were we were is past tense of we are.
prefer as in choice
perfere sounds like you are trying to stick holes in something (perforate)
sense as in five senses or a hypothetical sixth sense
since as in Ever since
Also look out for:
it's it is.
its belonging to it.
they're they are.
their belonging to them.
Word has a Thesaurus (Tools,Language or Shift-F7). Use it.
Best way to learn spelling is by reading. Good books by good authors. Any subject.
When you write well, it sets a tone of anticipation, and any typo or inappropriate word clashes. Bad art.
To substance.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Church of Scientology trojans in the W2K defragmenter is FUD.
Snide remarks about Microsoft marketing are not FUD.
Granted, the VBA API is rich enough to include:
Options.VirusProtection = False
... supply the necessary shims so that the interfaces match.
"IMHO that's a hack. A clean design does not rely on compatibility layers."
Precisely. If you have control of the interfaces, you can do a clean design. If you do not have control, you do the best you can with what you have.
Still, I'm not sure what you mean by clean design. Single level global variables looks clean until things get complicated and it breaks down.
If you treat it as in functional programming, ie f(g(h(... ad nauseum))), each parenthesis is an interface.
The power is in the simple concepts. Face it, everything is a string of bits which is about as simple as you can get. Actually I prefer coroutines, preferably recursive, to pipes.
You might be able to do an integrated spell checker in emacs if it (emacs) is lispy enough. Me. I barely know Control-X Control-C to exit the thing. There are people who live inside emacs.
If you don't like command line, you probably will not like emacs.
"This is an argument I have a serious problem with." Me too. With the whole thing and the assumptions that seem to underly it. I'm not sure I can do this coherently, but here goes anyway.
...
...
"However, I have a serious problem with operating systems or application programs which prevent me from coming up with quick elegant solutions on my own."
I think you have hit on the crucial reason that Unix is still around after some 30 years, after better systems have faded into oblivion. Remember "Obstacle" System 360?
Disclaimer: I am NOT fluent in Unix.
Basically, he's looking for quick and easy answers to hard problems. Microsoft does put up a glitzy facade and there are some spiffy (that should date me) things that can be done with it (provided you don't look too closely). Microsoft has succeeded in selling this ersatz to PHBs as if it were the best.
>It's an exercise in pain to get the simplest things working correctly. To accomplish something like a integrated spell checker linux would have
The juxtaposition seems to imply that an integrated spell checker is one of the "simplest things". Either that or he has immense difficulty with the simplest things. A basic rule of computers and automation is that you automate things that you understand thoroughly. You do not substitute automation for lack of understanding.
>the write once run anywhere crap
That's the basic reason for FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I etc., rather than Assembly Language. (4 lines of C per line of Assembly -- comment a few days back). Assembly can be quite productive and is NOT necessarily "low-level".
>The "do it your self" philosophy may be your preference, but my preference is that I don't have to spend time doing things that could be done for me by a machine.
This is basic Unix philosophy, from at least the 70's IIRC. A | B | C | D | E type of thing. Many of the basic tools were designed explicitly to fit in the middle of a piping scheme. To fit together smoothly the pieces have to be defined carefully. The "do it yourself" part of Unix is that you can compose the pieces, and if necessary supply any of the missing pieces. BTW, jon_c, were the misspellings added after you composed it or did you substitute them contemporaneously with the composition?
>Take tools that other people have used and use them to create something new.
That other people have MADE. Confusing consumption with production.
>Howard rook [Roark] designed beautiful buildings, they we're [were] beautiful because he and only he designed them, it was his "vision".
However, he used the results of committees, etc. for the actual construction, the tools used, the building materials, the design of the building materials. It's a dream. Without knowing Strength of Materials I can design a building and everything will be wonderful.
>For any two programs to work together they're [there] needs to be some ground rules.
Not really. You do need to know what the interfaces are, and if necessary supply the necessary shims so that the interfaces match.
>even things like command line parameters aren't consistent.
Sure they are consistent. HP and TI calculators are consistent. Just not with each other. Big Endian and Little Endian are consistent, but not with each other. The distinction between adding signed integers and unsigned integers can be made with the opcodes (IBM 360+) or with condition codes (PDP 11, VAX). It helps to reduce inconsistency as much as possible, but there is no way to eliminate it.
>it only took Sun a few years to come up with [Java].
After something like 10 or 20 years of Programming Language research. The stuff so that the language is useable without expediting such as Word macro viruses is "non-trivial".
I find it curiously interesting that jon_c wants an integrated spell checker. If you analyze the composition, the writing style is not consistent with the typographical errors. It is possible that he is using a spell checker that has substituted correct spellings of wrong words, and he doesn't read what he writes. However, it seems more plausible that this is a carefully concocted essay, typos and all. Doublethink?