The problem is there isn't a way to determine from a simplistic line of code metric whether or no a line is truly needed, resulting in sloppy bloated code.
Every line of code which is properly designed out of a block of code is a line which will not have to be executed, debugged, stored or every worried about again:
H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':
TB wrote: >Linux is far from "write once, works 3 years from now" and neither is OS X
An application properly written for the original 128K Mac was able to run all the way through the Mac OS X era on PowerPC machines: http://mrob.com/pub/source/missile.html
25 years. 1984 (initial Mac OS) -- 2009 (when Snow Leopard was released and Rosetta ceased to be available).
I'm still running Macromedia FreeHand/MX (and sometimes v10) on my iMac running Snow Leopard (unfortunately, it doesn't work outside of emulation on 10.7 or later) and it came out in --- that's 2003 or 2000 or so up to now.
By contrast, I can't get FreeHand v8 to run on my Windows machine 'cause the splash screen won't go away after the program launches.
(For those who don't recall their computer history, Apple's iOS comes from OPENSTEP, which Apple got when it bought NeXT, and OPENSTEP was the upgrade from NeXTstep which implemented the OPENSTEP standard for NeXT Computers.)
Hopefully this means we'll see a version of OneNote for Mac OS X --- it'd be a nice gesture if they'd bring back Apple's MacBASIC which BG bought for the princely sum of $1 so he could bury it --- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt .
I was a little disappointed that it's so keyboard-centric --- give it some interesting interface elements like Codea or Autodesk Sketchbook and it could be the replacement for Lotus Improv I've been looking for.
Because I'm trying to achieve a better sense of history by reading books, esp. biographies in chronological order.
In the days of HyperCard I'd've made a stack w/ file-links for each book, added the chronological information, then sorted the stack on that --- I'm not seeing a way to achieve that on an Android tablet or iPad --- I'd love to be wrong, but I'm contemplating using indx cards.
I meant chronological in terms of when the book is written / what time frame it's about.
That's tedious and slow --- I have to pull up the book, find the date on the copyright page, or determine what time frame of history it covers, make note of the title and the date and repeat that until I've compared all of them --- far easier to build one list and be done w/ it.
I don't want to limit the consumption --- I want to ensure that there are hooks in it which don't limit people who choose to use them.
Here's an example of how a programming / scripting environment would be useful: I'd like to read all the non-fiction ebooks on my ebook reader in chronological order --- I don't see a way to make that happen w/in the reader, so I'm reduced to copying all the ebook meta-data out, pasting it into a spreadsheet or some other tool I can sort w/ and then arranging them chronologically.
which kind of proves my point. (second hit is for a fingerpainting app, third is for a game --- and not even one as cool as Rocky's Boots or The Incredible Machine or The Widget Workshop). How does one successfully search for creativity apps on tablets while filtering out media like the Disney app above?
That's why I switched to a pen computer back in the days of PenPoint (and professors in college would allow me to use my NCR-3125 in classes where laptops were banned) --- still bummed I can't find a replacement for my Fujitusu Stylistic ST-4121 and its transflective daylight-viewable display though.
That's why I listed all the creativity tools which I use on my Tablet PC --- I keep looking for creativity apps on Tablets and mostly I just find fingerpainting or the equivalent.
I'm currently running up against limitations of using openSCAD and pyCAM to create G-Code for my hobby-level CNC-milling machine --- where's the fabulous, elegant, (opensource would be nice, but I'm to the point where I'd pay) 3D modelling program which will let me easily model files like:
Actually, the link which the AC provided was the sort of thing I was curious for --- I've spent a fair bit of time looking for creativity and programming apps for tablets and that's not one which I'd encountered, so I'm willing to accept the abuse to get the information.
The problem w/ that is Apple bought the premier ``Personal Workstation'' OS and candy-coated it for the masses.
My NeXT Cube, running Altsys Virtuoso and TeXview.app is dead, and the closest thing to a replacement I've got for it is a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 w/ Macromedia FreeHand and TeXworks (or my Mac at work running FreeHand and TeXshop). I have to give up:
- Display PostScript
- PANTONE colour library at the system level
- pervasive Services in all apps (they don't work in some Carbon apps on Mac OS X, Windows doesn't have an equivalent)
- no pop-up main menu --- ``Punch'' is a gesture for me in Altsys Virtuoso --- right-click, down, over to the right, release
- no re-positionable sub-menus (combined w/ Services this allowed one to configure a machine to support a given task w/ just a couple of easy clicks)
I can't believe that I'm actually considering putting OPENSTEP in an emulator and running Altsys Virtuoso on that --- but I can't find a better drawing program:
- the interface on InkScape leaves a lot to be desired (and it doesn't support PostScript directly as Virtuoso did)
- while Cenon is a GNUstep / Cocoa app, there's no DPS anymore, and its interface reflects its CAM roots
I'll go back to doing woodworking or carpentry before I'll break down to using Corel Draw (used it since v1.21) or Adobe Illustrator (since v3.2) as my main tool.
Yes, but we're not going to better the human race if people continue to do nothing w/ their machines but watch Youtube videos and use them as glorified memory typewriters.
Yes, but I'm also saddened for a generation of kids who grow up interacting w/ computers to only consume media, not to create.
Steve Jobs put forth that computers were ``bicycles for the mind'' [1] --- but this switch to tablets is taking general purpose computers out of the hands of our kids and replacing it w/ an interactive TV. While there have been some web mentionings of it [2] I can't find a copy of the ad, or a full set of the quotes. [3]
Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets? (and I say this as a person who uses Autodesk Sketchbook, Creaturehouse Expression, Futurewave SmartSketch, Macromedia FreeHand, Runtime Revolution and Lotus Improv on his Tablet PC)
I'd love to have a list of great creativity tools for tablets (though I wonder how much good it'll do --- I've been unsuccessful in getting my son to d/l and install Petit Computer [4] )
That last is the big problem --- I simply haven't found a vector drawing program to replace it --- Inkscape has most of the features I need, but I really miss the PostScript support, CMYK, and interface.
Win 7 boots on the Pentium III --- the problem was the needed disk space and how much slower the rotating drive is than the SSD.
It wouldn't install on the CF card in the IDE 'cause it saw it as a removable drive (which is a shame --- used to be quite handy to install Windows 2000 on a CF).
I'd be quite happy if that were the case, but it didn't run very well on my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 (933 MHz Pentium III, 768 MB RAM --- ISTR issues installing on a 4GB SSD, and it wouldn't accept being installed on a CF in an IDE adapter) --- are there any available equivalent systems w/ a daylight-viewable, transflective display?
Why indoors? Why not commoditize it and automate it as a part of one's home?
Imagine a replacement window, which is an aquarium, which plus into one's electric and has a small computer to monitor food levels &c., as well as a wireless connection to one's broadband to report on conditions inside the tank.
One pays to have the window installed, plus a monthly fee to have the aquarium serviced and topped off from the outside through a locked access panel (there's a second set of locks on the inside panel, one for the home-owner, one for the company to lock the homeowner out for non-payment).
Best of all, one could arrange to have a lobster or larger shellfish dropped into the tank if one has company visiting.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is there isn't a way to determine from a simplistic line of code metric whether or no a line is truly needed, resulting in sloppy bloated code.
Every line of code which is properly designed out of a block of code is a line which will not have to be executed, debugged, stored or every worried about again:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
Here:
http://www.fangoria.com/new/chris-alexander-remembers-richard-matheson-1926-2013/
and his first story, ``Born of Man and Woman'' is here:
http://www.inspirationbit.com/a-bit-of-literature-born-of-man-and-woman/
One of my favourites was WriteNow, a word-processor for the Mac OS, and later NeXTstep, ~100,000 of assembly language.
H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445
I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.
TB wrote:
>Linux is far from "write once, works 3 years from now" and neither is OS X
An application properly written for the original 128K Mac was able to run all the way through the Mac OS X era on PowerPC machines: http://mrob.com/pub/source/missile.html
25 years. 1984 (initial Mac OS) -- 2009 (when Snow Leopard was released and Rosetta ceased to be available).
I'm still running Macromedia FreeHand/MX (and sometimes v10) on my iMac running Snow Leopard (unfortunately, it doesn't work outside of emulation on 10.7 or later) and it came out in --- that's 2003 or 2000 or so up to now.
By contrast, I can't get FreeHand v8 to run on my Windows machine 'cause the splash screen won't go away after the program launches.
Just a few datapoints.
Quote by Bill Gates, of Microsoft, when asked if he would develop software for the NeXT computer: "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."
http://library.thinkquest.org/22522/quotes.html
(For those who don't recall their computer history, Apple's iOS comes from OPENSTEP, which Apple got when it bought NeXT, and OPENSTEP was the upgrade from NeXTstep which implemented the OPENSTEP standard for NeXT Computers.)
Hopefully this means we'll see a version of OneNote for Mac OS X --- it'd be a nice gesture if they'd bring back Apple's MacBASIC which BG bought for the princely sum of $1 so he could bury it --- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt .
I was a little disappointed that it's so keyboard-centric --- give it some interesting interface elements like Codea or Autodesk Sketchbook and it could be the replacement for Lotus Improv I've been looking for.
Ritepen, since bought by EverNote is quite good. Older versions seem to work in Wine:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=4444
Not even. More like ``opiates'' (to paraphrase Marx).
Because I'm trying to achieve a better sense of history by reading books, esp. biographies in chronological order.
In the days of HyperCard I'd've made a stack w/ file-links for each book, added the chronological information, then sorted the stack on that --- I'm not seeing a way to achieve that on an Android tablet or iPad --- I'd love to be wrong, but I'm contemplating using indx cards.
I meant chronological in terms of when the book is written / what time frame it's about.
That's tedious and slow --- I have to pull up the book, find the date on the copyright page, or determine what time frame of history it covers, make note of the title and the date and repeat that until I've compared all of them --- far easier to build one list and be done w/ it.
I don't want to limit the consumption --- I want to ensure that there are hooks in it which don't limit people who choose to use them.
Here's an example of how a programming / scripting environment would be useful: I'd like to read all the non-fiction ebooks on my ebook reader in chronological order --- I don't see a way to make that happen w/in the reader, so I'm reduced to copying all the ebook meta-data out, pasting it into a spreadsheet or some other tool I can sort w/ and then arranging them chronologically.
I don't see where I blamed tablets --- actually asked for a list of suggestions... I've not had much luck searching. Moreover...
Okay, I give up. What was the search term which brought that to the top?
The first result I get for ``tinker on an iPad'' is to:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tinker-bell-great-fairy-rescue/id441924310?mt=8
which kind of proves my point. (second hit is for a fingerpainting app, third is for a game --- and not even one as cool as Rocky's Boots or The Incredible Machine or The Widget Workshop). How does one successfully search for creativity apps on tablets while filtering out media like the Disney app above?
What else should I be looking for then?
I've only gotten one app suggestion (in a nastily phrased comment) when I did specifically ask for instances:
http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
That's why I switched to a pen computer back in the days of PenPoint (and professors in college would allow me to use my NCR-3125 in classes where laptops were banned) --- still bummed I can't find a replacement for my Fujitusu Stylistic ST-4121 and its transflective daylight-viewable display though.
That's why I listed all the creativity tools which I use on my Tablet PC --- I keep looking for creativity apps on Tablets and mostly I just find fingerpainting or the equivalent.
I'm currently running up against limitations of using openSCAD and pyCAM to create G-Code for my hobby-level CNC-milling machine --- where's the fabulous, elegant, (opensource would be nice, but I'm to the point where I'd pay) 3D modelling program which will let me easily model files like:
http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/download/file.php?id=1735 (from the discussion http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1756 )
and then generate G-Code to cut such out?
Actually, the link which the AC provided was the sort of thing I was curious for --- I've spent a fair bit of time looking for creativity and programming apps for tablets and that's not one which I'd encountered, so I'm willing to accept the abuse to get the information.
The problem w/ that is Apple bought the premier ``Personal Workstation'' OS and candy-coated it for the masses.
My NeXT Cube, running Altsys Virtuoso and TeXview.app is dead, and the closest thing to a replacement I've got for it is a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 w/ Macromedia FreeHand and TeXworks (or my Mac at work running FreeHand and TeXshop). I have to give up:
- Display PostScript
- PANTONE colour library at the system level
- pervasive Services in all apps (they don't work in some Carbon apps on Mac OS X, Windows doesn't have an equivalent)
- no pop-up main menu --- ``Punch'' is a gesture for me in Altsys Virtuoso --- right-click, down, over to the right, release
- no re-positionable sub-menus (combined w/ Services this allowed one to configure a machine to support a given task w/ just a couple of easy clicks)
I can't believe that I'm actually considering putting OPENSTEP in an emulator and running Altsys Virtuoso on that --- but I can't find a better drawing program:
- the interface on InkScape leaves a lot to be desired (and it doesn't support PostScript directly as Virtuoso did)
- while Cenon is a GNUstep / Cocoa app, there's no DPS anymore, and its interface reflects its CAM roots
I'll go back to doing woodworking or carpentry before I'll break down to using Corel Draw (used it since v1.21) or Adobe Illustrator (since v3.2) as my main tool.
Yes, but we're not going to better the human race if people continue to do nothing w/ their machines but watch Youtube videos and use them as glorified memory typewriters.
Yes, but I'm also saddened for a generation of kids who grow up interacting w/ computers to only consume media, not to create.
Steve Jobs put forth that computers were ``bicycles for the mind'' [1] --- but this switch to tablets is taking general purpose computers out of the hands of our kids and replacing it w/ an interactive TV. While there have been some web mentionings of it [2] I can't find a copy of the ad, or a full set of the quotes. [3]
Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets? (and I say this as a person who uses Autodesk Sketchbook, Creaturehouse Expression, Futurewave SmartSketch, Macromedia FreeHand, Runtime Revolution and Lotus Improv on his Tablet PC)
I'd love to have a list of great creativity tools for tablets (though I wonder how much good it'll do --- I've been unsuccessful in getting my son to d/l and install Petit Computer [4] )
1 - http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Bicycle.txt
2 - http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/
3 - http://creativityandinnovation.blogspot.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-amazing-quotes.html
4 - http://www.petitcomputer.com/
I'd love to do that, but....
- no handwriting recognition to speak of (I'm using the Tablet PC Edition)
No replacements for a bunch of the software I need:
- Creaturehouse Expression
- FutureWave SmartSketch
- Autodesk Sketchbook
- Macromedia FreeHand
That last is the big problem --- I simply haven't found a vector drawing program to replace it --- Inkscape has most of the features I need, but I really miss the PostScript support, CMYK, and interface.
Win 7 boots on the Pentium III --- the problem was the needed disk space and how much slower the rotating drive is than the SSD.
It wouldn't install on the CF card in the IDE 'cause it saw it as a removable drive (which is a shame --- used to be quite handy to install Windows 2000 on a CF).
I'd be quite happy if that were the case, but it didn't run very well on my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 (933 MHz Pentium III, 768 MB RAM --- ISTR issues installing on a 4GB SSD, and it wouldn't accept being installed on a CF in an IDE adapter) --- are there any available equivalent systems w/ a daylight-viewable, transflective display?
Interesting.
Nissan had a 1+1 commuter concept a long while ago --- glad to see people re-visiting this.
Why indoors? Why not commoditize it and automate it as a part of one's home?
Imagine a replacement window, which is an aquarium, which plus into one's electric and has a small computer to monitor food levels &c., as well as a wireless connection to one's broadband to report on conditions inside the tank.
One pays to have the window installed, plus a monthly fee to have the aquarium serviced and topped off from the outside through a locked access panel (there's a second set of locks on the inside panel, one for the home-owner, one for the company to lock the homeowner out for non-payment).
Best of all, one could arrange to have a lobster or larger shellfish dropped into the tank if one has company visiting.